Lindsey Davis - Graveyard of the Hesperides

I shot him a look. He managed not to squirm. “Look, we do our best! Well, I have tried always to … If she is adamant,” he continued, still looking abashed, “we are bound to issue her a license. She tells us what price she intends to charge. We enter her name in the roll.”

“Can she be removed if she gives up the trade?”

“No. Never. It’s permanent.”

“So no prostitute, even if she is forced into it at a very young age, by other people, can ever repent, reinstate her good name or be forgiven by society?”

Tiberius agreed dourly.

I knew better than to blame him for this. He acted as an instrument of government policy. If he refused the task, someone else would do it. I would rather he was checking the legality of market weights, but if an aedile had to be involved, better it was Manlius Faustus. He was straight. He had a charitable attitude.

I bet there had always been different magistrates, men who exacted a trick when they registered a woman. Their free sample. “Checking that her price is value for money.” These men had a duty to protect the public from rip-offs, after all. They would claim they must test out the goods. Compared to the majority, mine was oddly innocent.

I gave him a hug, to show I did not regard him as tainted. Then, without telling him my plans, I left him at the Hesperides while I went by myself to have a look around the district the Macedonians had mentioned, where both they and Menendra lived. From what they said, I too would soon feel soiled, merely from going there.

Some people know Ad Gallinas Albas as the whimsical name of the elegant imperial Villa of Livia at Prima Porta. Supposedly an eagle soaring overhead once dropped a white hen in the empress’s lap, bearing a sprout of olive in its beak. Waste not, want not, so the great lady kept both, planting an olive grove and keeping a poultry farm, with the bonus that on occasions they presaged the deaths of emperors. So useful. If I ever have my own olive tree, I want it to wilt when the daggers are about to be plunged into Domitian.

The poultry area by the Ten Traders may boast the same name, but it is as different as anything could be from the fine rural retreat on the Via Flaminia that was once the possession of Livia Augusta. Forget the desirable residential areas that did exist on the Viminal further on. Was Gallinae Albae ever a farm? If there had once been hens, they must have been hoarse, pox-ridden laying-fowl that produced soft-shelled eggs. Their eyes would weep, their lungs would clog with the foul seepage of diseases of the dirt. The human birds who lived in this sour valley bottom now, scrawny creatures pecking for clients, were little different.

Not all the prostitutes were brought in from abroad. Not all were slaves. A few were freeborn women, lured here by want, vulnerable souls in distress who were so desperate they had to turn to vice. They disappeared from their former lives, in total thrall to their procurers.

More often than you may want to believe, the people who controlled their daily acts were women. Many of those women had once been working girls too. They were callous; they felt no pity for the new generation. I suppose they were simply glad they themselves had grappled their way into a slightly better position. By then, abuse was all they knew. When perversion was not being imposed on them, they imposed it on someone else.

I was coming to see this as Rufia’s way of life, and Menendra’s too. This pair, I decided, were power players in the sordid game.

I wished I had not gone to the White Chickens alone. It gave me a terrible sense of dread. The reason I knew all about what went on here was that thankfully brief period when I myself had been kidnapped by a brothel owner. It had only lasted a day, though it was the worst of my life. At the time I was a forlorn child, who believed his lie that he would take me to a safe place. But when he violently turned on me it was no surprise. Living on the streets had taught me what goes on.

I would have given in and done whatever that man made me do, because I had no other recourse. No friends, no family, no home. At that time, to be wanted for his filthy purposes was better than not to be wanted at all. I could have pretended to myself that his lies were real. I could have spent the rest of my existence on earth in that dire condition.

But Fortune offered one kind nod. Didius Falco and Helena Justina gave me a better life. At the end of this month they would see me married to a good man, and I knew they would both shed tears for my happiness, knowing their own part in it. They had come across a child in misery and instinctively plucked her from it. They never dwelt on their benevolence. But on my wedding day, they would be prouder than most parents.

I felt troubled here, being reminded what they had saved me from. A deep-seated fear always lurked that my rescue was an illusion; security could be snatched away. Coming to this area, on top of my admissions to the Macedonians, unnerved me. As for them, I wished now that I had not taken them into my confidence. I hoped they never told anyone what I had said.

As soon as I started looking, I knew nobody in the White Chickens brothels stood a chance of escaping to respectability. Ordinary people could walk down the Vicus Longus or the Vicus Patricius, the long highways that ran on either side of the Viminal Hill, and never notice what was here. Once you stopped, once you began to see it, the area was dire.

There were entire tenements given over to brothels, each with the procuress either lolling outside on a wooden stool or just visible as she lurked indoors. Working women hung around on the streets, openly eyeing up potential customers, calling out invitations. Men lingered, hardly distinguishable, whether they were prospective clients or the sorry pimps and enforcers who were attached to the brothels.

Suddenly I saw Chia. She was alone now and at once I hailed her. She greeted me with a wan smile on her childlike face. I went up to her and said in a low voice, “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but in case you absolutely want an abortionist, the one in the Ten Traders is called Nona.” I could hardly forgive myself for telling her, but I pitied her position. “Ask at the bakery stall opposite the public facilities, Chia; the girls serving bread will direct you. They call her the wise woman.”

“Have you-?”

“No. Not me. I had to speak to her about my investigation.”

Chia was perfectly open: “Thank you. I have to find someone. There is a person the brothel uses, but I don’t like her.”

She asked what I was doing in the White Chickens. I said I was looking for my sister. I had to give a reason; a search for a runaway made sense. Chia was too immature to work out that I had another motive. She seemed to be heading to her room. As sweetly as my real sisters taking a girlfriend home for almond cakes, she offered to show me where she lived.

It was a full-scale brothel, reeking so much of dirt and lamp soot that after I left its smell would be ingrained in my hair, clothes and the very pores of my skin. Extending up for several stories, all completely occupied by working girls, the building was divided into many similar small, windowless rooms, so oil lamps were everywhere, some smoking langorously even by day.

The place was better run than I expected. The accounts manager, on a high stool with a record tablet, could have been chief clerk in any respectable business. They had a hairdresser (who looked as though she probably served her turn on a pallet when required) and a boy with a water basin so clients could wash afterward. Maybe the girls could use that basin of his, though somehow I thought not. His towel looked as if it was used by everyone for days on end without being laundered. Even the boy himself had a used look. Men could certainly bugger him, probably without paying extra.