Chapter 13 The Patron's Bargain

The house of Otacilius had changed in a week. New hangings in the atrium, a fresh coat of paint on the doorposts, and in the courtyard the covered cart with the betrothal gifts, which the slaves were lifting down one by one and carrying into the storeroom. Otacilius received her in the garden, and Quietus stood behind him, and neither of them offered her a seat. "I have spoken with Vibidius," Otacilius said. "He does not wish the matter pursued. He has agreed to withdraw the charge of theft, and to make good the loss to the dole from his own purse, quietly, over the season, so that no one is embarrassed and the grain is restored. He has also agreed that you were overzealous, not wicked, and that the wharf will not press it." "And in exchange?" Faustilla said. "In exchange, the contracts stand. In exchange, my son marries his daughter in the autumn, and the two houses are bound, and the debts are settled between families." He said it as a man reads a list of repairs: with satisfaction in the order of it. "The office of the grain prefect will receive a reconciliation of the season's accounts, signed by me, showing ordinary shrinkage. The grain will be made whole. The poor will be fed. Everyone will be saved, and no one will be ruined." "Except the truth," Faustilla said. "Truth is a luxury of the safe," Otacilius said. "I have a hundred and twenty thousand reasons to lie, and you have none, which is why you can afford to be honest. Do not mistake your poverty for virtue. If you had a house to lose, you would be standing where I stand." "If I had a house to lose," Faustilla said, "I would still not feed it with the bread of the poor. That is the difference between us, and it is not a difference of fortune. It is a difference of what a person will do when no one is watching." Otacilius looked at her. Behind him, Quietus looked at the ground. "You asked me once whether I knew," Otacilius said. "You were entitled to ask. The answer is that I knew a part of it, and I chose to know only that part, because the rest was a door I did not want to open. Do not imagine that I have no shame in this. I have shame enough for ten men. But shame is not a plan, and I am the head of a house, and my first duty is to the people under my roof." "You mean the people with your name." "I mean everyone under my roof. Which includes you, Faustilla, if you will let it." He took a step toward her. "Your place here is waiting. Your brother's work is waiting. Come back, take the ledgers, write the reconciliation, and this ends tonight. There is no third road. If you go on, the law will take you for the theft and the noise, and I will not stand for you, because I cannot, and Vibidius's men will see that you are silenced in a cell or in the street, and the grain will still be made whole, and it will be made whole by the very men who stole it. There is nothing to choose here. There is only the question of whether you live to see the grain restored." Faustilla stood with her hands folded, the way she stood when she was asked to wait, and she looked past the patron at the fish pool, and the carp turning in it, and the light shivering on the garden wall, and she thought of the potter's little girl, and of Onesimus on the boards, and of Granius in his cell, and of the woman at the dole with her hand over her mouth. "I will not write the reconciliation," she said. Quietus made a small sound, like a man who has been holding his breath. "Then you are dismissed from this house," Otacilius said, and his voice was steady, "and your patron's protection is withdrawn, and you will not come here again. This is not cruelty. It is arithmetic. A house cannot carry a person who works against it." "I understand arithmetic," Faustilla said. "I have spent my whole life in it. That is how I know that a column which balances on paper is not the same as a column which balances in the world. You are about to sign a reckoning that feeds the city with a false weight, and you are telling yourself that the grain will be made whole afterward. The grain will not be made whole. Vibidius will make good a share of it, and he will steal it back three times over, and in five years the dole will be half of what it was, and your son will still be signing what Vibidius sends, because that is what your son does." At that, Quietus lifted his head, and for one moment there was something in his face that was not weakness and not shame, and then he looked away, and the moment went. "Goodbye, Faustilla," Otacilius said. "One thing," she said. "When my mother died, the house paid for the niche in the garden wall. I would like to stand before it one last time. That is all I will take from this house." Otacilius looked at her for a moment, and then he inclined his head, and she crossed the garden to the wall by the fountain where the ash-niches were cut into the stone, and she stood before the small square with the name scratched on it, and did not speak, because she had never spoken to the dead and did not mean to begin now. Then she went back through the atrium, past the betrothal gifts, past the door-boy who would not meet her eyes, and out into the street. It was the middle of the day and the market was loud, and she stood at the corner and looked back once at the house where she had been born, and where she had been a slave, and where she had been freed, and then she turned and went down the hill toward the river, because the morning of the Ides was two days away, and there was work to do. ---