Chapter 38
Pertinax opened his eyes. “You.”
Still clutching the medical case, which was unlikely to have shielded his reputation when he was seen entering the brothel, Ruso said, “Good afternoon, sir.”
“I don’t know what’s bloody good about it. When am I going to get my crutches?”
Ruso restrained a smile of relief. He pulled up the stool and sat beside the bed. The room smelled normal and Pertinax’s grumbling was lucid, all of which was good news. He explained again about the dangers of postoperative bleeding as everything inside the wound grew back together and the stitches no longer held things shut. “So far it’s all healing up very nicely,” he said, having learned long ago not to say better than I’d expected, because the patient then concluded that his earlier words of encouragement had been a lie. “If you move about too much now, you’ll delay the recovery and you may end up a lot worse. Especially if you fall, which you will until you get used to a new way of walking.”
Pertinax closed his eyes and said, “Hmph,” but Ruso was not fooled. The man’s brow had smoothed, as if he were secretly glad to have the challenge taken away from him. Then Pertinax sniffed and his brow creased again. “Are there women around here somewhere?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
“Then what’s that smell?” The eyes opened. “Not you, is it?”
Ruso plucked the shoulder of his tunic and sniffed. There was a faint whiff of Larentia, who had conveniently turned out to be a blonde girl with a mole in the right place; he had declined her invitation to inspect it. She could vouch for Mallius being fully occupied in the early afternoon and for Liber being in the brothel at the time when he had told Virana he was on duty. He cleared his throat. “I think it might be me, sir.”
“You smell like a cheap whore.”
It was too complicated to explain. “I must have picked up some woman’s scent in passing, sir.”
“Hmph. My late wife never fell for that one.”
Ruso, who was supposed to be reporting back to Accius, opened his mouth to say what he had come to say, which was that Valens was taking over, but Pertinax said suddenly, “Women. Don’t suppose you could have one sent in?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, sir.”
Pertinax grunted. “Shut away in here all day. No idea what’s going on. Half-baked stories about bodies in the wall. Some idiot came in here earlier and told me your father’s just died. I told him your father’s been dead for years. Left you with a lot of debts, didn’t he?”
“There’s been a misunderstanding, sir.”
“What was all that shouting after the horn? Sounded like natives.”
“Nothing to worry about, sir.”
Pertinax’s eyes snapped open and glared at Ruso as if he had been watching him through his eyelids. “I’ll decide what I want to worry about.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re just like the rest of them: looking at me lying here and thinking, Poor old boy. He’s finished. No foot, no sense. Is that what you think?”
“No, sir,” Ruso assured him.
“Accius wants to take you away for special duties. What for?”
“That’s what I came to tell you, sir. I won’t be around for a while, but—”
“I know that! I’m asking what for?”
It was some measure of Pertinax’s current ambiguous status that the tribune had paid him the courtesy of asking before taking one of his men, but had not thought it necessary to tell him why. It was a sign of how ill Pertinax was that he had not insisted on knowing at the time. “The locals have lost a child, sir. It looks as if one of our men’s taken him. They’re demanding him back. I’m needed to help with the search because I have native contacts.”
The lines on the prefect’s forehead deepened. “One of our men?”
“We’re questioning some suspects now, sir.”
“Good. Don’t pussyfoot about.”
“No, sir,” said Ruso. “Doctor Valens has offered to come and take over here.”
“Offered? My son-in-law never volunteers for anything.”
“He really did, sir,” Ruso insisted. “He’s a good doctor: you’ll be in safe hands.”
For once Pertinax did not argue. Instead he asked how long the child had been missing. When he was told, he shook his head. “All that work we did getting the Brits settled down,” he said. “Good men were lost. When I think of some of those lads . . . I can still see their faces.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ruso, who for months afterward had suffered bad dreams about the men he had failed to save. The natives had raised a much more spirited rebellion than anyone could have expected, and the casualty list had been horrendous.