While she was still harassing the porter, a woman appeared in the rather dark atrium that we could just glimpse over his shoulder. She looked about the right age to be Gaia’s mother, so I asked, “That your friend?”
As Maia peered in and shook her head, the young woman was surrounded by a group of females who must be her attendants; they all moved as one out of view again. It seemed a strangely choreographed little scene, as though the maids had swept up their mistress and she succumbed to being whisked away.
“Who was that?” Maia demanded bluntly, but the porter looked vague and pretended he had seen no one.
After we left, the odd glimpse stayed with me. The woman had had the air of a member of the family, not a slave. She had walked towards us as if she was entitled to come and speak to us-yet she seemed to let the maids change her mind for her. Well, I was probably making too much of it.
Maia allowed me to escort her home again, and I collected Julia. When we left my sister’s house, outside in the street a group of little girls was playing a Vestal Virgins game. These were not pampered babies in some careful patrician residence. The tough Aventine tots not only had a stolen water jug to carry on their heads, but had obtained some embers and had lit themselves a Sacred Fire on their own little Sacred Hearth. Unfortunately, they had chosen to recreate the Temple of Vesta rather close to a house with a very attractive set of wooden balconies, some of which were now on fire. As it was not on Maia’s side of the street, I carried on walking in the traditional manner. I don’t like getting young girls into trouble. Anyway, they had looked as if they would bash my head in if I interfered.
Around the corner, I did pass a group of vigiles sniffing for the smoke. My guess was they had had to endure rather a lot of tiny female arsonists since the Vestals’ lottery was announced. The sooner the Pontifex Maximus pulled out a name, the better for everyone.
FOUNTAIN COURT SEEMED quiet when Julia and I returned home. The sensible after-lunch drunks had collapsed on the side of the street with the dank shadows and old cabbage leaves. The daft ones opposite would have fiercely sunburned foreheads, noses, and knees when they woke up. A feral cat mewed hopefully, but kept well away from my boot. Disreputable pigeons were picking over what the down-and-outs had left them from the charred bread Cassius, our local baker, had chucked out when he shut up his stall for the day. Flies had found half a melon to torment.
There were empty stools outside the barber’s shop. A thin pall of black smoke hung over one end of the street, reeking of burned lamp oil; sulfurous fumes rose from the back of the laundry. I thought about checking how the goslings were, now they lived in the laundry yard, but Julia and I were weary after half a day doing nothing in particular. My neighbors were taking their usual siestas, which for most of those idlers meant all-day ones, so the man who walked up the street ahead of us stood out alone. I had seen him emerge from the funeral parlor, clearly repeating directions. I can’t think why he had asked the undertakers for information, given the number of family mausoleums that end up containing urns with the wrong ashes due to those incompetents.
This fellow ahead of me was of average height, whiskery, hairyarmed, brisk in his walk, dressed in a dark tunic and rather floppy calf-high boots. He checked outside the basket weaver’s lockup as though he was going in there; then he skipped up the steps to the first-floor apartment where I lived.
Whatever he wanted, I was in no real mood for strangers, so I stopped off to talk to Lenia. She was outside her business premises, in the part of the street she had commandeered for clothes-drying; the morning wash was twisting about on several lines in a slight breeze, and with an irritated expression she was listlessly straightening the most tangled wet garments. When she saw me, she gave up immediately.
“Gods, last day of May and it’s too hot to move!”
“Talk to me, Lenia. Some beggar just went up to our house, and I can’t be bothered going to find out if he’s someone who wants to annoy me.”
“Just now?” croaked Lenia. “Some other beggar went up to look for you too.”
“Oh good. They can annoy one another while I have a rest down here.”
I leaned my backside against the portico. Lenia took Julia by both arms and practiced walking her a few steps. Julia grabbed a dripping toga, with hands that had somehow grown more grubby than I had realized.
We heard a yell from the apartment.
“Who was your beggar?” I asked Lenia lazily.
“Young chap with purple trim on his tunic. Yours?”
“No idea.”
“Mine said he knew you, Falco.”
“Permanent look as if his breakfast is giving him gyp?”
“That’s the pug-faced darling, by the sound of it.”
“Helena’s brother. The one we don’t care for. Sounds as if the man I followed home agrees.” The yelling continued. “Helena isn’t up there, as far as you know, Lenia?”
