第8章 The Duplicate Page

Faustilla did not go to Granius. Not that day, and not the next, because a woman who runs to a man the moment his name is spoken is a woman who has shown the whole street what she is afraid of. She had been married once, to a freedman of the same house, a litter-bearer named Atticus who had died of a fever six years ago. She had kept his name on her tongue and his couch in her room, and she had learned in those years what a widow's life is inside a great house: you are trusted with the money and never with the confidence, and the family looks at you the way it looks at a lamp it does not remember lighting, useful and unexplained. A woman who marries again marries a man's protection. A woman who does not marries her own, and pays for it in fear. She went instead to Albia, to the room by the river where the medica kept her salves and her bandages and the three beds that were always full. "How many of the dole poor have you seen this month?" she asked. Albia was grinding something in a small stone mortar, and she did not stop. "Sixty," she said. "Seventy. More than last month. The belly sickness, mostly, and the flux, and the ones who cannot sleep because they are hungry, which is not a sickness a medica can cure and which I am asked to cure every day." She tipped the mortar and showed the powder: gray, with dark specks in it. "Do you know what this is? This is the sweepings of a granary floor. A woman brought it to me out of the grain she was given at the dole, because she said it tasted wrong, and she wanted to know if it would harm the child she is carrying. It is grain, and chaff, and dust, and mouse droppings, and a mold that grows on spoiled wheat. It is not the bread of the city. It is the floor of the city, swept up and given to the poor." Faustilla looked at the powder for a long time. "When the good grain leaves the dole," she said, "it does not go where good grain should. And the poor are fed the floor." "That is the arithmetic of it," Albia said. "And it is not a thing that one can prove, because a woman who brings it to me in a bowl is a woman whose word is worth nothing in a court, and the bowl cannot testify, and the men who sell the good grain never touch it with their own hands." "But a token can testify," Faustilla said. "A weight can testify. A book can testify." She went home and sat down and did the thing that she had been circling for days. She laid the false clay token on the table, and beside it her own tablet with the true reckoning, and beside that the codex that Granius had given her, and she looked at the whole small heap of it and understood that it was, as it stood, the testimony of a freedwoman, and that no magistrate in the city would hold it to be worth the price of a loaf. So she made copies. She copied the true reckoning into four tablets, in her own hand, exact in every line, and she wrote on each one the day and the place where it had been made. One copy she left with Albia, who put it in the box where she kept her instruments, because nobody searches a medica's box. One she gave to Naevia, who hid it inside the brickwork of her oven, where it would burn if the oven were ever hot enough and no one would think to look. One she gave to the old porter with the rope-scarred neck, who had spoken in the yard, and who promised to keep it in the loft of the porters' lodging, where no one but a porter could climb. The fourth she kept on her own body, sewn under the hem of her cloak, with the token. She carried the copy to Naevia's bakery herself, at dusk, when the oven had cooled and the street was quiet. Naevia read nothing; she had never learned, and had never needed to. But she understood the shape of the thing the way the poor understand everything, by its weight, and she took the tablet and tapped the brick beside the oven mouth until a loose one shifted, and set the tablet in the gap, and tapped the brick back into place. "If they come for it," Faustilla said, "say it is a receipt for flour." "If they come for it," Naevia said, "they will not ask. They will take the oven and the house and me, and they will find nothing, because a brick is a good place for a thing that is no use to a rich man." She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Faustilla for a while in the light of the cooling oven. "You are going to get yourself killed. You were always like this. When you were a girl in that kitchen you would not leave a knot in the wool even when the wool was going to be burned. You would untie the knot first, and then you would burn it." "That is not the same thing." "It is the whole of the same thing," Naevia said, and closed the oven door. Only then did she let herself think about the name her brother had spoken. Granius had told her the signet belonged to the deputy of the grain prefect. He had told her that only the deputy could press it. And yet Granius himself had been the clerk who wrote the false tallies into the thick book, and Granius himself had come to her in the arcade with a codex of the whole season's fraud, and it occurred to her, for the first time, standing with the copies in her hands, that a man who knows a thing completely may know it because he is part of it, or because he means to end it, and that from the outside those two are hard to tell apart. She went out again in the last light and walked to the cattle market, and down the worn stair to the bricked-up door, and waited in the dry space before it with her lamp unlit, and she waited until the market was empty and the watch had passed twice and Granius did not come. The next morning she learned that the clerk Granius had been taken up by the watch for the theft of grain from the wharf, that a false token had been found in his room, and that the wharf's men had all confirmed that he alone kept the tally. It was not a week since they had stood together in the dark under the market, and he was already gone, and the false token he had given her was sitting at that moment in her own hem, and the only person left who could say it was false was a freedwoman with a limp and no patron who would believe her. Faustilla put on her plainest cloak and went to the house of Otacilius, and asked, through the door-boy, for an audience with the patron's son. ---