Leaves and Ledgers

The January sun had only just reached the gallery when Jack came out of his bedchamber, and it laid the shadows of the columns long and sharp across the boards.

Low voices came from the storeroom beyond the stairs. He stopped at the rail.

Sam stood at the storeroom door in her thin tunic, her arms wrapped about herself against the cold, and Janet was close beside her, speaking softly. Whatever Janet asked brought the colour hard into Sam’s face. She shook her head.

From her pouch Janet drew a small clay jar. Sam pushed it back. Janet would not have it, and folded Sam’s fingers over the jar with her own, keeping them closed until Sam nodded. A quick embrace followed, and then Janet was gone down the corridor.

Jack had no need of the words. With her back as it was, a night with him would have opened every welt Cato had laid on it, and Janet had come to see the damage. Sam had told her nothing had happened. Janet had left the unguent all the same.

Sam was coming back along the corridor, her arms still folded close, and she saw him too late to hang back. She stepped against the wall and lowered her head.

“Sir.”

“Hm.” Jack lifted a hand to cover a yawn and passed her on his way to the stairs.

When he reached the lowest step, Cato was crossing the courtyard. The atriensis turned and bowed.

“Domine.”

“The new girl. Sam.” Jack stepped off the last stair. “From today she attends to me and to no one else, in the tablinum and the bedchamber. She may as well sleep in the alcove off my chamber. See that the house knows it.”

Cato did not answer at once. When he did, he spoke to the floor. “As you wish, Domine.”

This was worse than he had expected. Before first light he had gone to the herb-woman, as he did on any morning after a girl went up. No one had come for the draught. The German was untouched.

In all his years in this house Cato had seen the Dominus call for a girl now and then, and she was always sent down when it was done. Not one had been kept till morning, let alone moved into his room. This girl had won that much without lying down for him.

“Something wrong, Cato?”

“No, Domine.” The answer came smooth. “Only that the girl is clumsy, and she forgets her place. I should not like the silver spent on her to go to waste.”

“Then it is my silver to waste.” Jack was already walking to the atrium. “See it done.”

Cato bowed lower than before. “At once, Domine.”

He went off down the corridor at a slower pace than usual. The girl was pretty; he was not blind to that. A few days of her clumsiness and her insolence, though, and the Dominus would see her for what she was. If not, it would make little difference in the end, for every man tired of a woman sooner or later. When this one came back down among the others, he would take up her lessons again.

Before the morning was out the kitchen talked of nothing else, and by noon the porter was telling it at the door. There was laughter in the telling, and more envy than anyone admitted. Cato said nothing at all.

---

A few mornings later, when the last of the callers had gone, the tablinum still smelled faintly of wet wool beneath the cedar oil and ink. Their sandals had left grey marks across the mosaic.

Sam came in with the broom and a small bucket of water, and stopped on the threshold.

“Sir.”

She had thought him gone for the morning. Jack sat at the desk in his toga with a tablet in one hand, and he did not look up.

Sam set the bucket down against the wall and began from the far side of the room. By the time she had worked through half the floor, the dust was rising off the tesserae in a pale haze. She coughed into her shoulder. The haze drifted on towards the desk, and Jack coughed too.

“Stupid,” she breathed.

She fetched the bucket and scattered water over the floor she had already swept. It darkened the clean tesserae well enough. The dust in the air was slower to come down.

Jack raised the tablet before his face and looked over its rim at the girl. He kept his breath shallow against the dust, though it did nothing to stop the smile he had to bite back.

Cato was right. She was hopeless at this.

Two days before, he had come in to find her on her knees at the brazier, feeding it. Gaius would have tipped the charcoal in from the basket and been gone. Sam had laid it piece by piece, each lump crossed over the last, until it stood in the bronze bowl like a funeral pyre for a very small general.

Still, he had not paid eight thousand sesterces for her to light his brazier.

“Sam.”

Sam went still and straightened where she stood, the broom upright at her side, and for a moment Jack half expected her to give him her name and her legion.

“When you have finished here, bring me something to eat. I will take my meal before I go out.” He kept his eyes on the tablet.

“Yes, Sir.”

Sam finished the floor quickly, scattering the water first this time.

In the kitchen Brenna piled the tray, a dish of cold pork after the bread and cheese and a bowl of dried figs after that, until the jug of wine stood at the very edge. Sam carried it back through the atrium with her elbows locked and her eyes on the jug. Not until the tray rested on the corner of the desk did she let her breath go.

He had been watching her when she crossed the threshold. It seemed to her that he was always watching her.

She took up the knife to cut his bread. But her glance kept slipping sideways to him instead of the loaf, and the blade skidded off the crust and into her thumb.

“Ah.”

She put the thumb to her mouth.

Jack picked the knife up from the tray where she had dropped it. He wiped the blade on a cloth and cut the bread himself.

“Sit.” He nodded at the stool by the wall.

Sam looked at the stool, then crossed to it and sat, careful to keep her back clear of the plaster.

Jack breathed out through his nose. “Not there. Bring it here.” He pushed half the bread across the desk. “Brenna has sent enough for three. Eat.”

It was a few heartbeats before Sam stood. “Thank you, Sir.” She drew the stool to the desk and perched on its edge. The piece of bread she took was the smallest on the board, and she nibbled at it. When it was gone, she took a sliver of cheese.

Jack took a plate, heaped it with bread and the thickest cuts of the pork, and set it in front of her.

“You did not grow that tall on crumbs.”

Sam nearly laughed, and remembered in time what she was. It was true enough. Janet came only to her shoulder, and under this roof no one but the Dominus stood taller.

“Thank you, Sir.”

Sam laid a piece of pork on her bread and bit into it. The garum gave it a taste she had not yet grown used to, but it filled her.

She kept her head low, but her glance went up all the same. Jack ate as he read, a tablet propped against the jug.

A kind enough master, then. She had kept count since she was moved into his chamber. There had been a cup broken on his floor and a tunic laid out that was not the one he wanted, and on two mornings she had woken to find him already up. Today he had coughed in the dust she raised. For none of it had he spoken a harsh word, and not once had he called her through the curtain.

Every night she lay in the alcove waiting for the summons that must come, and every night she drifted off listening to his breathing slow.

One day he would send for her; that much she knew. Until then she would sweep his floor and lay out his clothes, and try to make her clumsy hands earn the mercy she had been given. Sam bent her head and ate.

---

The next day Jack was home before dusk for the first time in a fortnight, and stood in the vestibule while Cato unwound the toga from him, fold by heavy fold.

He went on towards the tablinum with a light tread, in case the girl was there. At the sound of his step or his voice she would shoot upright, and eyes that were wide to begin with would go wider still. She looked, every time, like a child caught at the honey jar. The thought nearly made him smile.

“Grow strong, little green one.”

From outside the door he could see her on her knees beside the large terracotta pot that held his favourite myrtle, a gift from a Cretan legate years ago. With one finger she was lifting a branch that drooped.

She spoke again, in Greek this time.

“Θάρσει, μυρσίνη. Οὐκ ἐάσω σε μαρανθῆναι.”

Jack’s Greek had been beaten into him by a tutor in boyhood and left to rust through his years in camp, and it took him a moment. Take heart, myrtle. I will not let you wither.

“Planning to teach it rhetoric next?”

Sam spun round on her knees, and her eyes went exactly as wide as he had known they would. He began to wonder whether that was why he had come so quietly.

“S-Sir!” She scrambled to her feet with the little watering cup held against her chest. “I did not hear you come in.”

Jack crossed to the pot and lifted the drooping branch with one finger.

Sam ducked her head. “Among my people we believe a plant grows better if you talk to it. The myrtle looked weak, and I thought… I know it sounds foolish.”

“We say the same here.” He bent closer. The leaves did look a deeper green than they had a week ago.

He nodded and went to the desk. “Carry on.”

The pile of tablets took some sorting before he found the one he wanted. Beside the pot, Sam knelt again, and with the damp corner of a cloth she began to wipe the dust from the leaves.

“Can you write?” Jack asked, bent over the tablet.

Sam stopped wiping. “Yes, Sir.” She turned to read his face.

“Latin? Greek?”

She caught her lip between her teeth for a moment. “Both, Sir.”

Jack’s brows rose a fraction, though he did not look up. “Not overpriced, then,” he said under his breath.

Colour climbed to the roots of Sam’s hair.

“Domine.” Cato stood in the doorway. “Hermogenes is here with the accounts.”

Hermogenes came in with a scroll under one arm, a grey-bearded Greek with the iron ring of a freedman on a finger stained with ink to the second knuckle.

“Hermogenes. How is business?” Jack straightened in his chair.

The Greek had served this house for many years before Jack freed him. Since then he had taken rooms near the Forum and found no shortage of men who could not add, though he still came up to the Palatine each month to keep the household’s tallies. Last year, Jack had heard, he had taken on a few assistants.

“It prospers, Domine, thanks to your patronage.” Hermogenes bowed.

“Let us see the figures.” Jack gestured at the roll.

Hermogenes opened the roll across the desk, weighted its far end with the inkpot and stood at Jack’s shoulder.

“The Campanian estate first, Domine. The wine came to ninety-six thousand three hundred and fifty sesterces. A better vintage than last year’s, though the shippers at Puteoli have raised their price again.” He ran a finger down to the next line. “The oil, fifty-two thousand two hundred and fifty. The estate near Arelate sent sixty-three thousand two hundred and fifty, near enough what it sent the year before. The rents of the city properties, eighty-seven thousand four hundred.” He tapped the foot of the column. “Two hundred and ninety-eight thousand two hundred and fifty in all.”

He unrolled a hand’s breadth further. “Against that, the house and the estates have spent two hundred and fourteen thousand eight hundred, which leaves eighty-three thousand four hundred and fifty.”

Figures had never been Jack’s gift. He let Hermogenes run on and did not follow the finger down the column. He was watching Sam instead, from the edge of his sight. She had stopped wiping the leaves and sat back on her heels, her head tilted to one side and a hard little crease between her brows.

“What?”

Hermogenes straightened, and so did Cato, waiting by the door.

Sam’s eyes went wide again. She gave a quick shake of the head.

“Out with it. What were you frowning at?”

She pressed her lips together. All three men were looking at her now. She came up onto her knees.

“Sir. The hundreds come to twelve hundred and fifty.” Her voice barely carried across the room. “The thousand was not carried. The income should be two hundred and ninety-nine thousand two hundred and fifty, and what remains, eighty-four thousand four hundred and fifty.”

Jack had lost her somewhere among the hundreds. He looked at Hermogenes, whose face had gone the colour of the papyrus. The Greek gave Sam a glance with nothing kind in it, then took a small bronze abacus from his satchel and began working the counters up and down their grooves.

For a while there was no sound in the room but the click of the counters. At last Hermogenes looked up and wiped the beads from his forehead.

“The girl is right, Domine. I…”

“One of those new boys of yours, I expect,” Jack said.

“Ah… Domine. I assure you, the boy will be punished for his carelessness.” Hermogenes’s face had hardened.

“He will learn.” Jack let the roll curl shut. “You taught him, after all.”

Hermogenes bowed and went out with the roll under his arm.

Jack sat back in his chair and turned to Sam with his arms folded. She did not dare to move, but the Dominus was only smiling. “You read, you write, and you do this in your head?” he said at last.

Sam’s shoulders crept up towards her ears.

Jack laughed outright and turned to the door. “Cato.”

The atriensis came forward.

“This month’s tallies, the ones you have not yet sent to Hermogenes. Bring them here.”

Cato looked from his master to the girl. “But Domine… a bed-slave?”

“Now, Cato.”

Cato’s mouth thinned. He went into the archive room adjoining the tablinum and came back with a stack of tablets tied together with cord.

“Why are you looking at me? Give them to her.” Jack flicked his fingers towards Sam.

Cato set the stack on the floor in front of Sam without once looking at her. Sam watched Jack’s face a moment longer before she untied the cord. She read through the first tablet quickly and went on to the next.

“Can you keep the tallies?” Jack leaned to look over at her.

“Yes, Sir.” She closed the tablets and gave a firm nod.

“Good.” Jack turned to his atriensis again. “And Cato. Those letters I wanted copied last week. Philemon has still not finished them. From now on, work of that kind goes to her.”

He pushed himself up from the chair. “Eight thousand sesterces. That is what a good Greek accountant costs, and I have a secretary thrown in.” In the doorway he looked back at the girl kneeling among the tablets. “The best bargain I ever made.”

---

Cato came in the next morning with the day’s business, and Jack spoke before he could begin.

“I want another pair of hands in here,” Jack said without looking up. “One of the younger house boys, Gaius or the Thracian lad, whichever is quicker with a broom. Sam keeps the accounts now and copies my letters. She can still see to the lamps and lay out my clothes, but the sweeping and the water-carrying go to someone else.”

A vein stood out at Cato’s temple. “Domine, with respect… she already has the lightest work in the house. She barely lifts a finger compared to the kitchen girls. A second slave, for one bed-slave’s comfort…”

Jack came round the desk in two strides and clapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to rock the older man.

“My good Cato. Listen. Every Kalends I send Hermogenes twenty denarii for his trouble with the household tallies, and Sam did a month of them in an afternoon. That is two hundred and forty denarii a year back in my chest. The boy is fed already. Whether he sweeps here or elsewhere costs me nothing more.”

Cato still did not reply. Jack gave the shoulder a final pat.

“Assign the boy. It is simple arithmetic.”

Cato bowed at last. “As the Dominus wishes.” Later, as he went through the house on his morning round, his mind was still at it.

Arithmetic indeed.

Every morning he asked the herb-woman the same question, whether the German had come for her draught, and the answer never changed. Ten dawns had passed since the Dominus moved the girl upstairs, and not once had she been sent down for the pennyroyal that every girl drank the morning after.

Cato drummed his fingers against his thigh as he walked.

The Dominus could have her tonight, and be done before the lamp needed trimming. He would still have his clever little secretary in the morning, and most men would call that sense. Instead he fed her, clothed her, and set her down among his accounts like some freedman’s daughter.

There was no sense in it. Brenna had been bought for the kitchen, and she cooked. Philemon had been bought for the Dominus’s letters, and he copied them. The girl had been bought for the Dominus’s bed and kept out of it, and now she worked in the tablinum. What did that make her? The others would see that, and sooner or later some of them would begin to wonder what they were for.

None of that was his to settle. By noon the Thracian boy had been assigned, and Philemon’s copying had gone to the girl. But each morning after that, Cato looked in on the herb-woman, and she shook her head before he could ask.

One day, he told himself, one day the Dominus would remember what he had paid for.