Second Act

by Marilyn Todd

  The liquid was fire. It made Orbilio’s eyes water, scalded his throat, burned a hole from his stomach down to his toes. Once he’d stopped coughing, he held his cup out for a refill. ‘What is that?’

  ‘In the mountainous regions of eastern Gaul, along the Helvetican border, the natives brew up the yellow gentians which grow wild on the hills and distil the juice. This, my friend, is the result.’

  ‘Then here’s to barbarians everywhere,’ Orbilio croaked.

  He let the fire in his belly settle and used the time to study the herbalist. Late-thirties, his red hair receding from the temples and with the beginnings of a slight paunch, he was not an obvious catch for a vibrant young woman with a preference for bodices that showed off her midriff and fringed skirts that swayed with her hips. But he could see what had attracted Deva to him. His goodness, his gentleness, his wanting to help those in need of it most. Orbilio was wrong, he realized. The people who had trickled up to this house for their potions and pills had not handed over vast sums for their remedies. Deva and her man would not be living in such humble conditions if he had charged them the going rate.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ he said, twisting the cup in his hands. ‘This is not an official call.’

  Of all the times to seek a personal consultation, he could hardly have picked a worse one. The man was already a widower once, his first wife killed by falling masonry from one of the hundreds of renovation projects. Now Deva had been subjected to an ordeal that had driven her to the brink of suicide and the helplessness of it all was tearing the poor bugger to shreds. Yet here he was, in the early hours, being asked for his professional advice.

  ‘Please don’t feel obliged,’ Orbilio said. ‘I quite understand if you—’

  ‘Marcus.’ The herbalist motioned his visitor to sit. ‘Other men would pick up a sword and go charging round the city to hunt down this beast. To my shame, I’m not other men. I do not know how to avenge her, I can only mend the wounds on her body.’ His mouth twisted in self-revulsion. ‘I do not even possess the ability to heal the wounds in her head.’

  Orbilio wasn’t sure about that, and he said so. He’d seen many victims of rape. Had seen how their ordeal was viewed as bringing disgrace on their families, seen their husbands reject them, even though the women were blameless. What all victims of rape needed was tenderness, patience and love. Qualities the herbalist possessed in abundance.

  For several moments, the herbalist was unable to speak. Then he tossed down a third shot of the pale yellow liquor, grimaced, and his tortured eyes softened. ‘That, if it’s true—’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘—makes me feel a whole lot better about what I was about to say,’ he replied. ‘Because I was going to tell you that the best thing you can do for me at the moment is give me something to work on. A problem which can occupy my mind, even for the tiniest amount of time, affords me unimaginable relief from the pain.’

  Orbilio leaned back in his chair. It was hard and uncomfortable, and far too small for his large frame, but he barely noticed. He knew, from his previous visit to discuss the attempts to poison the Emperor, that the herbalist was a man to be trusted to listen, understand, sympathize and not judge. And perhaps that was the most important role of any physician. That of confessor.

  Which is how, at one o’clock in the morning, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio came to be telling a virtual stranger about the pixie. How he had met her at a friend’s house when she was dancing. How they had got chatting and ended up at her house, too drunk to notice, too drunk to care, who satisfied his bodily urges. That, even when he took Angelina to a tavern to let her down gently over a meal, he found himself in exactly the same predicament the following morning. Furred tongue, lack of memory, those damned castanets clacking like crazy behind his eyes.

  ‘My head wasn’t the only thing that was throbbing when I woke up,’ he admitted ruefully, explaining how he’d vowed never to touch another drop of wine so long as he lived. True to his word, he had gone to Angelina’s house sober last night to break off the relationship but it was in her bed that he awoke, exhibiting the same muzzy symptoms, the same burning erection and, as previously, the day was more advanced than he would have wished.

  ‘Hm.’

  The herbalist laced his fingers together on the desk. Behind him, on the shelves, earthenware vessels lined up like soldiers, along with glass and ceramic pots, copper pots, tin pots, horn, silver and onyx containers. Bronze boxes, wooden boxes, flasks, scoops and balances stood to attention beside mortars and palettes, pestles and bottles, spatulas and bandages of varying widths. On the table beneath the shuttered window sat turnips, garlic bulbs, mustard and rue, and a small jar marked ‘Cedar resin’.

  ‘You suspect Angelina of drugging you?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Let’s say the alternative worries me,’ Orbilio replied.

  Across the desk, the herbalist shifted. ‘I have some good news and some bad news,’ he said. ‘The good news is that you aren’t losing your mind and have indeed been the victim of drugs. A cyathus of mandrake, a scruple of henbane, one or two other bits and bobs and we have a sleeping draught which leaves a sledgehammer pounding between the eyes and a tongue that could pass for a rodent.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  A muscle twitched at the side of the herbalist’s mouth as he poured a shot of gentian liqueur for his visitor. ‘The bad news, my friend, is that under a sedative of that strength, you could not possibly have managed anything more energetic than a snore.’

  Despite the situation, Orbilio found himself laughing. ‘Not the four times she said, then?’

  The herbalist began laughing with him. ‘Not even once,’ he chuckled. ‘Although.’ He tapped the small jar at his elbow. ‘I can, if you like, make you a potion that would help.’

  Laughter was the trigger the herbalist needed. Within seconds, the first healing tears started to flow.

  *

  Orbilio and the herbalist weren’t the only two whose problems kept them awake in the early hours.

  *

  In her office, Claudia was going through her accounts with a fine flea comb. Sending Butico those three thousand bronze sesterces had literally drained her coffers dry. How on earth was she supposed to fund her Saturnalia banquet now? There was no quick way to liquidate her assets. That brickworks on the Via Tiburtina wouldn’t sell this close to Saturnalia. Rents on her properties could not be collected until New Year’s Day. To be seen selling off the silver and gold plate would start alarm bells ringing.

  It was enough that her fellow wine merchants had conspired with Butico and were, through him, turning the thumbscrews. She couldn’t afford to have anyone else get wind of her financial troubles.

  What a bloody mess.

  She drained a glass of warm, spiced wine and went through the accounts again.

  *

  Julia’s husband hadn’t been able to face his scrawny, sourfaced wife after the scene in the apartment on the Aventine. Couldn’t bear to hear another whine from her thin lips, another of her sanctimonious opinions. Pleading the necessity to work on his portfolio, he had returned to his own house and now, in the darkness and the cold, he had never felt more alone in his life.

  His darling. His rosebud. His precious cherubkins.

  My, how she must have laughed when he told her (time and again!) that making love with her went beyond the mechanical release of bodily tensions.

  ‘For the first time in my life,’ Marcellus had confided, ‘I know what it means to give someone my soul, my heart, my very being through the act of making love.’

  He felt the prickle of salt behind his eyelids, felt the pillow dampen under his cheek. Trust him to have fallen in love with a whore. A cold-hearted whore, who had rented the most expensive flat on the Aventine, demanded it be furnished to the highest standard, redecorated, and all at Marcellus’s expense. Claudia would have flayed him alive, had she realized that the stuff she’d repossessed was less than half w
hat he’d given the slut. She’d been selling it on, salting away the proceeds like the good little whore that she was, but what hurt, what really hurt, was that she hadn’t cared about him at all.

  Another stab of pain ripped at Marcellus. She’d already be latching on to another poor sap, flattering him with her weasel words, seducing him with her body (her beautiful, beautiful body), preparing to suck another man dry like the parasite that she was.

  That Claudia, of all people, should have seen through her was the ultimate in humiliation. She hadn’t pulled any punches, either. She’d exposed him to the truth in brutal fashion, emasculating him completely. She would never look him in the eye again. Jupiter’s balls, was she blind? Couldn’t she see that his beloved had been the image of her, with her bold, thrusting breasts and dark, flashing eyes? Did she not realize that his affair, at least in the beginning, had only taken off because he saw his mistress as a substitute for the real thing?

  Another spurt of salt water squeezed between his eyelashes and dribbled its way down to his pillow. Now he was little more than a eunuch in Claudia’s eyes. A middle-aged gullible fool. Even his rosebud would have forgotten him six months from now.

  He thought about the things he had said to her. The words she had said in return. That’s all they were, he thought bitterly. Words. I love you, Marcellus. The memory clawed at his heart, ripped it out with both hands. No one had ever said I love you to Marcellus in his life. Not his parents. Not his siblings. Not Flavia. Not even his wife.

  His darling, his rosebud, his precious cherub.

  He would have married her, too.

  *

  Sextus Valerius Cotta was not asleep. Beside him, in the wide double bed cast in solid bronze and covered with a damask counterpane scented with lilac, slept Phyllis. As beautiful and undemanding a mistress as he had ever taken. Skin the colour of cinnamon, the texture of silk, and with a laugh as soft as summer rain, she understood her status and behaved accordingly. Cotta was extremely fond of Phyllis. Much more so than his wife, in fact. His wife had the brains of a sheep. With his beautiful mistress, Cotta could indulge in his love of poetry, his passion for horseflesh. She sang as he strummed the lyre. More than any woman he’d known, Phyllis understood the complexities of politics, but Cotta was careful about what he disclosed. He didn’t believe Phyllis was a spy, but a man could not be too careful these days. In any case, as an ex-general and military tactician of some standing, he was used to making decisions unaided.

  Many considered leadership to be the loneliest job in the world, a sentiment Cotta neither shared nor understood. Patrician to his core, he appreciated the value of propitiating the gods, paying careful devotions to his family shrine of a day, pouring libations, intoning the prayers, leaving sacrifices of salt cakes and honey. With every success, whether political, military or domestic, Cotta followed up with a hefty donation to the temple of whichever divinity had looked after him and then offered sacrifices in the deity’s honour. Look after the gods, and the gods look after you was his motto.

  Despite what people thought, it was not the hand of Mars which guided the dashing Arch-Hawk. He was no war-mongerer, regardless of what they might say. Cotta didn’t relish Roman blood being spilled, or anyone else’s, come to that. A simple look at the records would show that his tactic had always been to strike swiftly and to strike sharply. Catch the enemy when and where they least expected it to minimize casualties and maximize the Eagle’s authority. Given that Cotta believed in justice as much as decisiveness, his protector was none other than the King of the Immortals, Jupiter himself.

  Jupiter represented the honour and integrity that Cotta himself tried to live by. All he wanted—all he had ever wanted—was for Rome to fulfil her true potential. That her people should enjoy the riches that they deserved.

  Sonofabitch, what the hell was wrong with that?

  * * *

  In a room littered with the paraphernalia of travelling players, the Digger also lay awake in the darkness, listening to the settlement creaks of the house, the soft snorts of sleeping companions. The house smelled of beeswax and venison, mulled wine and frankincense, with just a hint of fuller’s earth from where the clothes had come back from the cleaner’s. Homely smells. Homely sounds. Out in the street, carters geed up their mules and two tomcats squared up to each other up on the roof.

  The killer was thinking about the scene in The Cuckold, where the Miser ambushes Cupid (played by Periander, now that the dwarf had decamped with the rival company), in a bid to force Cupid to make the Miser’s Wife fall in love with her husband. It was a very funny scene. The point of Cupid’s arrows is that, once they’ve hit their target, the victim will fall in love with the first person they see. Tricked by the Miser into firing off three arrows just to make sure his Wife gets the message, Cupid retaliates by closing his eyes as he shoots. Consequently, the flying arrows cause chaos. One lands on Jemima’s bottom. Startled, she jumps up and who’s the first person that she sees? The Miser’s Wife. The Miser’s Wife, meanwhile, gets the full force of an arrow in her back, which sends her sprawling into her lover’s open arms. Whilst the third arrow ricochets off the wall on to the Miser, who has been watching developments in the mirror, so that the first person he sees is himself.

  The audience would be in hysterics, the Digger thought. The kidnapped victim’s hilarious revenge. But there was nothing comic about ambush—

  Vulnerable people are easy to lure. They have so many mixed emotions swirling around inside their heads that they cannot think straight. Do not seek to question. Vulnerable people are easily led.

  Easily led off the road.

  Easily led into the woods. Fragile and emotional, they are susceptible to any old sob story going.

  Staring up at the ceiling, listening to the rhythmic breathing of the others in the bedchamber, it seemed both yesterday and a lifetime ago that a young woman with a cloak of dark hair had run, laughing, down the embankment towards the stream at the bottom.

  ‘Look at those beautiful butterflies!’ she had gasped, using both hands to point to the profusion of painted ladies heading south. ‘Don’t they take your breath away, the way they dance through the trees?’

  She could not have imagined that butterflies would not be the only thing to take her breath away.

  *

  And the young woman with a cloak of dark hair rose silently out of her grave.

  ‘Why did you kill me?’ she whispered. ‘Why did I have to die? I, who had so much to live for?’

  *

  Entombed in the nightmare which would not end, the Digger shivered and cried.

  Twenty

  Gloomy and grey, daybreak brought with it an insidious damp to fill the vacuum left by the tramontana, chilling bones, wilting parchment and breeding mould on the walls and the bread.

  ‘Leonides.’ Claudia collared her steward on the landing. ‘This damp’s getting everywhere. I want the linens and blankets in the storerooms shaken then pegged out over the braziers, and when they’re fully aired, I want them refolded with alecost.’

  ‘Alecost?’ Leonides wrinkled his long nose. ‘Are you sure you want your clothes reeking of camphor, madam?’

  ‘More than I want bugs and mould in them,’ she retorted. ‘And in any case it’s a distinct improvement on the stinking hellebores which I notice you’ve strewn in the cellar to repel the vermin.’

  She couldn’t be sure. Leonides might have muttered something under his breath to the effect that if he was stretched any thinner, the mistress would be able to cover books with him, but then again it might have been his guttural Macedonian accent. She watched him barking orders at the underslaves and considered the changes she intended making to the house.

  Stuff endowing the Temple of Ceres with a fountain to commemorate the stand of pines! Claudia wanted to get ahead in business, and the way to do it was not through ostentatious gifts to the city, but by establishing a sound rapport with her clients. Staging the Halcyon Spectaculars was a good
start, her standing would rocket, and that would get up the Guild’s noses. Like ghouls on a corpse, they’d hoped to pick over the cadaver of Seferius Wine after Gaius’s death and now, believing they had tied her up like a kipper with the Moschus/Butico fraud, the ghouls were hovering again. Only this time they weren’t waiting for the victim to die—

  Claudia’s survival hinged on greasing palms and schmoozing and given that the former was out of the question, she was stuck with the latter. Unfortunately, schmoozing at this level required more than simply entertainment on an epic scale. She could throw all the lavish parties she liked, but no matter how many peacocks strutted round her peristyle, and no matter how many gilded gladiators she hired to slug it out during banquets, a woman in commerce was still anathema. Claudia Seferius needed an extra trick up her sleeve.

  The merchants were accustomed to extravagance—tigers in cages, sinuous Spanish dancers—this was a buyer’s market, where profligacy came with the territory and they expected every night to be a night to remember. They would certainly be wise to contracts being flashed in front of them while they were still merry. The point to grasp was that these were dyed-in-the-wool bigots she was trying to sell to, and the trick up Claudia’s sleeve was to reel her fish in gently, without them knowing they were even on a line. The room at the end of her bedroom gallery was spacious enough to convert to a small, yet intimate, dining chamber and it was here that she planned to entertain a small, yet select, band of businessmen in style. The idea was to invite three or four firm supporters, plus one influential chauvinist who would be won over by good living and his peers. Softly, softly, catchee monkey. Hook them one at a time and—

  ‘Erinna?’

  Skyles’ low rasp along the gallery cut short her schemings and Claudia realized that, standing behind the wooden support pillar, the actor hadn’t noticed her. His watchful eyes were flickering down to the atrium, to where Caspar was supervising the rehearsals, checking that none of the troupe saw him slipping away. Claudia felt her shoulder blades tensing.