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[albia]

'People always adopt babes who are plucked alive from disasters.' Now it was me speaking. I too had a dry edge. Helena's scornful gaze made me feel dirty but I said it anyway. 'The wailing newborn lifted from the rubble is assured of a home. It represents Hope. New life, untouched and innocent, a comfort to others who are suffering in a stricken landscape. Later, unfortunately, the child becomes just another hungry mouth, among people who can barely feed each other. You can understand what happens next.' ( The Jupiter Myth ) According to Albia, what happens next is that your carers intend to sell you into slavery, you make a run for it, and then spend the rest of your formative years on the streets being kicked and spat at by merchants, and stealing meals from cookshops with lax security. By the time Marcus Didius Falco and Helena Justina, his wife, come across the girl on the streets of a Londinium slowly growing after the Iceni rebellion that saw it burnt to the ground, she's a wild, starved excuse for a fourteen year old. Naturally, the ever altruistic Helena decides to take her in (Falco, like a good Roman paterfamilias, just nods). This does not go entirely smoothly — Albia, for one, refuses to behave, or even speak. When Falco attempts to exert his authority, he gives her an ultimatum: if she wilfully breaks another vase in their current lodgings, he intends to set her back on the streets. He doesn't, really, but there's a crash as soon as he leaves the room and in order to save face he takes her out to a pokey little food place, buys her a meal, and tells her to think seriously about what she's done. Meanwhile Falco goes off to interrogate a few witnesses, since being a historical crime fiction protagonist means that you can't expect to go on holiday without a murder happening, no. However the detective work goes, when Falco comes back to pick Albia up and take her back home, she's not there. The waiter says something about seeing her walk off with a stranger, and after a great deal of searching, he manages to find and rescue her from a brothel. Later questioning reveals the worst has happened to the girl — though at this point she's at her lowest ebb, Falco and Helena Justina make promises that there will never be a repeat of that incident. Albia accompanies them back to Rome, and is given the choice to be adopted into the family, which she takes. Fortune never favoured me and the problem with being a woman was that sometimes I could only obtain business that all the male informers had sniffed and refused. This was one of those months. ( The Ides of April ) By AD 89, Flavia Albia has gone from sullen, troubled child to the vision of a demure Roman matron — at least on a cursory glance. She has been educated, civilised, married, widowed, and has taken up her father's occupation of informer (the Roman version of a detective), although unlike Falco, Albia doesn't work for the imperial palace (the current emperor doesn't exactly hold much fondness for their family). This means she inevitably has to take on a great deal of duff cases — the one she's recruited for at the beginning of The Ides of April involves beating off the compensation claims of an aggrieved mother in the name of her client, owner of a building outfit. Bad luck also ensures that before long, Albia's client mysteriously winds up dead. Regardless of how her client was in life, even Albia isn't so callous as to be cheery over an ordinary woman's suddenly kicking the bucket (plus, this means no pay). As it turns out, there seem to be a lot of similar occurences happening all over Rome, and before long, Albia is drawn into a new investigation on behalf of her client's nephew. Not everyone wants her to get involved, however. Not long after, she's called into the offices of the vigiles (the watchmen and firefighters of Rome) who, on behalf of Manlius Faustus, the plebeian aedile overseeing them, attempt to delicately coerce her into ceasing her investigation. Albia, stubborn as ever, calmly agrees to back off... only to take a watchman's list of suspects as soon as she's out, and carries on her merry way. Eventually, the aedile seems to change his mind — he sends out a runner, Tiberius, to works with Albia gathering and sorting through evidence, though the two don't exactly get along very well. In the midst of all this, Albia finds herself romantically involved with another fellow from the office of Faustus; a charming archivist named Andronicus. He's intelligent, witty, and a little bit reckless — well, he commits arson whilst saving foxes, so perhaps that's an understatement — the sort of combination that catches Albia off guard. Until, at least, his behaviour begins to seem a little odd — after returning from a trip to question a suspect, it moves into worrying territory — and eventually the pieces fall together to reveal him as the murderer. Though frustrated by her lack of foresight, Albia works with Tiberius to catch and punish Andronicus — it all ends rather more messily than expected, but Rome has one more killer off its streets, and with Tiberius revealing himself to be Manlius Faustus, Albia appears to have made an interesting new friend in a high place.