Free The Spook Who Spoke Again: A Flavia Albia Short Story by Lindsey Davis

accounts!’
    ‘But he’s a pretty boy. He can just recite a laundry list and the women start fainting with pleasure. Any magistrates they are married to are so pleased the wives start taking an interest in sex again, they give us an extra night in the programme …’
    And so forth. I didn’t know how to converse like that so I just kept quiet. Thalia had introduced me to a group of the actors, then she left me with them while she went and sat beside Davos. I presumed that since he was her husband and she had not seen him for a while they wanted to talk privately about their adventures in the meantime. In fact for most of the evening they said nothing at all to each other; I know people who would say that proved they were married and had been for a long time. I looked at them in case they were quarrelling, but they were just taking no notice of each other, side by side. It did make them look as if they were jointly the king and queen of the feast.
    It was all rowdy but good natured. Everyone there seemed colourful in some way. They were used to having open-air dinners like this. Quite a few had not been at the Circus track that day so they were new to me. I also noticed children, though none of them came and spoke to me.
    Some of the actors I had been left with got up and walked over to another place, but three stayed with me as if they did not mind having been asked to look after me. These all had real names, plus names of the character they were to be in my father’s play and titles of the kind of character that was. I was flummoxed about all these; when they tried to explain it they decided to stick with their characters’ names.
    ‘So I am Moschion,’ announced the young man. He had unruly yellow hair that should have been cut about a month ago, but he let it tumble around in a way I wished mine would go. He looked like a wild brigand. ‘I’m the young hero. He is dim and cowardly; he cannot bestir himself to action, so he needs prodding.’
    ‘I am the clever slave who has to prod him. I do everything to sort out the plot,’ said another man, who was older but equally untidy and exciting. ‘I am called Bucco.’ That meant Fatso, but he was very thin. He told me this enabled him to show off his powers of acting.
    ‘And I play the Virgin, traditionally so-called – always a laugh as she works in the brothel,’ added a young lady. ‘She is Chrysis and is very beautiful –’ I didn’t think she was. She had a big wart on one cheek and her mouth went down at the corner in an ugly way, though I realised she couldn’t help it. Helena would say, she probably made up for it with a lovely personality. I think that was true because Chrysis kept picking out nice morsels of food and feeding them to me in a dainty way as if I were her little pet sparrow. ‘I never get any stage time even though I am supposed to be the prize the men are all wild to get. Moschion is in love with me, but he is too useless. The Spook has to pop up and order the idiot to get on with it.’
    ‘Who plays the Spook?’ I asked with interest.
    ‘Anyone who isn’t doing much at the time. He’s covered up. He has no words. You can just throw his sheet over your other costume and prance on.’
    That sounded like a good disguise.
    ‘Who is it the spook of? Who is dead?’
    ‘No one is dead, Postumus,’ the Warty Virgin corrected me sternly. ‘This is a comedy. Relatives are lost at sea, lovers are thwarted by mean parents, partners argue over a bag of gold, the jokes are terrible, but nobody can die or it would depress the audience. On comedy nights people come for pork scratchings, feeling up their neighbour’s wife and happiness.’
    ‘Until they go home very sick from too many snacks,’ added the Cowardly Hero gloomily.
    ‘But they smile through their vomit, darling!’ sneered the Clever Slave
    That sounded a good trick. Next time something made me sick I would see if I could throw up while smiling.
    ‘It was supposed to be