A reception party was waiting for us in her father’s street.
We had arrived without incident in the Capena Gate Sector, jiggled down a few side streets then lurched towards the senator’s house. The chairs stopped. We were both climbing out. Helena gasped. I turned: four or five slave market rejects were rushing us. Each had a pointed hat pulled down more securely over his face than his smallpox scars required, and one hand buried under his cloak as if whatever was hidden there would not be a satchel of bread rolls and country cheese.
“Hercules, lady! Bang the bell until someone comes!”
Helena flew to her father’s door as I rapidly unhooked a sedan chair’s carrying rod.
I glanced around. Passers-by were melting off the pavements into goldsmiths and flower shops, open for the evening trade with lanterns on their porticos. The area was far too select to expect help. The strollers were vanishing like bursting bubbles on the Tiber in flood.
The rejects were brisk, but not as brisk as me. Under the cloaks they were carrying thornwood cudgels, but after three months in a lead mine I had more pent-up aggression than they may have realized. I could do a lot of damage whirling an eight-foot pole.
Eventually Camillus burst out with his slaves in response to her ladyship’s spirited bell jangling. The rejects abruptly scattered. They left a trail of blood and one man dead. He had lunged at Helena. I hauled her sideways, pulling out the knife I stash down my boot, then stamped his shin like a soldier and stabbed upwards as he came. It would never have stopped anyone who had an army training, but plainly he had not; I finished him.
It is illegal to carry a weapon in Rome. Still, I was defending a senator’s daughter; no prosecution lawyer could make a magistrate convict. Besides, I hadn’t endured her for fourteen hundred miles to give her up on the home doorstep and throw away my double fee.
Camillus Verus, sword in hand, breathed heavily and surveyed the lively scene. Chaos welled round us, seeping down the street. Dusk made everything seem more ominous.
“Lost them! Out of touch, but I nicked one—”
“Not bad, sir. I’ll introduce you at my fencing gym!”
“Falco, you look a bit sick.”
“Overwhelmed by the warmth of our welcome…”
Killing people has a bad effect on me.
Both the senator and his wife, who came flittering out among her flock of slab-faced maids, were waiting to embrace their noble child. Once I grabbed her I had forgotten to let go. (A good rule with women, though difficult to follow up in a crowd.) It was probably the first time her honourable parents saw Helena Justina white-faced and silent, crushed to the palpitating chest of a badly shaved, mad-eyed ruffian waving a bloody knife. I released her with a hasty gesture into the arms of her papa.
He was so shocked at having nearly lost her that for a moment he lost all powers of speech.
I sat quaking on the edge of a great flowertub, while Helena Justina was passed about. Since no one liked to scold me for their fright, everyone scolded her. She seemed too stunned to object. I watched, so used to my role as her protector that I felt awkward hanging back here.
“Well done, Falco!” Her father strode across and hauled me to my feet. Then he asked, in the voice of a man who had money riding on my reply, “Everything go well on your trip?”
“Oh, the quietness of the journey matched the thin pay!”
Helena shot me a tricky look. I gazed at the evening sky like a man who was simply very tired.
Decimus sent a message to the magistrate about the man I had killed, and in sharp order the body was tidied off his frontage at public expense. I heard no more about the incident.
No doubt what these villains wanted: when they all suddenly ran, our baggage skipped off with them.
I organized a search party and the Camillus slaves soon trundled back with our stuff, which they found abandoned only two streets away. I set a candelabrum on the cool tiled floor of the senator’s hall. I was on my knees, spreading open each pack for a systematic check; Helena crouched alongside, helping me. While I searched we spoke to each other in the low voices of people who had travelled together for weeks. Her mother looked uneasy, though we were too busy to deal with that. Everyone we met on the journey had livened up their own dull days by imagining some scandal; both of us were used to ignoring it. Even so, I sensed Julia Justa now viewed me as an embarrassment. I had to smile to myself: my proud young lady’s elegant mother harried her as much as mine did me.
“These are hardly disturbed; there’s very little gone,” I told Helena Justina, consulting her like my partner in the case.
“My uncle’s letter—”
“Not fatal. Pointless in fact—he can write again.”
Something else. Something that had belonged to me.
At the moment when I realized, Helena must have seen my face. I knew from her look my own expression had become positively grey.
“Oh Falco—”
I touched her wrist. “Lass, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does!”
I simply shook my head.
They had taken the jet bracelet, the one Helena gave to Sosia and Sosia gave to me.