The Governor's Man by Jacquie Rogers (best beach reads TXT) 📕

It had been a golden start to his military career: his first active service in a staff job with his father’s proud Praetorian Guard, campaigning with the great Emperor Septimius Severus in exotic Britannia. Then Septimius had died suddenly in early 211 while putting down yet another rebellion in the far north of the island. I wasn’t even on duty when they cremated my lord, he reflected bitterly. So many funerals I didn’t attend. Too stupid to avoid that Caledonian warrior with the blue-painted face. I stood there, transfixed by the deaths around me, too slow to act. The Caledonian slewed sideways in the mud, dodged my gladius and slashed his long native sword deep into my leg. Had it not been for Gaius… And later I’d been too weak to mourn the Emperor, too near death myself even to be told.

A prickle came from the mass of old scars scything slantwise down his thigh, a faint reminder of the time he had thought despairingly that his career was over. But as the harsh northern winter gave way grudgingly to spring, he slowly healed in the Eboracum military hospital.

There had been a girl in the forum. A girl who glanced at him as he hobbled around the square on his first foray away from the army medics. He hadn’t got far. His bad leg collapsed under him, and he would have fallen had the girl not caught him. She was tall for a young girl, well-dressed. He was surprised that she had no escort. She told him later that she routinely slipped away from her grandmother’s elderly maid.

‘Caecilia is dull and slow. Anyway, what harm can I come to in my mother’s beloved city?’ The girl smiled, and he felt the cool northern light brighten into gold around her. She explained that she was visiting from the south, staying with her maternal grandmother while she trained as a healer at the new riverside Temple of Serapis.

Quintus saw the image of that girl, clear as cut glass. Her grey robe was plain and her long fair hair braided into a simple plait. But her necklace of golden owls proclaimed her high status, as did her educated voice and the grace of her movements. She smelled of rosewater. She sat with him, talked to him, walked with him every afternoon as the limp slowly lessened.  It became a habit to find her waiting outside the hospital, chatting to the orderlies and even the younger medics. She seemed interested in everything around her.

It was a time of magic. The days lengthened into a perfect summer of swift-song and amber evenings. They explored the quieter parts of Eboracum, finding nooks in the pale grey-stone buildings that allowed privacy for a young couple intent only on each other. For a time he forgot his nightmares, forgot he was a Roman soldier. Until he received a letter from Rome.

His mother wrote that his father was in political difficulties. Enemies in the Senate were turning against him.  His heart turned over as he read this. His father was a proud man of old Roman integrity. It was a deadly combination in those times under the new Emperor Caracalla.

His mother, however, was resourceful. She had made plans that would save the family, she wrote, even as her husband fell from influence. She had arranged an advantageous match for Quintus with the daughter of an old friend of wealth and high esteem. This marriage would restore the family’s reputation, perhaps allowing his sister to marry respectably also. He must return to Rome immediately. She was sure his sense of duty would bring him back quickly.

Sitting in the dark on a damp splintered bench in Aquae Sulis thirteen years later, Quintus remembered how love for his father and anxiety for Lucilla had driven him home. The pain and loss of the Caledonian battle was buried deep, so it had seemed then. He reasoned he would still have his career and his family, no matter what he left behind in this distant grey province. His duty was clear.

The army medics discharged him reluctantly, cautioning him not to strain the newly-healed leg. He was to ship out with a cohort of Legion 11 Parthica departing Britannia the day after next.

He tried to tell her, tried to explain, but she wouldn’t understand. She turned and ran, her fine-woven summer palla dragging over the paving of the forum as he stumbled and called after her, his voice rough over the lump in his throat. His leg let him down, he couldn’t catch her. He waited in the forum all that day and the next, the last day, but she never came back. He wrote a note begging her forgiveness and had a messenger take it to the house of her grandmother. No reply ever came. So he rode away with the Parthica. He didn’t even know her family name, or where her real home was. On that desperate voyage back to Rome he thought he was leaving Britannia for ever.

It was too late to save his father. While he was still travelling his father had slipped quietly away, his life ebbing with his blood into the warm bathwater. An honourable suicide, they said. But at least he arrived in time to prevent his open-hearted young sister being forced into a loveless match with some useful ally of his mother. His mother was so enraged and humiliated that she rarely spoke to him again. But he had done the right thing for Lucilla.

And now here he was, back in the one place that hurt more than Rome. On a mission rapidly getting dangerous and deadly. What would he give to just walk away, put it all behind him?

He laughed softly. Walk away from his duty? Leave that poor headless boy unavenged? Betray his Emperor? That was not the Valerian way.