Of Merchants & Heros by Paul Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

her like a servant, ordering her to fetch things, telling her to pull her chin up, and not to drag her feet, and not to whisper, and not to sulk. She had flat brown hair, hacked short with no care for how she looked; she had a pale, round face, and dull eyes that never met yours. I might have hated her, for being his daughter, and for moving in to the house I still thought of as mine. But she was too pitiful to hate. Seeing his bullying, and how he put her down, I felt sorry for her.
    She mooned about the house, or sat with my mother, or alone under the shade of the rowans on the sloping lawn outside.
    At first she was so shy of me as almost to be mute, and if I was around she would keep her eyes downcast like a slave. But one afternoon I had occasion to speak to her. It was some days after she arrived, when, returning from some business on the farm, I found her sitting alone on the terrace, peering intently at a scroll which lay open on her lap. Seeing me she set it quickly aside. ‘Hello Mouse,’ I said. ‘What is it you’re reading? Has he set you to work on his accounts?’
    Her big round face flushed to the ears. Reluctantly she picked up the book and proffered it, as if I had caught her doing something forbidden. I looked at the edge of the scroll and immediately recognized it. It was a book of Homer, which recently I had rescued from its exile in the outhouse. I was trying to master the Greek, having decided I must educate myself as my father would have wished. I had left it lying in the house.
    ‘Homer, is it?’ I said, somewhat dryly. ‘I suppose you read Greek then?’
    To tell the truth, I had intended this as something of a putdown.
    It irked me that she had helped herself to my book. Who did she think she was, to come to my house and take my private things without asking? But in her hesitant voice she replied, ‘I can read a little of it, but I am not really very good at all.’ She flushed once more and looked down. ‘You are cross with me. Here, take it; I should have asked you first, but Father said you had gone to the fields, and I was going to put it back before you noticed.’
    I had a sharp reply ready. I was still smarting from the dressing- down Caecilius had given me, and Mouse was an easy target. But each of us has the power to pass pain on, or let it stop with us. I thought of Caecilius. That was enough to make me swallow my harsh words.
    ‘Well never mind,’ I said instead. ‘Read it if you like. Anyway, you are right, I have work to do.’
    She looked up then. I saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes, and for the first time since she had arrived she smiled. She reminded me of the timid little birds I used to coax to my hand in winter with the promise of food, when the snow was on the ground and they were hungry. I said, ‘There are other books too, you know. They’re hidden away at the back of the barn there, but I can show you, if you want.’
    ‘Oh would you!’ she cried.
    I laughed. ‘Why not? Anyway,’ I added, kicking at the grass, ‘I shan’t have time to read them. Your father is taking me away.’
    At this her face fell once more. ‘Yes, Marcus, I heard. That is what he is like, always moving, never still. It’s like a sickness. But I wish you were staying.’
    From that day we were friends.
    Next morning, before work, I took her up to the barn. On the way I said, ‘I suppose, if you can read, you must have books at home.’
    ‘I have no home,’ she answered straight away.
    ‘Well you must have somewhere. Where were you before you came here? Rome, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Oh, Rome for a while. And before that Cales in Campania. Then Sicily; then Cales again. And now I am here.’
    ‘Doesn’t he keep you with him?’
    She shrugged. ‘He does sometimes, when it suits him. But business comes first.’
    ‘Ah yes,’ I said. I was beginning to learn that for myself.
    We clambered through the bales and casks and assorted implements to the dark corner at the back of the