She nodded. "I cook and clean and mind the dogs."
"Good." He unhooked the front door key from his belt and handed it to her. "What can you cook?"
She looked at him. "Soup?"
"Fine," he agreed.
"What in soup?"
Ruso thought about that for a moment. There was unlikely to be much in the kitchen, and if there was, the mice would have found it by now.
"Something tasty," he said, untying his purse. He picked out three coins and put them into her hand. "Buy something for breakfast as well."
Tilla picked up the coins and examined them on both sides as if she wasn't sure they were genuine. "Soup should start in the morning," she remarked.
"Well, do your best," he said. "I won't be back before dark anyway"
They passed into the main street of the fort. "This is the sort of route you are to take back and forth," he instructed her, sweeping one arm in the general direction of the legate's residence. "No exploring, you understand? Deva is not a place for a young woman to wander around on her own."
Tilla's head rose. "If a soldier touch me, my Lord, he will be punished."
"Perhaps," said Ruso, without a great deal of confidence, "but by then it will be too late. Listen to me. Both inside and outside the fort, you are to stick to busy streets where there are plenty of people. If a man pays attention to you, walk away. Don't try to put him in his place. You may get away with boldness wherever you come from, but it won't work around here."
Tilla said, "I pray to the goddess to protect me."
"Well, help her by using a little common sense. Two lone girls have died and I assume you know that at least one of them was murdered?"
"The goddess will punish that man, my Lord. I have put a curse on him."
"I see."
"Also, I will put a blessing on my Master."
"Let's hope your goddess is listening, then."
The girl smiled. "She is listening, my Lord. You see already what she do to Claudius Innocens."
45
The heavy door of the hospital swung shut and the latch dropped with a clank. The skies had cleared into a chilly night. Ruso nodded to the guards as he passed the legate's house. The great man himself was away, but his family would be asleep beyond that grand entrance. In moments of weakness, Ruso envied men who lived in married quarters: men who went home every night to a home-cooked meal and the pleasure of a woman to warm the bed. In such moments he usually took a firm hold of his imagination and brought it to heel by picturing the woman to be Claudia. Tonight, he had no cause for envy. He was going back to warm lodgings and hot food. There would be no one in his bed-he had told the girl to use Valens's room-but there would be no one nagging him in the morning, either.
What a lot of things a man doesn't need.
He shivered, and turned to head toward his supper.
The house was pleasantly cozy, but only the dogs came to greet him. Evidently his servant had gone to bed. He lifted the lamp that had been left burning by the door, and sniffed. Leeks? Onions? It was hard to say. He carried the lamp into the kitchen. Then he cleared a space on the table, laid out the wooden bowl, the spoon, and some bread, which had been placed in the box with the lid weighted down, and settled down to enjoy his first home-cooked meal in Britannia.
The soup was lukewarm.
It was watery.
It was bland.
He took a mouthful of bread and then tried again.
This time the spoon brought out something rounded and hard. Exploring it with his tongue, he found peculiar soft strings attached to it. He returned the object to the spoon and held it up to the lamp to examine it. In the yellow light he saw the top of a carrot with most of the leaves still attached.
Gaius Petreius Ruso sighed deeply and pushed the bowl away. Truly, he was alone in a barbarian land.
46
The bedroom door was wide open but she sidled in, singing softly to keep her courage up. Her eyes scanned the floor as she moved forward with the broom held out in front of her. Satisfied that the floor was clear, she ran clumsily in the medicus's big boots, twisted around, and landed on the bed with her feet in the air, the boots still on. Then she laid the boots and the broom on the bed and crawled around the mattress on her knees, bending to check that none of the covers were hanging down. Finally safe, she turned to the dog standing in the doorway, and said, "Are you ready?"
The medicus had told her to sleep in this room last night. It was the room of the other doctor, the friendly one, who had gone away. She had not slept well. To begin with she had lain rigid in the dark, listening for the sound of the medicus coming home and wondering if he would bed her, because he was a man, or beat her, because she was not a cook, or both.
Instead of the medicus's footsteps she had heard a faint pattering that she tried to tell herself was the sound of her own fear. As soon as she moved, it stopped. As she was drifting off to sleep, it began again. Then it squeaked. Fear might patter, but it did not squeak. So she had to keep listening, moving at short intervals, rolling over, kicking her legs or sighing, hearing the trumpet blowing the watches just as she had on bad nights in the hospital and trying to reason with herself that all houses had mice. No one died because of mice. She had grown up in a house where mice crept through crevices in the walls and nested in the thatch. At night she had heard them rustling the bracken on the floor, and she had gone to sleep with the blanket over her head, knowing that Bran would protect her. But Bran was dead, and the dog in this house was not as fast. Even the Romans, with all their organization, could not control mice.
It was past the middle hour of the night when the medicus came home. She watched a bright line appear and fade around the door as he carried the lamp into the kitchen. He did not spend long there. As soon as she heard his bedroom door scrape across the floor, she counted to ten, flapped the blankets to frighten the mice into their holes, and fled on tiptoe to the dining room, where the dog-after some shoving on both sides-had finally assented to sharing the couch. She had lain beside it, pondering the strangeness of Romans.
When she had first been carried into this house-before he had taken her to Merula's-she had been too weak to observe much beyond that the place smelled bad and looked cluttered. She had assumed that the servant was lazy, or away, or perhaps ill. It had come as a surprise to find that there was no servant except herself. It seemed that despite being surrounded by all this wealth, Roman doctors lived in poverty.
A healer among her own people would be better treated. Her mother was given gifts. Eggs or a hen. A pot of honey. A shawl. A goat. A mirror and comb set. Beer. Once, when she had safely delivered a son to an elder whose wife had been in labor for three days, a pregnant cow. They had lived well. They had a cook and a herdsman. Even when the harvests had failed, she could count on one hand the number of times the family had gone hungry. Whereas this medicus, with all his skill and authority, lived in a vermin-infested ruin and was reduced to bargaining for an injured slave in a back street. Small wonder that Romans had no respect for different tribes. They still had to learn respect for one another.
She must have fallen asleep on the couch, because the next thing she could remember was the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. She rose to find the medicus helping himself to the bread rolls she had bought for breakfast.
"That soup," he said, without looking up.
She swallowed. "Is-good?"
"Is that the sort of thing you eat over here?"
"Britannia cooking, Master," she ventured.
"Gods above. With that and the weather, I wonder you people have the will to live." He had given her more coins and said, "I haven't got time to go into it now. Get something from a shop for supper. Not a British shop. Understood?" When he left he was clutching his case in one hand and an apple in the other.