Memento Mori Read online

  “It must be very different to what you’re used to, sir.”

  “Hm. My former employers in the military want to know why I’ve gone native. The natives still can’t understand why the military are building Hadrian’s bloody great wall across their farm. Some of Tilla’s relatives seem to think I’m personally responsible for it. And both sides think I must be a spy.”

  “It must be very difficult, sir.”

  From anyone else, that might have been a rebuke. From Albanus, it was genuine sympathy. Still, it was a reminder that his own problems were nothing compared to what was happening down in Aquae Sulis.

  “Tell me what happened to Serena.”

  “Doctor Valens found that she’d been stabbed in the heart, sir.”

  Ruso imagined the horror of having to do a postmortem examination on one’s own wife. He closed his eyes and tried to chase the thought away by picturing Serena in life: the broad shoulders inherited from her father; the shining dark hair swept back in a no-nonsense bun; the occasional baffled expression that betrayed the naïveté behind the stern exterior. Stabbed in the heart. What a cruel waste of a vibrant young woman.

  “It was, ah … there were other complications, sir.”

  Albanus had had many days on the road to rehearse his account of the death, but it seemed he was still going to need prompting. “What sort of complications?”

  “She was”—Albanus paused to cough—“she was found floating in Sulis Minerva’s sacred spring, sir.”

  Ruso had never been to Aquae Sulis, but he could imagine the shock that the discovery of Serena’s body must have caused. Not only a violation of life but a desecration of the most famous shrine in the province.

  It was only when Albanus added “She seems to have been there for several hours, sir” that he remembered what he had heard about the temperature of the water. “Oh, dear gods.”

  “The business about the spring is confidential, sir.”

  “Of course.” The priests would have taken hasty steps to purify the site and to keep the dreadful news quiet.

  “And as if that wasn’t bad enough, sir, on the same night two visitors and a local died in a fire and another man went missing.”

  “What?” It was enough to drive a man to a belief in the anger of the gods.

  “The authorities are trying to deal with it all quietly so as not to spread further panic among the rest of the visitors, sir.”

  “Well,” said Ruso, seizing on the only aspect of this chain of disasters that seemed at all susceptible to logic, “gods or no, Serena’s death was obviously nothing to do with Valens. If a man wants to get rid of his wife, he divorces her.”

  “Centurion Pertinax is of the opinion that he didn’t want to get rid of her, sir.”

  “Really?” It was not often that Ruso found himself sharing an opinion with Serena’s father. “So why is he blaming Valens?”

  Albanus cleared his throat. “My own wife is of the view that all those curses people have thrown into the sacred spring over the years have finally come to fruition, sir.”

  “I see,” said Ruso, not adding that if a reasoned and sensible view were required, Albanus’s wife was the last person in the empire whom he would consult. “Tell me.”

  “Well, sir, Aquae Sulis isn’t just a healing shrine. People with grudges inscribe terrible curses on thin sheets of lead and fold them up and throw them—”

  “I know what curses are. I meant tell me about the night.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Ruso listened while Albanus explained about the death of two off-duty legionaries and their landlord in a lodging house fire, assuming that sooner or later the reason for accusing Valens of stabbing Serena might become clear. “And when I left,” Albanus continued, “the chief engineer was still trying to find his assistant. The young man vanished on the same night and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “That looks very suspicious.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did this assistant have any reason to harm Serena?”

  “No, sir. Quite the opposite, in fact. She was, ah … they appeared to be very good friends.”

  “ ‘Very good friends’?”

  “Very good friends indeed, sir, if you see what I mean. Doctor Valens was understandably upset about it when he found out.”

  “I see.” At last, a motive for a husband to turn violent.

  “He came all the way across from his new posting in Isca to see Mistress Serena and they had an argument. Mistress Serena left the house after sunset, and that was the last anyone saw of her alive. Or the young man.”

  Ruso sighed. If he had not known one of the married couple for even longer than they had known each other, he might have begun to think Pertinax had a point. “Perhaps,” he said, “Serena went to tell this assistant engineer chap it was all over, and he attacked her in a fit of jealousy and then fled.”

  “Let’s hope so, sir … I mean, of course we all wish such a terrible thing had never happened at all, but—”

  “I know what you mean,” Ruso assured him. “It’ll be a further disaster if Valens is convicted of the murder. Especially for their boys.” He got to his feet. “You didn’t bring a vehicle or a horse, I suppose.”

  Albanus shifted position on the bench. “I never want to sit on a horse again, sir. Unreliable, uncooperative, and uncomfortable. I was very glad to hand the last one back at the staging post. After that, I walked.”

  It was oddly comforting to know that some things hadn’t changed. “Sit here and rest while I go and pack,” Ruso told him. “We’ll sort out the transport later.”

  Instead of resting, Albanus adopted an expression of intense concentration. He reached his arms out, leaned forward, raised his backside into the air with his knees still bent, and slowly eased himself upright. “I’ll come and help, sir.”

  Anything, Ruso supposed, was better than being abandoned in the middle of a native farmyard where goats, chickens, and wild-haired barbarians clutching axes might approach you at any moment, and one of them might address you in a tongue you didn’t understand.

  “Sir, I’m afraid I completely forgot to ask after your— Ah!”

  Ruso followed his gaze and saw that a cart had drawn up under the oak tree in the lane. A slave leapt down to open the gate and gave the mule a friendly rub on the nose as Tilla took the reins. Tilla drove into the yard, spotted Albanus, and almost forgot to pull the mule up before it too helped itself to the haystack. That was when it dawned on Ruso that his announcement of an immediate and lone trip to Aquae Sulis was not going to be well received.

  3

  The average native house was nowhere near as ghastly as most Romans were led to expect, but in one respect Ruso felt British homes were deeply inferior to proper buildings: The living areas were separated from the bedrooms only by flimsy wicker screens and bright woven hangings. His own small family shared a house with another, and there was nowhere to be sure of holding a private conversation. If you wanted to keep something quiet, there were two choices: talk outdoors, or risk suffocation in the stench of the cow house.

  Fortune was kind today, and the British sun god was still in one of his unreliable good moods. Ruso and his wife left the exhausted Albanus asleep on their bed and their daughter with the baby-minder, and began to pick their way through the rough grass to where the land behind the farmstead dropped down toward the stream.

  Even then, escape was not easy. A couple of the innumerable grubby children, who were related to Tilla in some way, hurried over to ask where they were going. When Tilla said, “For a walk,” the older one announced, “We’ll come with you.”

  “Not this time.”

  “It’s all right,” insisted the smaller one, “we’re allowed near the soldiers if there’s grown-ups.”

  Tilla took Ruso by the arm. “My husband and I want some time on our own.”

  “Ha!” squealed the older girl, who must have been seven or eight. “We know what you’re going to do!” They both
giggled.

  “Then you will leave us to do it in peace, or I will see to it that your mother beats you,” said Tilla calmly. This set them both running back toward the houses, evidently delighted to have something to shriek about.

  As they walked, Ruso could hear the musical tink-tink of hammer on chisel from farther up the valley. This time last year he had been a legionary medic and responsible for the health of those quarrymen. When disaster struck, it was his duty to scramble up the landslide and try to release Pertinax from beneath a tumbled boulder.

  Tilla said, “You are very quiet.”

  One of the very few points of similarity between Tilla and Ruso’s first wife was that You are very quiet was always a prelude to What are you thinking? “I’m thinking about Serena’s father,” he told her, preempting the question.

  “I am sad for him.”

  “The day he was injured in the landslide.”

  “And you were late for supper, and I did not know where you were, and I was cross.”

  He could still picture Pertinax now, trapped halfway up an unstable heap of mud and broken rock. “He didn’t expect to get out alive. He was asking for someone to get a knife up to him so he could go quickly rather than slowly.”

  “He is a brave man. Even if he is always very rude.”

  Ruso cleared his throat. “I had to find some way to keep him going while I got ready to amputate the leg,” he said. “So I told him that if he didn’t live, Serena and the boys would be dependent on Valens. And he said, ‘The man’s an idiot,’ and I agreed with him.”

  “Are you wishing now you had not said it?”

  “Not really. I don’t think anything else would have worked. But it’s sad when you can use your best friend as a threat.”

  Tilla sniffed. “Your best friend should have treated his wife better and he would not be in this mess now that we have to go and sort out for him.”

  He let the we pass.

  “Why do we have to go? Does Valens not have important friends who can speak for him?”

  “They’ve gone back to Rome. Hadrian put new men in charge when he came to visit.”

  They made their way on down the hill, past grazing sheep that barely bothered to look up. The sound of workmen in the quarry was louder now. Somewhere way above them all, a late skylark was trilling. Suddenly Tilla said, “Oh, dear.”

  “Mm?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It is the way with bad news. You forget for a moment because it is too hard to believe. And then you think, Why am I sad? And then it jumps out and knocks you down again. Serena, of all people!”

  He nodded. He had had a little longer to get used to the shock, and there came a point when you no longer wanted to say how terrible something was all the time. You just wanted to be numb and silent and get on with the things that needed doing. And the thing that needed doing was for him to pack and leave at first light tomorrow for Aquae Sulis, because his oldest and best friend was in trouble.

  “I do not think any of what Albanus told you can be true,” she said. “About Serena being in the next world, yes. That must be true or he would not be here. But the rest makes no sense. She would never leave Valens. Not as long as your law says the father keeps the children. Serena would never give up her boys.”

  Ruso had concluded long before now that Valens would never completely leave Serena, either, because he would lose any access to her father’s substantial savings. But in the circumstances that was not a helpful observation, so instead he said, “Serena does have a history of rash decisions. She pursued Valens halfway across the province.”

  “One rash decision,” Tilla corrected him.

  “If he hadn’t done the decent thing and married her, her reputation would have been ruined.”

  “For choosing the man she thought she loved?”

  Sometimes he wondered whether the British mind was really as alien as his wife’s conversation implied, or whether she only said these things to bait him. “You know it would.”

  She said, “Have you ever thought how odd that is?”

  “No.”

  “A Roman man chases a woman and everyone thinks it is normal. Or even how clever he is. A woman chases a man for the same thing and you all pretend to be shocked.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it not good for a woman to want a man?”

  “Well, of course, but …” He was glad nobody else was listening. “It’s good for a woman to want her husband.”

  “But before he is her husband, she is not supposed to want him?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know it makes no sense,” she told him.

  He left her to have the last word. Any further explanation on his part would only sink him deeper into the mire. Besides, he didn’t want to be drawn into an irrelevant argument about men and women before he had to break the news that he needed to travel fast, and that meant without the encumbrance of a wife, a baby, and two slaves.

  He was aware that she was speaking but he was not paying much attention until—“What did you just say?”

  “I said, if Valens wanted to murder anybody—”

  “He wouldn’t,” he said. “He never laid a hand on her.”

  “I said if. If he did want to, it would be Serena’s father. Valens could make the death look like old age, or an illness, because he is a doctor. Then she would inherit all her father’s money and he could help her spend it.”

  “Sometimes, wife, I worry about what goes on in your mind.”

  “But Pertinax is not the one who is dead,” she continued. “So it was not Valens.”

  “Of course it wasn’t. He wouldn’t do a thing like that. Besides, he was fond of Serena.” He wondered how many times he was going to have to repeat those words in Aquae Sulis. He would have to sound more convincing than he did now. Was Valens fond of Serena? On reflection, he couldn’t ever remember him saying so. But then, had Ruso ever discussed his own feelings about Tilla with anyone else? Of course not. And most certainly not with Valens. What went on between a man and his wife was none of anyone else’s business. “Pertinax will probably think better of the accusation when he’s had a chance to calm down,” he said. “The grief must be affecting his reason.”

  Tilla said, “Valens was fond of Serena as long as she was a long way away.”

  “He was fond of her in the way that you’d be fond of”—Ruso paused to scratch one ear with his forefinger—“a spirited but difficult horse.”

  “A horse?”

  He skirted a clump of nettles growing out of a dip. “To be honest,” he said, “once the initial attraction wore off, I think he was secretly terrified of her. He avoided her by being busy working.”

  “That is not a difficult thing for a doctor to do.”

  Ignoring the acidity of his wife’s tone, he said, “And it didn’t help when Pertinax chose to interfere.”

  “You cannot blame a father for trying to protect his daughter. Will you not do the same for Mara one day?”

  He pushed aside the frightening prospect of their chubby, newly crawling daughter growing into a young woman who fancied herself in love with some unsuitable oaf.

  “And before you tell me again that she should never have chased him, Valens should have known better than to flirt with a girl that age. She thought he meant what he said.”

  He did not reply. He was recalling a long-ago conversation with Valens in the chaotic bachelor quarters they had shared when Ruso first joined the Twentieth Legion. Much had faded from his memory, but not the moment when Valens had observed that Serena was the only child of a successful man who must surely have plenty of money.

  “Poor Serena,” Tilla said. “I think she could never understand what she had done wrong. So, when do we set out for Aquae Sulis?”

  “I thought you might want to stay here with the family,” he said, as innocently as he could manage. “We’ve only been back a few weeks and I know how you hate the constant moving about.”


  A shadow passed over her face. “I am glad to be home,” she agreed. “But now when I say anything about where we have been, somebody says, ‘Oh, in Rome …’ as if I am trying to annoy them.”

  This was a revelation, but it had not come at a helpful moment. “I need to get there quickly, Tilla,” he confessed. “I can’t be delayed by—”

  “I have thought of this,” she told him. “And I talked to Albanus, and he says we can get a fast carriage to the coast and go by ship. And why did you not tell me he is to be a father?”

  “Ship?” he repeated, desperately groping for a reason why this was not a sensible idea.

  “It is the quickest way,” she assured him. “And we can all travel together! Isn’t that good?”

  4

  The sail billowed out, the ship creaked and tilted to starboard, and the blessed shelter of the riverbanks was sliding away again. As they headed out into the restless waters of the Sabrina estuary, the deck bucked and swayed beneath Ruso’s feet. He thanked the gods that the journey was almost over. Tilla was right: The trip had been fast, but that was the only thing that could be said in favor of traveling by sea when you didn’t have to.

  He found a vacant patch of sunny deck and lay back with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. He was never a good sailor, but there was definitely something malevolent about the way this little ship wallowed and rolled.

  He must order his thoughts, because these next few hours would be the last chance for him to piece together Albanus’s version of events before he arrived in the middle of what was bound to be a deeply unhappy situation. Albanus had done his best to tell him all the details of the disaster—several times—but it was very difficult to care about anything anyone said to you when you were feeling seasick. Especially when you suffered the added embarrassment of finding that none of the remedies you recommended for your patients seemed to help. But now, after a few blessed hours of relief while the ship took them upriver to the fortress of Isca, he was feeling much better. He must pull his thoughts together before his stomach took over again.