The Ides of April by Lindsey Davis Page A

Men, particularly. Not that I minded upsetting men.
    The ideal Roman matron was supposed to be docile, but I had noticed how few of them were. It seemed to me, Roman men had devised their prescriptive regime for their women precisely because the women really held domestic power. We let them think they were in charge. But in many homes they were wrong.
    I liked the Armilustrium because even without dog dirt it did harbour a smell, a musky odour near any undergrowth, a rank scent of wildlife that deterred many people: foxes frequented the area. When sitting still and silent I had often seen them. To me, since I had never kept ducks or chickens, foxes were a wilder, more intriguing kind of dog.
    The Aventine foxes were currently causing me anxiety. It was April. In the middle of the month would come one of the numerous festivals that cluttered the Roman calendar, this one dedicated to Ceres, the Cerialia. Like the Armilustrium, it always had several days of public events down in the Circus, but with one extra feature that I found loathsome. On the first night, live foxes would be driven down the hill, with lit torches tied to their tails. Whooping celebrants would herd them into the Circus, where they died in agony.
    Some years I went away. My family owned a villa on the coast.
    This year there was a big auction in which Father was involved, so the others were not going to the sea until later, and they wanted me to stay in Rome too. Ever since I was widowed, it had been understood I would be with them at this time. Our family had almost as many ritual days as the city had festivals, and the Ides of April was a compulsory engagement for me. In an unstated way, they had made it conditional on their allowing me to be independent the rest of the time. The thirteenth day of April, during the Cerialia, was my birthday. On the Ides, I had to be with them.
    Oh let’s get this out of the way.
    Nobody really knows when I was born, nor who my parents were. No one will ever know. Being an informer now, in a family of investigators, made no difference. I could never find out. Even I had accepted years ago that a search would be a waste of time. I would never go back to Britain. There was nothing for me there. Not even the truth.
    I was discovered as a crying baby in the streets of Londinium, that ramshackle shanty town at the mist-covered end of the world. I had been abandoned, or perhaps hidden for safety, when the Boudiccan tribes attacked and burned the Roman settlement. There were few important officials in Britannia in Nero’s day; it was a new, very remote, province. I was unlikely to be an official’s baby or my loss would have been noted. There were soldiers, but soldiers were not supposed to have families and in a rebellious frontier province that rule tended to be enforced. The most likely possibility is that I was a trader’s child, which meant I could be of any nationality, or half and half, with my mother possibly British though just as likely not.
    Orphaned babies plucked from horror tend to be hailed as miracles. They give hope at a time of chaos and grief. People fostered me. My childhood was spent among shopkeepers. These slipshod, uneducated people, emigrants from mainland Europe, were decent to me, until caring for an extra infant and feeding an extra mouth became burdensome. I began to sense they had ideas of selling me into one kind of slavery or another, so I ran away. I was a skinny, bitter, unwanted street-child who slept in chilly colonnades, handed as many blows as curses.
    Finally, more compassionate people saw me there and saved me. Didius Falco and Helena Justina, my new, cultured, adventurous, warm-hearted and eccentric parents, certainly did not object to a challenge; by then I was undomesticated, vermin-ridden and although we never talked about it afterwards, I had been targeted by a brothel-owner and raped. I was aggressive and angry, too – moods I never really lost. But I also yearned for survival. I