A Body in the Bathhouse (2 page)

The Janiculan house had a highly desirable location—if you worked on the north side of Rome. It suited Pa, with his auction house and antiques business in the Saepta Julia by the Pantheon. My own work required free access to all parts of the city. I was an informer, serving private clients whose cases could take me anywhere. However much I wanted to move out and across the river, I needed to live close to the action. Sadly, this sensible thought had only struck Helena and me after we had bought the new house.

By chance, father’s long-term companion, Flora, then died. He turned into a maudlin romantic, who hated the mansion they had shared. I had always liked the riverside quarter below the Aventine. So we organized an exchange. The bathhouse contractors became Father’s problem. That was appropriate because Pa had introduced them to Helena in the first place. I enjoyed waiting to see how he would persuade Gloccus and Cotta to finish, a task where even Helena had failed—despite the fact she had been paying their bills. As with all builders, the more unreliable they had become, the more extortionate those bills were.

With Pa, we couldn’t win: by some means, he fixed them. Within a week, Gloccus and Cotta had grouted their last wobbly tile and cleared off. My father then possessed a fine domestic outbuilding with a full cold room, tepid room, three-piece sweating-room suite; natty dipping pool; integral changing area with modish pegs and clothes bunkers; separate furnace and log store; deluxe Greek marble basins and a custom-designed sea-god medallion in one newly laid mosaic floor. But while people were admiring his Neptune, they also noticed the odd smell.

In moments when it caught me, that reek seemed to carry hints of decay. Pa knew it too. “It’s as if the room had been locked up with some old codger dead inside for months.”

“Well, the room’s brand-new and the old cove is still alive, unfortunately.” I gathered Pa must have had some neglected neighbors, in the past life we never discussed. I myself knew about smells like that from other situations. Bad ones.

There came an evening, after a long hot day, when we found we could no longer ignore the stink. That afternoon I had been helping Pa dig over a terrace, Jupiter knows why. He could afford gardeners and I was not one to play the dutiful son. Afterwards, we both sluiced off. It must have been the first time we bathed together since he ran away when I was seven. Next time we met, I was home from the army. For a few years I even pretended not to know who he was. Now I had to tolerate occasional brushes with the old rogue, for social reasons. He was older; he was on his own with that, but I was older too. I now had two baby daughters. I should allow them a chance to learn to despise their grandfather.

As we stood in the hot room that evening, we faced decision time. During the day, I had done most of the heavy work. I was exhausted, yet I still rejected Pa’s offer to scrape a strigil down my back. I had made a rough job of cleaning off the oil myself. Pa favored a concoction of what seemed to be crushed iris roots. Incongruous. And on that hot sultry night, nowhere near strong enough to mask the other smell.

“Rhea’s right.” I glanced down at the floor. “Something’s rotting in your hypocaust.”

“No, no; trust me!” Pa used the voice he kept for assuring idiots that some piece of Campanian fakery could be “school of Lysippus,” if looked at in the right light. “I told Gloccus to omit the hypocaust from this room. His quotation was outrageous for underfloor work. I worked out some figures myself, and with that kind of area to heat, I was going to be spending four times as much on fuel. …” He tapered off.

I eased my foot against the wide instep strap of a bath shoe. Helena’s original scheme had involved properly heating the whole warm suite. Once she admitted what she was up to here, I had seen the plans. “What have you done then?”

“Just wall flues.”

“You’ll regret it, you cheapskate. You’re on high ground. You’ll find it chilly round your rude bits in December.”

“Give over. I work right by the Baths of Agrippa.” Entrance was free. Pa would love that. “I won’t need to use this place except in high summer.”

I stretched slowly, trying to ease the stiffness in my lower back. “Is the floor solid? Or had they already dug out a hypocaust when you decided against it?”

“Well, the lads had made a start. I told them to floor over the cavity and block off any links to the other rooms.”

“Brilliant, Pa. So there won’t be an access point for crawling under this floor.”

“No. The only way in is down.”

Nice work. We would have to break up the mosaic we had only just taken over brand-new.

The underfloor space in a usable hypocaust would be eighteen inches high, or two feet at most, with a mass of tile piers to support the suspended floor. It would be dark and hot. Normally they send boys in to clean them, not that I would inflict it on a child today—to face who knew what? I was relieved there was no formal access hatch. That saved me having to crawl in.

“So what do you think about this smell, Marcus?” my father asked, far too deferentially.

“The same as you. Your Neptune is floating on rot. And it’s not going away.”

Instinctively we breathed. We caught a definite hum.

“Oh Titan’s turds.”

“That’s what it smells like, Pa!”

We ordered the furnace slave to stop stoking. We told him to go to the house and keep everyone else indoors. I fetched pickaxes and crowbars; then Pa and I set about ruining the sea-god mosaic.

It had cost a fortune, but Gloccus and Cotta had produced their usual shoddy work. The suspended foundation for the tesserae was far too shallow. Neptune, with his wild seaweed hair and boggle-eyed attendant squids, would soon have been buckling underfoot.

By tapping with a chisel, I identified a hollow area and we set to. My father got the worst of it. Always impetuous, he put his pick in too fast, hit something, and was spattered with foul yellowish liquid. He let out a yell of disgust. I leaped back and stopped breathing. A warm updraft brought disgusting odors; we fled towards the door. Judging by its powerful airflow, the underfloor system must never have been blocked off completely as Pa ordered. We were now in no doubt what must be down there.

“Oh pigshit!” Pa peeled off his tunic and hurled it into a corner, splashing water on his skin where the stinking liquid had touched him. He was hopping with disgust. “Oh pigshit, pigshit, pigshit!”

“Didius Favonius speaks. Come, citizens of Rome, let us gather to admire the elegance of his oratory—” I was trying to put off the moment when we had to go back for a look.

“Shut your lofty gob, Marcus! It’s putrid—and it bloody well missed you!”

“Come on; let’s get this over with.”

We covered our mouths and braved a look. In a depression that must have been used as the lazy workmen’s cache for rubbish, amongst a mass of uncleared site rubble, we had unearthed a stomach-turning relic. Still just recognizably human, it was a half-decayed corpse.

II

I
T HAD
already been a hard winter. For most of it, Helena Justina had been pregnant with our second child. She suffered more than with the first, while I struggled to let her rest by looking after our firstborn, Julia. As queen of the household, Julia was establishing her authority that year. I had the bruises to prove it. I had gone deaf too; she enjoyed testing her lungs. Our dark-haired moppet could put on a burst of speed any stadium sprinter would envy, especially as she toddled towards a fiercely steaming stockpot or darted down our steps onto the roadway. Even dumping her on female relations was out; her favorite game lately was breaking vases.

Spring saw no domestic improvements. First the new baby was born. It was very quick. Just as well. Both grandmothers were on the spot this time to complicate proceedings. Ma and the senator’s wife were full of wise ideas, though they had opposing views on midwifery. Things were frosty enough; then I managed to be rude to both of them. At least that gave them a subject on which they could agree.

The new mite was ailing and I named her in a hurry: Sosia Favonia. In part, it was a nod to my father, whose original cognomen was Favonius. I would never have demeaned myself paying him a compliment if I had thought my daughter would survive. Born skinny and silent, she had looked halfway to Hades. The minute I named her, she rallied. From then on, she was as tough as a totter’s ferret. She also had her own character from the start, a curious little eccentric who never quite seemed to belong with us. But everyone told me she had to be mine: she made so much mess and noise.

It took at least six weeks before my family’s fury at the name I had chosen died down to simmering sneers that would only be revived on Favonia’s birthday and at family gatherings every Saturnalia, and whenever there was nobody to blame for anything else. People were now nagging me to acquire a children’s nurse. It was nobody’s business but Helena’s and mine, so everyone weighed in. Eventually I gave up and visited a slave market.

Judging by the pitiful specimens on offer, Rome badly needed some frontier wars. The slave trade was in a slump. The dealer I approached was a creased Delian in a dirty robe, picking his nails on a lopsided tripod while he waited for some naive duffer with a poor eye and a fat purse. He got me. He tried the patter anyway.

Since Vespasian was rebuilding the Empire, he needed to mint coinage and had raided the slave markets for laborers to put in the gold and silver mines. Titus brought large numbers of Jewish prisoners to Rome after the siege of Jerusalem, but the public service had snapped up the men to build the Flavian Amphitheatre. Who knows where the women ended up. That left a poor display for me. In the dealer’s current batch were a few elderly Oriental secretary types, long past being able to see to read a scroll. Then there were various lumps suitable for farm laboring. I did need a manager for my farm at Tibur, but that would wait. My mother had taught me how to go to market. I won’t say I was scared of Ma, but I had learned to trot home with what was on the shopping list and no private treats for myself.

“Jupiter. Where do people buy disease-riddled flute girls nowadays?” I had reached the bitter, sarcastic stage. “How come there are no toothless grannies that according to you can dance naked on the table while weaving a side-weave tunic and grinding a modus of wheat?”

“Females tend to be snapped up, Tribune. …” The dealer winked. I was too careworn to respond. “I can do you a Christian, if you want to stretch a point.”

“No thanks. They drink their god’s blood while they maunder about love, don’t they?” My late brother Festus had encountered these crazy men out in Judaea and sent home some lurid tales. “I’m looking for a children’s nurse; I cannot have perverts.”

“No, no; I believe they drink wine—”

“Forget it. I don’t want a drunk. My darling heirs can pick up bad habits watching me.”

“These Christians just pray and cry a lot, or try to convert the master and mistress of the house to their beliefs—”

“You want to get me arrested because some arrogant slave says everyone should deny the sanctity of the Emperor? Vespasian may be a grouchy old barbarian-basher with a tight-arsed Sabine outlook—but I work for him sometimes. When he pays up, I’m happy to say he’s a god.”

“How about a bonny Briton, then?”

He proffered a thin, pale-haired girl of about fifteen, wilting under her shame as the filthy trader poked her rags aside to reveal her figure. As tribal maidens go, she was far from buxom. He tried to make her show her teeth, and I would have taken her if she had bitten him, but she just leaned away. Too meek to be trusted. Feed her and clothe her and the next we knew, she’d be stealing Helena’s tunics and throwing the baby on its head. The man assured me she was healthy, a good breeder, and had no claims at law hanging onto her. “Very popular, Britons,” he said, leering.

“Why’s that?”

“Dirt cheap. Then your wife won’t worry about you chasing this pitiful thing around the kitchen the way she would with some ogling Syrian who knows it all.”

I shuddered. “I do have some standards. Does your British girl know Latin?”

“You are joking, Tribune.”

“No good, then. Look, I want a clean woman with experience of headstrong children, who would fit in with a young, upwardly moving family—”

“You’ve got expensive taste!” His eyes fell on my new gold equestrian ring. It told him my financial position exactly; his disgust was open. “We do a basic model with no trimmings. Lots of potential, but you have to train the bint yourself. … You can win them over with kind treatment, you know. Ends up they would die for you.”

“What—and land me with the funeral costs?”

“Stuff you, then!”

So we all knew where we were.

I went home without a slave. It did not matter. The noble Julia Justa, Helena’s mother, had the bright idea of giving us the daughter of Helena’s own old nurse. Camilla Hyspale was thirty years old and newly given her liberty. Her freedwoman status would overcome any squeamishness I felt about owning slaves (though I would have to do it; I was middle class now, and obliged to show my clout). There was a downside. I reckoned we had about six months before Hyspale wanted to exploit her new citizenship and marry. She would fall for some limp waste of space; she had him lined up already, I bet. Then I would feel responsible for him too. …

Hyspale had not approved when Helena Justina abandoned her smart senatorial home to live with an informer. She came to us with great reluctance. It was made clear at our first interview (
she
interviewed us, of course) that Hyspale expected a room of her own in a respectable dwelling, the right to more time off than time on duty, use of the family carrying chair to protect her modesty on shopping trips, and the occasional treat of a ticket for the theater, or better still a pair of tickets so she could go with a friend. She would not accept being quizzed on the sex or identity of the friend.

A slave or freedwoman soon rules your life. To satisfy Hyspale’s need for social standing, dear gods, I had to buy a carrying chair. Pa lent me a couple of bearers temporarily; this was just his excuse to use
my
chair to transport
his
property to his new home on the Janiculan. To give Hyspale her room, we had to move in before Pa’s old house was ready for us. For weeks we lived alongside our decorators, which would have been bad enough even if I had not been lured into giving work to my brother-in-law Mico, the plasterer. He was thrilled. Since he was working for a relative, he assumed he could bring his motherless brats with him—and that our nursemaid would look after them. At least that way I got back at the nurse. Mico had been married to my most terrible sister; Victorina’s character was showing up well in her orphans. It was a rude shock for Hyspale, who kept rushing over to the Capena Gate to complain about her horrid life to Helena’s parents. The senator reproached me with her stories every time I met him at the gym we shared.