Virgin Territory

by Marilyn Todd

  Part of a hand, she thought it might be a knuckle, followed the rounded contour of her bottom. Claudia swatted it away.

  ‘What I think,’ she said slowly, ‘is that Sullium frieze painters are braggarts and liars with a very inflated opinion of themselves.’

  The old man chuckled. ‘Every other woman who’s seen this room has been shocked into silence.’

  They were interrupted by the arrival of his thick-lipped secretary, Dexippus, with several letters under his arm, followed by Acte, carrying a steaming bowl of something which resembled cabbage water and smelled worse. Claudia quickly excused herself, but the ice had been broken and she felt an affinity with Eugenius which had not been possible with the rest of the bums and stiffs in his family.

  The sun had moved round, throwing the water trough into shade. As Claudia shook the folds in her tunic and adjusted her stola, her attention was caught by a young woman darting furtively along the colonnade across the street. Her hair was dark and wild, her cheeks flushed as she flitted from pillar to pillar in short rapid steps. One-two-three, stop. One-two-three, stop. Not surprising, Claudia thought. The family’s barking, why not the locals. And this was a local woman, you could tell by her costume, torn and disarrayed as it was. As Claudia headed back towards the mercer’s, the woman rushed over to her.

  ‘Have you got kids?’

  Claudia rolled her eyes to heaven and moved on, but the woman followed.

  ‘I’ve got to know!’

  Although her eyes were glistening feverishly, underneath there seemed a genuine concern, so much so that for a fleeting moment Claudia thought about mentioning her own fictional brood, invented to hook Gaius. But since they were also fictionally dead, there was no point.

  ‘No.’ She brushed the woman’s hand off her arm.

  The woman darted in front of her, blocking her way outside the harness maker’s, and one breast fell out of her torn tunic, staring at Claudia like a malevolent eye.

  ‘You’ve got to keep a close watch on ’em. My little girl was stole away, no kid’s safe.’

  Claudia felt a rush of sympathy for the pathetic creature, obviously mad with grief at the death of her child, and pressed two brass sesterces into her hand. To her amazement the woman, poor as she was, refused them.

  ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you, I can see it in yer eyes.’

  ‘Um—’

  ‘She’s not dead. Not my little Kyana. He stole her.’ She jerked her head to a point over Claudia’s left shoulder and against her will yet mesmerized by the woman’s desperation, Claudia turned. Harnesses jangled from their hooks, the smell of leather was overpowering. Her gaze turned upwards. A hand’s span away, under the eaves of the shop, the most enormous black spider sat in the middle of its web.

  ‘Euch!’ Claudia recoiled in horror. She’d seen mice smaller.

  ‘That’s right, you be afraid of spiders. He was collecting ’em when he stole my little Kyana.’ Her face took on a wistful appearance and tears welled in her eyes. ‘You’ve got to watch ’em so carefully.’

  Leaving the local woman sobbing on her knees in the gutter, the sesterces lying forgotten beside her, Claudia turned the corner just as Matidia was emerging, empty-handed, from the mercer’s.

  ‘I do hope that awful Hecamede hasn’t been bothering you, dear, she’s quite deranged you know.’

  Claudia bit back the retort about black kettles and pots as Matidia elaborated.

  ‘Went that way after her daughter disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared? She didn’t die, then?’

  ‘Kyana? Oh no. Well, that’s to say her body’s never been discovered, but the child was five and you know what they’re like at that age, forever getting into mischief.’ Somehow Claudia could not imagine Sabina, for instance, getting into mischief, but bit that back as well, concluding that today she had set something of a record for holding her tongue. It didn’t come easy. Probably because it was such a teensy-weensy thing, you didn’t notice it had run away until it was too late.

  ‘The worst part is,’ Matidia was saying, ‘three other women have now latched on to the notion of someone stealing their babies. Hysterical nonsense, which one does well to ignore, lest it spread right out of hand. Now tell me honestly, do you think I should have bought the red cushions?’

  Claudia glanced at the mercer, wiping his brow with his handkerchief and shaking his head, and felt little pity for him as she heard herself saying:

  ‘Matidia, dear, why don’t you go and have a look at the coloured ones again, just to be on the safe side?’

  Watching the shopkeeper’s face turn ashen as Matidia disappeared into the back of his shop, she telegraphed him a silent message. It’s you or me, chum, and I’ve had four days of the old windbag.

  The one good thing about a small town like this was that you could dispense with the bodyguards and the litter and the conventions, and just be yourself. Claudia paused to pass a critical eye over the work of the bronzesmith (really quite good, she might come back and buy that lantern, it would set off the front entrance). Lingering to watch a Syrian glassblower, her senses were aroused by the commerce around her. The acid tang of rope-making fought for first prize with the sharp smell from the paint seller’s before both were knocked out of the ring by the skills of the herbalist. The air was filled with the cries of the fishmonger, his live catch splashing in the tank, together with the agonized squeals of axles begging for grease, the grinding of the millstone and the braying of the donkey that worked it. A doorway draped with greenery signified a tavern, a cracked and smoke-blackened wall stood testimony to the presence of a cookshop. Claudia was passing the stall of the root-cutter, the man who supplied roots and rhizomes to apothecaries and the like, when she spotted the Collatinus family physician.

  Blond, athletic and classically handsome, Diomedes could be nothing but Greek. Not a Greek from the north like her own lanky steward, this man hailed from Achaea in the south, and it was tempting to ask whether his income came solely from serving the needs of the sick. A good many matrons in Rome would pay lavishly for his services, women in the rudest of health. With emphasis on the word rude. He wore the pallium, too, revealing a muscular shoulder and tanned chest which bulged in all the right places.

  ‘Claudia!’

  His eyes—seducer’s eyes if ever she saw them—roved over her and not for the first time did Claudia find herself responding to the frankness of his stare. She hadn’t had a satisfactory sexual relationship since…since…oh for gods’ sake, did it matter?

  ‘Going back to the villa?’

  No.

  ‘Yes.’ To hell with Matidia. ‘As a matter of fact, I am.’

  ‘May I walk with you?’

  ‘Walk? Did you say walk?’ Claudia cocked her head on one side and grinned. ‘Diomedes, if it ever gets back to Rome that Claudia Seferius walked anywhere, so help me, I’ll sue.’

  ‘Then I’ll show you a short-cut.’

  She fell into step, conscious of his raw masculinity. Unlike most Greeks, Diomedes was clean shaven and his hair lacked the curls for which his compatriots were famous. As a result, when he shook his head, every hair fell straight back into place as though it had been combed, an action which was having a distinctly hypnotic effect—

  His quarters were adjacent to, but completely separate from, the household. No one would see them.

  Diomedes was explaining how there was little he could do for Eugenius, but Claudia remembered Matidia gushing about this man’s healing powers. Why, he had been here only a week when she was taken ill herself, very ill indeed, and my word, wasn’t that man a marvel? Had her cured within a matter of days, she’d have you know, and nothing to show she’d even been poorly.

  Claudia, who until now had been of the opinion that the roles of physician and undertaker were more or less interchangeable, had a quick rethink. This was a man worth falling sick for!

  ‘What brings you from Greece?’

  He shrugged the sort of shrug that break
s hearts. ‘I don’t know, Claudia. I wanted to travel, get away from home, the usual things.’

  ‘I heard you trained at Alexandria. Wasn’t that exotic enough?’

  ‘Not really.’ His accent was thick (deliciously thick!) in contrast to his Latin grammar and vocabulary, which were virtually perfect. ‘The more you see, the more you want to see, I just went where the wind blew me. I moved around, selling my services to wealthy families from Smyrna to the Narbonensis until, after four years, I found peace here.’

  ‘Peace?’

  They had reached a small plateau and he paused to watch a butterfly, a swallowtail, faded after the long, hot summer, sunning its wings on the stony path.

  ‘It got to the stage where in sunsets, I could see only blood, in the emperor’s purple, I could see only the colour of viscera.’ He smiled a sad, drop-dead handsome smile. ‘Does that make any kind of sense to you?’

  Claudia was about to put some conviction into the words ‘I suppose so’ when she noticed the faraway look in his eyes had changed to something instantly more recognizable. He moved closer, placing the flat of his hand against her cheek. A shiver of anticipation ran through her body, she could smell the sweetness of his breath. His hair, that devastatingly obedient hair, fell tantalizingly into place, but as he leaned forward to kiss her, his eyes dark with passion, the image of another man filled her mind. Tall, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a boyish grin he was forever trying to hide behind his hand.

  ‘Good heavens, is that the time?’ She glanced up at the position of the sun. ‘I’m late.’

  He ran to catch up with her, but the moment had passed. She was cheerfully recounting a story about a senator in Rome and the public meeting between his wife and mistress as the path zigzagged its way down the hill. Stretched out ahead, the African Sea shimmered under a blazing October sun, the pines behind the sand packed as tight as thatch. The white walls of the Collatinus villa were dazzling, the heat haze over the red tiles as thick as steam. As they rounded the bend, Claudia was on to another risqué tale when she noticed Sabina stretched out on the grass, hands at her side, staring up at the sky. Her heart sank. When it came to party-poopers, this woman was in a league of her own.

  Diomedes checked his pace. He glanced at her, then began to run. Her heart firmly in her mouth, Claudia raced after him.

  Sabina was lying down all right, but she was neither daydreaming nor sunbathing. Her hands and arms anchored her tunic, which had been arranged neatly on top of her naked body. Her eyes stared skywards not in a dream-world, but in death. A pool of blood had seeped into the parched yellow grass, staining it scarlet, but when Diomedes turned the body over, it was clear Sabina Collatinus had not died from this wound.

  Sabina Collatinus had had her spinal cord severed at the base of the neck, which had caused paralysis and ultimately death from asphyxiation.

  Worse, from the dark bruises and wheals on her body and the stickiness on the inside of her thighs, it was evident the poor cow had been raped as she lay dying and helpless.

  Beside her, smashed into a dozen fragments, lay the tiny blue flagon which Sabina Collatinus believed had contained her soul.

  VIII

  Damn, damn, and double damn. So much for keeping a low profile. Claudia reached for the jug of wine at her bedside. As breakfasts go, it wasn’t ideal, bread or pancakes would have been more sensible, but who on earth wants to be sensible?

  ‘Cypassis, is that you?’

  Good grief, where was she? Sleeping late, lazy hussy. Probably with some callow household slave. How that child has the energy is beyond me. Work her to the bone and she still finds time to seduce pimply youths. Claudia swallowed half a glass of wine in one gulp. Jealousy, my girl. Just because you can’t remember what an orgasm is, no need to deny Cypassis her own pleasures.

  Certainly anyone who’d noticed a muscular young Gaul slipping into Claudia’s room in the early hours would have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Since the bizarre manner of Sabina’s death was likely to generate gossip right across the island, the chances of the name Seferius not cropping up were parchment thin. So much for ‘early days’ and ‘no hurry’. Now she had to eliminate the threat and skedaddle. Fast.

  Not that she wasn’t shocked and sorry about Sabina, she was. Goddammit, she was. But from the moment she’d realized the woman was an imposter, Claudia had been expecting trouble. In fact, she had covered every contingency…bar one.

  Life was a bitch and, as irritating as she was, Sabina didn’t deserve this. Wherever she went, she had clutched that stupid, empty flagon, slept with it, even, reminding Claudia of a child with her favourite doll.

  Yesterday there had been a tang of salt and cypress in the air, pines and wild celery, that made you forget winter was sneaking up on the backroads. The blue of the sea spoke of summer picnics and sleeveless tunics, the suck of waves against sand whispered peace and tranquillity. Neither of them so much as hinted at bloodshed.

  Had it been a hot killing, like for instance gladiatorial combats which were bloody in the extreme, that would have put a different complexion on it. Or a crime of passion, where one man drives a knife into another in a fit of jealousy or revenge…

  And yet passion there was.

  Of a sort.

  Except the cold brutality of the act was chilling. As was the dangerous and calculating mind behind it.

  It was creepy, too, the reaction of the poor woman’s family, the callous manner they totally disregarded the violence of the crime yet threw themselves vigorously into the funeral arrangements. In a way it reinforced Claudia’s impression that they, too, had believed this strange, ethereal creature could not be one of them and had found a convenient way of covering it up. But why? Why not speak out? Were they all party to the conspiracy? Or was it just one of them, sowing seeds of doubt amongst the others? Questions, questions, questions. Claudia had barely slept for questions.

  A gentle scratching at the door received a peremptory ‘Come in,’ and a small slave girl, no more than fifteen and with skin as dark as a chestnut, crept into the room. Drusilla stiffened.

  ‘Senbi sent me, madam.’

  ‘Why?’

  Drusilla’s ears flattened as she let out a low howl from the back of her throat.

  ‘Hrroww.’

  The girl blinked rapidly. ‘Um—’

  ‘Come on, spit it out. What do you want?’

  ‘Hrrro wwwwww.’

  The girl backed up tight against the door frame. ‘Your maid’s bin taken sick with the fever,’ she replied in one frantic breath, her eyes riveted on the snarling cat. Claudia sat bolt upright. ‘Cypassis?’

  Dear Diana, she was telling Diomedes only yesterday what a treasure that child was!

  She considered the timorous creature flattening herself against the wall. ‘Can you dress hair?’

  An imperceptible shake of the head.

  ‘Cosmetics?’

  A grimace.

  Claudia resisted the impulse to scream. ‘Is it within your powers, do you think, to help me dress?’

  At last, a nod.

  ‘I can try,’ she whispered.

  Good life in Illyria, what have I got myself into? Claudia threw off the bedcovers and marched over to the window.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said, throwing wide the shutter, ‘pour some water into that bowl and fetch a towel.’

  Drusilla was watching the proceedings very carefully, and only when she was completely happy the intruder wasn’t a kitten-skinner in disguise did she ease up on the growling. The girl’s sigh of relief was probably audible the other side of the island.

  ‘Bring me that mirror.’

  There was no way Claudia intended letting this novice loose on her hair and, without Cypassis’s expertise, she wasn’t going to spend half the morning fiddling with curls and plaits and ringlets and things. She’d wear her hair in a bun at her neck. Simple, elegant—and well under two minutes to fix.

  ‘Now fetch that misty blue tunic, the o
ne with short sleeves and the flounce along the bottom.’

  ‘And which stola?’

  The girl was untrained! ‘For heaven’s sake, you only wear that at formal occasions or when you’re going out.’ Where on earth had the child been? ‘Give me a hand with this belt.’

  As the young slave neatened up the overhanging folds, Claudia asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Pacquia.’

  From the atrium came a clatter, clatter, crash, followed by loud remonstrations met in return with querulous protests that it was not somebody’s fault, she’d tripped over Young Master Marius’s whipping top. Unlike home, where Leonides would sort the matter out quietly and without fuss, Senbi clearly decided that his presence needed to be felt—and in this case, more than just his presence. Claudia could hear the blow from her room. If that had been Leonides, she’d have his Macedonian ears for breakfast. With garlic on.

  ‘Oi! Pack it in!’

  Good old Linus, putting his oar in now the fuss had died down. Typical of the man, a loser if ever there was one. To some extent Claudia could sympathize because he’d given fifteen years to the business and was still, thanks to the law, without an authoritative role.

  That was the law which made Linus accountable to his father.

  The same law which made Aulus accountable to his father, who had no intention of letting go the legal reins.

  In other words, the same law which gave Eugenius Collatinus absolute control over every person and every thing that he owned, including his family.

  Unfortunately for Linus, Fabius’s return after twenty years meant even the weak position he held had now been usurped. It was an unenviable situation by any reckoning, but whatever sympathy he might have earned was blown away thanks to his blatant whoring, his persistent bragging and his bullying. Like father, like son. Nothing Corinna did could please him and as an outsider, Corinna found no allies in this house, not even in Matidia.

  Especially not Matidia. The old man wouldn’t even delegate the running of the household to his own daughter-in-law, which under normal circumstances was her right as matriarch. Daily, with the others, she had to endure the humiliating morning ritual whereby Dexippus, Eugenius’s secretary, passed across to Acte the wax tablet on which he had written the old man’s instructions and she would call them out to the slaves. Then, when the slaves had left, Dex would hand over a second tablet and she’d read out the old man’s instructions to his family.