Distracted by the sight of this unusually diligent appeal to the household gods, Ruso was startled to hear a heavy sigh beside him. A pair of muscular arms leaned on the wall. They were attached to solid shoulders encased in plate armor. Above the armor a thick neck led to a square jaw, a broken nose, and an army haircut.
Valens finished his devotions and looked up. “Can I help, sir?”
“I’m a friend of the landlord,” said the centurion. “Saw the address on the night watch report. Any damage?”
Valens unwrapped his toga and rolled it into an untidy bundle as he made his way through the weeds to the garden wall. “Just a downstairs window forced. Ruso there chased him off before he could take anything.”
The gaze was aimed at Ruso while the broken nose veered slightly off to the left. “Don’t suppose you got a description?”
“It was dark,” Ruso said. “I tried to stop him getting past me, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He was covered in something slippery, he was wearing a hood, and he’d left the door open to make a quick escape.”
“Greased himself to avoid capture,” said the centurion, as if it was something Ruso should have expected. He glanced at the apprentices and the kitchen boy. “Any of you lot see anything?”
The taller lad looked delighted to be asked. “I’m almost sure there was a man with a hood following us down behind the wharf last night, sir.”
“I meant here.”
“No, sir. We were asleep till we heard all the crashing around and the ladies calling out, sir.”
The man grunted. “I’ll submit a report.” He gestured toward the window, said, “Get some bars put on it,” and walked away.
While Valens was dealing with his patients, the short apprentice emerged from the surgery with a small box of broken pottery. Part of the disturbance Ruso had heard last night was a jar of bear grease smashing on the tiled floor.
“He took the hall lamp in there, sir,” the lad observed. “He must have been clever not to wake anybody. But he wasn’t much of a burglar. Doctor Valens’s equipment was all laid out in there, but nothing’s been taken.”
“Good,” said Ruso, his unease growing. Quality medical instruments were precision made, portable, and costly, and a thief as intelligent as this one seemed to be should have stolen them. He had been prowling around the house for longer than Ruso cared to remember. What had he been doing?
It was a mystery he did not have time to ponder.
“That letter I gave you,’ he said. ‘Did you have any luck deciphering it?”
They had not, but both apprentices had spent a couple of hours trying. Oblivious to how happy this must have made Valens, the short apprentice went back into the surgery to fetch the wax tablet on which it was written.
While he was waiting, Ruso gathered up a couple of chunks of fallen plaster almost the size of his fist from the foot of the hall wall. He tried to fit them, painted side out, into the hole made by whatever weapon had narrowly missed his head. More dry plaster crumbled away from the lath and showered onto his feet. The hall table, presumably broken, had been removed. Serena was not going to be pleased when-if-she returned.
Ruso unfastened his left boot and shook out a piece of plaster grit. Then he leaned back against an intact stretch of wall, folded his arms, and began to make a mental list of the new questions he was going to ask Caratius.
He was interrupted by the reappearance of the short apprentice, pink in the face and clearly agitated. “It must be in our room, sir,” he declared, scuttling away toward the back of the house. “Won’t be a moment.”
There followed a series of muffled crashes, thumps, and screeches that suggested the flinging open of cupboards and the shifting of heavy furniture. After a brief silence in which Ruso wondered if he should offer to help, the noises recommenced with increased vigor. Finally the youth reemerged, his face even pinker and shiny with sweat. “Sorry about this, sir. He’s put it somewhere.”
“He” was presumably the tall apprentice. Moments later both youths were in the hallway denying having moved the letter from the surgery shelf and blaming each other for its disappearance.
“It was probably Doctor Valens,” suggested Ruso, not wanting to voice a growing suspicion that it was none of them. “You two get back to work. I’ll have a word with him in between patients.”
As they headed back through the surgery lobby, the tall apprentice voiced Ruso’s own thoughts. “Perhaps the burglar took it.”
“Huh,” said his companion. As the door closed Ruso overheard, “That’ll be the same thief as took the only decent pen I had, and gave you one just like it.”
Ruso went into the dining room. Since the apprentices were not allowed to use the room, there was no reason why the letter should be in it, but he might as well do something while he was waiting.
Shifting cushions and peering under the couch produced several small coins, a wooden whistle, a child’s shoe, a crust of bread hardened to the consistency of concrete, a green hair ribbon that must belong to Serena… and a writing tablet. His brief moment of elation was destroyed by the words Pharmacy List inked on the outside. Idly curious, he took it across to the window to read.
What it contained was not a list but a message.
Scrawled in a large and badly formed hand were the words, “When you finally notice that we are not here, you may want to know that I have taken the boys and gone to live with my cousin.” The message was scraped so deep into the wax that it had scored the wood underneath.
So that was it.
Ruso was more saddened than surprised. He wished he had found the note before Tilla had gone. She would have known what to say. In fact it would have been better not to have found it at all, or at least to have left it unopened. Now he felt like the woman in the old Jewish tale: the one who ate the fruit from the tree and knew too much. He should say something helpful to Valens, but what? How could a man interfere in his friend’s marriage? Especially since he was not supposed to have read the note, anyway.
He pushed the message back under the couch. When the apprentices reappeared with orders from Valens to question the kitchen boy and search the rest of the house, he closed the door of the dining room and told them he had already checked it. There was nothing there.
He entered the surgery just in time to see a middle-aged man stagger out into the street with a poultice clutched to his face and a message for the next patient that he would be called in a moment.
“Splendid abscess,” said Valens, describing the departed patient rather than the space beside a stack of rolled bandages to which he now pointed. That was where he had seen the letter late last night. He had almost called one of the boys to put it away until he realized it was not a patient record after all. “Somebody must have come in here after me.”
Ruso waited until the patient had shut the door-before suggesting, “The burglar was in here.”
Valens’s eyes widened. “Ruso, you don’t think you’re taking this investigation business a little too seriously? I know it must have been a shock finding this chap in the house, but really-what sort of burglar steals somebody’s letters?”
“The sort who wants to know what’s in them?” Ruso suggested, remembering Caratius’s eagerness to see the letter. “Or the sort who already knows and doesn’t want other people to find out.” He glanced around at the neatly stacked shelves. “If it was here last night and it’s not here now, where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Valens admitted.
“The women wouldn’t have taken it. Neither of them can read.”
“Nor can the kitchen boy, much.”
“Which leaves only the burglar.”
“I’m sure it’ll turn up,” Valens assured him. “You can let the lads carry on hunting for a while. I’m running late for house calls, and it’s much quicker in here without them. Don’t fancy seeing a few patients yourself, do you? Keep your hand in?”