The Fateful Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

as well. Apart from that, there was no sign of life. The usual array of pots and implements were neatly stacked for use and half a pig had been suspended to smoke above the cooking-fire – though it wasn’t doing so. The flames had been permitted to go out. Some time ago, as far as I could judge.
    This was extremely odd. No one permits the cooking-fire to die. I picked up a handful of ashes from the grate, and ran them through my fingers – which only confirmed what I already knew. They were completely cold. I lifted a cloth from a baking iron nearby, and found unleavened bread dough neatly shaped into a loaf but it had not been set to cook. In fact the handsome domed ‘clay’ bread-oven on the farther wall – an unusual luxury for a private house – had not yet been swept out and relaid with fresh twigs. The bake-stone on the bottom wasn’t even warm. (It was called a ‘clay oven’, as Marcus’s chief cook had once explained to me, because once it was hot and the fire inside was raked away, whatever was baking was inserted in the space and the opening sealed with clay to maximise the heat.) But there was no heat today.
    I shook my head. Even a depleted staff would have to eat and – by tradition – cook-slaves do not attend the dead for fear that ill luck might attach to them and somehow be passed on in what they served. So where was everyone?
    The slave quarters perhaps? That had been my guess at first. The building was just a little further to the rear and I hurried over there, though my hopes of finding anybody there were dwindling rapidly, especially as I heard no noise as I approached. No whisper of voices, no sound of a lament. It was fairly evident that there was no one there.
    The door was slightly open – as it generally was – and I stooped down and went inside. I’d been before and knew what I would find: a long, low building, divided into two – one half for females and the other for males – with the chief steward’s private curtained sleeping-room positioned in between, beside the door. The lesser slaves had only a small sleeping-space apiece, marked by a straw mattress, each with a blanket over it and a little chest beside it for a change of clothes and anything else they happened to possess. I tried the lid of one at random. It wasn’t locked – few slaves have anything that’s actually their own, and if they get tips they tend to hide them somewhere else – and I found only a neatly folded tunic and a hoarded piece of twine.
    The room was clean and ordered, too, with everything in place. There was no sign of any struggle, nothing overturned – none of the elements which might suggest a panic or a raid. Certainly no sign of any funeral. Or of any servants, come to that. I shivered.
    With that in mind I went out to the gatehouse at the rear, fearing that I’d find a replica of what was in the front, but the place was empty and the gate was duly barred. The whole back courtyard was as silent as a ghost.
    No sooner had I thought of ghosts than I wished that I had not. The spirits of murdered are said to walk abroad and haunt the area where they were killed, putting a curse on everything until they are avenged. There is a villa near Glevum where a killing once took place, and which has been famously ill-omened ever since. The family that owned it all met dreadful fates: one brother had been forced to flee abroad, a second to sell himself to slavery, while the third one hanged himself. Such is the power of a vengeful ghost, they say. I only hoped that the gatekeeper’s spirit was not lurking here!
    I listened. The sound of my own footsteps seemed unnaturally loud and when I heard a sudden creaking of a gate I felt the few hairs on my neck stand up and bristle like so many hedgehog spines.
    I retraced my steps, but it was only the gateway to the inner court, which was open and swinging in a little gust of wind. It was unusual for that gate to be unlatched. It led into the garden courtyard