The Legatus Mystery Read online

  THE LEGATUS MYSTERY

  Rosemary Rowe

  Copyright © 2003 Rosemary Aitken

  The right of Rosemary Rowe to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2013

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 0509 4

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also By

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  About the Author

  Rosemary Rowe is the maiden name of author Rosemary Aitken, who was born in Cornwall during the Second World War. She is a highly qualified academic, and has written more than a dozen bestselling textbooks on English language and communication. She has written fiction for many years under her married name. Rosemary has two children and also two grandchildren living in New Zealand, where she herself lived for twenty years. She now divides her time between Gloucestershire and Cornwall.

  Also by Rosemary Rowe and available from Headline:

  The Germanicus Mosaic

  A Pattern of Blood

  Murder in the Forum

  The Chariots of Calyx

  The Legatus Mystery

  The Ghosts of Glevum

  Enemies of the Empire

  A Roman Ransom

  A Coin for the Ferryman

  For Keava and Vonnie

  with love from Granny Rose.

  Foreword

  The Legatus Mystery is set late in AD 187, at a time when Britain had been for almost two hundred years the northernmost province of the hugely successful Roman Empire: occupied by Roman legions, criss-crossed by Roman roads, subject to Roman laws and taxed and ruled over by a provincial governor answerable directly to Rome, where the increasingly unbalanced Emperor Commodus still wore the imperial purple and ruled the Empire with an autocratic and capricious hand.

  The visit of an official imperial ambassador was therefore a considerable event for any city-state within the Empire, and Glevum (modern Gloucester), founded as a colonia for retired legionaries, and by now a republic in its own right within the province, would have been no exception. There is no such historical character as the Marcellus Fabius in this narrative, but the story of his rise from legionary officer to imperial legate overseas is not untypical. A legate would travel with a retinue, protected by an imperial warrant and seal – interference with which was a capital offence – generally carried a seal-ring so that he could issue official documents, and could expect civic entertainment at any town he visited en route. A visit to an outlying province like Britannia would presuppose a tour of several weeks, even given the excellent state of the military roads and the provision of official transport.

  In the Britannia that he visited Latin was the language of the educated, and most people aspired to emulate Roman ways, although native dialects still existed and Celtic ways were not altogether lost. The conquerors had brought with them not only laws and customs, but their religion too – a whole pantheon of gods, ranging from the familiar names like Jupiter and Mars, and the household lares et penates, to a whole host of minor deities responsible for every aspect of daily life, such as Pales, goddess of the herds, or Consus, protector of the granaries. Another import was the Imperial cult, in which dead emperors were worshipped – though Commodus had modified this tradition by declaring that he was the reincarnation of Hercules and therefore a god already. Nonetheless Imperial worship was formally required (it was the refusal to accept this which led to the persecution of the Christians – the religion itself was not forbidden at this period) although conformity to the cult appears to have been more a matter of good citizenship and a profession of loyalty to Rome than one requiring any deep-held spiritual belief. The Romans were generally quite tolerant of other cults, provided that this condition was met. There is evidence of many foreign cults in Britain during this period, those of Mithras and Isis in particular, and most local gods and goddesses continued to be worshipped as alternative manifestations of the Roman deities. Only the Druids were at this time legally forbidden to practise their beliefs, perhaps because they called for human sacrifice.

  State religious observance in the main was not as we might imagine it today. Roman temples were not, in general, designed for congregational worship. The priests, who often had other jobs as well, entered the temple and offered sacrifice to propitiate or bargain with the gods, and most temples had several shrines in the precinct, where sacrificial offering could be made. Imperial altars are known to have existed in some Capitoline shrines. There are even occasions where a small second temple was erected, or a sacred wood enclosed, as in this narrative – though there is no evidence that such a thing existed in Glevum.

  Ritual and omens had a vital role to play – correct procedure had less to do with individual faith than with proper adherence to the rites, and any trivial mistake or omission was seen as an evil augury, requiring to be propitiated by a new round of ritual. Immense importance was accorded to signs and portents, charms and amulets were in great demand, and the whole calendar revolved around days which were judged auspicious or inauspicious. It seems that every major provincial temple at this period had its own local augurer, whose job it was to read the signs and report his conclusions to the high priest and the highest-ranking local magistrate. It was these men who decided what action was appropriate – a clear indication of the close relationship between religion and civic government.

  Jupiter was particularly venerated, especially in legionary towns, since he was not only father of the gods, but also identified with the protection of the state, and every army unit worshipped him. The ritual ‘burying of the altar’ alluded to in the book is an attested fact, and it is known that there was substantial worship of Jupiter in Glevum at the period, and there was a huge statue of him in the forum. Some details of that cult (in particular those relating the exacting restrictions and strange costume required of the Flamen of Jupiter) are well attested, both in manuscript and monumental records. The precise rituals of the Imperial cult are not recorded, however, though it is known that the priesthood was reserved
for freedmen, rather than those born free, and that it was – as the narrative suggests – an expensive honour, but a sought-after one, as it opened the way to advancement for its holders.

  Accounts are somewhat ambiguous. It is clear that there was a council of Augustales from which a new sevir was appointed every year, but one source appears to speak of ‘two assistants’ at a ritual, who may have been seviri-in-training, and that is the interpretation which is adopted here.

  The distinction between freemen and slaves was an important one, though a man might move between these two conditions in a lifetime and it was much easier to get into slavery than out of it. A man, like Libertus, might be born free, captured and sold into slavery and later inherit both his freedom and the coveted rank of citizen from his master. Others might be driven into slavery by want or debt, some were sentenced to it for crimes against the state, and some gamblers staked their freedom on the fall of a die. Not all masters were harsh, and slaves might manage large estates, like Meritus, or be the indulged favourites of their owners, like others in the story. Many a poor free peasant, scratching out a precarious living on the land, must have lived a less enviable existence than the majority of slaves, who at least were certain of food and shelter.

  Other slaves, however, lived pitiable lives: especially female slaves who were the explicit sexual property of their owners, and might be called upon to fulfil any whim. Children born of these liaisons were automatically slaves, and the owner had the power of life and death over such offspring, who had no rights until they were literally ‘taken up’ from the floor, and might be disposed of in any way their owner/father chose. (Even restrictions about burying corpses within the walls do not appear to have applied to such infants, and several mass graves have been discovered – though some commentators blame epidemics of childhood disease.) Slaves were not permitted to marry – ‘taking’ another man’s slave was tantamount to theft – and once a person became a slave any pre-existing marriage was legally annulled. Equally, a freeman or citizen marrying a slave automatically forfeited his status; although it was open to him to legally manumit his own servant and then marry her, and there are several attested incidents of that.

  The Romano-British background in this book has been derived from exhibitions, excavations, interviews with experts and a wide variety of (sometimes contradictory) pictorial and written sources. This is, however, a work of fiction, and although I have done my best to create an accurate picture there is no claim to total academic authenticity. The existence of the Roman governor, Pertinax, and his promotion to Africa at about this date, is historical, although there is no reliable evidence to show the exact date of his departure, or, interestingly, the name of his successor.

  All other characters are the product of my imagination, as are the rituals of the Imperial cult.

  Relata refero. Ne Iupiter quidem omnibus placet. I only tell you what I heard. Jove himself can’t please everybody.

  Chapter One

  ‘Marcus Aurelius Septimus is here?’ I asked the attendant slave at Glevum baths, as I stripped off my cloak, sandals and tunic and stuffed them into one of the stone ‘dove-holes’ provided for the purpose.

  The boy eyed me doubtfully. I could not blame him. I had come here without an attendant slave, my clothes were travel-stained and dusty, and I had not even been wearing a belt around my tunic. I scarcely looked like a Roman citizen, let alone a fit bath companion for the most important man in Glevum.

  ‘He is expecting me,’ I assured him, as I wrapped a linen toella around my nether parts. It was not obligatory – indeed many men visit the baths without wrapping themselves in anything – but a humble pavement-maker like myself can hardly meet the personal representative of the provincial governor of all Britannia dressed only in his own drooping skin. Besides, if I knew Marcus, he would be at this moment sitting in the caldarium, the hot room where he sometimes came, like other influential Romans, to conduct business and meet acquaintances. To my thin, fifty-year-old Celtic posterior the stone seats in the caldarium soon seem uncomfortably hot, and I knew I might find myself very glad of the protection of my towel.

  In the absence of my own slave, I slipped the bath attendant a quadrans to watch my clothes.

  The boy took the coin. It seemed to loosen his tongue. ‘His Excellence is here all right, and his attendants with him. He’s been here all the afternoon, with no end of important people coming to see him – I think something special is going on. That slave watching his clothes has been waiting there for hours.’

  He gestured towards a servant boy in a bordered tunic who was sitting with patient boredom in a nearby niche, keeping guard over a pile of neatly folded garments on a bench. It was a necessary precaution. Many a fine citizen has left the baths – here as in every other city – with a poorer cloak than he arrived in. One or two unfortunates have even been known to lose the ‘bath tunic’ (which most people wear under their cloaks when travelling to and from the baths) with humorously embarrassing results which have been the topic of town gossip for weeks afterwards. But Marcus’s garments were more than usually worth stealing – even from here I could see the wide purple border of his toga. Marcus was very conscious of his patrician status, and famously wore that cumbersome badge of citizenship even to the baths.

  ‘You’ll find His Excellence in the hot room,’ the bath boy said.

  I nodded, and began to make my way in the direction of the warm pools and the tepidarium. Little time for me to linger there – I should have to plunge almost immediately into the caldarium.

  ‘I hope you’re right about his wanting to see you,’ the boy called after me. ‘He doesn’t take kindly to being unexpectedly interrupted at his ablutions.’

  He hardly needed to tell me that. I had been extremely surprised by the messenger myself. Normally, when Marcus wants me – often at the most inconvenient hour – he summons me to come to his apartments or to his official rooms, where he can keep me waiting in comfort. But here? Marcus may regard a visit to the baths as an excellent opportunity to discuss affairs, but usually with patrician friends and town dignitaries, not a mere mosaic-maker like myself. Roman citizen I might be – indeed I was born a nobleman in my own tribe – but I was also an ex-slave and a tradesman, and the gulf between myself and Marcus was as great as that between me and the bath-house attendant himself. Without the most explicit instructions I would never have dared to come to seek my patron here. What was so critical that he had sent for me?

  Perhaps he was irritated that I had not called on him at once, the night before, when I had returned from a journey to Londinium. That was a worrying possibility. Indeed, I should probably have done so, had we not come home to all the usual time-consuming problems created by prolonged absence – damp blankets, reluctant firewood and the discovery that a large rat had made his home in the bedding – and had consequently slept until long after sun-up. At least – I comforted myself as I hurried through the tepidarium and entered the caldarium, where the hot steam gushed out to meet me – here in Britannia a rich man’s protégés, his clientes, are not expected to attend him flatteringly at dawn every morning, as they are in Rome.

  I need not have worried. Marcus greeted me cordially enough. ‘Ah, Libertus! I have been waiting for you. Come in. Welcome.’ He raised himself a little on one elbow and blinked at me benevolently through the steam. He was elegantly draped in a long swathe of blue linen towel, and wore a pair of thick-soled bath slippers against the heat of the floor. He was looking wonderfully bronzed and relaxed. Although his short blond curls were plastered to his head and his handsome young patrician face was slightly flushed, he seemed otherwise unmoved by the temperature. He held out a languid hand for me to kiss.

  I was not altogether sure of the protocol. How does a mere ex-slave mosaic-maker – however much of a citizen he may finally come to be – greet his patron with dignity, draped only in a skimpy towel? I made a swift bow over the hand, an equally swift grab for my wrappings and sat down gratefully o
n the lower bench he indicated, lifting my bare feet clear of the floor. Marcus’s bath slippers were not merely for show. Glevum caldarium is not as hot as some, but the tiles still left my soles stinging.

  I was ready with apologies, but Marcus waved them aside. ‘Libertus my old friend, it is a long journey to Londinium, even for a younger man. Days of travelling are wearisome. Naturally I forgive you for any lapse of courtesy.’

  I was on my guard. When Marcus calls me his old friend it is almost always because he wants my services and, since he was elegantly pointing out how magnanimous he was being, I had an uncomfortable feeling that this was no exception. On the other hand, perhaps he genuinely wanted my news. After all, I had been the guest of the Roman governor, Pertinax, who was Marcus’s particular friend and advocate. (Even patrons may have patrons of their own.) ‘You are gracious, Excellence,’ I said.

  ‘I hear you were of great service to the governor,’ Marcus said approvingly.

  I murmured something suitably deprecating. ‘A mere matter of a dead corn officer . . .’ but Marcus made an impatient gesture.

  ‘Of course, of course – he has told me all that in his letter.’

  On reflection, I should not have been surprised. The imperial post, carried at top speed by a single man on horseback, is obviously faster than a man in a carriage. Marcus would have heard the news from Londinium days ago. And he had ‘forgiven me’ for failing to call on him. So it was some other matter on which he wished to see me. Knowing that Marcus refused to ‘insult me’ by ever offering me money for my service and advice, I fervently hoped that the reason for this meeting was not the ‘something important’ which the bath slave had mentioned. I had been away from Glevum for almost a month, and the store chests and shelves in my humble workroom and garret were depressingly empty.

  Marcus fixed me with a vague smile. An attendant, dripping perspiration in his tunic, brought him a dipper of cool water from the apse at the door, and Marcus buried his face in it.