Richard Blake - Conspiracies of Rome

Entering Rome with twenty-eight pounds of gold in the saddlebags and two around my waist, I’d thought we were unimaginably rich. The Syrian clerks didn’t turn a hair as I dumped bag after bag onto the table. They opened a few bags at random, tested the coin, and just weighed the rest. Most of it went unopened into another vault even deeper underground. They gave us a little parchment book with our names and addresses and the weight of the amount deposited. Being still a distrustful barbarian, I kept hold of the two pounds I’d killed for. All the while, big boxes of coin came back and forth, each one accompanied by a sheet of papyrus covered in writing by many hands.

Now to our lodgings. Back in Canterbury, Maximin had been given an introduction to some monastery nearby the old Praetorian Camp. This would give us a floor to sleep on and our bare fill. But we had gone somewhat up in the world in the past few days, and Maximin saw no sinful indulgence in revising our arrangements.

‘Let us give our places to some other poor souls who cannot afford what God has placed within our reach,’ he’d explained in Tarquini, as he sent ahead. ‘So long as we do not enjoy it to the exclusion of our spiritual needs,’ he’d added with a monitory wave of his finger, ‘it is our duty to take what luxury God has made possible.’

‘Indeed,’ I said, with an attempt at meekness. I was wondering where the brothels might be, and what excuses I’d be able to make to get away from Maximin.

Luxury for him was the house of Marcella on the Caelian Hill, with a fair view from its roof down to the southeastern wall and the country beyond. Looking away from this, one could see the still noble shell of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine.

Usefully close to the Lateran, the house was a sizeable place, in a district still populated and reasonably wealthy and therefore unruined. Two storeys high, it was built around a central garden. The external walls were as blank and windowless as a fortress’s. There was a double gate in, which showed that Rome had never been a very peaceful city. Other similar houses lined the street on both sides. The paving stones were unbroken, and were kept clear of weeds and rubbish.

All within was delightful. The rooms were light and airy. There was fresh plaster on many of the walls. The furniture was ill-matched, having been picked up in various auctions. But, unformed as my taste then was in such matters, I could see that many pieces were of remarkable workmanship. I was most struck by a table in the entrance hall – ebony legs in the shape of caryatids, the top a single sheet of blue glass two inches thick. Rather big even for that big hall, it supported a crystal vase filled every day with freshly cut flowers.

In Richborough, we’d all lived in one big room. In Canterbury, I’d slept in a dormitory with the other monks, and it had needed great care not to wake the others as I went out for my nightly exercise with Edwina. Otherwise, I’d slept in common rooms in taverns, in monasteries, or by the side of the road with Maximin. Now, I had my own suite of rooms on the upper floor. I entered through a door with a lock that led off a corridor. Within, I had a fine living chamber, where I could eat and work if I felt disinclined to share my company. Through a connecting doorway was a bedroom – with a bed, with a mattress, with linen coverings, with a lead chamber pot underneath.

‘Piss only in there, if you please,’ Marcella had said when I drew it out. ‘We use it for bleaching the clothes.’

Through another door was my own bathroom. At the time, the Claudian Aqueduct was back in a semblance of working order, and the house drew water from it. There was no longer any furnace to heat the water in the main bathhouse downstairs, but I could have a bath whenever I pleased to have the slaves bring up cold water. In his own suite, across the corridor, Maximin sniffed at the idea of a cold bath. But a childhood spent swimming in the sea off Richborough had prepared me for the very gentle chill of the Roman water supply.

But I haven’t described the toilets! These were in a low building in a corner of the garden. There was a bank of five stone seats, each one in the shape of an omega. You sat yourself down. You shat. You reached through the opening between your legs and cleaned yourself with a vinegary sponge on a stick. I could see there used to be a time when the shit and piss fell into a little channel and was washed away into sewers that led down to the Tiber. Nowadays, though, the water hadn’t the pressure to reach here, and so buckets were placed under the seats and emptied before they could overflow.

It was delightful! I’d never imagined such delicacy of living. The poets and sermonisers I’d read had declaimed against warm baths and silken sheets. But none had thought to mention this. It must have been to them an accepted fact of civilisation. Never was cleanliness made easier or more elegant.

‘Right, my lad,’ said I as I sat sponging myself for the first time, ‘it’ll need more than for Ethelbert to change his mind before you set foot in boring, dumpy old England again.’

I have no idea how old Marcella was. With her scrawny arms and black wig and hard, painted face, she could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty. She tyrannised her slaves and as many of her guests as she could terrify into line.

‘This is a respectable house for respectable guests,’ she’d said as she’d showed us round. ‘I’ll have no excessive drinking in the rooms, nor any gambling, nor male or female callers after dark.

‘And you can keep your hands off my slaves!’

This last was thrown in my direction. I took my eyes off one of the maids who was scrubbing the steps down to the garden, her tits bobbling most provocatively, and tried to look demure. But my amorous propensities were well and truly excited, and I marked that girl down for a delivery of bread and cheese or whatever to my room as soon as the Pleiades had set around the midnight hour. I’d not lie alone that night, I was sure.

Before dying in one of the plagues, Marcella’s husband had been a middling imperial official. She’d then had the house adapted for paying guests, and had managed very well ever since. Her guests were a mixed lot – merchants from the East, the poorer sorts of diplomat, officials on business from Constantinople who didn’t fancy being put up in what was left of the Imperial Palace. With her rates, and assuming a three-quarter occupancy, she must have taken about three pounds of gold a year, of which two-thirds could have been profit. In a city like Constantinople or Alexandria, this would have bought solid comfort. In Rome, where coin was short outside the Church, it let her put on all manner of airs and graces, and think herself the equal of the ancient senators.

‘Of course, we fair dote on learning in my house,’ she’d said, throwing open the door to her library.

Also on the upper floor, the library was across the garden, just opposite my rooms. About fifty volumes, with scorched covers and water-stained pages, her collection was an incongruous mass. I don’t doubt she’d got that too at auction – a job lot of stuff collected from ruined houses after one of the sieges or internal riots. Much of it, not surprisingly, was religious. Some of it, though, was of interest for me. I took down some volumes translated from Greek on mathematical theory, together with a brief work on the construction of drains. Marcella saw me and pulled out a papyrus notebook.

‘Your name and the title, if you please,’ she said briskly. ‘I find this avoids much unpleasantness.’

She looked at my name and pulled a face sour even by her standards. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked. ‘You’re not a barbarian, surely?’