Cast Not The Day Read online

  ‘But Ambitus, why does he want me? Why do I matter so much to him?’

  He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Think as he thinks, Drusus – if you can bring yourself so low. You are the son of an aristocrat, and so you are useful. Well-born fathers keep their sons away from him – and their daughters too, for they also have their uses. And until the men with real influence – the Notables and the Illustrious and the rest – take him seriously, he must make do with the city rabble who count for nothing. Everyone else thinks he is a joke.’

  I frowned, and stared down the sloping street. The nook where we were standing led to the back yard of a tavern. The air smelled rancid; someone had pissed in the doorway.

  ‘I believe everything you tell me, Ambitus,’ I said eventually. ‘I’ve met him, and I do not trust him. But if I refuse and my father dies, what then?’ I paused, biting my lip. It was this thought that I had returned to, again and again, during the long night.

  He let out a sigh. I felt his hand close about my arm and I turned to him.

  ‘You had better hear this from me, since your uncle will not tell you. If the emperor intended to execute your father, he will already be dead. If not, then nothing that fat fool the bishop does will make any difference. He thinks he is important, and because no one dares stand up to him, his friends can break temples and bully good citizens. But in truth he is no more than a cock preening himself on a midden. Take it from me, Drusus: forget him, and forget your father too.’

  He looked round. From an upper window across the street a raddled crone was calling out to us, enquiring if we were in the market for a girl, or maybe one each, or perhaps a boy. Ambitus threw her a fluent gesture and she withdrew, clucking.

  ‘Let’s get away from here,’ he said. And when we were walking once more, ‘Have you told Balbus any of this?’

  ‘No.’ I told him why.

  ‘Quite right; he would go running straight to her, like a dog to its master. He’s good at his trade, but hopeless otherwise. I don’t suppose you know this, but Lucretia is the daughter of a shipwright, and a miserable second-rate one at that. Balbus found her serving in some dockside tavern, and if he hadn’t taken a fancy to her she’d still be there now. I’ll tell you this too: if she is involved, then she will be trying to promote her own advantage, either by enriching herself – if there’s money behind it – or by obtaining favours for that brat of hers. I imagine the bishop has promised a great deal, if she reels you in. No, friend, don’t let them use you. You’ll be sorry otherwise.’

  We said no more. After what I had seen that morning, and what I had heard from Ambitus, it seemed to me that ugliness and cruelty was the true heart of life, and all else nothing but empty dreams. I felt sick with the world, and with all humanity.

  We parted at the streetside colonnade of Balbus’s offices. I thanked Ambitus for his advice, and told him I was going to walk for a while, and consider what to do.

  At first I had no clear purpose, but as I went I conceived the notion that I needed to be free of the noise of men. Coming to the eastern gate I passed through, taking the open track into the marsh scrub on the north side of the river.

  A sharp wind had picked up, snapping at the tall grass and urging flat, turbid cloud inland from the east. At a low rise, beside a tangle of gorse, I sat, and pulled my cloak around me, and looked out over the mud-flats. The tide had peaked. It was turning now, starting to ebb. In the distance a coaster was making its way upriver, its lines taut, its buff square sail straining in the wind.

  I looked down, and pulled idly at the long grass. I felt a great coldness in my heart; but now, at last, I saw what I must do. I would submit to the bishop, and let him use me as he chose. The trade he offered was shameful; yet nothing else was possible. If I refused him for the sake of my pride and honour, the knowledge that I had left my father to his death would dwell with me forever. The bishop had seen that, and sprung his clever trap. He had used my weakness.

  I filled my lungs with the chill air and let out a bitter laugh. What anyway was honour to me, with all else lost? It was just another empty dream. Easier by far to live like Ambitus, seeking for self, worshipping coin, and trusting no one. And though I told myself I did not care, yet I felt something precious, like a spark of light, flee protesting from my soul.

  The sound of far-off shouting pierced my thoughts. I glanced up. On the deck of the coaster the pilot was waving his arms and calling towards the shore, words I could not make out. I scanned the water without much interest, thinking perhaps a man had fallen in; but there was no one in the river, no panicked flailing of arms or splashing on the surface.

  Suddenly the vessel veered shorewards, making for the deep-water dock where Balbus kept his warehouse. Something was wrong. The pilot was signalling to the men on the wharf. I could see them in the distance, cupping their ears to show they could not hear.

  I stirred myself and, being in no hurry to return home, decided to investigate. I set off at a jog, taking the river-side path. By the time I arrived the ship was alongside, its bow hitched clumsily to a bollard, its stern swinging out with the current, untethered and forgotten.

  The pilot and crew were on the quay, talking urgently to a gathering crowd. I pushed in to listen. Even before I heard the dread word being passed back from man to man I had guessed. I had seen the look on the men’s faces. For no one grows up on Britain’s shores ignorant of the wild raiders who come from the sea, the death-bringing Saxons.

  I pushed in closer. Someone said, ‘How many ships?’ Another, turning impatiently, cried, ‘What matter how many? Let the man finish.’ But by now others had arrived who had not heard. The pilot drew his breath and in a torrent of words began again.

  He had been sailing round the coast from Richborough – a voyage he made many times each year. Joining the estuary, he had spied hidden in the marsh inlets a flotilla of Saxon longships, lying in wait among the tall rushes. They must have been foraging inland, or raiding, for they had not followed him. Even so, his crew, he said, had been for beaching the ship on the opposite shore and running for their lives. But he had kept his head and sailed on.

  Already word was spreading along the wharf, and I could hear the fear in the men’s voices, catching from one to the other, like flame in tinder. Already some were running back to the city. Discarded crates and baskets lay abandoned on the quayside.

  The group around me began to scatter. Someone, in his haste to escape, shoved me aside. I stumbled. Suddenly an iron hand clapped onto my shoulder. I cried out and turned. It was my uncle’s black-toothed foreman, Gaius.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he cried over the din. ‘Where is Balbus?’

  I said I was alone.

  ‘Then come at once, and hurry, before the gates are closed against us.’

  It is said that rumour travels faster than a running man. By the time I reached Balbus’s house the news had preceded me, and had amplified with the telling, so that one might have supposed an army of Saxons were already within the walls, sacking the city.

  The house-slaves were running about; and at the sound of the door, Lucretia came clattering down the passage, wailing and crying, dressed in her silk dressing-robe and little gold-strapped house-slippers, with her elaborate hair falling about her face, and her eyes smeared with kohl.

  Seeing me, she ran and snatched me by the shoulders. ‘Where is he?’ she cried, shaking me so hard that my sleeve tore.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, staring.

  ‘Albinus! My own darling Albinus! Is he not with you? Where then? Have you not heard? The Saxons are here!’

  I told her I had not seen Albinus all day, and tried to calm her. There were no Saxons; only a rumour of boats in the estuary. But she would not listen. She kept on shaking me, demanding to know where her precious Albinus was, her voice rising louder and louder as she lost all control.

  It was only when thickset, shaven-headed Gaius stepped up and said, in the hard voice he used on the stevedores, ‘He was alone, madam, as he
has already told you,’ that she finally released me. For a moment she glared at him. Then she flung herself round and went flailing and sobbing down the corridor, calling for her maids.

  I looked at Gaius; and he looked back at me. Then, across the dark atrium, I caught sight of Balbus, standing solemn-faced in his study doorway.

  ‘You had better come here, Drusus my boy.’

  I thought, ‘What now?’

  But as he closed the study door, he said gravely, ‘I have received news of your father. I think you should sit down.’

  He tried to spare me, in his heavy-handed way. The details I got long after.

  The emperor Constans, when my father had arrived at the imperial palace at Trier, had refused even to admit him to his presence. Eventually there was a trial. Even before it began, everyone knew the outcome.

  ‘I never thought it would come to this,’ Balbus kept saying, his voice wavering. ‘He died with dignity. I am sure he died with dignity.’ In the end, releasing us both, he said, ‘Well, I expect you want to be alone.’

  I nodded and walked away. But at the door I turned.

  ‘Was it from the bishop that you heard this?’ I asked.

  ‘The bishop? Why no. It was my friend Ambrosius the cloth-merchant; he has an agent in Trier, and can be trusted.’ He paused and frowned. ‘But why the bishop? What has he to do with this?’

  ‘He said he could save my father.’

  ‘He did?’ Balbus’s eyes widened. ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘He told me himself.’

  He began to speak, but thought better of it. Then he said, ‘Still, it is odd that you should mention him now.’

  ‘Why is that, sir?’

  He scratched his head and looked uneasy. ‘I daresay it is nothing, it is just that your aunt Lucretia tells me . . . But now is not the time.’

  ‘Uncle, please. What is it?’

  He gave a reluctant sigh. ‘It is just talk, and perhaps she is mistaken. But it seems the emperor has granted your father’s property to the Church.’

  My hand had been on the door-latch. I released it and turned to face him. There was a ringing in my head. Time turned slowly. Somewhere outside, I could hear Lucretia railing at the maid.

  ‘What?’ I whispered. ‘But how?’

  He spread his hands. ‘I cannot say. I ought not to have mentioned it, not now, not today. It is said the bishop has friends at court . . . or perhaps, after all, your father decided in his will—’ He broke off and shook his head. ‘But no, not that. To tell the truth, I do not believe your father had much time for Bishop Pulcher.’

  I did not weep. I felt hard and unmoved. I surveyed the wreck of my life, and some part of me blamed my father for it. But Sericus wept; it was the first time I had ever seen him do so.

  Even this did not move me. I stood silently beside him, my hand on his trembling shoulder, remembering that my family had been everything to him. He had tutored my mother when she was a girl, and had come to my father’s house when they married. Now both were dead, and he was too old to begin afresh.

  Eventually he eased me from him and said, ‘Perhaps we shall find a way to return, even so.’

  I shook my head. There was no use in hope. ‘No, Sericus,’ I said, and told him how our property had been confiscated, and who had gained by it.

  I had seen him angry before, or thought I had. His tears ceased. His red-rimmed eyes flashed. In a slow voice taut with fury he said, ‘Then your father has been robbed, and so have you. I do not know who lies behind this injustice: but look who gains, and you cannot be far from the mark.’ He looked sharply into my face, then said, ‘Tell me, did you go to the bishop? Did you give him what he asked?’

  I shook my head and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Good then, for he would have said your father had willed it, and you were the proof. He has taken what is yours because you cannot fight to keep it. Remember that.’

  I nodded and said, ‘I will remember.’

  When, soon after, Lucretia summoned me to her private room and asked how, in the absence of an allowance from my father, she was expected to keep me, I answered that her friend the bishop had lately grown rich at the cost of one she knew, and perhaps I should go to him for alms.

  For all her goading I had never spoken to her thus. She caught her breath, and clutching at the beads around her neck cried that I was a wicked, evil boy. But when she complained to Balbus he said, ‘Calm yourself, my dear. We shall easily find for him. He has been useful, and we cannot abandon him now.’

  Sericus’s cure was study, and he worked me at my lessons: grammar and arithmetic, the poets, prosody and history.

  A grim determination had settled upon him. I should not let trivia fill my life; it was time, he said, that I worked on my mind, before I became stale and humdrum.

  ‘Balbus sees no point in it,’ I said.

  ‘I do not care what Balbus sees. You are your father’s son, not Balbus’s. Do you know what a gentleman is, Drusus?’

  ‘A rich man,’ I said.

  He told me sharply not to talk nonsense, saying, ‘That is what the vulgar may tell you, because they know no better.’

  ‘What then?’ I asked.

  ‘A gentleman prefers what is true to what is easy. He is not content with small things. He knows what he is, and what he can be. Do you understand?’

  ‘Not really, Sericus.’

  ‘Then all the more reason for you to learn. It is a lifetime’s work, and time is short.’

  He obtained books from somewhere – from a friend he had made in the teaching quarter, he said – and in the pages of those scrolls and tomes he stretched and challenged and exercised my mind. We read of old battles, old generals, old virtues – but never of what was happening across the water in Gaul: there were no books to tell me that – for no one dared write one.

  But what the historians would not tell, I heard from Sericus. The old emperor Constantine, having seized the empire by force, had divided it upon his deathbed among his three sons, like a barbarian chieftain carving up the spoils of war. To one son – also named Constantine – he had given the provinces of Britain, Gaul and Spain; to another – Constans, my father’s murderer – he gave Italy and Illyricum; and to the third, Constantius, went Thrace and all the rich provinces of the East.

  But, not content with what had been allotted to them, they had quarrelled. There had been civil war; and in the end only two sons remained, Constans in the West and Constantius in the East, ruling the empire between them.

  ‘That,’ said Sericus when he told me, ‘is where our troops went. They were summoned to go and fight in this needless war. And now, though the war is over, I doubt they will return.’

  Constans had purged the Western court at Trier, exiling or beheading the most able of his conquered brother’s generals and advisers.

  As for my father, he had never cared for court intrigue. He had served under the old emperor Constantine, and had retained his position under his successor. When Constans had taken over in the West, he had offered to resign, or stay, as the new emperor required.

  But even this had been taken as a sign of disloyalty. At Trier, the sycophants and schemers had whispered day and night into Constans’s ear: yes, my father claimed he was loyal – but loyal to whom? Gaul, having been ravaged by years of barbarian incursions, was weak. But the British province was prosperous, well garrisoned, and had a history of independent action. Who could say, they insinuated, with so many troops at their disposal, what the leading men of Britain might do? Was the emperor prepared to take such a risk?

  Constans, when it was put to him in such a way, decided he was not. So he had summoned my father, who had been foremost among those leading men; and, one day in winter, when the clouds hung low over the bleak imperial residence at Trier, he had signed the order for his execution.

  Balbus announced he had business in York. He would be gone for the winter, visiting his contacts and clients, and asked me to see to a few matters at the off
ice while he was away.

  It was a kindness of sorts. He had no power in the house, where Lucretia ruled; but the office was his own domain. I saw him off, walking with him to the northern gate, where his carriage was waiting. The journey would have been easier by sea; but like everyone else that year, he was avoiding the coastal route, in case of Saxons.

  Next morning, Lucretia’s attack began. I was in my room, dressing, when there was a tap on my door. It was Claritas the housemaid, to say the Mistress wished to see me, and was waiting in her private sitting-room.

  I finished dressing – without hurrying, I confess – and went downstairs.

  I found her pacing in front of her new turquoise couch – a recent gift from Balbus, an expensive item imported from Italy, with fine worked ends inlaid with ivory, and dainty silver stag’s feet at the base.

  ‘Ah yes, Drusus,’ she said, not meeting my eye. ‘I saw Bishop Pulcher yesterday. He wishes you to call on him.’

  I looked at her in disbelief.

  ‘Please tell him, madam, that I have more important business to attend to.’

  She ceased her pacing and spun round. Her beads and bracelets jangled.

  ‘Important business? Listen to you, boy! Do you set yourself above me now? You will do as I ask.’

  ‘He wanted me to join his cult. I will not.’

  Her face stiffened. I had spoken sharply back at her, without the fawning she took for proper deference. Even so, no one had told me the Christians disdain the word cult, which they reserve for followers of other gods than theirs – of Mithras or Isis or the Great Mother.

  ‘You may have gulled your uncle,’ she snapped, ‘with your melancholy air, and your fine aristocratic manners, but I am not such a fool. The bishop is a friend of mine and a great help to our family; I will not have him treated with disrespect.’

  ‘He asked me to make a choice. I have made it. That is all.’

  ‘And who are you,’ she said in a low, venomous tone, ‘to set yourself against the Church?’

  It was a question I should never forget, and on which I spent many years brooding and formulating an answer. But then I merely said, ‘I am not his slave, madam, nor anyone else’s.’