“What is it really?”
“What is what?”
I knew that game. “You know. The tripe?”
“Liver.”
“Yum.”
“Everyone likes a bit of comfort food. I never use a recipe, I just put onions and a bit of pearl barley into everything. Sometimes I do liver, sometimes kidney. I like to put a pastry lid on kidneys. I don’t enjoy cooking all the kinds of offal. Udders, stomachs-you can keep those. I feel funny if I have to handle brains.” After this speech, she continued rapidly chopping shallots. Her knife was an old, heavy, wide, wooden-handled one. Luckily I knew Gavius was hurt with a slim blade or I would have wondered whether the attack on him was a family affair.
“I’m drooling. I can wait a bit. Liver will just need a fast flash in the pan … I can’t keep calling you Gran. What’s your real name?”
“Everyone calls me Gran. What makes you so special, young woman?” I wanted to keep talking like this, to be nostalgic. What with the wedding, I must be missing my own grandmothers. She may have sensed my sadness, for she softened, as they do. “It’s Prisca.”
“Thank you. I appreciate the honor.”
I gazed at her. She paused in her vigorous chopping. We understood each other. She realized I had something to tell her.
“Prisca, I am very sorry, I have something bad to say.”
She laid down the knife gently, wiping her hands on her skirts. These were small, formal preparations so she was decently ready. “Who died?” At her age, there was only one sorry message that solemn people brought to you.
Awkwardly deferring the moment, I asked slowly, “Did you see Gavius here last night?”
“Who’s gone for our Gavius? Is it him then?” She was upset, though perhaps not entirely surprised, I thought. “What happened?”
“Did you see him when he came over?” She had seen him when he first realized Rhodina had been killed. I had to treat her as a significant witness, press her for her story before she knew what had happened to him.
“I might have been in here, just taking a tot for my arthritis. No harm in that.”
“Little warming drink. Helps you sleep despite the pain. At your time of life, you deserve it, Prisca.” I had been properly instructed in senior people’s rights. “So, tell me. When he came across from the Hesperides, all upset, did he say anything to you? His old grandma?”
“Of course. He’s a big enough lump now, but I used to wipe his little pink arse. He can’t keep much from me.”
“The story about Rhodina, the one-time barmaid? The one the men all hankered after?”
“Yes. I got that out of him.”
“Tell me exactly what he said, Gran. This is important. He talked to his mate, his backup in the business, Appius-”
“I know Appius. Get a move on. What’s happened to my Gavius?” She had not forgotten my threat of bad news.
“You guessed, Gran. I am sorry to be the one who has to tell you.”
“Albia, stop messing with me.”
Obediently I told her. “He was attacked. Someone went to his house last evening. He let them in. They stabbed him in the neck. We found him lying on the floor a little while ago.”
“He’s dead?”
It was no good. I had to ease Prisca’s misery. If it was bad enough for parents to lose children in their lifetime, how was it for a grandparent? Prisca spoke of Gavius as a favorite. So I told her he was in great danger but we needed to pretend he was actually dead.
“I’ll have to go and see him.”
“No, Gran. His parents will look after him. This is for his safety while they try to save him. Just make sure everyone knows you’re heartbroken.”
She was silent, resisting me, then she burst out instead: “Were those dogs with him?”
“Going crazy.”
“Who’s got his dogs? All he would care about would be the dogs.”
“His parents have all three, at least temporarily. I suspect Appius will help sort something out. The men are all devastated … I’m doing what I can to discover who attacked him. So now can you tell me, please, what Gavius said to you.”
She set about it, an efficient storyteller. It was identical to what Appius had said, though flavored with sneers about her grandson’s foolish fancy for Rhodina. “I forgot all about her years ago, but when he said it, I remembered. I didn’t think much of her. Flirty, bosomy little piece. I can tell he really wanted her-and he never bothered with anyone afterward. I thought our boy had a lucky escape there. You want to know about the barmaid? If you ask me, that one was only interested in finding some man soft enough to be conned into bringing up her children. That Rhodina. She was one of those types, you know-a man only had to wink at her and she fell pregnant. Of course that wasn’t her fault. Some women just can’t help conceiving.”
“She could have kept to herself.”
“Oh, she worked in a bar, Albia! No hope of keeping her legs crossed. She would have lost her job.”
“She bore two little tots, apparently.”
“And some.”
“There were more?”
“I’m sure.”
“So she wasn’t young?”
“She started young.”
“They all do. Be fair-they have to, Gran. Whether it’s their own sad choice or they are slaves and shoveled into it. Did the other babies die naturally, or did she get rid of them? Did Rufia help her sort herself out?”
“I wouldn’t know. I never did anything like that, and none of my daughters neither. Well,” said Prisca, being realistic. “As far as they ever told me.”
I was still thinking about the barmaid’s little ones. “If it wasn’t Rhodina who picked up the two children that night, can you suggest anyone else?”
Prisca shrugged. “Someone who wanted a ready-made family? Must have been someone who knew that Thales or someone had polished off that Rhodina and buried her. Then, since we live in a cruel world, most likely they thought they could make some money selling the brats to a slaver. I expect they were horrible, snively little things.” She implied “not like my grandchildren.” It was probably true, since her descendants would be chubby and contented on kidneys in a pastry lid, oozing with gravy …
“I don’t suppose their lives were very happy,” I said. “Weren’t they very small? Yet old enough to be left with a minder. If they are still alive, they must be coming up to adulthood; they will remember nothing of their mother or her history.”
“So you can’t expect to find them?” Until that moment I had not intended even to look. Damn. As an informer I was always picking up this kind of responsibility.
“Only if I can learn who took them. It’s a very small chance.” Almost not worth bothering, Albia. Leave it alone!
“It’s not their fault, the life they were born into. If anyone had known, people would have tried to do something for them, I expect. Our Gavius would have looked after them, he was silly enough. Put them down to sleep on a dog blanket. Added two bowls to the row…” She was sniffing now, buffing at her eyes irritably with the back of her wrist.
“I know. Your grandson is a good one.”
“The best.” She started crying properly. On principle she blamed the onions, but I was allowed to acknowledge what had really caused her tears.
I had to sit with her while she grieved over the danger her grandson was in. She refused fuss, so I stayed there very quietly.
It struck me nothing is as simple as it looks. I could easily dismiss the Ten Traders and White Chickens as filthy enclaves of vice: all drink, prostitution, extortion and slave-trading, alien to respectable people like me and Tiberius. Yet he and I had both done things we would never talk about at dinner parties.
And here, despite the rawness, it was still possible to expose pockets of normal family life. Some people had skills, held down regular jobs in the community at large. Walk in here, past the peculiar-sexed doll with the livid eyeliner, and you found an ordinary grandmother cooking up a stew using age-old peasant ingredients, utensils and methods. Comfort food, tasty and gelatinous, always with pearl barley because that was her way of doing it. She saw the vice, yet somehow kept apart from it; in her world there was family love and even compassion for orphans of flirty flibbertigibbets.