Of Merchants & Heros (6 page)

So Rome was forgotten.

It was soon after this, one hot day in high summer, when I was working with a group of farmhands in the orchard, that the swineherd came running from the house.

He was a hulking boy called Milo, rather simple, who had a habit of blurting out whatever came into his head, however indiscreet.

Usually he made the others laugh with his observations, but now he came bounding down the terraces to where I was standing halfway up a ladder and cried at the top of his voice, ‘Marcus, sir, you must do something: he is sending old Postumus away!’

I climbed down from the ladder and set aside my basket, and told Milo to sit down and tell me all he had heard. He spilled out his words in his usual rambling way and I listened, though I scarcely needed to, for I had guessed already. But at least the pause allowed me to master my rising anger. Postumus was the oldest of the hands on our farm. He had grown slow of late, and forgetful, and already I had had to intervene with Caecilius, who thought him inefficient and a waste of money, though Postumus was old enough to be his father.

I heard Milo out, then left him in the orchard and went up to the house.

I found Caecilius in my father’s old study, which he had made his own. I avoided the room if I could. He had removed my father’s books, replacing them with a matching set of painted vases he had imported from Greece, of rampant satyrs chasing nymphs. He looked up sharply when I entered. He expected people to knock, even me and my mother. I was dusty from the orchard. In the cool interior I could smell my sweat.

‘Yes?’ he snapped. ‘What is it?’

‘You are sending away old Postumus,’ I said.

He set aside his papers and sat back, as if he had been waiting for this. ‘Yes, I am. He is a hired hand, not a slave, and I have no more use for him.’

‘No one has thought to tell you, sir, with all that has happened lately, but Postumus has been with us all his life, and his father before him. He has nowhere else to go.’

‘And I have a farm to run.’

‘But sir!’ I cried. ‘What else will he do? He is part of the family almost, not some old shoe to cast out on the midden.’

He stared at me and there was an awkward pause. No doubt I had gone too far. But I was angry.

‘Is this the way your father taught you to speak to your elders?’

he said pompously.

‘My father would never have dismissed a man like Postumus.’

His thick lips tightened into a harsh line. ‘I will not speak ill of the dead, Marcus. Your father had his merits, I daresay. But he was too indulgent by far, and such men are taken advantage of. These workers’ – with an angry wave towards the window – ‘are paid to work. One day they will
all
be old and useless. What then? In my opinion you are much too close to the farmhands; it is bad for discipline to think of them as ‘family’ as you call this man. And now I see they have you dancing to their tune. I suppose they put you up to this, or do you deny it?’

I began an indignant answer, but he silenced me. ‘No, do not speak. Listen. Out of consideration for your mother I will find something else for this old man to do, though God knows what. But do not come to me again with such a request, unless you intend to pay for it with your own funds. I hope that is clear.’ He reached out and pulled a letter from a pile of scrolls, saying, ‘And while you are here there is something else. I have decided to appoint a bailiff here: there are useful men all over Italy – discharged servicemen, landowners down on their luck – who will accept what they are offered. My business will soon take me away, and it is clear to me I cannot leave things to run themselves.’

This was his revenge. The expression on his face told me so. He was not a man to be crossed, even in the smallest thing. Everything was a battle, and every battle had to be won.

I said, ‘But sir, I can manage.’

‘Oh? I do not think you can. But either way I do not intend to leave you here, wasting your time picking apples and threshing corn like some land peasant. You are more useful to me elsewhere; I need help, and now you are my adopted son it is time you earned your way.’

He paused – a significant, self-satisfied pause to let me know who had triumphed and who had lost in this exchange. For a few moments our eyes locked, mine full of anger; his challenging me to say more. Eventually I looked down at the grey-stone floor; I was powerless, and he knew it, and he wanted to make sure I knew it too.

Then with a contented grunt he went on, ‘So. I am awaiting news from Rome that will determine my future plans. When I am ready you will be told.’ He fluttered his hand. ‘Now you may go and tell old-man Postumus of his good fortune.’

Before long my new stepfather had another surprise for me. I knew he had been married once. But I did not know, until the day before a carriage arrived bearing her, that he had a daughter.

She was twelve years old. Her name was Caecilia, but her father called her Mouse. It was not a term of endearment. It was his way of mocking the way she looked.

He spoke to her like a servant, ordering her to fetch things, telling her to pull her chin up, and not to drag her feet, and not to whisper, and not to sulk. She had flat brown hair, hacked short with no care for how she looked; she had a pale, round face, and dull eyes that never met yours. I might have hated her, for being his daughter, and for moving in to the house I still thought of as mine. But she was too pitiful to hate. Seeing his bullying, and how he put her down, I felt sorry for her.

She mooned about the house, or sat with my mother, or alone under the shade of the rowans on the sloping lawn outside.

At first she was so shy of me as almost to be mute, and if I was around she would keep her eyes downcast like a slave. But one afternoon I had occasion to speak to her. It was some days after she arrived, when, returning from some business on the farm, I found her sitting alone on the terrace, peering intently at a scroll which lay open on her lap. Seeing me she set it quickly aside. ‘Hello Mouse,’ I said. ‘What is it you’re reading? Has he set you to work on his accounts?’

Her big round face flushed to the ears. Reluctantly she picked up the book and proffered it, as if I had caught her doing something forbidden. I looked at the edge of the scroll and immediately recognized it. It was a book of Homer, which recently I had rescued from its exile in the outhouse. I was trying to master the Greek, having decided I must educate myself as my father would have wished. I had left it lying in the house.

‘Homer, is it?’ I said, somewhat dryly. ‘I suppose you read Greek then?’

To tell the truth, I had intended this as something of a putdown.

It irked me that she had helped herself to my book. Who did she think she was, to come to my house and take my private things without asking? But in her hesitant voice she replied, ‘I can read a little of it, but I am not really very good at all.’ She flushed once more and looked down. ‘You are cross with me. Here, take it; I should have asked you first, but Father said you had gone to the fields, and I was going to put it back before you noticed.’

I had a sharp reply ready. I was still smarting from the dressing- down Caecilius had given me, and Mouse was an easy target. But each of us has the power to pass pain on, or let it stop with us. I thought of Caecilius. That was enough to make me swallow my harsh words.

‘Well never mind,’ I said instead. ‘Read it if you like. Anyway, you are right, I have work to do.’

She looked up then. I saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes, and for the first time since she had arrived she smiled. She reminded me of the timid little birds I used to coax to my hand in winter with the promise of food, when the snow was on the ground and they were hungry. I said, ‘There are other books too, you know. They’re hidden away at the back of the barn there, but I can show you, if you want.’

‘Oh would you!’ she cried.

I laughed. ‘Why not? Anyway,’ I added, kicking at the grass, ‘I shan’t have time to read them. Your father is taking me away.’

At this her face fell once more. ‘Yes, Marcus, I heard. That is what he is like, always moving, never still. It’s like a sickness. But I wish you were staying.’

From that day we were friends.

Next morning, before work, I took her up to the barn. On the way I said, ‘I suppose, if you can read, you must have books at home.’

‘I have no home,’ she answered straight away.

‘Well you must have somewhere. Where were you before you came here? Rome, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, Rome for a while. And before that Cales in Campania. Then Sicily; then Cales again. And now I am here.’

‘Doesn’t he keep you with him?’

She shrugged. ‘He does sometimes, when it suits him. But business comes first.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said. I was beginning to learn that for myself.

We clambered through the bales and casks and assorted implements to the dark corner at the back of the barn where Caecilius had dumped my father’s library. When I had first found them there, the books were cast into a heap, piled up with no care for the order of the volumes, food for the rats. Knowing what they had meant to him I had picked them up and placed them out of reach of the damp, thinking thereby to preserve some part of his memory.

Now, seeing them, Mouse reached out and touched them reverentially one by one with her stubby fingers, turning the fluttering labels and whispering, ‘Oh, oh,’ to herself. In the dusty halflight the happiness shone in her face. It touched my heart. Her unselfconscious joy made her seem almost beautiful.

Presently, after we had spent some time picking through the scrolls, I said I must go; the farmhands would be waiting. But before I left I said, ‘Mouse?’

She turned from the books and looked at me with her big eyes.

‘I just wanted to say . . . I am glad you are here. Everyone needs a home, so this is yours, for as long as ever you want. Don’t forget.’

Priscus our neighbour stopped calling at the house. But about a month after the marriage, when I had gone up to the town on some farm matter, I ran into him at the market.

For a little while we spoke inconsequentially. Then there was a pause and he said lightly, as if carrying on from what had gone before, ‘I met your stepfather the other day, while I was walking in the orchard.’

‘Oh?’ I said, catching his eye. ‘Then you are fortunate. He seldom ventures from the house.’

He paused and coughed, and pretended to look over a stall selling knives and hooks. ‘He called me over . . . I think, actually, he thought I was one of the farmhands. He was looking up at a tree and wanted to know what was wrong with the apples. I told him there was nothing wrong with the apples, if I was any judge, but that he was looking at a plumtree.’

I laughed out loud.

‘Still,’ went on Priscus, frowning, ‘it is an easy enough mistake, after all, and I suppose he grew up in the city, where one does not learn such things.’

‘The city? Not at all. He’s from Campania, where the people take in farming with their mother’s milk. But not Caecilius, it seems. He despises farming. He is a man of business, so he says.’

Priscus raised his grey brows and walked on, and when I caught his eye he said, ‘Ah, a man of business. Well, indeed.’

We carried on down the narrow cobbled street in silence. Then I could restrain myself no longer and I burst out, ‘I tell you, Priscus, Father would have hated such a man. Everything has a price, and he makes it his business to know it. He thinks all things may be bought and sold. He calls it “business”, and now he says I must learn it.’

Priscus nodded into his beard. One never quite knew, with Priscus, whether he was amused or not. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no harm in learning the value of things, or how else will you learn judgement? What price, I wonder, does he buy friendship at?’

I laughed. ‘Friendship?’

‘Or love?’

I shook my head.

‘Then, it seems, he does not know the price of everything, after all. But what of you, Marcus, who know so much less than he about “business”? What price, would you say, do these things fetch?’

‘Why, no price at all, Priscus!’ I cried. ‘A man cannot buy and sell such things!’

‘And yet,’ he said, ‘they have a value.’

We had come out at a small, paved square. I had often played here as a child, and knew it well. On one side, shaded by a spreading lime, there was a stone bench beside a fountain. Here we sat, and looked out over the valley. The sound of goat-clappers came tinkling across the terraced fields, and, from somewhere beyond my view, the voice of a herdboy singing.

Priscus said, ‘You see, Marcus, some things have value yet have no price, and a wise man learns them and their worth. So do not let the standard of the marketplace be your guide. A man goes there for flour and greens, but not for virtue.’

I drew down my brows and gazed out at the distant hills, the oak groves and the descending rows of cypresses, and was seized suddenly by the beauty of the place, and by Priscus’s gentle wisdom, which, in my youthful hurry, I seldom heeded. My father had said to me once that it was the burden of the wise never to be listened to. I remembered his words now, though I could not recall why he had spoken them. I said, ‘He is going to take me away from here.’

‘You will be back. In the meantime, think of it this way: there are things you can learn from your stepfather; though not the things, I suspect, that he imagines. But you will draw what you need nevertheless, and leave what you do not. Remember, it is in your power to fashion yourself into what you will be. And your stepfather is right in this at least, that you cannot stay here for ever. The world is stirring, and you serve nobody’s good by hiding from it, least of all your own.’

I turned to him. ‘Is that my fate, then, Priscus, to be some merchant?’

‘I doubt it. But that is for you to decide. Besides, you made a vow, as I recall. Have you told your stepfather of it?’

‘I have told no one,’ I said, ‘least of all him. He would not understand.’

‘No, perhaps he would not. And such things are best kept between you and the god. But you have not forgotten it, I see.’