Ruth Downie - Ruso and the Root of All Evils

‘No, I’m not.’

‘No, you’re not,’ agreed Ruso, relieved that he had not been the first of them to say it. ‘I got your letter.’

‘Gaius.’ Lucius’ breathing was audible, as if the lungs were weighed down with the bulk of the paunch. ‘This is very bad timing.’

‘I couldn’t get here any faster. I know you had to be careful, but you might have given me some idea of what the problem was.’

Lucius glanced behind him and closed the door. ‘How many people know you’re home?’

‘How long has this legal business been going on?’

Lucius smoothed the top of his thinning hair. ‘We could probably keep it quiet. The staff won’t talk. Did you see anyone you knew on the road?’

Ruso frowned. ‘You didn’t say anything about coming home in secret.’

Lucius subsided on to the chair that Ruso still thought of as belonging to their father. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Not now that you’ve turned up.’

Ruso stared at him. ‘But you’re the one who wrote and asked me to come home!’

The tired eyes that reminded him of his own seemed to be displaying equal bafflement. ‘No, I didn’t. That’s the last thing I would have done.’

Ruso pondered the remote possibility that the letter had said, DO NOT COME HOME. Surely he could not have misread it? Tilla’s views were of no help since Tilla could barely read her own name. But Valens had interpreted it as COME HOME too. ‘It was in your writing.’

Lucius shook his head. ‘The only things I’ve written to you about lately are Cass’s brother being drowned, and Marcia’s wretched dowry.’

‘That’s not the letter I got.’

‘No, you’d probably already left by the time it arrived. Are you sure this COME HOME was addressed to you?’

‘Of course I am! And it looked exactly like your writing. You don’t think I’d travel a thousand miles on crutches because of a letter to somebody else, do you?’

‘I suppose not.’ The tone was reluctant rather than conciliatory.

Ruso sat on the trunk, propped his stick against the wall and scowled as it slid sideways out of reach and clattered on to the floor. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘Did you bring this letter with you?’

‘I burned it. So if you didn’t send it, who did?’

‘I’ve no idea. I wish they hadn’t.’

Ruso shrugged. ‘Well, I’m here now.’

‘Yes.’ Lucius cleared his throat. ‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. You’re looking well, anyway. How was Britannia?’

‘Messy. Is it true someone’s trying to bankrupt us?’

Lucius leaned back in their father’s chair and folded his arms. ‘If I were to say no,’ he said, ‘and ask you to go straight back to Deva for the good of the family, would you do it?’

‘I can’t,’ Ruso pointed out. ‘I had to wangle months of leave to get here.’

‘So you can’t go back to the Legion.’ Lucius managed to look even more depressed.

‘Arria says somebody’s applied for a seizure order.’

Lucius let out a long breath. ‘There’s a law somewhere,’ he said, ‘that says you can’t take out a seizure order against someone who’s away from home on public service.’

Ruso began to grasp the nature of the problem. ‘Does that apply to an ordinary man in the Army?’

‘The last thing I would have done, Brother, was to ask you to come home.’

‘So it’s true, then? We have a legal problem?’

‘We do now,’ said Lucius.

Finally, Tilla was alone with her headache. The Medicus’ nephews and nieces had been rounded up by their mother. The older girls had grown bored with her and gone about their own business, and the cook, eager to get this stranger out of his kitchen, had handed her a cup of water and suggested that she go and sit in the garden.

She glanced both ways down the long stone porch that shaded the front of the house. There was no sign of the man whom she called the Medicus, everyone else called Ruso and now his family — confusingly — seemed to know as Gaius. She supposed he was somewhere talking to the brother, finding out at last why they were here.

She crossed the porch and went down the steps into a garden where roses and lavender grew in beds corralled by little clipped hedges, as if they might otherwise make a dash for freedom.

The path led under the dappled shade of a long wooden frame that she thought might be called a pergola. The word was one of the many new things she would have to learn here. She already had the word for the insects hiding up amongst the leaves. Cicadas. The Medicus had promised her she would grow to love the song, but so far the terrible grating screech made her feel as though she was having her back teeth sawn off.

Tilla sank on to a stone bench that looked out over a cracked concrete pond. The water had evaporated long ago, leaving a black flaking coat that might once have been algae. She gazed at a plinth, where a rusted bracket reached for a statue that wasn’t there, and tried not to think how far she was from home. Everything was as the Medicus had described it: the sunshine, the olive grove outside the gates, the tall vines, the winery … but her mind had taken his words and painted its own pictures. In those pictures nothing was quite as big, or as hot, or as foreign. Or as badly maintained.

The people were not what she had been expecting, either. The fine fleece that had taken much of the journey to spin would stay bundled up in the luggage. She did not want the humiliation of presenting it as a gift and having to watch the stepmother find something polite to say about it.

While they were travelling she had tried to understand exactly how the Medicus’ family had managed to get itself into such debt, but his attempts to explain how loans worked had only caused more confusion.

‘Imagine,’ he had said, ‘that you borrow a cow for a year. You drink the milk every day. When the time comes to give the cow back, you give back the cow, and the calf it’s produced, as thanks for having had the use of it.’

She had said, ‘What if there is no calf? What if the cow dies?’

‘That’s the advantage of money,’ he said, looking as though he thought he was clever. ‘It doesn’t deteriorate.’

‘Then what is the problem?’

He had scratched one ear as he did when he was thinking and admitted that borrowing money could not really be explained in terms of cows. ‘Basically, you have to make the money make more money,’ he said. ‘Instead, Arria and my father chose to spend the money on a temple to Diana and Home Improvements.’

‘So it is as if she slaughtered the cow before it calved, ate the meat and boiled the hooves down for glue, and now she has no meat or a calf to give back.’

He had pondered that for a moment before agreeing that it was near enough.

Now that she had seen the house, she understood at last what Home Improvements were. Mosaics on the floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’ father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.

The water was cool in her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back and stretched out along the length of the bench. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’ life. Now it was plain that, even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.