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Authors: Lindsey Davis

Deadly Election

BOOK: Deadly Election
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Contents

Also by Lindsey Davis

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Character List

Rome, the Caelian Hill: July AD 89

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Epilogue

Also by Lindsey Davis

The Course of Honour

Rebels and Traitors

Master and God

The Falco Series

The Silver Pigs

Shadows in Bronze

Venus in Copper

The Iron Hand of Mars

Poseidon’s Gold

Last Act in Palmyra

Time to Depart

A Dying Light in Corduba

Three Hands in the Fountain

Two for the Lions

One Virgin too Many

Ode to a Banker

A Body in the Bath House

The Jupiter Myth

The Accusers

Scandal Takes a Holiday

See Delphi and Die

Saturnalia

Alexandria

Nemesis

The Flavia Albia Series

The Ides of April

Enemies at Home

Deadly Election

Falco: The Official Companion

DEADLY ELECTION
Lindsey Davis
A Flavia Albia Novel

 

 

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Lindsey Davis

Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Lindsey Davis 2015

Map by Rodney Paull

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

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 444 79420 5

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

CHARACTER LIST
Flavia Albia
an informer, feeling seedy
The Camillus brothers
her useful uncles
L. Petronius Longus
her father’s old crony, another uncle
Maia Favoniaher
laid-back aunt
T. Manlius Faustus
a magistrate, not her lover
Tullius Icilius
his uncle, with big plans
Dromo
Faustus’s slave, with little sense
Laia Gratiana
Faustus’s unforgiving ex-wife
Gornia
a very old auction porter
Staff
porters, security, messenger, donkey boy
T. Claudius Laeta
a retired bureaucrat
T. Claudius Philippus
his son, a chip off the old stylus
Abascantus
a mandarin, on gardening leave

Candidates for Plebeian Aedile and their manifestos:

Trebonius Fulvo
devoted wife, strong core, harsh attitude
Arulenus Crescens
disappointed mistress, weak principles
S. Vibius Marinus
missing wife, good intentions
L. Salvius Gratus
loyal sister, cynical manipulator
Dillius Surus
rich wife, convivial appeal
Ennius Verecundus
quiet wife, stern mother, no hope
Volusius Firmus
loving wife, thwarted hope, standing down

 

Callistus Valens
who has gone to the country

And his family – sons, nephew, wives, ex-wives, granddaughter, slaves

Julia Verecunda
the mother-in-law from Hades

And her family – daughters, son, in-laws, grandchildren

Marcella Vibia and her husband
proud parents

 

Strongbox Man
a mystery
Titus Niger
an efficient agent
Claudia Galeria
his wife, a good manager
‘Puce Tunic’
a loafer with a terrible dress sense
Fundanus
an undertaker with a horrible job
Priestess of Isis
a wounded plaintiff

The financial fraternity

Nothokleptes and Son
Egyptian bankers
Balonius
a Gallic banker
Other bankers
Greek, Syrian, unavailable
Claudia Arsinoë
a different kind of banker

Miscellaneous

Consul/‘Incitatus’
a spirited hound
Venus with the Big Behind
popular art (in quadruplicate)
Boy with a Thorn in His Foot
unpopular art
Ursa
a mouldy bear, unsaleable
Patchy
a deplorable donkey
ROME, the Caelian Hill:
July AD 89
1

N
ever hold an auction in July. In Rome, who’s around then? People who can escape will have fled to rural retreats in cooler parts of Italy. The rest are on their deathbeds or have stayed here to avoid relatives.

Hopeless. Everybody’s tunic is sticking to them; sweat pours down their greasy necks. Porters drop things, then storm off in a huff. Sellers vacillate and buyers renege. Dockets go missing. Payments ditto. Wild dogs invade and scatter the punters. Afterwards, somebody points out that no advertising notice was ever put up in the Forum. Rival auctioneers are not bothering to gloat at your poor takings: it’s too damned hot.

My father owns an auction house and in high summer he hides away at his seaside villa. His staff keeps the family business chugging along. It’s always a quiet period.

Nothing was different in the year of the consuls Titus Aurelius Fulvus and Marcus Asinius Atrantinus, except that before one sale in July our workers found a corpse.

I was in Rome. I had been at the coast, carried off there by my mother – ‘rescued’, she said – during an illness that had nearly killed me. She plucked me from my apartment and took me off to the family spread, south of Ostia. After three weeks of people fussing, I was longing to come back. A friend had originally found me lying half dead and gallantly saved my life, so I wanted to thank him properly and believed I was now strong enough for city life.

You may be thinking this friend and I were lovers. How wrong you would be.

It was an all-day journey by rackety cart down the Ostia Road to Rome. That really drained me. As soon as I stepped into my stuffy and silent apartment on the Aventine, I knew I was too weak. I stayed in bed for two days, fortunately sustained by a hamper of dainties from my mother. Lonely and tearful, I propped myself on pillows and munched my way through everything. I thought I had no appetite, but I had been a starving street child once. I hate waste.

All too soon, I licked out the last little dish of aspic salad. I would now have to fend for myself – or crawl back to the parents ignominiously. No chance of that.

Still, I love them. They adopted me when I was lice-ridden and desperate, a difficult teenager to whom they were loyal and affectionate when others would quail. They had turned a lost soul from far-away Britain into a fairly normal Roman daughter. I was now twenty-nine and an independent widow, but I had whined and argued to come back from the coast, worming away at it like my two younger sisters when they wanted new sandals.

‘Go, then. We’ll keep your bed made up!’ the parents scoffed. So now I had to live up to my claim of being fit.

I forced myself to drag on a tunic. Slowly, I descended a flight of outside stairs towards a balcony walkway. This half-rotten structure, a so-called fire escape, was inaccessible to most tenants. It ran around the bare interior courtyard, once a laundry but nowadays deserted. I lived in the Eagle Building, Fountain Court: one of many dark, creaking, stinking tenements in which miserable, poverty-stricken Romans – most of us – endure what passes for life. The edifice was full of inadequate apartments and prone to extremely odd smells. Father owned it, I regret to say. This did not add lustre to his reputation, though since he was a private informer, it was low to start with. People were amazed he had the money to possess a building – though much less amazed once they heard he was also an auctioneer, a profession that is famous for wealth.

I was an informer myself. Public opinion was even harder on me, because a respectable woman ought to remain at home all day. I should be weaving at my loom in a gracious atrium, between beating my inoffensive slave-girl or screwing a litter-bearer rather than my husband. Stuff that for a game of knucklebones. ‘Loom’ was a dirty word among my mother, sisters and me. I didn’t own a slave-girl and my husband died ten years ago. I worked. Not that I felt like it at the moment.

BOOK: Deadly Election
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