Cotta shook his head with a tight smile.
‘Sorry, Domina, but whether you appreciate it or not, you’re the wife of a Roman senator, even if he has fallen on rather harder times than we might like. One of these days that young man’s family name will be restored to its previous status, and I see no reason not to show due respect to it in the meantime. Now, where is this house of yours, exactly?’
They climbed the Aventine Hill at a pace sedate enough for the women, who were both carrying their children, until at length Felicia stopped and stared in a combination of hope and trepidation at a house of moderate size in its own modest garden, protected from casual onlookers by a six-foot-high wall. Overlooked on three sides by larger buildings, it was nevertheless clearly still the sort of residence that only a well-to-do and moderately wealthy family would be able to afford. The district was of a decent quality, with nothing more jarring to Cotta’s trained eye than a pair of roughly dressed children playing with a wooden hoop on the corner. Taking in Felicia’s determined expression, the veteran officer held out his hand.
‘Perhaps I ought to go in first, Domina. After all, we have no idea what might be waiting for us inside. If I might have that key please?’
After a moment’s thought she surrendered the iron key, and with a word to his men to stay on their toes, Cotta opened the gate and looked cautiously through it into the garden, a well-tended paved affair with flower beds and plant pots that had clearly been weeded and watered recently. Slipping though the gateway he pushed the door back into place, sliding a dagger free from its sheath on his upper-left arm as he turned to stare at the house. Padding softly across the paving slabs, he walked quickly to the window on the front door’s left, peering through the glass’s rippling sheet into the room behind it. Nothing was moving. Walking on round the house, he found a door, and, lifting the latch, was surprised to find it unsecured. It opened with a gentle creak that announced his presence as obviously as if he’d knocked, and, abandoning stealth, he went through the doorway with his knife held ready to fight, finding himself in a well-sized kitchen which had been left scrupulously clean by the previous inhabitants. The plates and pans were clean, and stacked in orderly piles, and there was none of the smell of rotting food he had expected. Moving through the house he found the same situation in every room, the floors clean, the furniture well ordered, but no trace at all of whoever had lived in them previously, and after a few minutes of cautious searching he shrugged, sheathed the knife and made his way to the front door.
‘The place is empty, my lady, with nothing more troubling than a slightly musty smell — will you come inside?’
The two women walked into the house, Felicia looking about her with a mix of wonderment and disbelief, while Annia simply stared at the rooms’ relative opulence with unabashed approval.
‘Soft furniture? Glass windows? It’s lovely, Felicia! You’re so lucky to have something like this!’
The doctor nodded in a distracted manner, turning to Cotta with a questioning look.
‘And there’s no sign of anyone?’
The veteran shook his head.
‘No, Domina, nothing to give any clue as to who was living here before the place was emptied out.’
She took a deep breath and then, with a brisk nod of her head, made a decision.
‘Very well. This house belonged to my father, and since it was never transferred to my first husband’s ownership whoever was living here would have known they had no claim to it when he was killed in Britannia. They were probably just hoping that I would never return.’ She looked about her again with a new light in her eyes. ‘This is my house, and I shall treat it as such. Centurion, would you be so good as to inform my husband that I will be taking up residence here for the period that we are in Rome, and request him to send up my clothes?’
‘I will, Domina. And I’ll arrange for a standing guard to be mounted on the property, to make sure that you and the child aren’t bothered.’
Felicia smiled gratefully at him before turning to Annia.
‘Will you stay and keep me company? It’ll make a pleasant change from repairing broken soldiers, and we can pretend that we’re a pair of respectable Roman matrons for a few weeks.’
Her friend looked about her for a moment before grinning at her mischievously.
‘I think I can bear the hardship, Domina. After all, the last time I had a proper roof over my head for more than a day or two I was running a brothel, so it’ll make a novel change not to have a constant stream of soldiers walking in with their pricks tenting their tunics.’
A spluttering cough behind Annia coupled with the sudden look of amusement on her friend’s face made her turn back to Cotta, whose face was a picture of uncontrolled amazement. Putting a hand on his arm, she favoured him with a sweet smile of apology, patting his hand as he fought to regain his composure.
‘I’m sorry, Centurion, I’d completely forgotten that you don’t yet know who we are and where we’ve come from. You and I must sit down over a glass of wine when all this excitement is done with, and I’ll explain the finer workings of a city whorehouse to you. And now, Domina, shall we go and have a look around your lovely home?’
‘So tell me, Centurion, what sort of engineering tasks are you and your men trained for?’
Avidus raised his eyebrows disapprovingly.
‘Which tasks, Tribune? All of them.’
Scaurus frowned.
‘Really? I thought there was a tendency to specialise?’
The engineer nodded knowingly.
‘Well there is, sir, except you have to bear in mind that we’re the only legion on the entire African coast. If our bridge builders got lost in a sandstorm or ambushed by the locals, then we’d look a bit stupid when we got to the next river only to find the crossing burned out. Third Augusta has always made sure that every man in the pioneer centuries is skilled for every task, which means that when we’re not on the march we don’t get sent to bring in the harvest or pick stones out of the fields, we get sent for training.’
‘So you can genuinely carry out any feat of military engineering?’
Avidus raised a hand and tapped the raised digits with his other forefinger.
‘Road repair, mining operations, bridge building, demolition, siege machinery-’
‘What, you mean you can build bolt throwers?’
He smiled at Dubnus’s question.
‘Yes. But not just bolt throwers. Siege towers, catapults, battering rams … you name it, me and my lads can do it.’
Julius walked around the desk from his place behind Scaurus to stand beside the engineer.
‘The centurion here and his men have been lost in transit, from the look of it. Wherever it is they’re supposed to be going, the idiots in charge of manpower appear to have mislaid the instructions. And of course, no one wants to ask the grown-ups for fear that they’ll end up looking stupid. So at some point soon these poor sods are going to find themselves being assigned to a legion just to get them out of the way before they become a serious embarrassment, and they’ll probably end up freezing their balls off in Germania. Or …’
He let the word hang in the air, and Scaurus raised a jaundiced eyebrow.
‘Or? Or what? The last time we had this discussion I ended up taking on a half-century of disgruntled legionaries and having more than one interesting conversation with the Sixth Legion’s camp prefect. It was a good thing he was feeling friendly towards us in the wake of our having rescued their eagle from the Venicones, wasn’t it? And now you want me to quietly fold a century of engineers into your cohort?’
‘It’s only thirty men, tribune, hardly a-’
Scaurus shook his head.
‘No you don’t. He’s a centurion, they’re a century. And what makes you think that the man in charge of troop allocations won’t smell a rat when you slide this man and his soldiers up your sleeve?’