Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

The old woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. “Where are your children?”

Tilla said, “I have no children.”

The woman shook her head. “No, no. Always know where your children are. Always have a bag behind the door. See?”

She held out the bag. It did not smell good. “Bread and cheese, a blanket and a-a-”

“A comb,” prompted the maid.

Trying to coax her toward the door, Tilla said, “Very good.”

“Yes. Somebody will always take you in if you comb your hair and look respectable. Mother says so.”

As they passed, the maid murmured in Tilla’s ear, “I think it’s seeing those men set her off. She thinks she’s a child again. Her father was killed when the Iceni raided the town.”

“What’s that? What is she saying?”

There was nothing wrong with the old woman’s hearing. “We are all safe here, Mother,” Tilla assured her.

“That’s what they told us. The warriors will never come here. The army will stop them.”

“The army has stopped them.”

“Put your shawl over your nose when you run through the smoke. Hold Mother’s hand.” The bag fell to the floor as the thin hands went up over her face. “Don’t smell the man with his clothes on fire. Don’t hear them calling for help.”

“It is over now.”

“Can you hear the other mothers?” The vein tracks on her hands glistened with tears. “Listen! They are calling for my lost friends who went out to play.”

Tilla swallowed. She put an arm around the thin shoulders.

“Always keep a bag by the door,” whispered the old woman. “Always know where your children are.”

By the time Tilla and the maid had settled the mother with a large cup of strong beer (sometimes, according to the maid, it was the only way), it was dark. Tilla went out onto the porch. She could hear the voices of the men returning from the woods. There were three lanterns bobbing about by the track. A couple of them headed off toward the stables. The third came back toward the house. She unfastened the safety strap on her knife. In all the fuss with the mother, she had forgotten the Medicus altogether. Anything could have happened. “Who is there?”

“It’s all right, Tilla.”

She relaxed her grip on the knife. “What is happening?”

She could make him out now, on the left of a group of five or six men. Dias was one of the two supporting a stumbling Caratius. Caratius, unusually, seemed to be having trouble with his words. “I still can’t believe… To think that… Out there all this time… How terrible this must… I never thought anyone would stoop to this!”

The Medicus was talking to him in the way he spoke to his patients. “Don’t worry about it tonight,” he was saying. “Just go indoors, keep warm, and have a hot drink with some honey in it.”

“Whoever did this has no fear. No fear of gods or men. We are all in danger.”

As he came into the light, Tilla could see a leaf caught in the long gray hair and mud smeared across his face. All of the men seemed to have muck on their clothes and boots and there was a smell about them that she did not like. The Medicus followed them into the house. As he passed Tilla he murmured, “I’ll just get him settled, then we’re going straight back to town.”

“But what-?”

“While they were rounding up that horse in the woods,” he said, “they found the remains of the missing brother.”

Ruso woke to a sense that there was a heavy burden lurking just beyond the comfort of his bed and that when he opened his eyes he would have to get up and shoulder it. Sooner than he wished, the sound of a horse whinnying in the stables brought back the memory of last night: the ghastly journey to town in the dark, enveloped in the smell that none of them would ever forget. Gavo driving the borrowed cart with a subdued Tilla beside him. Dias riding next to Ruso, quietly taking charge of transporting the body in a manner so professional that Ruso began to wonder if he had been mistaken about him. Maybe Dias was no more than an ambitious young man with an overactive love life.

There had been no thought of taking Bericus’s remains to lie indoors next to Asper. The cart had been left in the cemetery all night with a pair of lanterns for company. Dias had observed that nobody was going to steal it, and if anyone but Ruso had felt a slight chill at the thought of ghosts and murderers, or imagined they glimpsed some movement in the darkness as they glanced back over their shoulders, they had not spoken of it. Dias had promised to alert the local doctor and ask him to join them in the morning to see what they could find out before a hasty cremation. Finally, once Tilla had been safely delivered back to Camma’s house with the bad news, Ruso had returned to the mansio, dismissed his guard, and made sure the doors of Suite Three were securely locked.

He swung his feet onto the floor and stretched and yawned before splashing his face with water from the bowl. Then he wandered barefoot out onto the wooden walkway and told the passing slave that he would not be needing breakfast after all. Before long he was going to have to face the remains of Bericus in daylight. He leaned out over the rail that separated the walkway from the garden and took a deep breath of chilly air. The sun was not fully up, but the sky was clear. It would be a fine morning.

A servant emerged from the main kitchen, carried a pail across to one of the flowerbeds, and carefully ran a stream of water along a row of seedlings. Another appeared farther along the walkway with a bundle of bedding clutched to her chest and threw it over the rail. Ruso wondered whether Asper’s funeral procession had set off yet. Tilla had promised to break the latest bad news to Camma and the housekeeper last night.

He wished Tilla were not caught up in this wretched affair. She was only trying to help, but her presence was a further complication. Her courage was beyond doubt. But courage and loyalty would not be enough. He needed to be impartial, objective, and highly alert if he was to steer a safe course for them both among the procurator’s politics, Metellus’s scheming, and whatever the hell Caratius-and possibly Dias-had been up to. He did not need the distraction of worrying about his wife.

Ruso frowned at a beetle scurrying along the edge of a flowerbed and tried to order his thoughts. Caratius had strenuously denied any involvement in the murder, but he had no explanation for why Julius Bericus had been found on his land. It must be the work of “some enemy,” or “that woman’s curse.” The servants and laborers whom there had been time to question seemed as shocked as their master.

Camma had been right about Bericus all along. He was not responsible for the death of his brother. Ruso wondered briefly if events might have happened the other way around-if Asper had been injured while murdering Bericus for his share of the money-but digging even Bericus’s pathetically shallow grave would have been beyond the strength of a man with a serious head injury.

There seemed to be three versions of events, and not all of them could be true. He pressed his right forefinger onto the rail as if to hold down the first version while he considered the others.

Asper and his brother had taken the money, intending to deliver it to Londinium.

Second finger.

Asper and his brother had taken the money, intending to steal it.

Third finger.

Asper and his brother had not taken the money at all, as they were intending to visit Caratius and then go home.

This led to three possibilities. Left hand.

Asper had lied about his intentions.

Second finger.

Someone was mistaken about what Asper had said and done.

Third finger.