Chapter 1 The Third Hour

The third hour of the day belonged to the accounts, and Faustilla had learned to guard it the way a porter guards a full sack. She sat at the small table in the room behind the atrium, where the house stored its wax and its papyrus and its seals. A lamp burned at her elbow although the sun was already high enough to stripe the floor; the chamber had one window, and it looked into the narrow court where the kitchen smoke gathered and would not leave. Wax tablets stood stacked at her left in the order she preferred: the day's receipts on top, then the week's tallies, then the month's reckonings, bound with a cord she tied and untied a hundred times a week. To her right lay the ink, the reed pens, and the little bronze seal of the household. She was permitted to press that seal into dull matters. She was forbidden to press it into anything that touched money, and the prohibition had been explained to her slowly, twice, the way one explains a thing to a child or to a person one does not fully trust. Faustilla was thirty-eight years old. She had been born in the back room of this very house, the daughter of a Cappadocian woman who had served in the kitchen and died of a fever when Faustilla was nine. She had been a slave for twenty-six years and a freedwoman for twelve. Between those two lives there was no wall she could see, only a doorway she had passed through and could not pass back, and on the far side of it a patron who called her his little Faustilla when he was pleased and his good woman when he wanted something. The house belonged to Lucius Otacilius Blandus, a senator of middling age and middling fortune, whose family had for three generations held a share in the contracts that moved grain from the river wharves into the city's public granaries. That was the family's dignity and its whole livelihood. A senator was not supposed to soil his hands with trade, so the hands belonged to freedmen and to slaves and to partners who took the risks and the blame; the name on the contracts belonged to Otacilius. On this morning the reckonings were wrong, and Faustilla had known they were wrong for eleven days. She had gone over the column again at dawn, before the clients came for the morning greeting, and she went over it a third time now. The numbers were not false in the way a careless clerk makes numbers false. Nothing here had been smudged or overwritten. Each figure sat in its proper place, each total agreed with the total beside it, and the ledger balanced as neatly as a well-cut beam. The trouble was that the beam was holding up a roof that was not there. Eleven days ago the house had received from the Ash Wharf a delivery of Egyptian wheat: three hundred and forty sacks, weighed and tallied by the wharf's own men, entered in the day-book by a clerk named Granius, and signed in the name of the Otacilii. The tally said three hundred and forty. Faustilla had counted the emptied sacks herself, later, when they were folded and stacked for return, and she had counted three hundred and twenty-two. Eighteen sacks, gone. Not spilled, not stolen by a porter with a hole in his cloak, not eaten by rats that left no droppings. Gone in the way that numbers go when someone has decided that a number should be smaller than the thing it describes. She had said nothing. That was the first lesson her mother had taught her, and the house had taught her the second: an observation is not a fact until it can be proved in a place where proof is allowed to stand. The morning greeting ended. Through the wall she heard the clients shuffle out into the street, their sandals scraping the mosaic, their voices settling back into the ordinary complaints of men who came for bread and stayed for favor. Otacilius would be in the garden by now with his son. The son, Numerius Otacilius Quietus, was twenty-four and had lately begun to speak of standing for the office of quaestor, and so the house smelled of ambition and of the debts ambition requires. Faustilla took the day-book from its place and carried it into the garden. The garden was small and shaded and had a fountain that worked only when the water office remembered the house. Otacilius sat on a stone bench with a cup of watered wine, and Quietus stood at the edge of the fish pool with his hands behind his back, watching the carp circle. Neither looked up when she came, which was a courtesy of a kind; they let her stand, and standing was what she was for. "My lord," she said. "The Ash Wharf delivery of the eleventh day is short by eighteen sacks." Otacilius did not move. Quietus turned his head. "Short," Otacilius said. It was not a question. "The tally says three hundred and forty. The returned sacks number three hundred and twenty-two. I counted them twice, and once again this morning." "You counted sacks," Quietus said. "Sacks. Not grain. Sacks may be lost, or lent, or used to carry a mason's rubble." "They may," Faustilla said. "They were not. I asked the porter Menophilus, who loaded them, and he remembers the pile of folded sacking on the morning they were returned, and he says it was smaller than the pile that came off the barge. Menophilus does not lie to me." Quietus smiled at that, thinly, as if she had told him something charming about a dog. Otacilius set down his cup. "You have been in this house a long while," he said. "You know how the wharves are. Grain breathes. It takes on damp in the hold and gives it off in the granary, and the weight moves under your feet like a tide. Eighteen sacks is a morning's confusion to the men down there." "It is four days' bread for a hundred and forty people," Faustilla said. "If it is confusion, it is a confusion that has happened on every delivery this season. I have compared all six. Every one is short, and always by a share of about one part in twenty." Now Otacilius looked at her, and she saw in his face something that was not surprise. A man who has not been told a thing is surprised. A man who has been told it before and chosen not to hear it wears a different expression, and she had seen that expression on the faces of patrons before, at the moment when a servant says the thing that everyone has agreed to leave unsaid. "One part in twenty," he repeated. "You are certain of this." "I am certain of the ledgers. The ledgers are certain of nothing except themselves." He was quiet for a while. The carp turned in the pool, and the water caught the light and threw it against the garden wall in a slow shiver. Faustilla stood and waited, and her left leg began, as it always did when she stood too long, to ache from the knee down, where a fever in her tenth year had left her with a limp she had spent a lifetime learning to make look like patience. "Bring me the reckoning of the contracts," Otacilius said at last. "Not the day-book. The contracts. I want to see who signs for the wharf side." "Vibidius signs," Faustilla said. "Titus Vibidius, for the shippers. He has signed every tally this season." The name sat in the garden like a stone dropped in still water, and she watched the ripples move across her patron's face before he smoothed them away. "Bring me the contracts," he said again. "And Faustilla. Say nothing of this to anyone below the stairs." "Of course, my lord." She went back through the atrium, and as she passed the little room behind it she stopped and looked at the stack of tablets on her table, the day-book on top, the month's reckonings beneath it, and the cord she had tied so many times that her fingers did it without her. Somewhere below the house, in the dark under the floor, the grain that had not arrived was being turned into bread that would not be baked, and in the ledger the whole matter was already settled and neat and closed. She had guarded the accounts for twelve years. It had not occurred to her until this morning that the accounts might be guarding something back. ---