Lindsey Davis - Three Hands in The Fountain

'Anyone would think you were afraid of my mother.'

He grinned. 'Isn't everyone? I'm serious about this.' So was I, about avoiding it.

I continued eating my dinner. I wasn't going to joke about Ma with him. Helena deposited herself on a second stool alongside me. She linked her hands on the edge of the table and glared at Anacrites. 'Your question seems to be answered. Is that all you came here for?'

He looked flustered in the face of her hostility. His pale grey eyes wandered uncertainly. Since he'd been clouted on the head he seemed to have shrunk slightly, both physically and mentally. It was odd to have him sitting here with us. There was a time when I only ever saw Anacrites at his office on the Palatine. Until Ma brought him to our party he had never met Helena formally, so he must be wondering how to deal with her. As for Helena, even before he came to our house she had heard a great deal about the troubles Anacrites had caused me; she had no doubt how to react to him.

Ignoring Helena, he appealed to me again. 'We could be a good partnership, Falco.'

'I'm working with Petro. Apart from the fact that he needs to keep occupied, we're old team-mates.'

'This could be the end of your friendship.'

'You're a pessimistic oracle.'

'I know how the world works.'

'You don't know us.'

He bit back any rejoinder. I then kept my head down over my food bowl, making no attempt at conversation, until the spy took the hint and went home.

Helena Justina turned to face me. 'What's he up to, do you think?'

'I made my feelings clear the other day. He's behaving impulsively coming here again; I put it down to his crack on the head.'

'According to your mother he keeps forgetting things. And he looked very worried by the noise at our party. He's not right.'

'All the more reason not to work with him. I can't afford to carry a dud. Whatever Ma says, he's not up to it.'

Helena was still perusing me critically. I enjoyed the attention. 'So Petro is coping. And how are you, Marcus Didius?'

'Not as drunk as I could have been, and not as hungry as I was.' I wiped round my bowl neatly with the last of a bread roll, then laid my knife at an exact angle in the bowl. I drained my beaker of water like a man who was really enjoying her choice of drink. 'Thank you.'

Helena inclined her head quietly. 'You could have brought Petronius over,' she conceded.

'Another day maybe.' I lifted her hand and kissed it. 'As for me, I'm where I want to be,' I said to her. 'With the people I belong to. Everything is wonderful.'

'You say that as if it were the truth,' scoffed Helena. But she smiled at me.

The next time I ate dinner the surroundings were more luxurious, though the ambience was less comfortable: we were being formally entertained by Helena's parents.

The Camilli owned a pair of houses near the Capena Gate. They had all the amenities of the nearby busy area around the Via Appia, but were ensconced in a private insula off a back street where only the upper classes were welcome. I could never have lived there. The neighbours were all too nosy about everyone else's business. And someone was always having an aedile or a praetor to dinner, so people had to keep the pavements clean lest their highly superior enclave be officially criticised.

Helena and I had walked there over the Aventine. Her parents were bound to insist on sending us home in their beaten-up litter, with its just-about-adequate slave bearers, so we enjoyed a stroll through the early evening stir of suburban Rome. I was carrying the baby. Helena had volunteered to lug the large basket of Julia's impedimenta: rattles, spare loincloths, clean tunics, sponges, towels, flasks of rosewater, blankets and the rag doll she liked to try to eat.

As we came under the Porta Capena, which carries the Appian and Marcian aqueducts, we were splashed by the famous water leaks. The August evening was so warm we were dry again by the time we arrived at the Camillus house and I worked up a temper rousing the porter from his game of dice. He was a dope with no future, a lanky lout with a flat head who made it his life's work to annoy me. The daughter of the house was mine now. It was time to give up, but he was too dumb to have noticed.

The whole family had assembled for the ceremonial meeting with our new daughter. Considering the household boasted two sons in their early twenties, this was quite a coup. Aelianus and Justinus were ignoring the call of theatres and the races, dancers and musicians, poetry parties and dinners with drunken friends in order to greet their firstborn niece. It made me wonder what threats to their allowances must have been issued.

We handed over Julia to be admired, then beat a retreat to the garden.

'You two look exhausted!' Decimus Camillus, Helena's father, had sneaked out to join us. Tall, slightly stooped, and with short, straight, upstanding hair, he had his problems. He was a friend of the Emperor, but still laboured under the shadow of a brother who had tried to hijack the currency and disrupt the state; Decimus could not expect to be awarded any senior post. His coffers were light too. In August a senatorial family ought to be sunning themselves at some elegant villa on the spa coast at Neapolis or on the slopes of a quiet lake; the Camilli owned farms inland, but no proper summer haven. They passed the million sesterces qualification for the Curia, yet their cash in hand was insufficient to build on, either financially or socially.

He had found us sitting side by side on a bench in a colonnade, heads together and motionless, in a state of collapse.

'Having a baby's hard work,' I grinned. 'Were you allowed a glimpse of our treasure before she was mobbed by cooing women?'

'She seems skilled at handling an audience.'

'She is,' confirmed Helena, finding the energy to kiss her papa as he squashed informally on to our seat. 'Then when the flatterers finish, she's good at being sick on them.'

'Sounds like someone I knew once,' the senator mused.

Helena, his eldest child, was his favourite; and unless I had lost my intuitive powers, Julia would be next in line. Beaming, he leaned across Helena and clapped me on the arm. He ought to view me as an interloper; instead I was an ally. I had taken a difficult daughter off his hands, and proved I intended to stick with her. I had no money myself, yet unlike a conventional patrician son-in-law, I did not come round once a month whining for loans.

'So, Marcus and Helena, you are back from Baetica – in good repute as usual, say those in the know on the Palatine. Marcus, your resolution of the olive oil cartel greatly pleased the Emperor. What are your plans now?'

I told him about working with Petronius, and Helena described our skirmishes with the Censors' clerk yesterday.

Decimus groaned. 'Have you done the Census yourself yet? I hope you have better luck than I did.'

'In what way, sir?'

'Up I marched, full of self-righteousness for reporting promptly, and my estimate of my worth was disbelieved. I had reckoned my story was foolproof too.'

I sucked my teeth. I thought him an honest man, for a senator. Besides, after the business with his treasonous brother, Camillus Verus had to prove his loyalty every time he stepped into the Forum. It was unjust, since he was that political rarity: a selfless Public man. The condition was so rare, nobody believed in it. 'That's hard. Do you have any right of appeal?'

'Officially, there's no audit. The Censors can overrule anybody on the spot. Then they impose their own tax calculation.'

Helena's dry sense of humour was inherited from her father. She laughed and said: 'Vespasian declared he needed four hundred million sesterces to refill the Treasury after Nero's excesses. This is how he intends to do it.'