A Comedy of Terrors

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Rome, AD 89: mainly on the Aventine

The week before Saturnalia: 12–17 December

Who can sing of these spectacles, this unrestrained humour, this banquet with free food and lashings of free wine?… How far into the future will news of this day stretch? Sacred and ageless, your feast will survive as long as the hills of Latium and Old Father Tiber, or your Rome, O Leader!

Statius, Silvae 1.6

OUR FESTIVAL CHARACTERS

The colourful people of the Aventine, mostly drunk and getting drunker

I

Io!

Saturnalia: the year when we acquired the boys. People kept telling my husband, “Well, this will put an end to that work of hers!” Tiberius only smiled ruefully. I stopped bothering to argue: I would continue to be a private informer because I refused to be doomed by parenthood.

The killjoys kept trying to depress us: “And of course,” they gloated happily, “Saturnalia will be so difficult for you!”

Idiots. Life would certainly hold challenges for our two nephews. From now on every December, the month when their mother died, would be sad. All of us would feel it. Tiberius would never stop grieving for his lost sister; he was that kind of man. But you cannot ignore Saturnalia, not when everyone around is heartlessly throwing themselves into the riot and, because we lived on the Aventine, the caterwauling public were keeping our two tots awake every night. Gaius and Lucius were country-born. They knew how to ignore endlessly crowing cockerels or even yokels shrieking over snail races. But the city racket of the great December holiday disturbed them. Then they whimpered into their pillows. We tried to comfort them, but they were just little boys who thought they were going to miss all the presents, jokes, cakes, and parties with ghost stories.

We were treading a fine line in sensitivity, but we handled it as best we could. Tiberius was still grieving for his sister Fania, but we wouldn’t keep these two stuck at home as if they could never have any fun again.

The other stupidity I had to endure was people assuming that I—that well-known piece of work, Flavia Albia—would have no idea how to look after the boys. Cobnuts. For a start, I knew how they were feeling because I had been an abandoned child myself, somehow lost by my birth parents in the Boudiccan Revolt in Britain. Later, when I was adopted by Falco and Helena, I too had discovered what it was like to arrive in Rome, this huge overwhelming city, and to find yourself stuck among clamorous new relatives who were not always welcoming. Even fifteen years later I felt like an outsider, though it hardly mattered since Rome was stuffed with incomers. There were more of us than them.

“How will you cope, Albia? You’ll really have your hands full now!”

Oh, leave me alone. I was ready. When I came to Rome, I had had baby sisters, then later a brother. I do know how to blow a small snotty nose on a child who is wildly struggling to escape. I had a fair idea how to set a daily routine. We were not trying alphabet lessons yet, but when we did, I would teach them myself; we already had a set of letters because I was making our slave, Dromo, learn. In his case it was tortuous, but by the time he was ready for freedom, he would be able to run his own business. So, these two little boys would survive, if it was up to me.

Gaius and Lucius had now been here for three days. They were tentatively joining in Saturnalia; if they decided to hide away and cry instead, we found them, gently bringing them back for cuddles. We made sure they knew that, even though their loving mother was no longer here, there would be new toys. As reassurance, I had promised to take them out to buy horrible little figurines that they could give to members of our household and a few people they had decided they liked. That included my parents and sisters, though not my brother Postumus, who had scared the boys at our wedding (most people find him scary), nor Uncle Tullius, who openly loathed children.

I had to learn quickly. I shared a laugh with my own dear mama about having to provide gift-figurines secretly for Postumus and Tullius so they didn’t take offence. Helena Justina was no help. Though a lovely woman in many ways, she said she had done enough of this in her time (and still had three at home, plus Father); she would just sit back and enjoy watching me go through it.

However, she did tell me which sigillaria-seller could be trusted with small boys: an African street hawker called Agemathus. And she warned me to choose pottery figurines, because wax ones would melt in their hot little hands when they played with them before handing them over as presents.

“Even though you explain they shouldn’t, because the statues are meant for other people?”

“Oh, yes. Postumus innocently claims he is testing for hidden weaknesses, which would disappoint his recipients.”

“He knows. Some sigillaria hardly last a week, Mama.”

“They are made with flaws on purpose, Albia. The hawkers want you to buy new ones every year. No hiding them at the back of a cupboard for next time.”

“Next time?” Glumly, I faced the fact that I was trapped. Saturnalia stress was mine for ever: the matron in a household has to make the festival run smoothly. You cannot rely on the paterfamilias because he is probably drunk.

Who can blame him? asked my mother. She would be drunk herself, she said, only somebody has to be capable of counting the wheat-cakes. You can’t run out to buy more; it’s a holiday so the bakery is closed and all the street-sellers have vanished. I had a steward to monitor supplies, but Helena warned me Gratus might be tipsy too.

Even so, since the parents were holding a traditional family feast, she wanted to borrow him to help. Also, since my cook had once worked in a celebrity restaurant, she asked very sweetly, could Fornix send a batch of his wonderful cakes? Not too much cinnamon because it made Postumus sneeze.

“Anything else?” I groaned.

“You will have to find the boys a nurse, if you want to keep working.”

My mother must be the only person in Rome who assumed I would never give up. Neither of us realised how soon this would be tested.

I duly took Gaius and Lucius to buy sigillaria. We found the street where the recommended figurine-seller was supposed to lurk. Agemathus was nowhere to be seen.

Locals claimed the man with the tray had been around all morning, yet no one could say where he had wandered off to or when he might stroll back. If he had been lured to a bar in full festival swing, he might only surface tomorrow. The boys were becoming fretful. In the end someone told me where he lived. Needless to say, his cold hutch was a meagre room in a dark tenement off a back alley behind a street of sponge-sellers, though believe me, it was not clean.

The building where we were now having our adventure rose to about six storeys, as high as regulations permit. It seemed to consist of one-room lettings from ground floor to attic, with no superior apartments lower down and no exterior streetside shops. Agemathus lived on the third floor. I homed in because he had fixed a figurine to his doorpost to advertise. I couldn’t believe many people would see this by chance; already I was starting to fear the statue-seller might be scattier than Mother had promised.

Clutching the children’s sticky hands, I barged into his accommodation. He was in the room, lying face down on the bed. His tray of ghastly statuettes was there too, on a wonky stool: odd little men, who might have been religious in origin. A woman with no conscience might simply have snaffled a handful for free but to reach them I would have to pass close by Agemathus. Even I shrank from that. He had clearly not passed out from festival excess: blood was soaking the back of his tunic and a knife had been plunged between his shoulder blades.

“Oh dear!”

Oh, pigshit. And you try telling a three-year-old and a five-year-old who have been promised horrible figurines that now they can’t have them.

II

For me, as a private informer, this was a familiar situation. I always seem to be stumbling upon suspicious deaths, and since I don’t trust the vigiles to investigate, I often knuckle down to it myself. A woman’s work is never done. I cannot abide mess and, besides, I specialise in solving problems. I have even had clients who were snuffed out by some enemy after they hired me—though more likely I would find out my client had ignored my advice and taken rash action against someone else. Many of my commissions are family affairs. People in trouble do love to snap and go for one another. As a professional, I have to warn against murder as a remedy but, let’s be honest, it can be a neat solution.

The first arrival at a crime scene should carry out certain key actions. First you must stop any hysterical spouse flinging him- or herself upon the corpse in real or fake grief. Don’t stand for that nonsense. Assume that they did it, until proved otherwise. The more they act up, the more certain their guilt.

Next, remove very young children. Just shove them out. It is generally assumed the sight of blood will work upon their tiny minds in a bad way. You are supposed to rescue them from that. Later, you can give them honeyed figs and interrogate them cruelly, just in case they saw anything useful.

Mine were being pretty cool about Agemathus. Coming from the countryside, full of animals being slaughtered, must have made them blasé. Also, they seemed to regard the soaking blood as a Saturnalia jape. I managed to grab them by their tunic-necks before they could run to the figurines. Thwarted, they screwed up their eyes ready for tantrums. Gaius, the five-year-old, could go red in the face at will. Lucius, aged three, watched carefully then tried to copy him.

I would have to take them home. I had automatically fired up my forensic mode, assessing the death scene and looking around for clues. I could not be distracted, not while I was conducting an examination.

Grasping their little hands again, I led them from the room. I pulled the door closed after us as best I could, though it did not fit properly and had no latch. I had got in originally by leaning on it. Had that nailed-up figurine outside helped a murderer find Agemathus?

We clattered back down two flights of a stone staircase, past the usual stinking dolium of collected urine that stood in the filthy entrance lobby—“Oh, pooh-ee!” and “Why isn’t there one of those at your house, Albia?”—into the comparatively fresher air outside. I paused on the threshold, wondering whether to alert anyone.

We had seen no door porter or watchful crone when we entered the tenement. It had sounded unoccupied then; it still did. I could tell that plenty of people lived here; their litter was everywhere. Something was sticking my shoe to the ground. At mid-morning the tenants must all be out working, women as well as men. Children would have been taken to grandparents, aunts or pittance-a-day minders. I doubted that any of them went to school, but the current term had already ended for the holiday.

No one in these suffocating little rooms would own slaves. Conceivably, some were runaway slaves themselves. If so, they too had gone out to beg. The Aventine was crowned with ancient temples, whose high flights of steps were sought-after pitches. My father says a cartel controls them, charging beggars a premium to sit in prime spots, even if they are genuinely blind, lame or have no arms and must hold a money-cup in their teeth. He’s a gloomy theorist. Falco thinks everyone is crooked. I don’t bother thinking it: I know.

This tenement was the only building on a short dark alley, with a blank wall opposite. The alley was a stub off a small crossroads piazza to which we now walked. It contained a fountain—not large, no flowing river-god statuary, just a lead pipe that dribbled sluggishly into a stone basin. Basic. Still, it was adequate. If the pipe was kept hygienic, the water would be drinkable. Fresh water came to Rome from distant hills, with very clean sludge in it and hardly any live wriggly things.