Ruth Downie: Caveat emptor

He waited for the contraction to pass, silently absorbing this fresh evidence that women were very poorly designed. He had, without telling his wife, added a book on pregnancy and childbirth to his collection of medical texts. Yet it still remained a mystery to him why Tilla, who knew more about childbirth than most, was so desperate to go through it. Picturing himself carrying a small son or even a daughter on his shoulders gave him an inexplicable sense of warmth and contentment, but had his own part in the procedure been as troublesome-not to mention dangerous-as this, he might have wondered whether it was worth the bother.

Finally Camma let go of the windowsill and whispered, “Another step closer?”

“Another step closer,” Tilla assured her. “Do not worry. My husband will help to look for your man. He is good at this sort of thing.”

As the woman began to describe the missing brothers, he could see his wife counting the time to the next contraction on her fingers.

Julius Asper was a tall man with kind eyes. He was thirty-four years old. His hair was short and brown, with some gray at the temples, and he had no beard. To Ruso’s relief he also had a scar under his right eye, which might distinguish him from hundreds of other brown-haired tallish men of the same age. As for the kind eyes-that would perhaps depend on whether one was a devoted wife or a defaulting taxpayer. The brother was shorter, with darker hair in the same style and-oh, joy! — part of an ear missing. Now that was a useful description. Both spoke good Latin. She had never noticed an accent, but since she had one herself, that might not mean much.

“Please find him!” She clutched at the sill again. “Everyone is lying to me. Aargh! Oh blessed Andraste, make it stop!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Why did I let him do this to me?”

Ruso left the room quietly, unnoticed and doubtlessly unmissed.

Downstairs, Ruso conceded that he would be going to Verulamium. “Serena won’t mind if Tilla stays here, will she?”

Valens’s hesitant “Uh” hinted at complications.

They had never discussed it, but Ruso was aware that despite their own friendship, the two women had never been close. Serena was the daughter of a high-ranking Roman centurion. Tilla was not only a native, but, when they had first met, she had been Ruso and Valens’s housekeeper. It was a social distance that neither woman had really managed to bridge. Still, it was surely not so serious that Valens would turn down a request for hospitality. He said, “I don’t think an investigator is supposed to have his wife trailing along all over the place.”

“Oh, absolutely. But if Serena comes home tomorrow and finds somebody else’s wife here with just me, the apprentices, and the kitchen boy, it’ll look a bit odd.”

“You mean she’s not back tonight?”

“Anything’s possible,” said Valens, whose earlier statement that his wife had gone to visit a relative had, now Ruso thought about it, been unusually vague.

Ruso looked more closely at the room in which they were sitting. It was true that the walls were elegantly painted and there were no beer stains, but there were balls of dust in the corners. He saw for the first time that someone had dribbled oil down the lamp stand and not wiped up the pool on the floor, and recalled the dying flowers on the table in the hall.

“So where-”

“She’s bound to be back any day now,” Valens assured him. “She left most of her shoes behind.”

Ruso decided not to pry. He would leave that to Tilla. Instead he tried, “How are the twins?”

Valens brightened. “Oh, fine little chaps. Coming along very nicely. New teeth and new words practically every time I see them. Sorry about the state of the place, but she’s got most of the staff with her. Still, I was thinking we could crack open that amphora tonight and perhaps Tilla might, uh…”

“You want Tilla to cook?”

Their eyes met. For a moment neither of them spoke, each perhaps recalling his own selection of Tilla’s culinary disasters.

Valens said, “Of course we could always…”

“We’ll have something brought in,” agreed Ruso, anticipating the end of the sentence.

Londinium reminded Ruso of a child whose mother had dressed it in a huge tunic and announced, “You’ll grow into it.” Four years after his first visit, there was still no sign of the town expanding to fit the massively ambitious Forum. Its red roofs dominated the skyline on the far side of the marshy brook separating Valens’s end of town from the wharves and most of the official buildings.

Joining his own footsteps to the dull thunder of feet on the nearest bridge, he wondered how the hell he could walk away from the tax office without getting Valens into more trouble than he deserved.

He was distracted by snatches of conversation in a blur of languages: words of complaint in Greek, the first half of an old joke in Latin, and something Eastern. As he passed the gaudy bar where he had first discovered that the native brew really did taste as foul as it smelled, he overheard two trouser-wearing slaves arguing in an oddly strangled burble and realized with a shock that it was British. He had spent much of the voyage struggling to wrap his tongue around the complications of Tilla’s native speech, but Tilla was from the North. Now it seemed that if his efforts were to be of any use, he was going to have to perform some sort of mental swerve onto a new track.

He passed the timbered workshop of a cobbler who had once repaired his boots. He nodded to some native god at a street altar, resolving to give proper thanks for a safe voyage as soon as he had time. Moments later he was enjoying the simplicity of Latin as he explained himself to the guards at the grand gatehouse of the Official Residence.

It seemed that the governor had ordered improvements to be made to the Residence in his absence. Ruso followed the guard across the courtyard, through the hall of the main building, and out into what should have been a formal garden area where the great man and his guests could enjoy a grand view of the river. The view was intact but the garden had been converted into a temporary builders’ yard. Their progress was accompanied by the musical clink of stonemasons and the crunch and rattle of someone shoveling gravel. A cargo of roof tiles was being unloaded from a vessel moored against the governor’s private steps. A chain of slaves was passing them along and the last man was stacking them inside the clipped rectangle of a box hedge as if they were some kind of delicate plant.

The guard escorted him past the fish pool and around a pile of timber blocking one side of the walkway. Ruso ducked under a scaffolding pole to see a makeshift sign that read, “Procurator’s Assistant.” Beyond it, he was ushered into the dank chill of a room where the plaster was still drying out.

This wing of the complex might be imposing one day but at the moment nothing was quite finished, and that included the official behind the desk. Firmus was indeed frighteningly young. He had the smooth cheeks of a boy, the nose of a patrician, and the tan of someone who had not just spent a winter in the Northwest provinces. These were arrayed beneath what Ruso supposed was the next fashion in haircuts.

As he approached, a bent slave leaned forward to whisper something in one of the aristocratic ears.

“So you’re Ruso,” the youth began, squinting as he looked him up and down. “I’m told you’ve done some work for the governor’s security chief?”

“Just an isolated case, sir,” said Ruso, hoping Metellus was still safely up on the northern border and had not been seconded to the finance office.

“And you’ve also worked for the Twentieth Legion?”