A Body in the Bathhouse Read Online Free Page B

though honored by your faith in me—”
    “Don’t blather. So you won’t go?” sneered Vespasian.
    “New baby,” I offered as a way out for both of us.
    “Just the time to nip off.”
    “Regrettably, Helena Justina has a pact with me that if ever I travel, she comes too.”
    “Doesn’t trust you?” he scoffed, clearly thinking that was probable.
    “She trusts me absolutely, sir. Our pact is, that she is always present to supervise!”
    Vespasian, who had met Helena in one of her fighting moods, decided to back off. He asked me at least to think about the job. I said I would. We both knew that was a lie.

IV
    J UPITER , J UNO , and Mars—I had enough to do that spring.
    The house move was complicated enough—even before the day when Pa and I smashed up the bathhouse floor. Having Mico under my feet at the new riverbank place constantly reminded me how much I hated my relatives. There was only one I would have liked to see here—my favorite nephew, Larius. Larius was a fresco painter’s apprentice in Campania. He could well have repaid all my kind treatment as his uncle by creating a few frescoes in my house, but when I wrote to him, there was no reply. Perhaps he was remembering that the main thrust of my wise advice had been telling him that painting walls was a dead-end job. …
    As for that feeble streak of wind, Mico—it was not just that he left plaster floats in doorways and tramped fine dust everywhere; he made me feel I owed him something because he was poor and his children were motherless. Really, Mico was only poor because his bad work was notorious. No one but me would employ him. But I was Uncle Marcus the sucker. Uncle Marcus who knew the Emperor, flash Uncle Marcus who had a new rank and a position at the Temple of Juno. In fact, I bought the rank with hard-earned fees, the position was literally chick-enshit and Vespasian only asked me over to the Gardens of Sallust when he wanted a favor. He saw me as a sucker too.
    At least, unlike Mico, Vespasian Augustus did not expect me to buy rissoles all round as an end-of-week treat for his horrible family. With gherkins. Then I had to keep a pot handy, because gobbling the gherkins made Mico’s awful toddler, Valentinianus, sick in my newly painted dining room. All Mico’s children owned top-heavy names, and they were all villains. Valentinianus loved to humiliate me. His chief ambition currently was to vomit over Nux, my dog.
    I now owned a dining room. The same week it was redecorated, I lost my best friend.
    Petronius Longus and I had known each other since we were eighteen. We served together in the army—in Britain. We were naive lads when we joined up for the legions. We had no idea what we were taking on. They fed us, taught us useful skills, and trained us to be well up in connivance. They also subjected us to four years in a faraway, under-developed province that offered nothing but cold feet and misery. The Great Rebellion of the Iceni came on top of that. We crept home no longer lads but men, and bonded like a laminated shield. Cynical, grimmer than the Forum gutter tykes and with a friendship that should have been unshakable.
    Petro had now spoiled everything. He fell for my sister after her husband died.
    “Petronius hankered for Maia a long time before this,” Helena disagreed. “He was married, so was she. He played around, but she never did. There was no point in him admitting how he felt, even to himself.” Then Helena paused, her dark eyes somber. “Petronius may have married Arria Silvia in the first place
because
Maia was unobtainable.”
    “Cobnuts. He hardly knew my sister then.”
    But he had met her and seen what she was like: attractive, independent and subtly dangerous. Such a good homemaker and mother (everyone said)—and what a bright girl! That double-edged remark always implies a woman may be on the lookout. I myself liked a hint of restlessness in a woman; Petronius was no different.
    Around the Aventine he was