Tabula Rasa(10)

She could not argue: The one time she had seen him, Conn had certainly worn the face of a man who had found a dead rat in his dinner. Perhaps it really was because his once-betrothed had been raped by a soldier during the troubles and refused to get rid of the soldier’s baby, and perhaps it wasn’t, because these women would believe any scandalous nonsense they were told. They deserved to be shamed. To be set straight. To be made to say they were sorry for being so spiteful. To be made to feel sorry.

The trouble was, anything she said now would leave them with even more to gossip about than before. And nothing would make this evening any easier.

She drained her beer, clapped the cup down on the table, and strode across the bar toward the back door. It would have been better if she had not knocked over a bench on the way, but she was not going to turn around and pick it up. Nobody was going to see how pink her face was.





Chapter 5

“Not bad, considering.” Medical Officer Valens finished his examination of Ruso’s handiwork, moved the lamp away, and let the damp cloth fall back into place over the wound. He surveyed his sleeping father-in-law for a moment, then turned to the orderly. “I’ll be here all night. Call me if there’s any change or if he wakes up.” Standing in the gloom of the hospital corridor, he murmured, “What do you think?”

“He was already weak when I got to him.”

Valens said, “Anyone else would be dead by now.”

“Has Serena been sent for?”

“Of course.”

For a moment Ruso felt bad for doubting it. But the way Valens added, “He is her father,” suggested he too had considered leaving his wife in ignorance back in Deva. “It’s strange. I always imagined the old boy was indestructible.”

Ruso said, “You don’t have to cover for me tonight if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t mind,” Valens assured him. “This way I can tell the wife I did something useful.”

The room by the hospital entrance was just the right size to be an office, a pharmacy, or an overflow storage space—but not, unfortunately, all three at once. It was certainly not big enough to store anything that was not supposed to be there, and Ruso felt firmly that a dead hen fell into the latter category. It lay in the deflated way that dead hens did, with its head flopped over the side of the desk that should have been occupied by Ruso’s clerk.

Valens said, “Has somebody brought you a present?”

“Not that I know of.” Grateful patients sometimes offered gifts, but he had no idea where this had come from. He hoped it did not have lice.

Valens pulled a thin wooden writing tablet out of his belt. “One of the centurions asked me to give you this.”

Ruso took it across to the lamp and flipped the leaves apart. A Centurion Silvanus from Magnis, the next fort along the line, wished him to know that Legionary Candidus was no longer stationed there. He had left there a week ago and was now working as a clerk in the hospital at Parva.

The fact that it was Ruso—now standing in that very hospital at Parva—who had raised the query in the first place, did not seem to spark any curiosity. The whereabouts of a man who was no longer his responsibility was clearly not at the top of Centurion Silvanus’s worry list. Ruso noted bitterly that the message was written in one hand and hastily signed in another. It seemed Silvanus had a clerk of his own—one who had turned up and done his job as expected.

Valens had seated himself on the pharmacist’s table. Fortunately the pharmacist was on leave and so unable to object. Valens extended one leg, hooked a stool, and pulled it over for a footrest. “Bad news?”

“My clerk hasn’t reported for duty for three days. Nobody seems to know where he is.”

“Ask for another one.”

“It took me two months to get this one. Now he’s vanished.”

Valens surveyed the teetering piles of writing tablets stacked on every available surface. “He seems to have been very productive while he was here.”

“He was supposed to be sorting all this mess out. But he didn’t seem to know where to start.”

The table swayed as Valens leaned sideways to peer over the top of splayed wooden doors that were held together by only a taut length of twine around the handles. “There’s more in here.”

“Don’t touch that. The staff have taken to calling it Pandora’s cupboard. Open it and we’ll all be sorry.”

Valens said, “Perhaps he’s fallen on his sword.”

“I hope not. He’s Albanus’s nephew. I promised I’d keep an eye on him.”

“Not the one with the pungent bath oil?”