第5章 A Word in the Garden

Otacilius sent for her two days later, at the seventh hour, when the garden was in shade and the house had taken its afternoon quiet. He was not angry. She had served him long enough to know the difference between a master who shouts and a master who has decided, and Otacilius had decided. He sat on the bench with a ledger open on his knee, the ledger she had made for him, and he looked at it the way a man looks at a horse he means to sell. "Sit," he said. She sat on the edge of the stone lip of the fish pool, which was not a seat, because he had not offered her a seat, and because she did not want to seem at ease. "I have read what you gave me," he said. "The contracts. The tallies. I have also written to a man I know in the office of the grain prefect, and he tells me that the wharf's weights were checked in the spring and found true, and that the office has no record of any complaint." "The office would have no record of a complaint that was never made." "Exactly." He turned a page. "Do you know what the family owes, Faustilla?" "I keep the accounts, my lord." "Yes. You keep the accounts, which is why I am speaking to you and not to my son." He set the ledger on the bench beside him. "We owe the Sosii a hundred and twenty thousand sesterces, taken three years ago to buy the shore lots at the Ash Wharf. We owe the state the penalties on two contracts that were late. We owe my daughter her dowry, and my son's creditors a sum I do not care to write down, and the interest on all of it is a stone tied to the neck of this house. The grain contracts are what keep us above the water. Without them we are a family with a fine name and nothing to eat under it." "I understand that, my lord." "I do not think you do." He looked at her then, and his face was not cruel; it was tired, which was worse. "The contracts are with Vibidius. Vibidius moves the grain, Vibidius weighs the grain, Vibidius signs the tally, and we lend our name to it and take our share. If Vibidius is careless, the loss is his. If Vibidius is honest, the profit is ours. Either way the family stands. But if the Otacilian name is dragged through the grain office over a matter of eighteen sacks, then the contracts are void, and we are finished, and the people below the stairs who depend on this house for bread are finished with us." Faustilla said nothing. The carp turned in the pool. She thought of the woman in the dole line with her hand over her mouth, and she thought of the child on the stones, and she made herself keep both of them before her eyes. "There is a way to write these entries," Otacilius said, in a level voice. "A way that is true and not true. Grain is lost in moving; everyone knows it. The wharf's own clerks set aside a portion for shrinkage before any of it reaches a book. If the loss is written plainly as shrinkage, and the tally is adjusted to match, then the accounts will be clean, and no one will look, and the house will stand." "That would be a false entry," Faustilla said. "It would be an entry," he said. "You have written a great many of those." He waited. She understood the architecture of the moment as clearly as she understood a ledger: this was not a demand, because a demand can be refused. It was a demonstration. He was showing her the whole wall at once, the contract and the debts and the son and the marriage and the brother and the patronage that had lifted her out of slavery and could, with one word in the right room, set her back into a house where a woman of no family and a lame leg had no protector at all. "I served your mother," he said, "and she freed you. I freed your brother. I do not say this to bind you. I say it so that you know that I know." "Yes, my lord." "Will you write the entries?" Faustilla looked at her hands, which were the hands of a woman of thirty-eight who had spent a lifetime making figures behave, and she thought of the false weight in the granary, which was iron and could not be talked away. "I will look at the entries again," she said. "If the loss can be explained as shrinkage, I will explain it as shrinkage. But I will need the wharf's tally sheets for the season, and the tokens, and the seals, because a shrinkage entry that is not supported will not survive the office's auditors, and I would not write an entry that would fail." It was the safest sentence she had ever built. It gave him the thing he wanted, or the shape of it. It bought her the papers. And it bought her a little time, and time was the only field on which a woman like her had ever won anything. Otacilius considered it, and then nodded, and for a moment he looked almost fond of her. "Very well," he said. "Bring me the entries when they are ready. And Faustilla—the boy, my son. If you find anything in the papers that touches him, bring it to me first. Not to the office. To me." That last sentence stayed with her all the way back to her table. She sat down and drew the cord on the month's reckonings and, before she did anything else, copied the whole of the true reckoning into her own tablet, in her smallest hand, and then sat looking at the figure that the house would soon be asked to forget. ---