As I was tapping my toe, Petronius two rowers suddenly began shouting. Then Petro himself joined in. His boatmen began to row very fast towards Gaius and Phlosis. They tried to speed up. Then, to my amazement, my two handy lads jumped over the side, swam rapidly to the jetty some distance from me, and made off down the quay.
The realisation that I had been caught by a swindle fell on me like a cartload of wet sand.
Next moment I was screaming with anxiety over Pa's cargo of glass. Fortunately the inner harbour was sheltered, so there was rarely a swell, and no large ships were manoeuvring at that moment. The abandoned skiff had rocked wildly when Gaius and Phlosis dived over the gunnels, but it had stayed afloat. It was collected by Petronius, who had stepped across from his own boat, then held the two craft close together so that Fusculus could scramble across too. Petronius could row; he brought my goods slowly back to me while his own boatmen raced to shore. Still yelling, they jumped out and ran after Gaius and Phlosis.
I didn't care about those thieves; I just wanted Pa's treasure. Petronius threw a rope to me, while Fusculus shook his head over my narrow escape. `You were certainly conned there! A lovely example of the craft-rig,' he informed me knowingly.
`Oh yes?'
`They steal a boat, then prowl the wharves looking for a sucker who has just arrived at the harbour and needs some goods transferred somewhere. Luckily our own two honest fellows recognised the boat. It belongs to a friend of theirs, so they knew your heroes must have pinched it.'
I did not want to hear the depressing details, but I gave him a hand to jump back to dry land. `You're the expert on low tricks are you, Fusculus?'
`Fusculus is a fervent scholar of the underworld,' grinned Petro. Thankfully, he was too good a friend to jeer directly at my mistake.
`Balbinus used to run a gang who specialised in this dodge along
the wharves by the Emporium,' Fusculus said. `You'd be surprised, Falco, how easily tired travellers can be taken in.'
`I'm not surprised at all,' I growled.
The two rowers who had exposed the near-disaster came back, having failed to catch my lads. We unloaded half the glass from the first boat, then got hot and fractious transferring it to the second one so we could spread the weight between the two and hitch a ride ourselves. Petronius, Fusculus and I all stuck with the precious cargo right to the barge at Ostia. Not until I had seen every crate transferred did I feel able to relax again.
Exhausted by our adventurers, we lay on deck in the autumn sunlight as slowly the barge started to navigate the shoals, creeping up the muddy Tiber into Rome.
VII
HELENA JUSTINA HAD not heard me come home. She was tying in strands of my climbing rose, a thing of long spindly growth that struggled for water and nourishment on the narrow balcony outside my sixth-floor apartment. For a moment I was able to watch her while she remained quite unaware of me.
Helena was tall, straight-backed, dark-haired, and serious. She was five days from her twenty-fifth birthday. The first time I ran across her, married life in the utmost luxury but with an insensitive young senator had left her bitter and withdrawn. She had just divorced him, and made it plain that anyone else who got in her way could expect to be kicked out of it. Don't ask how I got around the problem – but writing my memoirs promised some fun.
Astonishingly, two years of surviving scandal and squalor with me had softened the hard shell. Maybe it was being loved. Now, as she paused rather dreamily to suck at a thorn in her finger, there was a stillness about her. She looked far away, yet unconscious of her own thoughts.
I had neither moved nor made a sound, but she turned quickly. `Marcus!'
We embraced. I buried my face in her soft neck, groaning with gratitude for the way her strong, sweet face had lit with pleasure when she realised I was there.
All the same it worried me. I would have to hang a bell inside our entrance door, so nobody else could creep up on her like this. Where we lived was a lawless tenement.
Maybe I needed to find a better place for us.
Helena seemed tired. We were both still drained of energy after travelling home from the East. Coming in and crossing the outer
room, I had seen evidence that she must have spent my absence at Ostia unpacking and tidying. My mother or one of my sisters might have dropped in to help, but they fussed around and were likely to have been seen off politely with cinnamon tea and a few tales about our journey. Helena never fussed. She liked to set things just so – and then forget about them.
I pulled her to the rickety wooden bench, which felt even worse than I remembered. Bending down with a curse, I fiddled about with a piece of broken roof tile – which probably meant we had a new leak somewhere – and managed to level up the bench's feet. Then at last we sat quietly together, gazing out across the river.
`Now there's a view!'
She smiled. `You love coming home, Marcus.'
`Coming home to you is the best part.'
As usual Helena ignored my suggestive gleam – though as usual I could tell she welcomed it. `Did everything go all right at Ostia?'
`More or less. We got back to Rome about an hour ago. Pa finally managed to show an interest. Once I'd done the hard work he turned up and took charge at the Emporium.' Luckily my father actually lived on the riverbank, below the Aventine cliff and only a step from the wharves. `He's got the glass, so make sure he pays you an agency fee.'
Helena seemed to smile at my advice. `Did Petronius do what he wanted? And are you now going to tell me what the fuss was about?'
`He was sending a condemned man into exile.'
`A real villain?' she asked, lifting her bold eyebrows as she caught my surly tone.
`The worst.' Petronius Longus would be horrified at the way I shared such information; I knew he never told his wife anything about his work. Helena and I had always discussed things; for me, the big rissole was unfinished business so long as I was waiting to confide in Helena. `Balbinus Pius. We saw him on to his ship, and one of Petro's men has gone along undercover to see he doesn't hop ashore prematurely. By the way, I asked Petro and Silvia to dinner once we're straight again… Everything in order here?' I didn't bother looking back at the bare room behind me: a small table, three stools, shelves with a few crocks, pots and beakers, a next-to-useless cooking bench.
`Oh yes.'
For the past few months my sister Maia would have valiantly toiled up the six flights from time to time, making sure for us that no one broke in and that Smaractus, my pig of a landlord, had not tried his usual trick of squeezing extra cash from subtenants if he thought I was not here. Maia had also kept the balcony garden watered and had pinched back the herbs, though she drew the line at controlling the rose. She reckoned I had only planted it to get cheap flowers for seducing girls. All my sisters were naturally unfair.
I took charge of Helena's finger, removing the thorn with adept pressure from one thumbnail. My right hand was habitually caressing the two-month-old scar on her forearm where she had been stung by a scorpion in the Syrian desert.
`I'll be in trouble over your war wound.' Both my own mother and Helena's noble parent would blame me for taking her to such a dangerous province and bringing her back scarred for life… And there might be another new situation that would set both our mothers on the alert. Newly home after a whole summer abroad, I did not want to start broaching issues. But I took a slow breath and braced myself. `Maybe there's worse than that in store for me.'
Helena showed no reaction: so much for being mysterious.
`I think there's something we need to talk about.'