A Roman Ransom Read online

  She gave me a pitying look. ‘Well, naturally she did – those two girls may not be citizens, but they’re respectable. Their mother saw to that. Not that she had an easy time herself. Widowed twice, poor woman, but she managed to survive. Of course she was always handy with herbs, and she used to help women when they came to birth – I believe her mother used to do the same. First husband was a proper brute, from what I hear of him, but he fell down a well one night and left her penniless. But she wouldn’t be defeated – went as midwife to a family in the town, and when the mother died in childbirth she stayed on as wet nurse to the babe. They didn’t pay her much, I understand, but at least it kept a roof over her head.’

  ‘Quite a substantial roof, by the look of it.’ I gestured to the house.

  ‘Oh, that was her second husband. He was a cart-maker, and pretty well-to-do – you can tell that from the house – but then he cut his hand. Got poison in it, and wouldn’t heal. He was doing less and less, but it killed him in the end and after that she was on her own. Brought up the two girls, though – and taught them a trade. Said the world would always be in want of nurses.’

  Marcus was looking enquiringly at me, so I gave him the gist of it. He frowned and said in Latin, ‘I thought that she took nurslings in?’

  The woman understood him, and turned back to me. ‘Oh, that was later, when the girls were growing up. She did try taking passing travellers in – the house was big enough – but it wasn’t very safe with only women in the house, so she started taking children in instead. Paid a farmer’s wife to wet-nurse them till Secunda was old enough to wed – since then of course they’ve done it all themselves. Mind you,’ she added, looking at the coin, ‘I’m only telling you what people say. I’ve only known her for the last few years.’

  ‘And how exactly did you come to meet her?’ I enquired.

  She gave me that pitying look again. ‘She still helps at birthings, and she helped at mine. My eldest would have killed me else, I think, and it looks as if I’ll need her help again.’ She hitched up the squirming child at her hip and looked despairingly at her bulging waist. ‘And I buy her remedies. Magical, they are. Croup, colic, teething pains, you name it, she’s got a cure for it. And she’s reliable.’ She looked behind her at the empty house. ‘Usually she is, at any rate. But this morning, it seems, she isn’t here. It’s very strange. There’s usually somebody about – if only the elder sister and her two little ones, come to mind the baby. But I can’t wait any longer; I shall have to go. I’ve left the other four youngsters in the roundhouse on their own and I’m afraid that they’ll fall into the fire.’

  I relayed all this to Marcus, who held up the coin again, saying as he did so, ‘You’ve looked round the back?’

  This time she seemed uneasy, but she answered him direct. ‘There’s nobody about. There is a little courtyard behind the house. I heard a noise and thought they might be there, but there was no one to be seen. I was just giving up and deciding that I’d go home again when you came. That’s all I know, I swear by all the gods. I didn’t go inside.’ She tugged at her son, who was pulling at her skirts, ‘Don’t fidget, Aldo. We’ll be going home soon.’

  She reached for the sestertius, but I prevented her. ‘A noise? What sort of noise?’ I said, using Latin too so that my patron understood.

  She looked away and shrugged. ‘A sort of squeak,’ she said. ‘Rats, probably. Most likely from the stable end they never use. I didn’t go to look. Obviously they wouldn’t be in there. The place is dangerous. The son-in-law has taken all the carts – they were given as a dowry when Secunda wed, because her husband’s got a little business on this side of town. Then there was a storm and half the roof fell down. They keep odd sacks of corn and things in there, but otherwise they haven’t used the place for years.’

  I was thinking furiously. It occurred to me that a space like that would make a splendid prison, if it could be secured. I could think of no reason why the missing women should be here, but I could not overlook the possibility. I turned to Marcus.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I think it would be worth our while to look. It’s possible there might be something there.’

  I didn’t say that it might be our wives, but perhaps he had worked out something of the kind himself, because he said very quickly, ‘Junio, go and search. You too, Pulcrus. And Malodius – you go the other way. If anyone is there you can cut off their escape.’

  Malodius got down, glowering, from his perch, and went to guard the path on which the woman had appeared. Junio went round the other way towards the ruined block, while Pulcrus – at my suggestion – went into the house.

  ‘See if there’s another exit to the rear,’ I said. ‘We don’t want anyone escaping by that route.’ Then I got down from the carriage and painfully took up a position at the gate: I was a deterrent there, I told myself, although I should have been little use if anyone had actually tried to vie with me. The woman glanced nervously at me.

  Aldo was snivelling again. ‘Saving your presence, mightiness,’ the mother said, addressing herself to Marcus and ignoring me, ‘if you have no further use for me, can I take the children home? Aldo’s getting fretful and the baby needs a feed, and there are the others to think about as well. You can find me at my roundhouse if you want me any more.’

  Marcus nodded, and tossed the sestertius to the ground. Aldo was on it like a flash, and she was obliged to prise it from his hand. ‘We’re grateful, mightiness,’ she said, dropping it into a patently light purse. ‘Aldo, say thank you to the gentlemen.’

  The suggestion sent him huddling to her skirts, but at least it stopped his tears, and with hasty apologies she led him off and we saw them disappearing through the trees.

  They were hardly out of sight, however, before Junio came running back to us. His face was ashen and he was breathing hard.

  ‘Excellence! Master!’ His shout brought Pulcrus rushing from the house. ‘There’s someone here all right. She . . . they . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I think perhaps you’d better come and see.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  It had not been an easy death, that much was evident. The young woman was lying peacefully enough now, but there were ugly bruises on her face and body as though someone had beaten her before she died. There was a lot of blood. Not only from the deep wound beneath her heart but also from slashes on her legs and arms. She had not been able to defend herself, because her hands were tied behind her back, so tightly that the cords were cutting into her flesh.

  She was lying huddled on the flagstone floor of what might once have been a sort of workshop for the cart-maker. The roof here had somehow survived the collapse that had destroyed the remainder of this part of the house, but the area was not much used, and had been allowed to fall into neglect. It was cut off from the inhabited wing, in any case, by piles of fallen debris from the collapse, and only approachable through thorny weeds – though there was a trace of what might have been a path. It was clear what had made the squeaking sound – the rusty door was swinging in the wind, although it was evident there was an outside bolt.

  Inside, however, the room was surprisingly intact. There was a narrow window space that gave a little light. A solid wooden wheel still stood against one wall, and a pile of axle timbers lay on a dusty bench, together with a row of open pots holding what looked like the remains of ancient grease or paint. Apart from that the place had obviously been cleared. There were no tools on the workbench (though fresh patches showed where they might have been) and the floor showed signs of having recently been swept, but it was covered in dark splatters now and a pool of drying blood. The place smelt horribly of death.

  It was a moment before anybody spoke. This unexpected encounter with murder had shocked us all.

  Then Pulcrus cried, ‘By all the gods! It’s Myrna. What have they done to her?’ He bolted for the garden, and was copiously sick.

  It broke the silence. Marcus walked slowly over to the corpse. ‘He’s right. There’s s
o much damage to her face, I wasn’t absolutely sure at first, but now I’ve looked closer there can be no doubt. I thought it might have been her sister – Secunda, or whatever she is called. They are – were! – quite alike, although Secunda was a little taller – taller than Julia, I think. But this is clearly Myrna.’ He looked at the pathetic form on the floor. ‘At least it used to be. Poor girl. I fear that it is her association with us that brought this fate on her.’ He turned towards my slave. ‘Junio. Fetch my page and get her covered up. In fact, you can find Malodius and get her on the cart. We’ll take her to the villa – we can’t leave her here.’

  ‘At once, Excellence.’ Junio bowed and disappeared.

  Marcus seemed surprisingly stricken by the death. He avoided my gaze and spoke aloud, but as though he were talking to himself. ‘We’ll give her some sort of funeral and put her ashes in the servants’ grave – unless her family turn up again and want to perform the rituals for themselves. We can’t allow her to be simply thrown into a common pit, as if she was a pauper or a criminal. She was working for our household, after all, and I don’t imagine she belonged to any guild.’

  ‘You are generous, Excellence,’ I said. I meant it. He was offering to do this at his own expense. Most slaves are paid up members of a funeral guild (though Marcus, like many owners, pays the fee on their behalf) precisely to ensure a fitting send-off when they die, so their spirits are not forced to walk the earth. Myrna, however, as a freewoman working for a wage, would have had to find a guild of wet nurses to join and pay the fees herself. It was unlikely that she’d made any such provision – and I had never heard of such a women’s guild. Marcus would provide at least a proper pyre, with someone to say prayers and offer sacrifice, and a decent resting place for the remains.

  He nodded brusquely. ‘I ought to ask you, I suppose. What do you make of it?’

  I had lowered myself gingerly to my knees beside the girl. It was hard to find a place to kneel where I would not stain my clothes with blood, but I was glad not to be standing up. I steadied myself against a baulk of wood and forced myself to look at her, and think. I had wondered, at one stage, if Myrna herself had somehow been a party to the kidnapping – that was why I had wanted to talk to her so much – but now it seemed she was a victim too. And a pathetic one. The wounds were pitiful.

  ‘It was the deep wound that killed her, almost certainly,’ I said, levering myself back to my feet again. ‘He used a dagger, by the look of it. You can see the two lips where the knife has been. But these other cuts are just as worrying. They were meant to cause agony, not death – as if her killer had been questioning her first.’

  Marcus had turned away, and was gazing determinedly out of the window space. I guessed that he was struggling with tears. I confess I was a little bit surprised. True, this was not a pretty sight, but Marcus – being a senior magistrate – is required to see that sentences are duly carried out, sometimes in spectacularly grisly ways, and might be expected to be inured to violent scenes like this. Besides, like many Romans, he scarcely considers that servants are human beings at all.

  His next words explained his mood. ‘So, the kidnappers are killers, as they claim to be,’ he said, in the bleakest tone I’ve ever heard him use. ‘Not only killers, but torturers as well. And they still have my wife.’

  And very likely mine as well. That was a shocking thought. I was glad that Junio chose this moment to appear, accompanied by Malodius and the page. I forced myself to concentrate on them.

  Marcus was doing something similar. The three servants had come in with a piece of sack, and as he barked commands they quickly covered Myrna up with it.

  Pulcrus was still looking whiter than a freshly laundered toga, and I said – chiefly to occupy my mind and his – ‘You’ve checked the remainder of the house?’

  The question brought a little colour to his cheeks. ‘I was doing so when I heard Junio call. I’m sorry, citizen, I should have reported on it earlier – but this had driven it out of my head. There is obviously nobody about – but the place is in an awful mess in there.’

  Marcus looked at him sharply. ‘What sort of mess?’

  The page looked mystified. ‘Just a confusion, Excellence. It’s clean enough. No . . . blood or anything. Not like in here. But things are overturned and lying everywhere.’

  I turned to Marcus. ‘Signs of a struggle, by the sound of it.’

  ‘Perhaps we had better go and have a look ourselves,’ he said, with such alacrity that I felt he was glad of an excuse to leave the scene. I knew how he felt. ‘Malodius, and Junio. Take the body to the cart. Pulcrus, come with us,’ Marcus commanded, and strode away. Pulcrus hurried to accompany him. I had to trail after them at a slower pace, back into the lane and down the path towards the cottage door.

  This time I followed Marcus and his page inside, and could get a better impression of the place than had been possible from the exterior.

  There were two adjoining living spaces, in imitation of the Roman style, each with a brazier rather than a fire. The larger room, which we had caught a glimpse of from the door, was neat and ordered, but as soon as we got into the inner area it was obvious what Pulcrus had been alluding to. A battered table, set against the wall, was somehow still upright but everything else – loom, stools, and benches – had been overturned. Pans and cooking vessels had been tossed aside, their contents emptied roughly out upon the floor, and behind a small partition the sleeping area had been similarly pulled apart – the bedstraw scattered everywhere, and items of women’s clothing strewn in untidy heaps.

  I righted the smallest of the stools and sank down on it, grateful for a chance to take a rest. This was an offence against my patron’s dignity, since he was still on his feet and had not invited me to sit, but my head was spinning so much that I had little choice. Marcus acknowledged my dilemma with a frown, and gestured to the slave to bring a seat for him.

  ‘Rest yourself,’ he said, without a smile. He looked around the room. ‘A struggle, do you think?’

  ‘More like a search,’ I managed. ‘Why else turn out the contents of the pots? There’s nothing broken here, that I can see.’

  The frown deepened. ‘Searching for what, do you suppose?’

  ‘Money perhaps. Or something fairly small, in any case. They seem to have been looking under things. Whatever it was,’ I was thinking slowly as I spoke, ‘it appears that they found it in the end – otherwise they would have hunted in the outer room as well.’

  ‘Unless they were disturbed. By that woman with the children, possibly?’

  I shook my head, and wished I hadn’t. ‘But where could they vanish to? She swears that she saw no one, and we were here immediately afterwards ourselves. Someone might have run out into the garden, I suppose, but that wall surrounding it is far too high to climb. And she didn’t rob the place. We both saw she had barely two coins in her purse.’

  Marcus seemed unwilling to relinquish his idea. He said, still in that strained voice he had been using more and more, ‘I’m sure that she knows more than she’s admitting to. And this has all happened very recently – Pulcrus was here yesterday, and there was no murder then.’

  ‘You can’t think she had any hand in that?’

  ‘She’s withholding information. We know she came round to the back – she must have looked inside. She would have seen the turmoil, if nothing else, but she didn’t mention it to us.’ Marcus had that grim look on his face again. ‘When we get back to the villa, I will send for her and bring her in for questioning again. It won’t be hard to find her. It’s obvious she can’t live far away. If she – or anyone else for that matter – has any information which could lead us to this brutal kidnapper, they’ll wish they never . . .’ He tailed off, but I understood him perfectly. ‘I’ll get at the truth. This is no time for gentleness. Julia’s life and safety is at stake.’

  I said, partly to convince myself, ‘We have no actual proof that this was the kidnapper. It does seem very likely, I agree,
but there is no solid evidence to link this crime with him.’

  Marcus turned to face me, and even in my exhausted state I could see the anguish on his face. ‘Oh, but there is. You saw that cord round the nursemaid’s wrists? That’s Julia’s. Her favourite girdle – woven silk and gold – she was wearing it the day she disappeared. And that’s her lilac stola, over there, lying on the floor. You can see the frayed edge where they tore the strip off it to tie round the scroll. Believe me, Libertus, this was the kidnapper.’

  I stared at him. My thoughts were in a whirl. So it was possible that Julia had been here? In that little workshop room, perhaps. Yet who could possibly have brought her there? And why, and how? There was a lock on the outside of the door and it would have made a prison, of a kind. But if that was the case, where was she now? Where were the other inhabitants of the house? And, most importantly for me, where was my Gwellia?

  Marcus was struggling for Roman self-control. ‘I wonder what he was searching so desperately to find. Was that what the torture was about? Questioning Myrna, to find out where it was – whatever it was that he was looking for?’

  ‘Questioning Myrna!’ I exclaimed, struck by a sudden, very different, thought. ‘Dear gods! That’s what we were hoping to go back and do. But if that is Myrna lying dead there in the stable block, she can’t have been arrested outside Lallius’s house today. So who is it that the guards are dragging to the villa as we speak?’

  Marcus looked startled, and for the first time since we had come here, he used his normal tone. ‘Great Jupiter, I hadn’t thought of that. In fact, I’d quite forgotten that the guards were on their way. We’d best be getting back. Pulcrus, assist Libertus to the carriage, and tell the coachman to make all speed home. You stay here with the horse and guard the house. Make sure no one tries to rob the place. It’s conceivable Myrna’s mother will come back – in which case you can break the news and tell her that funeral arrangements have been made. I’ll have someone relieve you as soon as possible – probably some land slaves in the interim, until I can get a proper guard detachment from the garrison.’