The Grove of the Caesars by Lindsey Davis

Author:Lindsey Davis [Davis, Lindsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2020-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

36

The woman who had reported her friend missing lived in a one-room rental in a quarter inhabited by waterfront workers. Here were the dangerous glass and pottery kilns, watermills on the Janiculan slopes and brick factories on the Vatican. Tanners, fish-pickle suppliers, metal-beaters, dye-brewers and other antisocial small businesses had been shifted to the Transtiberina out of the luckier districts of Rome. People of influence lived centrally, whereas here there were only the poor, foreigners, and others with no political voice.

Here, too, lived thin women, old before their time, who struggled to earn a tiny income from selling themselves. Many of the men they went with were brutish. Most of the women died young. They expected they would succumb to battery, disease or pure exhaustion, though at least they would make it into their twenties or thirties. The one taken last night had had her thread snipped at nineteen. Even at that age, she had two children, by different fathers, neither of whom were around. I heard the infants grizzling from the bed, as I interviewed her friend.

This older woman maintained she had been like a mother to the victim, though they were neighbours, not relatives. She was of an earlier generation, yet I suspected she still occasionally worked in the same trade. She might well have introduced the younger one to this hard method of survival. Her appearance was as the other must have been in life: hollow-cheeked, scrawny, an unhealthy colour. She looked as if she drank, or worse, if ever she could afford it. And as if she would drink, or worse, in preference to eating or sleeping.

She told me they had heard what had happened to Victoria Tertia. Their attitude had been He is at it again; watch out. Most did not stop working. Prostitutes in the district were being as careful as they could, but they had to live. When the young woman, whose name was Satia, had decided she had no choice but to go out to Caesar’s Gardens last evening, she left her children in her neighbour’s care, saying she would collect them by midnight, sooner if she managed to find a customer and earn something. She was a good mother. That was why she had had to venture out in the first place, because they were all starving. On previous occasions she had always returned when she had promised. When she failed to reappear yesterday, it meant serious trouble had befallen her.

Satia had no pimp. She was not that type. Neither did she have a close friend with whom she could go out in a pair, watching out for one another, as some girls managed to do. Caesar’s Gardens was her usual walking ground. She never went up by the Naumachia: it wasn’t a nice place.

Originally, Satia’s family were immigrants, though none but her survived. She looked foreign. She could have been beautiful, but misery had worn her down. She had grown up half starved and remained so all her life. There was nothing of her.

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