“We apologize,” said Maia briefly. She might have argued, but she still wanted to be off on her own errand. Instead, she picked up the reference to it being a difficult time. “We were, of course, sorry to hear of your loss.”
Wide-eyed, Caecilia Paeta spun back to stare at her. A rather extreme reaction, though grief can make people touchy in unexpected ways.
“Your family were attending a funeral when Maia came to visit you,” I reminded her gently. “Was it somebody close?”
“Oh no! A relative by marriage, that is all-” Caecilia pulled herself together, inclined her head formally, and went out to the carriage.
Even Maia managed to wait until the woman had departed, so she could mouth at me, “What’s going on? That family is so sensitive!”
“All families are sensitive,” I intoned piously.
“You cannot be thinking of ours!” scoffed my sister-running off at last to hurl herself into a quarrel with Pa.
I went to see my mother, like a devoted boy.
It was a long time since I had driven Ma out to the Campagna to see Great-Auntie Phoebe and whichever she was currently harboring of my unbelievable uncles: moody Fabius and broody Junius-though never the truly loopy one who had gone permanently missing, and of whom we were never supposed to speak. It would be easy to dump Ma at the family market garden for a long gossip, then to find something harmless to occupy myself.
I could, for instance, drive on a few miles to the place Caecilia Paeta had mentioned, and interview the estranged escapee father of little supposedly overimaginative Gaia Laelia.
XX
“HELENA JUSTINA, A man who loves you ferociously is offering to jolt you for hours in a hot open cart, and then grope you in a cabbage field.”
“How can I resist?”
“You can surely leave Gloccus and Cotta on their own for just a day.”
Helena made no sign of hearing me mention the two names. “Do you need me?”
“I do. I have to manage a mule, and you know how I hate that; I shall also require your sensible presence to control Ma. Anyway, if I don’t produce you, Great-Auntie Phoebe will assume you have left me.”
“Oh, why would anyone think that?” Helena knew how to deny it in a way I found faintly worrying.
“By the way, sweetheart, Pa sent a message, in his devious style. He thinks you should know he has heard that Gloccus and Cotta are not all they were at the time he recommended them.”
Helena finally turned around from a pot she had been scrubbing with grit and vinegar. Her eyes blazed. Through set teeth she hissed, “I really do not need anybody to tell me what Gloccus and Cotta are like. If I hear anyone else mention Gloccus and Cotta, I shall scream!”
It was from the heart. The picture at least had a chalk outline now. Pa had stuck her with a pair of his pet noodles; these boys had to be fixers in the building trade. I grinned and backed off.
It was now three days before the Nones of June, a festival of Bellona, Goddess of War: a deity to respect, naturally, but one with no direct poultry connections as far as I knew. Another voting day, so it was handy to flee from the Forum before anyone grabbed me for jury service.
We made good time out to my relatives’ disorganized patch of vegetable fields, where as usual the leeks and artichokes were struggling on their own, while the uncles busied themselves with lives of fervent emotional complexity. They were men of huge passionsgrafted onto absolutely mediocre personalities. I stayed long enough to hear that dopey Uncle Junius had finally broken his heart over his doomed affair with a neighbor’s flirty wife, and-after a terrible scene bang in the middle of the cress harvest-having failed to hang himself from a broken beam in the ox-harness room (which Great-Auntie Phoebe had repeatedly told him to mend), he had left home in a new huff over the ill-timed reappearance during a violent thunderstorm of his brother, Fabius, who had previously gone off in a huff over, I think, a crisis about what he did in life (since what Fabius actually did was to cause trouble in the lives of other people and then hang around apologizing, his huff had been encouraged by everyone else). All much as usual. The two brothers had a lifelong feud, a feud so old neither of them could remember what it had been about, but they were comfortable loathing each other. I had not seen Fabius for years; he had failed to improve.
Ma took Julia from us and settled in to shake heads with Phoebe over the lads and their troubles. Nux came with me. Nux had become anxious and clinging after the episode on the Capitol where she was arrested by the priestly acolytes who were looking for doggies to crucify. In addition to that, a succession of nasty male curs had occupied our front porch recently, suggesting Nux was in heat; this too was making her behavior unstable. I was annoyed; acting as midwife for my own child had been enough of a disturbing experience, one I was not keen to resume for a bunch of pups.
Helena knew I was checking up on the Laelius family, so once we dropped off Ma, she came on with me.
A hot June morning, ambling along with a mule who was tired enough to do as I instructed, feeling Helena’s knee against my own, and Helena’s lightly clad shoulder nuzzling my arm. Only the wet nose of Nux, squeezing between us from the back of the cart, spoiled what could have been an idyll.
“Well, here we are peacefully traveling together,” mused my beloved. “Your chance to lull me into telling what my secret is.”
“Would not dream of it.”
“I expect you to try.”
“If you need to share your troubles, you’ll come out and say so.”
“What if I really want you to squeeze the story out of me?”
“Child’s stuff. You are far too serious,” I proclaimed piously. “I love you because you and I never have to descend to such games.”
“Didius Falco, you are an aggravating swine.”
I smiled at her fondly. Whatever she was doing, I trusted her. For one thing, if she really wanted to deceive me, there was no way I would ever have noticed that anything was happening; Helena Justina was too clever for me.
I had my work. It tended to be a solitary occupation. She helped when it seemed appropriate-and sometimes when it was so dangerous I felt terrified that she was involved-but she deserved stimulus of her own. Even when our lives were separate, I would always seize any chance to extract her and take her apart so that we could lose ourselves…
Part of our early courtship had taken place in the countryside. It seemed a nostalgic treat to roll around with her while hard lumps of vegetation were sticking in our backs. Still, nostalgia is a dish for the young.
“Ow! Jupiter, let’s just concede that we have a bed at home. Fun’s fun-but we’re grown up now.”
Helena Justina looked at me tenderly. “Didius Falco, you will never be grown up!”
Nux, tied up to the cart, started to howl.
Anyway, it was later than it might have been when we found the farm. It was a neat smallholding that looked well run, though barely capable of supporting more than the people who were living there. They had rows of summer salad crops, occasional poultry pottering about in a soft fruit orchard, a couple of cows, and a large friendly pig. Two geese wandered out to greet us; I could have done without them.
The farm dogs sniffed out the presence of Nux within minutes. Tying her up would only have made her a sacrificial victim. I tied them up instead. Then I carried Nux, preserving her canine chastity however fiercely she tried to squirm. Helena said it would be good practice for when our daughter grew up.