Lindsey Davis - Time to Depart

I did not want to hear the depressing details, but I gave him a hand to jump back to dry land. 'You're the expert on low tricks are you, Fusculus?'

'Fusculus is a fervent scholar of the underworld,' grinned Petro. Thankfully, he was too good a friend to jeer directly at my mistake.

'Balbinus used to run a gang who specialised in this dodge along the wharves by the Emporium,' Fusculus said. 'You'd be surprised, Falco, how easily tired travellers can be taken in.'

'I'm not surprised at all,' I growled.

The two rowers who had exposed the near-disaster came back, having failed to catch my lads. We unloaded half the glass from the first boat, then got hot and fractious transferring it to the second one so we could spread the weight between the two and hitch a ride ourselves. Petronius, Fusculus and I all stuck with the precious cargo right to the barge at Ostia. Not until I had seen every crate transferred did I feel able to relax again.

Exhausted by our adventures, we lay on deck in the autumn sunlight as slowly the barge started to navigate the shoals, creeping up the muddy Tiber into Rome.

Helena Justina had not heard me come home. She was tying in strands of my climbing rose, a thing of long spindly growth that struggled for water and nourishment on the narrow balcony outside my sixth-floor apartment. For a moment I was able to watch her while she remained quite unaware of me.

Helena was tall, straight-backed, dark-haired, and serious. She was five days from her twenty-fifth birthday. The first time I ran across her, married life in the utmost luxury but with an insensitive young senator had left her bitter and withdrawn. She had just divorced him, and made it plain that anyone else who got in her way could expect to be kicked out of it. Don't ask how I got around the problem – but writing my memoirs promised some fun.

Astonishingly, two years of surviving scandal and squalor with me had softened the hard shell. Maybe it was being loved. Now, as she paused rather dreamily to suck at a thorn in her finger, there was a stillness about her. She looked far away, yet unconscious of her own thoughts.

I had neither moved nor made a sound, but she turned quickly. 'Marcus!'

We embraced. I buried my face in her soft neck, groaning with gratitude for the way her strong, sweet face had lit with pleasure when she realised I was there.

All the same it worried me. I would have to hang a bell inside our entrance door, so nobody else could creep up on her like this. Where we lived was a lawless tenement.

Maybe I needed to find a better place for us.

Helena seemed tired. We were both still drained of energy after travelling home from the East. Coming in and crossing the outer room, I had seen evidence that she must have spent my absence at Ostia unpacking and tidying. My mother or one of my sisters might have dropped in to help, but they fussed around and were likely to have been seen off politely with cinnamon tea and a few tales about our journey. Helena never fussed. She liked to set things just so – and then forget about them.

I pulled her to the rickety wooden bench, which felt even worse than I remembered. Bending down with a curse, I fiddled about with a piece of broken roof tile – which probably meant we had anew leak somewhere – and managed to level up the bench's feet. Then at last we sat quietly together, gazing out across the river.

'Now there's a view!'

She smiled. 'You love coming home, Marcus.'

'Coming home to you is the best part.'

As usual Helena ignored my suggestive gleam – though as usual I could tell she welcomed it. 'Did everything go all right at Ostia?'

'More or less. We got back to Rome about an hour ago. Pa finally managed to show an interest. Once I'd done the hard work he turned up and took charge at the Emporium.' Luckily my father actually lived on the riverbank, below the Aventine cliff and only a step from the wharves. 'He's got the glass, so make sure he pays you an agency fee.'

Helena seemed to smile at my advice. 'Did Petronius do what he wanted? And are you now going to tell me what the fuss was about?'

'He was sending a condemned man into exile.'

'A real villain?' she asked, lifting her bold eyebrows as she caught my surly tone.

'The worst.' Petronius Longus would be horrified at the way I shared such information; I knew he never told his wife anything about his work. Helena and I had always discussed things; for me, the big rissole was unfinished business so long as I was waiting to confide in Helena. 'Balbinus Pius. We saw him on to his ship, and one of Petro's men has gone along undercover to see he doesn't hop ashore prematurely. By the way, I asked Petro and Silvia to dinner once we're straight again. Everything in order here?' I didn't bother looking back at the bare room behind me: a small table, three stools, shelves with a few crocks, pots and beakers, a next-to-useless cooking bench.

'Oh yes.'

For the past few months my sister Maia would have valiantly toiled up the six flights from time to time, making sure for us that no one broke in and that Smaractus, my pig of a landlord, had not tried his usual trick of squeezing extra cash from subtenants if he thought I was not here. Maia had also kept the balcony garden watered and had pinched back the herbs, though she drew the line at controlling the rose. She reckoned I had only planted it to get cheap flowers for seducing girls. All my sisters were naturally unfair.

I took charge of Helena's finger, removing the thorn with adept pressure from one thumbnail. My right hand was habitually caressing the two-month-old scar on her forearm where she had been stung by a scorpion in the Syrian desert.

'I'll be in trouble over your war wound.' Both my own mother and Helena's noble parent would blame me for taking her to such a dangerous province and bringing her back scarred for life… And there might be another new situation that would set both our mothers on the alert. Newly home after a whole summer abroad, I did not want to start broaching issues. But I took a slow breath and braced myself. 'Maybe there's worse than that in store for me.'

Helena showed no reaction: so much for being mysterious. 'I think there's something we need to talk about.'

She heard the message in my tone that time. She looked at me askance. 'What's wrong, Marcus?'

Before I was ready I heard myself saying: 'I'm beginning to suspect I'm going to be a father.'

I fixed my gaze on the laniculan Mount and waited for her to accept or reject the news.

Helena was silent for a moment, then asked quietly, 'Why do you say that? There was a very slight rasp in her voice.

'Observation.' I tried to sound nonchalant. 'Matching evidence with probability is my job, after all.'

Well, I'm sure you're the one who knows!' Helena spoke like an angry householder whose chief steward had just accused a favourite slave of raiding the wine cellar. 'How do you reckon it happened?'

'The usual way!' Now I sounded tetchy. We had only ourselves to blame. It was a classic failure of contraception – not the alum in wax letting anyone down, but two people failing to bother to use it.

'Oh,' she said.

'Oh, indeed! I'm referring to a certain occasion in Palmyra -'

'I remember the date and time.'

As I feared, she was sounding far from overjoyed. I decided that pity consoling hand on the scorpion scar might be unwelcome; I drew back and folded my arms. Once again I gazed out beyond the Tiber to the Laniculan Hill, where I sometimes dreamed of owning a villa if Destiny ever forgot that I was the one she liked tormenting with hammerblows My chance of ever becoming a householder in a quiet and spacious home was in fact ludicrously slim.

'I know you have your position in society to think about,' I told Helena, more stiffly than I had intended. 'Your family's reputation, and of course your own.' Unhelpfully, she made no comment. It tipped me into flippancy: I'm not asking you to stand by me.'