London - Edward Rutherfurd [43]
Carefully, now, he opened the bedroom door.
She was alone. The faint moonlight fell across the bed. One of her breasts was uncovered. He looked at her and smiled. Very well. She was not deceiving him. He watched her breathing softly. The room gave no hint of the presence of any other in the house. All was well. As quietly as a cat, the thickset mariner moved round the room, glancing at her as he went. Perhaps he would give her a pleasant surprise and climb into the bed with her. Or perhaps he would steal away and observe another night. He was just debating these two courses in his mind when he noticed a piece of parchment on a table near the bed. Picking it up, he moved to the open window.
There was light enough from the quarter-moon to read the letter Julius had sent. The signature gave him no clue as to the identity of the sender, but that did not matter, since the note gave a place and a time. Gently he replaced the letter and made his way out of his house.
For once Julius’s mother had acted with remarkable swiftness.
The fat girl had not seen the soldiers. She had slept through their visit and finally, finding no one about in the workshop any more, she had waddled home, arriving late. It was this late arrival, together with something in Julius’s manner, that had made her suspicious. A few extra slaps had got from the fat girl that the two men had set her to watch the street for soldiers. Then the older woman was sure. “That Sextus has got him into trouble,” she muttered.
As soon as Julius and his father had left, therefore, she had searched his room. She had found the bag at once, seen its terrifying contents, sat for over a minute in a state of shock, and then announced: “We’ve got to get rid of these.” But where?
For once, she was grateful that her daughter was fat. “Stick this under your clothes,” she ordered. Then, putting on her cloak, she and the girl had set out.
At first she thought of throwing the bag in the river, but that was not so easy. There were people about on the water-front. Instead, therefore, she led the girl along the main thoroughfare to the nearby gate in the western wall. All the city gates were supposed to close at dusk, but on warm summer nights this rule was often relaxed. Young people liked to wander out, and so no one paid the slightest attention as the fat girl and her mother passed through. They had only gone a little way, however, before they stopped. The road ahead led over a bridge to the shrine where the water goddess dwelt, but there were several couples in sight that way. On each side of the road, as at all the city gates, was a cemetery.
“Give me the bag and go back now,” her mother ordered. “And tell nobody about this, especially not Julius. You understand?” When the girl had waddled away, she turned into the cemetery. She looked about for an open grave, but found nothing. Continuing through the cemetery, she came out at the other end, passed by the outside of the upper western gate, and continued to wander along a path that ran parallel with the city wall.
It was a quiet place. The wall, with its horizontal tile stripes, looked ghostly. Below, about four yards out from the wall, a deep defensive ditch made a broad shadow like a black ribbon along the ground. There were no guards on top of the wall: she was not being watched. She took her time, passing the corner of the city and skirting the long northern section of the wall. She passed a gateway that was closed, and continued on her way. About six hundred yards further on, she saw what she wanted.
The little brook that descended between the city’s two hillocks was divided into several tributaries in its upper reaches, and in three or four places these tiny rivulets passed under the city’s northern wall through neatly engineered tunnels with grilles across their entrances. For a moment she had considered dropping the bag into one of these watercourses, until she remembered that the grilles were regularly cleaned and the channels dredged. Just past one of these tunnels, however, she noticed that someone had