Persona Non Grata (24 page)

51

R
USO HAD HOPED to leave out parts of the truth. Omission was easier than lying. As he and Calvus rode slowly back along the road with a resentful Stilo leading the lame horse, it seemed that he might get away with it.

He summarized the circumstances of Severus’s death, adding that Claudia had since confirmed that her husband was not in the best of health.

“Yes, I hear you’ve been to see the widow,” observed Calvus. “Twice.”

“We used to be married,” said Ruso, noticing the heavy ring on Calvus’s right hand and wondering whether a stone that size was there to add a sharp edge to his punch.

Calvus said, “What was Severus doing at your house?”

“We were both involved in a court case.”

“He was going to wipe you out, and you’re telling me he just dropped by for a chat?”

Ruso suspected the investigator would not believe that Severus had come to discuss a settlement, and he was right.

“Why would he do that?”

They were approaching the oxcart they had overtaken a few minutes before. The driver looked them up and down, noted the lame horse, and passed by with the barely concealed superiority of one who had known that too much rushing about never came to any good in the end.

Ruso said, “It’s complicated. There was a falling-out between the women in both families.”

“And Severus let it affect his business decisions?” It was obvious that Calvus was not convinced.

“Judge for yourself,” suggested Ruso. “You’ve met Claudia.”

“Somehow,” said Calvus, “I don’t see a man like the senator choosing an agent who’s told what to do by his wife.”

“Severus made some remarks about my sister,” Ruso explained. “Apparently he meant it as a compliment, but my brother took it as an insult and my stepmother reported it to Claudia, who gave him a very bad time about it. He was angry with my family for stirring up trouble in his marriage, and since—according to him—we owed him money, he decided to make things difficult for us.”

“I see.”

“Only later on, he realized things had gone too far,” said Ruso. “We’d just done a deal to straighten things out when he was taken ill.”

“We’ll need to talk to whoever witnessed the agreement.”

“There wasn’t anybody,” explained Ruso. “There wasn’t time to get things orga nized. I was more worried about his state of health.”

“I see.”

“I know this doesn’t sound very likely.”

“Did I say that?” asked Calvus.

“You didn’t say that,” confirmed Stilo across the horse.

Ruso said, “Severus was a bully and a liar. We can’t have been the only people he tried to swindle.”

“The first rule of investigating,” said Calvus. “Never trust a suspect who tries to blame somebody else.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“If Severus went around swindling people,” put in Stilo, “where’d he hide the money? The wife says he didn’t have a bean.”

“All I’m saying is, he might have had other enemies. People with fewer scruples.”

“We’ll bear it in mind,” said Calvus.

“If we get desperate,” said Stilo.

“It could be somebody who knew he was coming to see us and who deliberately tried to blame us for his death.”

“Talks a lot, don’t he?” observed Stilo to his partner. “I reckon it was him.”

“Before we jump to conclusions,” said Calvus, frowning at Stilo across the back of the lame horse, “go through again exactly what happened when Severus fell ill.”

Ruso’s account was as accurate as he could make it. So accurate, indeed, that as he explained the process by which he had eliminated all the causes he could think of, Stilo began to yawn. “So you’re saying he was definitely poisoned, right?”

Ruso said, “I think so.”

“Well was he, or wasn’t he?”

“I can’t think of anything else that would make sense of the symptoms.”

“Is that yes or no?”

“Probably.”

Stilo sighed. “You’re all the same, you medics. It might be this or it might be that, or it might be some other bloody thing altogether. Do you have a special school where they teach you how not to answer questions?”

“Yes.”

Calvus said, “What were his last words?”

“ ‘Somebody’s poisoned me,’ ” said Ruso.

“Hah!” Stilo raised his free hand to the sky as if imploring the gods to listen to this idiot.

“Somebody has poisoned me,” repeated Calvus slowly, as if he were speaking to a foreigner who was just learning Latin. “I’d say that was a clue, Doctor, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“Hmph,” put in Stilo. “For a minute there I thought we were going to get a straight answer.”

“He might have been wrong.”

Stilo muttered something that sounded very much like “Smartarse.”

Ruso had a feeling that, had their positions been reversed, he would have felt the same way. The most convincing part of his story was the censored version of Severus’s last words. All the rest— the conveniently unwit-nessed offering of a truce, the victim’s sudden collapse in the lone company of a man equipped with medicines and a motive— pointed in entirely the wrong direction.

“It wasn’t me,” said Ruso. “If I were going to murder Severus, I’d have found a much cleverer way of doing it. I’d have used a poison that wasn’t so obvious, or I’d have found a way to blame somebody else right from the start.”

“I see,” said Calvus.

“It can’t be him, boss,” said Stilo. “It weren’t clever enough, see?”

“I see,” said Calvus again. “Tell us how you would have done it then, doctor?”

52

R
USO SURVEYED THE household lined up along the porch in an awkward parody of the welcome he had received only a few days ago. This time nobody was looking cheerful. Lucius was striding up and down and muttering to himself despite being ordered to stand still. Arria and the girls looked bewildered, Galla pale, and even the nieces and nephews were temporarily overawed by the presence not only of Calvus and Stilo, but of four grim-faced men armed with clubs. Ruso recognized a couple of them as Fuscus’s men. Try as he might, Ruso could not imagine Fuscus had sent them to protect the family of his dear departed friend Publius Petreius.

Evidently the staff did not like the look of Fuscus’s thugs, either. The cook was clutching a saucepan as if it were a weapon. The kitchen boy and Arria’s maid seemed to be trying to hide behind him. The bath boy was a picture of drooping misery, and the cleaning girl and the laundry maid stood with heads bowed, each seemingly examining the reddened hands clasped in front of her for some explanation of why this was happening.

The stable lad scurried in through the yard gate and ran up the steps to join the others, trailing a strong whiff of embrocation in his wake. The nine farm laborers, not usually allowed to enter the house, hesitated down on the path.

“And you lot,” ordered Calvus. “Up you go.”

The men looked variously at Calvus, at Ruso, and at Lucius, evidently not sure whom to obey.

Ruso moved forward. “Go and stand next to the other staff,” he ordered them, counting the line to make sure nobody was missing except the two women who were at this moment heading into unsuspected trouble in Arelate.

He made his way down the steps and turned to address his house hold. “These men have come to ask us all some questions about the visitor who died here the other day,” he said. “They’re representing the senator, and I want you to answer them as fully and as truthfully as you can.”

He turned to Calvus, whose long dark eyes were surveying the family with an expression that reminded Ruso of a predator choosing its next meal. He said, “You can use the study when you’ve finished inspecting it,” and, lowering his voice as he drew closer, added, “My people are witnesses. They’ll do their best to help you, but most of them don’t know a thing. They don’t need to be frightened and they certainly don’t need to be hurt.”

Calvus raised one eyebrow. “What an interesting idea.”

It occurred to Ruso that what the man lacked in height, he made up for in arrogance. “You didn’t need to bring a bunch of thugs with you.”

“The suspect telling me how to carry out the investigation.”

“It’ll never catch on,” said Stilo.

Ruso felt his muscles tense. He made a conscious effort to relax his shoulders before saying, “I’m warning you not to do anything you’ll regret later when you find out the truth.”

“Nice of you to care,” said Calvus. “But I’ve been in this business a long time—”

“A very long time,” put in Stilo.

“I’ve been in this business a very long time,” repeated Calvus, “and I don’t often suffer from regret.”

Ruso turned on his heel and limped away toward the garden seat. If he did not put himself out of reach of Calvus immediately, he would hit him. And that would do his case no good at all.

53

R
USO SLAMMED THE gates so hard that they rattled. He shoved the bolt across and turned to the dog. “Next time,” he instructed it, gesturing toward the gate that shut out the departing investigators, “bite them.”

The enthusiasm with which the dog wagged its tail did not inspire confidence.

Rubbing his sore elbow and feeling ten years older than he had this morning, Ruso turned to limp back toward the stables. Already the shadow of the pergola was stretching its legs across the garden. Tilla and his sister-in-law were somewhere far beyond the safety of the estate, and there was no way anyone could catch up with them before dark.

The crunch of footsteps announced someone behind him. “If my vintage is ruined,” announced Lucius, “it’ll be your fault.”

“Is everyone all right?”

“If you couldn’t keep that bloody woman under control you had no business bringing her here.”

There was no time to argue. “We’ve got to get to Arelate to night, brother. Cass and Tilla don’t know what they’re walking into.”

“It’s bad enough you getting us all accused of poisoning. Now my wife’s run off because your fancy woman’s filled her head with rubbish, and you send a slave to come and tell me!” Lucius kicked open the yard gate, sending a couple of hens fluttering away in alarm. “You don’t know how it feels to have to lie to your own children, do you? To tell them their mother’s gone for a holiday and you don’t know when she’s coming back? Did you see the faces on those nosey bastards just now? Even you suspected her of being a poisoner: What must they think?”

“Are the mules fast enough, or can we borrow some horses?”

“I’m in the middle of supervising the vintage, remember? Good old reliable Lucius, here every year—”

“We’ve been through this. We need to—”

“I stay here and work while you float around the empire picking up women. You don’t have the faintest idea what responsibility really means, do you? Now I’m going to be gone for who knows how long, because somebody who can walk on both legs needs to go and get my wife out of the clutches of that woman so she can come back here and do her duty!”

Lucius paused for breath and Marcia’s voice floated across the yard. “Are you two going to have another fight?”

The unified, “No!” was one of the few things they had agreed on since Ruso’s return.

“I’ll take the cart,” growled Lucius to the approaching stable lad. “The farm will have to manage without it because my brother’s wrecked the only fast animal we’ve got our hands on and that woman he brought—”

“Yes, all right!” snapped Ruso. “If you’d taken your wife seriously in the first place, you wouldn’t need to chase after her now.”

“Hah! You’re advising me about marriage?”

Ruso took a deep breath, consciously unclenched his fists, and said, “Neither of us did anything to help, so Cass and Tilla have gone to Are-late by themselves to see what they can find out about the
Pride of the South.
Now I’ve found out Severus had a man in the port who—”

“What man?”

“All I know is that his name is Ponticus, and if he finds out why they’re there, he’ll try to silence them.”

Lucius ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I can’t believe this. You knew my wife was in danger and you didn’t even tell me?”

“If we leave now—”

“Oh, no. This time
we
is just me. You’ve made enough of a mess.”

“But—”

“I’ll take the stable lad. You can stay here and do all the work for a change. You can have the old mule that’s left, and that horse will want delivering back to the estate in the morning.”

“But—”

Lucius’s fist shot out and grabbed a handful of his tunic. “Just for once, Gaius, just once— will you bloody well let me make my own decisions?”

54

R
USO LEFT HIS brother strutting about shouting orders. He was making his way back past the dead fountain when his thoughts were interrupted by a wail of “Gaius!”

It was time to see what he could do to clear up the rest of this afternoon’s chaos.

“They’ve been through our underwear, Gaius!” shouted Marcia, leaning out over the porch balustrade, clearly eager to get her complaint in first.

“Not while we were in it,” added Flora.

“Really, Flora!” This last was from Arria, who was positioned at the top of the steps like a legionary about to defend a breach in the garrison walls. As he lurched unevenly up toward her she said, “You must send a complaint to the senator, Gaius! They’ve upset everybody and broken one of the best bowls.”

“Only one?” asked Ruso, relieved. While Calvus questioned the house-hold, Stilo and three of Fuscus’s thugs had been searching the house for—he was not sure what. Poisons, he supposed. Stilo had emerged still clutching the knife in his disfigured hand. Perhaps he imagined that if he found the poison, someone was going to force him to swallow it.

“It was one of a set. A beautiful set. Your poor father bought them for me.” She sniffed. “On our first anniversary.”

As he climbed the steps, he saw that his stepmother’s eyes were glistening with tears. The girls, noticing the same thing, retreated into the house.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, putting an arm around her shoulders and realizing this was probably the first time he had ever touched her voluntarily. “We’ll get another one.”

“But they’ve been through all our lovely things!”

The lovely things were of secondary interest. “Is anybody hurt?” The fourth member of the gang had been ordered to prevent him from leaving the garden. Ruso had been forced to wait out the questioning, limping back and forth along the gravel paths, listening for any sounds from the house and planning to beat Fuscus’s man aside with his walking stick if he heard anyone scream. He had heard nothing, but he was still relieved when Arria confirmed that Calvus and Stilo had done no worse than frighten their victims.

“And they’ve upset Cook! I knew they would. Goodness knows what we’ll get for dinner now, and we can’t cancel Lollia again. Those dreadful men made him open all the jars in the pantry and then they made the kitchen boy eat something out of every one of them. No wonder he was sick.”

Ruso scowled, trying to stifle the guilty awareness that he might have spared them all of this by giving the investigators the evidence about Claudia buying rhododendron honey. “What about the others?”

“Then they found some wretched dried leaves in the barn— Lucius says he uses them to get rid of wild dogs— but they’ve taken them away.”

“Dogbane?” suggested Ruso, summoning a vague childhood recollection of watching his father’s farm manager making dry leaves into cakes with suet and being told not to touch them.

“Oh, who knows what he keeps in there?” Arria sighed, letting him lead her out into the garden. “And now they’ve taken your lovely case . . .”

“Nothing that was in my medical case will be a problem, I promise you,” he insisted.

Arria sniffed. “But it was so beautiful, with all those pretty clips and places to put the little bottles. What would your father say?”

“He’d say at least they let me keep the instruments,” insisted Ruso, who was privately outraged at the confiscation. After all the arguments about duty and responsibility, the gift of the medical case had been the tacit sign of his father’s ac ceptance that Ruso was not going to stay at home and run the farm. “They promised to release it when they’ve checked the medicines.” As if he had been likely to believe them.

“Oh, Gaius, what are we going to do? I told that horrible man we don’t know anything and it was all a silly fuss about nothing, but he still kept on asking questions and looking at me.”

“A murder isn’t nothing, Arria.”

“But he wasn’t murdered, Gaius! For goodness’ sake!”

This was unexpected. “Have you been talking to Lucius?”

“I told him, you’re not that sort of doctor.”

“What did you say to him, exactly?”

“I told him the truth. Well, that was what you wanted, dear, wasn’t it?”

“And the truth is?”

Arria paused to run her little finger along the lower lid of each eye and inspect it for stray makeup.

“You look fine,” he assured her, knowing he would get no sense out of her until her poise was recovered.

Arria patted her hair. “I explained to him,” she said, “that you’ve been away in the army.” She put her hand on his arm. “Please don’t be cross with me. I’m sure you’re a very good doctor. I’m sure you know all about arrows and sword cuts and what to do when people get their fingers stuck in those ballista things, but really, dear—the legionaries don’t go around poisoning people, do they?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“So you really don’t know an awful lot about it, do you?”

He bristled. “I know a lot more than most people.”

“Yes, dear, but even you can still make a mistake. Can’t you?”

“Of course, but—”

“And you’re tired after all that traveling, and to be frank, Gaius, you do have a tendency to overdramatize.”

“I have a
what
?”

“You see? I knew you would be upset!”

“A tendency to overdramatize,” he repeated, deliberately keeping his voice under control. “What else did you say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t even know Severus was here until after he— until it was too late. Then I just asked Galla to make him look presentable for the family.”

“Right.”

He sensed her movement as she straightened up beside him. “I only did it to help. I didn’t mean to make you cross.” She sniffed again. “I know you’ve never approved of me, Gaius.”

“I—what?” He did not want to discuss this now. Or indeed, ever.

“I know everyone thought I only married your father for his money.”

Ruso cleared his throat. “That was all a long time ago.”

“I did my best, you know. It wasn’t my fault I could never be your mother.” She wiped away tears with her forefinger, crinkling the skin beneath her eyes. “If you could try to like me just a little bit, Gaius—”

Ruso cleared his throat again.

“All this will blow over,” he assured her, feeling the graze on his elbow as he tightened his arm around her. “We’ll find a way to sort out the money, Lucius will bring Cass home, the investigators will find out we didn’t poison Severus, and in a few weeks it’ll all be forgotten.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he assured her, ignoring the voices in his head that were demanding to know how all this was going to happen and pointing out that he should have told her about Marcia’s gladiator.

“And you’ll be nice to Lollia and Diphilus to night, won’t you?”

Ruso, who had forgotten all about the wretched dinner, managed a grunt of assent.

“Goodness knows what we’ll eat: Some of the traders have been very tiresome. I wish these people would keep proper records. Of course Lucius has paid their accounts. Anyway, Cook says he’s found some oysters and there’s enough here to manage. Now, the next thing is entertainment. If the girls do some practice perhaps they could play their—”

“Do they ever do any practice?”

She paused for a moment. “No, perhaps we’d better just talk to each other. Seating is going to be awkward with an even number of diners, but I’m going to put you with Lollia at one corner, and then Diphilus and me at the other, and the girls . . .”

Ruso made an effort to care, and failed. He would wait till after the dinner guests had gone and then tell her about Marcia.

Arria leaned her head against his shoulder. “I am glad you’re home, Gaius. I’m sorry you were let down by that girl. What did you call her? Tilla?”

“At least she and Cass are together,” said Ruso.

“Cassiana is bound to come to her senses in a day or two. And that girl will find a way to survive. These foreigners are often cleverer than we give them credit for, you know.”

“True.”

Arria lifted her head. “After all, she managed to work her way around you, didn’t she dear?”