Enemies at Home: Falco: The New Generation - Flavia Albia 2 Read online

  It was lucky that she lived in an apartment without sanitation and had those small children, because among her meagre possessions she owned a robust chamberpot. I grabbed it from the corridor as I staggered through the dismal series of rooms she occupied; I fell into my own place. The heavy door closed behind me of its own accord.

  Barely was I in my room when, without warning, I disgraced myself with an uncontrollable eruption from every part of me that could erupt.

  After that I was helpless. I would not have thought the human body could be so wrung out. After several painful episodes, I managed to strip off my tunic. Then I lay on the floor, curled up and occasionally crying, naked and despairing, lost.

  I had a big old couch here, but I could not reach it. There was a door to a walkway over the courtyard, where I could have called for help, but getting there was impossible.

  In a moment of lucidity, I knew what caused this. The well. The well with the poisoned water. I had not been so stupid as to drink from it, but I did splash that water all over my hot face; I had drunk from a silver goblet that had been in the well water, not washing the cup, as far as I could remember. No, not washing it, because yesterday the apartment had run out of clean water.

  For almost a couple of decades, the disease that lurked in the well had been waiting for another victim. Maybe there was unhealthy leakage, a hidden cracked sewer seeping into the groundwater. Then I came along. The family who were here before all died of dysentery. About five of them …

  I was in no doubt what was happening now. I had that and I was dying too.

  This was the penalty for owning no slaves. What an irony.

  Nobody knew that I was here. Nobody would miss me. I had caught a catastrophic, virulent infection. Alone and unable to move, even to summon help, there was no hope. I was glad in one way. Lying in this soiled room, soiled myself and disgusted, I would hate anyone I knew to see me. There was absolutely nothing that I could do about it. I would end up as one of the inhabitants of this sour building who died unnoticed, only to be found weeks later, reeking, putrefactious or mummified.

  I lay there all evening and overnight. Throughout that time, I kept being ill. I reached the most dangerous condition; I knew my internal organs were so wrenched with disease they were bleeding.

  At times I could hear muffled noises from the Mythembals, but the door to my room was deliberately heavy. They never came in here. That was our bargain; I arranged for her to live almost rent-free; in return, this room at the end of the corridor stayed shut, was mine, was never even acknowledged as existing. We were on pleasant terms if we happened to meet but she spoke little Latin, even though she had been in Rome for years, and I had no Punic. Mythembal was hypothetical; he may have died or gone back overseas. I never saw her entertain other men, but from time to time she would produce another baby, each one different from its siblings.

  Either she had not missed her chamberpot or she thought thieves had walked in and stolen it.

  I was growing worse. It would not be long now. I had passed through raging fever and violent shivering chills. Racked with spasms and dehydrated, my whole inside was one great ache. I drifted in and out of consciousness, simply waiting for the end.

  After a long period of relative quiet, that I took to be night time, I sensed a new day starting. I knew I could not last another. This would be the day when I would die.

  Time passed.

  More time passed.

  There were intermittent sounds sometimes. I thought I heard a man’s voice in the Mythembal apartment. I even dreamed I heard heavy footsteps, in a hurry, someone upstairs in my own rooms. An intruder? Once I would have gone up there with a weapon; now I could not and did not even care.

  I was slipping away. Although I was a fighter, there was no more I could do here.

  And then I heard the door to this room being thrust open.

  I let out a sob of intense relief. Of all those it could have been, this was Tiberius. As I looked up at him, somehow his arrival was no surprise.

  ‘Help me.’

  The grey-eyed man was already crouching down to me. Oddly, what he said was, ‘It’s all right. I am here now.’

  59

  Give that man every honour: I never saw him flinch.

  Nobody would want the tasks Tiberius undertook for me. There was probably no one else on earth I would have trusted. He did whatever had to be done. He made no fuss. He worked fast. Called the Mythembal woman to bring him warm water, which luckily she always had. He could have asked her to help, but I know he did not. She stayed outside the door.

  ‘I’m dying, aedile.’

  ‘We’ll see. Hold on, hold on for me.’

  He stood me up. Cleaned me down. Used the sponge as gently as he could, but thoroughly, absolutely everywhere.

  When that was done, he walked me to the reading couch. That was just somewhere to prop me while he stripped off his own tunic. The undertunic came off as well, so for one strange moment we were both stark naked. I knew why, when he dropped the second garment over me; it was much softer material and warm from his body. I was shaking with cold and my skin could hardly bear touching. Any time nowadays that I want to define bliss, I call up that moment, being enveloped in softness, in comfort, in human warmth.

  From him, I simply accepted everything. He lifted me over his shoulder, then carried me bodily upstairs to my own apartment. He had never been there with me. Rodan must have shown him today, and opened the door for him. Faustus must have come looking for me when I never appeared at the Stargazer. Who knows how he realised that I must be in trouble?

  He put me to bed. Kept me warm. Rehydrated me. Watched all afternoon and all night. I grew worse after dark; for hours I was delirious, soothed only when he cooled me with wet cloths. He slept in a chair by lamplight, when he felt he could risk sleep. The next day while I was sleeping myself, he went down and cleaned the room or arranged for it to be done; maybe he gave Mythembal’s wife money. He somehow acquired broth and when I woke, warmed it and spooned it into me. When I was sick again, he cleaned up uncomplainingly.

  I told him to leave, to go to his own life. He stayed, as I still hovered between life and death. He dragged, cajoled me, enticed me back to life.

  He must have had help. People provided things. A cook with a delicate touch made those broths that appeared each day. Laundry came and went. I thought I heard Rodan’s voice, and Dromo’s, at the front door. They never crossed the threshold. No one was admitted to my rooms. That was a subtle respect for the privacy that Tiberius knew I guarded closely.

  At length I was stable; I saw him relax.

  Still he looked after me himself.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Friendship.’

  Now he was like a visitor, a helpful, easygoing one. He read in silence to himself. He read aloud to me. He hummed around, tidying the place. He washed up. When he was utterly exhausted, he slept on a couch out in my day room.

  We never spoke about the case. He had my report. Even though I was sickening when I wrote it, I knew I had done a good job there.

  Eventually, although I had told him not to, he wrote to my family to tell them what had happened. I had said, wait until either I am better or I die; do not put them through this anxiety. Faustus had never met my family, but he knew who they were and how close we were to each other. He sent the letter to Quintus Camillus for urgent forwarding, then when it was too late for me to make him recall it, he told me what he had done.

  I was not surprised, therefore, when only a day later my mother came to the apartment.

  Faustus was reading when she let herself in. I saw him look up as he heard someone enter. I had recognised her footfall so I did not need to look. I kept looking at him.

  ‘You must be Manlius Faustus!’ Helena Justina’s familiar voice dryly accosted this unknown man in her daughter’s bedroom. Even though his occupation (reading aloud a scroll about how to win elections) was not typical of men in women’s bedrooms, as a moth
er she went straight on the offensive: ‘A friend of my daughter’s – though for some reason none of us have met you … Are you lovers?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Tiberius answered without a flicker. Then he looked up with a sudden broad smile. ‘I’m saving her for best.’

  As I covered my face with the bedsheet, I believe it was the first time I ever knew my mother lost for words.

  After that, Tiberius seemed to allow that my mother still thought she owned me. She intended to collect me and nurse me herself. I was twenty-nine years old, widowed, working, independent – but when I was in trouble, my family expected me to go home. A woman of tact, Helena Justina avoided saying to Faustus, ‘so she can be looked after properly’.

  He must know what she thought. Although his own died twenty years ago, I had to hope he knew the ways of mothers.

  He might do. I had learned a little about his mother now. Once, during his care of me, I had asked how he became so competent. He said he had a younger sister; his mother had taught him to help bath the baby. This was so he would not be afraid of children if he ever had any – and he would not be shy with girls.

  We smiled together over that. Nobody, on either side, who shared what Tiberius Manlius did for me that week could be called shy.

  My mother started to pack things for me, calling in bearers who had brought a chair to take me to our town house. Before I knew it, they were lifting me in and arranging rugs. Faustus retreated to the other room. Of course when he informed my people, he must have known someone would come. They would have assumed he wanted to be relieved of the burden. I ought to think so too, though I had doubts.

  Our strange interlude was over. We had been so close it was a painful wrench to leave him. I found myself highly emotional, perhaps because I was still so weak. I had come to rely on his daily presence. I would now be among my own people for as long as they could persuade me, probably even be driven to the coast when I was strong enough, for more sun, sand and fishing expeditions, or at least sun, sand and lying on a rug in the dappled shade of the pine trees. Tiberius would be in Rome, leading his own life.

  The inquiry I carried out for him already seemed long past. We would work together again, but socially and professionally there were limits.

  As we left the apartment my mother thanked Faustus, apologising as if he had been imposed on. Brushing that aside, he asked to be kept informed of my progress, though it sounded a formality. Attendants carried the chair down to Fountain Court, where they waited for Helena while she talked to Rodan. It was always good to witness a hoary ex-gladiator being reduced to slush by a sweet but stern woman. Manlius Faustus also watched with amusement, as he stood with his thumbs hooked into his belt on what passed for a pavement.

  Helena had already sized him up. Later, I was to hear her tell my father that Manlius Faustus looked like a man you could ask to take charge of your wood cart as a quick favour, then when you came back, he would have unloaded all the logs for you and stacked them neatly.

  In the depths of the chair, I dwelt on what had just happened between us. The Aviola case had given me a portrait of life with many slaves. In such households, the owners are never alone. Their slaves carry out the most intimate tasks for them – physical, financial, sexual. Slaves make excuses for them and form a protective barrier. In one way they ensure privacy, yet their constant presence everywhere means their owners have no privacy at all.

  Those few days that I spent being cared for by Tiberius were absolutely private. He could easily have brought in slaves to help him, but I know he never considered it. I would tell no one, not even my mother, the details of how he nursed me; in future, he and I might not even acknowledge it between ourselves. It had been the most intimate intervention, one I would not have tolerated from anybody else. I accepted it from him because of this: Tiberius did everything, not because he was obliged to look after me as a slave would be, but because he wanted to.

  Once my mother was ready, he came closer and said goodbye to me. Being so ill made me stupidly tearful. I was unable to speak.

  As the chair lurched when the bearers lifted it, I looked back through the window curtains. He was still standing in the roadway. Seeing me looking, he made a sudden gesture of redundancy, sharing my regret. He would not come to our house, though he might send Dromo with enquiries. I could write; he liked my letters. I would lure him into answering.

  I realised that, oddly, Tiberius had enjoyed looking after me. I even thought that as I was taken away, he watched me go a little sadly.