A Body in the Bathhouse (17 page)

Larius, my favorite young nephew, had bunkered off to learn to be a painter in the Bay of Neapolis, where the rich had their fabulous villas and there was top-class work. It was three years since I had seen him. I tried luring him to Rome to help me decorate Pa’s Aventine house, but my letter went unanswered. Larius had always been a businessman, too sensible to commit himself to unpaid favors. Besides, in Rome he had his appalling parents. Galla and her ghastly husband were enough to drive any son to a remote apprenticeship.

“Hmm … So that’s where it is!” Helena brushed past me suddenly to seize on a dress of hers. It was a cream affair, with wide bands of blue on the hems. Although simple, it had cost a sackful; the material was a gorgeous weave shot through with silk. As she lifted it out with a seductive rustle and held it by the shoulders, she caught me looking skeptical. “Hyspale keeps trying on my clothes. There’s no point. I am far too tall, so they bunch on her.” I said nothing. “Yes, she does it to annoy me.”

Another problem with the damned nurse. I sighed. “You know—”

“I know!”

I held my peace.

“When we get home,” promised Helena, “I’ll tackle her in Rome. Mother will take her back.”

“And she won’t be surprised.”

Helena looked at me. “Are you sniping at my mother?”

“No.”

It was true. She might be my mother-in-law, but I had observed the Camillus family enough to know she had had a strong influence on Helena’s development. I paid the proper respect to that. When a senator omits to divorce his wife after she has given him the correct number of children and he has used up the dowry, it generally means something too. I did not mess with Julia Justa.

“Oh, your undertunic’s mucky too, Marcus. You’ll have to take it off and bathe.”

I was already halfway through the motion of peeling down to bare skin when I realized that Hyspale had come into the room.

Helena flushed. “Hyspale, do knock, please!” I made sure I stayed decent. I can stand admiration from the wider public, but I rather liked Helena Justina deciding my body was her personal territory. She was shaking out the cream-and-blue dress. “Did you move this? Can we understand something, Hyspale—I would not allow my sister, my
mother
even, to borrow my clothes without asking me.”

Hyspale glared at me as if she believed I had caused her reprimand.

“Where are the children?” I asked coldly. Hyspale stormed out. Actually, I had already seen the children safe in the doting care of fair-haired, fair-skinned women from the King’s household, who were entranced by my daughter’s dark eyes and foreign good looks. The baby was asleep. Julia always behaved perfectly for strangers.

Helena and I looked at each other. “I shall deal with it,” she repeated. “At least she’s not beating or starving them. We just reached the stage where our servants are other people’s useless gifts. Next we shall choose our own—no doubt bungling it through inexperience. Then at last we shall move on to exactly what we want domestically.”

“I’d like to miss out on some stages.”

“You like to rush everything.”

I grinned salaciously.

I found my oil flask and strigil, selected clean clothes, and went out to explore the King’s baths. Helena then scurried after me, growling under her breath and needing to relax in the steam. In a private bathhouse owned by a royal master, there is always hot water. At off-peak times, you can virtually guarantee no one else will turn up to be shocked by mixed bathing.

We found the bath suite was high quality. To one side of the entrance lay a room with a cold swimming pool. None of your shallow paddling puddles; this was more than waist deep with plenty of space for a good thrash, as Helena vigorously proved, I had never learned to swim. She kept threatening to teach me; a freezing pool in Britain did not encourage me to start lessons. I sat on the pink mortared bench and watched Helena for a while, though even she was gasping at the temperature. Slightly chilled, I wandered off to enjoy myself in not one but three different hot rooms, each of increasing temperature. She stopped showing off her stamina and joined me.

“You found the fresco painters this morning?”

“I found their hut. I saw the mosaicist.” My solemn lack of logic had Helena giggling.

“Don’t play up, Falco.”

I gave her a cheeky smile.

Helena languidly went to a basin where she used a dipper to splash water over her shoulders. It ran down … well, where gravity was bound to take it. She came back to sit by me. That gave me the chance to trace the water streaks with my fingers.

“So,” she asked me doggedly, “what stage have you reached?”

“Are you supervising?”

“Wouldn’t dare.” Untrue. “We consult, don’t we?”

“You consult and I confess. …” She kicked me to encourage honesty. I sobered up to save my shins. “I’ve got the measure of the project architecturally. It’s a good structure and the planned finish treatments are striking. I’m eyeing up the personnel; that’s ongoing. Now I have to find an office—”

“I have sorted out a room near our suite for you.”

“Thanks! That’s good—not too close to the site managers. So next I take all the project documents into my new office and lurk there auditing. I know what scams I’m searching for. When I’m ready, I’ll pull in your brothers to help. Meantime, both are placed in good spying positions.” I omitted their seamy conditions. Their loving sister might storm off and rescue them.

Within the thick walls of the bathhouse, we were cut off completely from the outside world. Nobody knew we were here. Naked and peaceful together, able to be ourselves. Once you have children, such private moments are rare.

I gazed at Helena quietly. “Britain.” I took her hand, winding my fingers among hers. “Here we are again!” She smiled slightly, saying nothing. I first met her in this dismal province—both of us at a low ebb at the time. … “You were a snooty, angry piece and I was a sourfaced, hard beggar.”

Helena smiled more, this time at me. “Now you’re a snooty but mud-stained equestrian and I’m …” She paused.

I wondered if she was content. I thought I knew. But she liked to keep me on edge. “I love you,” I said.

“What’s that for?” She laughed, suspecting bribery.

“It’s worth saying.”

I felt sweat trickling slowly down my neck. I had a vague scrape with my strigil. I had brought my favorite, which was bone. Firm, yet comfortable on the skin … like many fine things in life.

When I complained about the pain in my wrenched back, Helena eased it with some interesting massage. “Toothache as well,” I whimpered pathetically. She leaned round from behind me and kissed my cheek gently. Flattened by the steam, her long straight hair fell forwards, tickling parts of me that decidedly liked being tickled.

“This is nice. No one using these smart facilities but us. … Maybe we should take full advantage, sweetheart. …” I pulled Helena closer.

“Oh, Marcus, we can’t—”

“I bet we can!”

We could too. And we did.

XXI

O
NCE YOU
have servants, even rare moments of privacy are at risk. I fooled the woman, though. By the time Hyspale sought us out at the baths, Helena Justina was in the changing room, drying off her hair. I was coming out through the porchway, newly clad in a clean tunic. With a mother like mine, I had long ago mastered the art of looking innocent. Especially after a hot dalliance with a young lady.

“Oh, Marcus Didius!” Our freedwoman’s podgy face glowed with satisfaction at disturbing me. “I’ve been looking for you—somebody wanted you!”

“Really.” I was in a good mood. I tried not to let Hyspale dissipate that.

“I should have sent him here to you. …”

She was determined to follow the cliché that men of affairs use the public baths to socialize with their lawyers and bankers, all dull creeps seeking dinner invitations. Not my style. In Rome, I patronized Glaucus, my trainer. I went to get my body fit. “I don’t take the conservative line. When I’m at the baths, Camilla Hyspale, it’s for cleanliness and exercise.” All types of exercise. I managed not to smirk. “I don’t want to be found.”

“Yes, Marcus Didius.” She was an old hand at using people’s names as insults. Her meekness was a front. I had no faith in her to obey.

Helena came out behind me. Hyspale looked shocked. And she only thought we had been bathing together.

“Who was it?” I asked calmly.

“What?”

“Looking for me, Camilla Hyspale?”

“One of the painters.”

“Thanks.”

With a terse nod to the women of my household, loved and loathed, I strode off to be a man of affairs in my own way. The one I loved blew me a kiss suggestively. The freedwoman was even more shocked.

I returned to the site.

I had a feel for it now. In some ways, it reminded me of the four-sided walled complex of a military fort. With the same slightly rectangular layout, the palace would be almost half the length and breadth of a full legionary base. They house six thousand men, two legion bases double that. Like a small town, a permanent fort is crammed with magnificent buildings, dominated by its Praetorium, huge administrative headquarters, and the commandant’s home. The King’s new palace was about twice the size of a standard Praetorium. It, too, was designed primarily to impress.

Activity in a far corner caught my interest. I made the diagonal route march over there. Pomponius (the project manager) was in heavy debate with Magnus, Cyprianus (the clerk of works), and another man, whom I soon deduced was the drainage engineer. In this part of the site, where the level was natural, laborers had gone ahead with the stylobate platforms that would front each wing. They were laying the first courses of supporting blocks on which colonnades would stand.

The planned extra height of the dramatic west wing with its audience chamber posed a problem the designers must always have known about—how to link it aesthetically to the colonnades of adjoining wings; where they abutted at the corners, they would be much lower. Now Pomponius and Magnus were having one of the long site discussions where such matters are thrashed out, feeding each other with suggestions—then each finding insurmountable difficulties in any idea that was put forward by the other man.

“We know we have to step the colonnades,” Magnus was saying.

“I don’t want any variation in the visuals—”

“But you’re losing five foot, off twelve foot, max. Unless you raise the ceilings, only dwarfs will be able to walk in the ends of these wings! You need graded headspace, man.”

“We lift the colonnades, in gradual stages—”

“Bitty. Much better to employ single flights of steps. Vary your roofline if you want. Let me tell you how—”

“I have made my decision,” Pomponius asserted.

“Your decision’s crap,” said Magnus. He was frank, yet given that surveyors tend to be hotheaded know-it-alls, he spoke amiably enough. He was only concerned to explain the good solution he had devised. “Listen—at each end, put in steps to move the people up to the west wing. Then don’t just run the lower colonnades along level until they bump into the big stylobate. Put in one taller column on each wing. Raise the colonnades at top height.”

“No. I’m not doing that.”

“These columns will need thicker diameters,” Magnus pressed on, deaf to the objection. “It gives better proportions—and if you tidy off with roof features, they’ll be carrying more weight.”

“You’re not listening to me.” complained the architect.

“You’re not listening to me,” the surveyor answered logically.

“The point is,” piped up Cyprianus, who had been listening to both patiently, “if we go with Magnus, I need to put in our order for the over-height columns now. Those in your main run are twelve foot. You’ll be going up to fourteen, fourteen and a half, for the larger ones. Specials always take longer—” Not even Magnus was listening to him.

It was clear they would be wrangling over the corner design for hours yet. Days, possibly. Weeks, even. Well, be realistic; call it months. Only when the builders reached the point of no return would this design feature be settled. My money was on the Magnus plan. But Pomponius was, of course, in charge.

Seated on a great limestone slab, from time to time the engineer put in, “What about my tank?” No one so much as acknowledged him.

From its placing, the slab under his backside seemed to be part of a preliminary mock-up of one of the colonnaded walks that would line the interior garden. I deduced it was part of a gutter that would lie at the foot of the stylobate and catch the runoff from the roof. Its deep hollowing at least provided a shaped perch while the engineer waited to be heard.

Pomponius and Magnus moved off slightly, still going endlessly over the same points. This probably often happened. Delaying the decision might allow time for new ideas to form; it could prevent expensive mistakes. They were not exactly quarreling. Each thought the other was an idiot; each made that plain. But this seemed to be a perfectly routine confab.

“Finials!”
cried Magnus loudly, like an exotic obscenity. Pomponius only shrugged.

I parked on another slab of limestone and introduced myself to the engineer. His name was Rectus. He must suffer from cold feet, for he wore knitted gray ankle socks in his battered site ankle boots. But his wide body must be tougher; he had only a dingle tunic, with short sleeves. Bushy eyebrows flourished above a big Italian nose. He was the type who always saw disaster coming—but who then without despair attacked the problem practically. Gloomy in aspect, he was a doer and solver. But he never gained the self-confidence to cheer up.

“So you have a problem with a tank?” I sympathized.

“Nice of you to notice, Falco.”

“I’m here to apply bandages to this project’s wounds.”

“You’ll need a few rags.”

“So I’m learning. Tell me about your tank.”

“My tank!” said Rectus. “Well, I just need to remind those fart-arses to build it before they get any further with their farting stylobate. It sits on a stone base, protruding into the garden, for one thing. I want a cavity dug out and the base laid. The sooner they put the tank in, the happier I shall be. Never mind the farting levels of their fancy colonnades.”