Adrian Goldsworthy - Vindolanda

Yet there was even less hint of real affection in her brisk and formal ‘Good morning, my dear Ferox. I trust you are well.’

‘My lady,’ he replied. ‘You are most kind.’ He looked for some sign to show whether she now hated or trusted him, but there was none, only the noble Roman lady and dutiful wife walking beside her husband.

Cerialis hesitated in the doorway, breathed deeply, and then went in. Before Ferox could follow, Lepidina stepped after him.

‘My lady,’ he said, ‘it is probably better if you remain outside.’

She turned, every inch the high and mighty aristocrat. ‘Centurion, I am grateful for your concern for my welfare, but this is my house and I am not one of your soldiers to order as you please.’

Privatus was standing behind her and Ferox saw the chamberlain give an approving nod. The freedman could not see his mistress wink. He hoped that it was a sign of forgiveness and the simple gesture brought memories of the night flooding over him again. Ferox could tell that all his natural suspicion and scepticism would not be enough whenever he was near this woman, for there was something overpowering about her. As he followed her through the door he looked down at her shoulders, the smooth white skin barely covered by her light dress, and he longed to pluck off the brooches holding it up and see it rustle to the floor. As if she could read his mind, the lady turned her head and gave him a cold stare.

The smell brought him fully back to grim reality. There was the usual odour of a bedchamber in the morning, before the slaves had come to empty the vase of night soil. It was the scent of the human body, tinged with sweat, and if this was fainter with a woman it was always there. The damp, musty smell so common at Vindolanda and especially on the ground floor of the praetorium lingered in the background, even when Privatus got a pole and opened the shutters on the high windows, so that bars of sunlight speared into the room.

Over it all was the smell of death: not the violent butcher’s yard stink of the dismembered dogs, but a subtle, insidious cloud that seeped into the nostrils and throat. The girl lay on the bed, and now that the windows gave them more light Ferox could see that what he had taken to be a necklace was a deep cut around her throat. Someone had covered her up in blankets, so that it would look as if the guest was asleep in her bed.

‘It is her maid,’ Privatus told them. ‘Her name was Artemis and she was a silly little thing, but worked hard and was faithful.’

Cerialis sighed. ‘I’ll organise a search. Ferox, would you mind taking a look and seeing if you can work out what happened?’

‘Of course, sir.’ One thing Ferox knew had happened was that he had failed. He had saved the golden woman in this room, but the price had been the death of this unfortunate slave girl and maybe her mistress as well.

‘I shall stay and assist.’ Cerialis looked surprised when his wife spoke. ‘In case the centurion needs to ask about the household,’ she explained.

The prefect stared at her for a while and Ferox could not read his thoughts. Then Cerialis gave a gentle nod. ‘That is prudent.’

After he had gone Ferox went to the side of the big wooden bed with its high canopy.

‘Ugly old thing,’ Lepidina told him. ‘It was left behind by the previous commander and his family – and no doubt by everyone else back to the fool who bought it.’

The girl was young, fourteen or fifteen at a guess, and she had an unremarkable face. Her hair was dark brown and a little thin, her staring eyes small and grey in colour. Drained of blood her skin was white, but her lips were dark and mottled and stains on the bed beside her showed that she had frothed at the mouth. Ferox leaned over and sniffed, and heard his boot crush something. It was a piece of mistletoe, and when he smelled it there was the trace of other things as well. He guessed that one was nightshade, and that meant they had forced poison into the poor child.

The centurion pulled back the covers, grimacing at the stink of excrement. The corpse was naked, save for a bracelet of cheap stones, and there was no other trace of injury. Someone had drugged her, placed her in the bed and then slit her throat. She had not been dead when it had happened, so the cut had bled freely and she had fouled herself.

Sulpicia Lepidina had covered her eyes with one hand and sounded as if she was praying.

‘You should not be here, my lady,’ Ferox said.

She looked up, stern and proud again. ‘This is my house. I must know everything that happens here. Everything. Privatus?’

‘Mistress.’

‘Go and find out who saw the girl and our guest yesterday. We will need to see them.’

‘Yes, mistress.’ The chamberlain left, and Lepidina began to look at the clothes and boxes on a table in the corner of the room. Ferox wondered whether to talk to her about what had happened, but he did not know the right words, so got on with the matter in hand.

He drew the blankets back over the dead girl and closed her eyes. It was the least he could do and did not make him feel any better. He tried to look for signs in the room. There were some scuffs on the floorboards that looked fresh, which suggested the hobnailed boots of soldiers, but that might mean no more than a recent visit by the prefect to his lover. Nearer the window the boards were wet from damp seeping up from the ground and there was a print or two, faint, but showing traces of at least two boots – one markedly smaller than the other.

‘Look at this.’ Sulpicia Lepidina was holding up a writing tablet. As Ferox took it he saw that her eyes were moist. She must have gripped it tightly because her thumbs had left deep smudges in the wax coating on the surface of the thin wooden sheet – made from silver ash by its feel and colour.

Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus, the slave of the August Emperor and sometime slave of Iucundus, has bought and received by mancipium the girl Fortunata, or by whatever name she is known, by nationality a Diablintian, from Albicanus, for six hundred denarii. And that the girl in question is transferred in good health, that she is warranted not to be liable to wander or run away, but that if anyone lays claim to the girl in question or to any share in her…

He did not bother to read on. He had seen hundreds of similar documents, recording the sale and purchase of slaves. Somewhere there was surely another document announcing her manumission. Until now he had not thought of Vegetus, who had also made the jump from slave to free man.

‘Do you think that she is dead?’ The question was direct and he knew that the lady was not asking about the corpse in the bed.

‘I cannot say. We may find her.’

‘You can forget trust if you lie to me as plainly as that,’ she said.

‘There is not much hope,’ he admitted. ‘We might be able to catch them.’

‘And I might one day forget that you are a pig as well as a good man.’ She waved him down when he tried to speak. ‘I did not like the woman. How could I? Husbands stray and that is the way of the world. I do not take it personally. How could I after last night?’ There was a thin smile. ‘Nor did she commend herself to me in any other way. Just a foolish little whore who flung herself at men – even you if I remember that dinner last month.’

That was a surprise, for he had not thought anyone had noticed.

‘It does not matter.’ Lepidina’s voice was sad. ‘She was a guest in my house and that does matter. Murderers came over my threshold and they killed this child and abducted her owner. Perhaps they have killed her too.’

She began to sob, shoulders quivering. Ferox glanced quickly at the door, was relieved to see that Privatus had closed it behind him and he went and clasped her to him. Her head was on his shoulder and he felt her body shaking. One hand clasped her and the other smoothed her hair.