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Back Enemies at Home Save as PDF
Chapters (66)
  1. Also by Lindsey Davis
  2. ENEMIES AT HOME
  3. Lindsey Davis
  4. Copyright
  5. Map
  6. THE CAST
  7. ROME, the Esquiline Hill:June AD89
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Sextus Simplicius escorted me to the door. He seemed anxious. ‘I should warn you about Mucia Lucilia’s guardian … The man can be a menace – he holds some wild theories. Do not believe everything he may say.’

I like wild people. I thanked Simplicius for the advice – then opted to make the guardian my very next interviewee.

13

Hermes was a sixty-five-year-old family freedman. He had a long, narrow head with vase-handle ears. This came with a pinched, unhappy expression, though I bore in mind he had recently lost his patroness, in grim circumstances.

Women have to be assigned a guardian when they have no husband, father or other obvious head of household. Some women are so much under their guardian’s control they marry them, others manage to bamboozle their so-called protectors. As I established when I took Faustus to meet my uncles, I would never have wanted one; I was not prepared to have anybody sign my contracts, speak for me legally or invest my capital. Mucia Lucilia had known Hermes since childhood. Perhaps, like so many women I would judge as dimwits, she just accepted the situation – or had she married to escape constraints, thinking Aviola would give her more freedom?

Everything may have been amicable. The picture Hermes gave me was that he and Mucia had enjoyed a friendly relationship and that he organised her affairs with a light hand. Certainly she liked him enough to have kept him as her executor, even when she re-wrote her will recently (which she had done on her marriage, like Aviola); at that time, she could easily have dropped Hermes. If she was nervous about dismissing him, she could always have said her husband made her change.

‘Would you call Mucia Lucilia a woman who knew her own mind, Hermes?’

‘Very much so.’

Not the nervous type then. This was the first I had heard of Mucia being strong-willed. ‘Was she domineering?’

‘Oh no. There was never unpleasantness. Mucia Lucilia got her way very diplomatically … But she had firm opinions and was quick to act when the mood took her.’

‘With Aviola?’

‘With anyone. But being contentious was rare; it was just not her way.’

I insisted on being sure; this was important. ‘Nobody thought of her as tyrannical? She was well liked?’

‘Very much so,’ said Hermes again. I would have left it – had he not added, ‘ – by most people.’

I pricked up my ears. ‘Who disliked her?’ Apparently Hermes failed to hear the question.