Persona Non Grata Read Online Free PDF Page B

never know, do you? Polla had a terrible fever a while ago, then little Lucius broke his arm, and last month Sosia was ill—Arria was so cross about the cushions but she couldn’t help it, could she? We tried everything. It was a pity you weren’t here, Gaius.”
    “Mm.”
    “They’ll be so glad you’re home. They do miss their uncle Justinus terribly.”
“Justinus? Is he away somewhere?”
She stared at him. “But Lucius told you, surely?”
“The letter must have got held up. What’s happened?”
    She shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said. “That’s the worst part. My brother went on a merchant ship from Arelate down to Ostia back in June and . . .” Her voice trailed off. “The ship never arrived,” she said. “They could be shipwrecked on an island or something, couldn’t they? Waiting to be rescued.”
    Since it was now September, Ruso could not pretend that this was likely.
    “If it was pirates . . .” Her voice trembled and faded away.
    Ruso hoped she was not going to cry. He was never sure what to do with women when they cried.
    She swallowed. “We would just like to know.”
    “I’m sorry.” The last time he had met Cass’s brother was in the house of Ruso’s former father-in-law, where Justinus was a respected if somewhat put-upon steward. “What was he doing at sea?”
    “Probus sent him to oversee some sort of business deal. You probably heard about it. The Pride of the South .” She paused, evidently expecting this would mean something to him.
    Ruso did not want to tell her that ships went down every day. That unless the Pride had been carrying something valuable, or somebody famous, it was unlikely that anyone except her owners and the families of the crew would mourn her loss or even bother to remark upon it.
    “We were on a different sea,” he explained. “He’d have been going south. We came down the west coast and across.”
    “What about the men on the river barges? Didn’t anybody say anything at all?”
    “They might have thought it was bad luck,” he said, trying to soften the blow of public indifference.
    “He was so excited about seeing Rome,” she said. “He had some wine from the senator’s estate to deliver. He dropped in on the way to Arelate to say good-bye.”
    “I’m so sorry,” said Ruso, and meant it. “I liked Justinus.”
    She hesitated, as if she was wondering whether to continue. “Lucius says I ought to give up hope,” she said. “He says we should build the tomb and call his spirit home and let it rest.”
    Ruso, scenting a marital dispute, said, “He’s probably worried about you.”
    “He’s right, isn’t he? If we don’t do it . . .” She did not need to explain. Her brother’s spirit would be left wandering lost and alone, unable to find peace.
    “There really aren’t many pirates out there these days, Cass. If there’s been no word in three months—”
    “I know! I know all that. I was going to say yes to having the tomb built, but . . . oh, now I don’t know what to do!” She glanced around to make sure the door was closed. “Gaius, you know Probus better than any of us. If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it a secret?”
    Ruso hoped his face did not betray his rising sense of foreboding at the mention of his former father-in-law.
    “Probus came to see me a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to know whether I was sure my brother was dead.”
    Whatever Ruso had been expecting, it was not this. “Why?”
    “I don’t know. He seemed to be angry about something, but he wouldn’t say what.”
    Ruso refrained from pointing out that in his experience, Probus usually looked angry about something.
    “So I said to him, You were the one who told me the ship was missing in the first place, and all he said was Yes . When I wanted to know why he was asking, whether he’d heard something, he just told me to forget all about it and not say anything to anybody.”
    It certainly seemed odd, not to mention