Cast Not the Day (34 page)

There was a murmur like the flutter of birds, for by now word had got round of the notary’s arrival, and his reputation. But no one spoke; there was nothing to say. Everyone knew that Martinus was not there to consult, but to instruct.

‘I really cannot see,’ said Gennadius later, ‘why he does not dissolve the Council and have done with it.’

It was the evening of the same day. We were sitting in the study of Aquinus’s town-house, with its plain chairs of polished wood, its lattice-doored book-cupboards, and shelves of neatly labelled scrolls. I had come to see Marcellus, and had encountered Gennadius walking up the street from his own house, accompanied by one of his house-slaves.

‘Because,’ answered Aquinus, ‘it suits Constantius to preserve the form of freedom, like all tyrants. But we are all guilty in his eyes.’

‘He cannot execute us all!’ cried Gennadius with a quick laugh.

But Aquinus did not laugh, and, seeing this, Gennadius broke off with an appalled look on his broad farmer’s face. ‘But he must know we did only what was best for the province,’ he continued. ‘Surely he must see that? Gaul is in ruins, and Britain prospers. What more evidence does he need?’ He picked up his wine-cup from the little oak side-table beside his chair, then immediately set it down again as a new thought came to him. ‘And what was the bishop doing? Did you see him smiling and nodding at that dreadful notary like some theatre clown?’

‘It is rumoured they have become friends.’

‘Well, like attracts like. Even so, surely he would not ally himself with such a creature.’

‘The bishop is a man I find difficult to predict. But if one thinks the worst of him, one is seldom wrong. And as far as I can tell, he is a man who would set alight his house in order to bake a loaf.’

Clemens tapped at the door and announced that supper was ready. ‘But come, Gennadius,’ said Aquinus, ‘will you not eat with us?’

‘No, no. Thank you.’ He got up to leave, adding with a frown, ‘It is said Constantius trusts no one but his spies, and even they are spied upon.’

‘Still, we have Martinus.’

‘I did not see much evidence of moderation there. He made Constantius sound like an Asiatic despot.’

‘I fear he portrayed him accurately.’

Gennadius shook his head. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

Aquinus said, ‘I knew Martinus once, long ago, when I was a student in Rome. No doubt he too is watched. But he is an honourable man.’

‘I hope you are right. We live in a world where the cart leads the mule, and I confess I no longer understand it. It is time I returned to the country and left government to the young.’

But in the days following his address to the Council, Martinus invited the leading citizens to the governor’s palace, and it was reported by those who attended that the notary was nowhere in evidence. Martinus, they said, was courteous, charming and urbane; he sought their opinions on minor affairs of state, and afterwards was praised for his good sense and humanity. When next I saw Gennadius he was in a better mood, saying he supposed his fears had been excessive.

The spring equinox passed. The whitethorn was in blossom, and the city air was scented with lime-flowers. One bright morning Marcellus walked into my room at the fort and asked me to come out riding. I agreed without questioning him. His face had told me enough.

We crossed the bridge and turned east, taking the tracks through reeds and marsh grass beside the river.

Marcellus drove his horse hard. After some time, when the city was far behind and the river had widened into the slow-flowing estuary, he turned off and walked his horse up a path that climbed a grassy knoll clustered with yellow-flowering gorse and heather tufts. He dismounted at the top, tethered his horse, and from his saddle-bag took the little pack of food he had brought. We sat on the grass. But instead of eating he gazed absently across the river plain and the glinting water beyond.

For a while I ate in silence, leaving him to his thoughts. His mother had been to visit; I had not seen him for some days. Presently I broke off a fistful of bread and held it out. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘before I finish it all.’

He took the bread from my hand and looked at it.

‘What happened?’ I said. ‘Or will you suffer in silence?’

He set the lump of bread down beside him and clasped his arms around his knees. ‘We fought again. Remember last week, when she took me off to the country?’

I nodded. She had wanted him to visit an uncle.

‘I knew she was up to something. Remember I told you? Well she took me to meet the daughter of some nobody she knows. I shouldn’t have minded if only she had told me first; but I found out only when we were at the gates. It was humiliating, as if I were some child having a cure forced on it.’

‘What then?’

‘Oh, we sat on couches sipping drinks and picking at sweetmeats and trying not to look at each other, while my mother talked on and on, and the girl’s father sized me up like a stallion at a horse fair . . . Here, you eat this; I’m not hungry. I tell you, Drusus, it makes me not want to marry at all.’ He looked up. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘So no luck for the squire’s daughter then?’

He threw the lump of bread at me, but by then he too was smiling, in spite of himself. ‘You’d think,’ he said, ‘that Mother was breeding hounds. In truth the girl was pleasant enough, in a dull, country sort of way. But with her father and my mother there, we scarcely spoke ten words.’

But after this his mood lifted a little. He ate some bread and olives, and drank the wine I had brought. Presently he said, ‘You know, afterwards, she even went to Grandfather, to get him to speak to me. Can you believe it? It makes me angry.’

I asked him what Aquinus had said.

‘He just laughed. He told her time was a wise counsellor – whatever he means by that. Anyway, she didn’t like that either, and now she has gone back to the country to sulk.’ He gave a deep frown and plucked at the grass. After a long pause he said, ‘You’re the only one I can tell these things to.’

I nodded. Sitting close, I could smell the weathered leather of his riding tunic, and the male scent that was all his own. He had fallen silent again, and was frowning out across the plain with its ash and hazel saplings and shining marsh-pools. The wind had dropped; high flat clouds were streaking in from the east, casting shadows beneath them.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘she will blame me.’

‘She has no reason.’

I remembered the day in the snow, and her look from the high window; and I thought, ‘No? But what will she have me do? Walk away?’

I leant over and kissed him. ‘There is her reason,’ I said.

He looked at me with his grey troubled eyes, then looked down at the grass between his knees and nodded. ‘Then let it be. I need you, Drusus.’

I drew a slow breath. In his proud male love he had never said such a thing before. I swallowed, and through my longing and desire saw that he was baring to me his naked soul, which it was in my power to nurture or to harm. Part of him was but a hand’s touch away; and yet the greater part, I knew, was forever beyond my reach.

I said, ‘I will be here always. You know that. I love you.’

He gazed out at the sky, as if considering. After a while he said, ‘See, the clouds are passing; it will be clear tonight. We can build a fire, and make a bed from these blankets. Or must you be back in London?’

I turned my head and met his eyes, to make sure I had understood.

‘Is it what you want?’ I said.

He looked back smiling, then pushed me down in the soft grass.

‘You know it is,’ he said.

It was shortly thereafter that the first trouble in the city began.

It started, as such things often do, with something minor. Marcellus and I, having a day to ourselves, had decided to spend the afternoon at the great city baths near the forum. We were on the way to the dressing-rooms – passing through the entrance concourse with its vaulted arches, coffered painted ceilings and high crisscross windows – when there arose a sudden violent shouting, and then a man’s voice crying out for help.

People glanced round. There was another loud cry; the crowd parted, and in the gap three burly slab-faced men appeared, dragging a fourth from the direction of the warm-room, out across the marble floor towards the exit. The man in their hands – around whom a robe had hastily been thrown – was struggling like a snared rabbit, but one had taken his thin white legs, and the others his arms, and soon he was gone.

The people around us shook their heads and carried on with their business. It was a sorry sight, but every day at the baths there were spats of one sort or another; over a dice-game, or a boy, or some such matter.

We went off to undress, and I should have thought no more of it; but in the changing-room the man beside me said, ‘Too bad for old Fabius, eh?’ So I asked him what had happened.

Fabius, it turned out, was a carpenter who kept a small workshop not far from the docks. Earlier that day he had struck his thumb with a hammer; it was sore, and while he was relaxing in the warm-room he had mumbled a charm to himself to take away the pain. Within minutes men had come bursting in, accusing him of sorcery and of conjuring devils. The rest I had seen for myself.

I said, ‘Don’t the bath-slaves have anything better to do than bully old men?’

He paused, and I saw his eyes move to my soldier’s clothes on the bench. Dropping his voice he said, ‘Warned is protected, as men say. Those weren’t bath-slaves; they were the bishop’s people. I do not ask your beliefs, tribune, and you do not ask mine. But take my advice and mind you do not say a prayer before a temple, or wear a charm in the street. The city is full of spies. You saw what happened to poor Fabius, who is no more than a simple working man who hurt his thumb.’

We said no more.

Each person has his own tale to tell of those days, and what first alerted him to what was happening in the city. To begin with, people tried to ignore it and carry on with their lives, as a man will ignore the onset of some fatal sickness, which he has no power to avert.

Suspicion hung in the air. It crept around one like a cold chill. I began to take note of who was near me, and to mind my words; and, having begun to look, I noticed men with evasive eyes loitering on street corners, or the solitary person at a tavern table, nursing an undrunk cup of beer, bending his head to overhear the talk of those around him. I noticed the second glances and careful faces and speaking eyes.

Then the bishop, newly emboldened, turned his attention to the city schools.

There was a well-known teacher, a woman by the name of Heliodora. It was common knowledge that the bishop had a score to settle with her, for once, when he had objected to the teaching of logic and what he called pagan learning, and had challenged her to a public debate, she had bettered him in front of all the senior professors of the city. She had travelled widely, and had a reputation for outstanding wisdom; she had studied at the schools of Alexandria and Athens, and it was said that there was no one else in the whole province who could speak as knowledgeably as she about Plato and Plotinus. She did not charge more than a person could pay; she used to say, when others suggested that she could have made herself rich, that she preferred her students to possess good minds than rich fathers. Her school was always full, and people of all ages came to her for advice. It was even said that with the aid of music she had cured sicknesses of the mind.

All this the bishop resented. He called her learning sorcery and magic. He called her a corrupter. He mocked her for being a woman, and said she was strange and unnatural because she was unmarried. And now, seeing his opportunity, he moved against her.

I heard it first from Aquinus, one day when I had gone to call on Marcellus. Hearing my voice, he emerged from his study and asked whether by any chance I recalled the name of the bishop’s deacon – ‘that squalid-looking death’s-head of a man.’

‘His name is Faustus,’ I said. ‘But why, sir? Have you seen him?’

‘He has paid a visit to Heliodora. He brought her a warning, saying that if she knew what was good for her, she would close her school and leave the city. I heard it only by chance, through a friend of Gennadius, who has a daughter there. She would not have mentioned it herself; she has no time for women who make a fuss.’

Marcellus said, ‘We’ll go and see her.’

‘Yes; why don’t you? See how she is.’

Her school lay just west of the forum, in the quarter where the copyists and bookshops are.

From the street one scarcely noticed it: there was only a faded wooden door beside a silversmith’s shop. But beyond, a narrow brick passage opened to a courtyard paved with rose-coloured herringbone brickwork, and an enclosing colonnade decorated with frescoes and lined with pots of healing plants. The shuttered windows stood open. From within came the sound of a woman talking, firm and calm, and from elsewhere the plucking of a lyre.

We found Heliodora inside. A class had just finished; a small group of youths and girls were leaving as we entered. The room was simple and unadorned. On one wall a row of musical instruments hung from pegs. There was a cabinet of books, and a table of wooden geometrical shapes – cubes and cones and cylinders.

She was arranging them back in their places, and had her back to the door. Hearing us she turned. She was dressed in a plain workman’s tunic; her hair was cropped short, and her face was fresh and boyish. She was, I guessed, about forty. Her large brown eyes were full of intelligence.