Sour Grapes

by Marilyn Todd

  ‘Doesn’t it make your blood run that wee bit hotter, seeing our primitive ways at such intimate quarters?’ a familiar brogue chuckled.

  Under the Etruscan corona, the tunic, the traditional wrap, the only thing to distinguish Lars from the masses was his perpetually smiling face. There was a woman with him, also in national costume, and Claudia remembered that he’d spoken once in passing of a sister. She wondered why he didn’t introduce her.

  ‘Seeing isn’t necessarily believing,’ she retorted. ‘I can’t understand a word anyone’s saying.’

  With Latin the principal language these days, her only experience of Etruscan was the written language, which, since it looked like Greek, she’d assumed it would sound like Greek. When Lars’s old school friend came through the night Candace first walked the winds, they’d jabbered away in Etruscan, but the conversation had been brief, interrupted by Eunice’s rather persistent cousin, and of course the boy was only eleven years old when he’d died. Given the shock of that night, Claudia felt she might be forgiven for not taking much notice, plus you’d expect some distortion in sound quality when the poor kid had trekked all the way up from Tartarus.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Lars said. ‘We write back to front, as well.’

  ‘That goes some way to explaining the gibberish,’ she laughed back.

  As he linked her arm with his and led her round the square, translating some of the ancient songs that were being sung, re-enactments of Etruscan history, she was conscious of his musky scent and firm muscle tone. With his over-long nose and stocky build, you could never accuse Lars of being handsome. Yet sex appeal oozed from every pore. The nickname red gigolo should be embraced as a compliment, she thought. Not an insult.

  ‘Over here, you see Tyrrhenos leading his people to this land from the east, to escape famine. Those soldiers in armour are re-taking Rome, so don’t look, don’t look!’ He pretended to cover her eyes. ‘Watch the priests from the College, instead. They’re re-enacting the son of Genius rising out of the soil to give his divine pronouncements for Cosmic Order.’

  ‘What happened to Fufluns? I thought this was supposed to be his festival?’

  ‘When we only have the one day, we cram everything in that we can,’ Lars said dryly. ‘Fufluns takes centre stage when the sun sinks. Then the fires are lit, the idol is brought out, the Brides take their oaths and then they dance through the night.’

  ‘Lucky Fufluns. Thirteen times in one night.’

  ‘Like I said, when you only have the one day, you make the most of it,’ he chuckled, and turned to the woman on his other arm. ‘Isn’t that right, pumpkin?’

  Eunice?

  ‘Don’t look so shocked, darling. Tonight I’ll be the Roman merchant’s widow again. Respectable matron attending the festivities as an honoured guest, and I’ll be in robe and slippers, tiara and fan, flanked by a zillion dutiful slaves.’

  ‘With a deliberate smudge of red paint on your cheek,’ Claudia said.

  ‘You do, you know me too well.’ Eunice laughed. ‘But why not? I’m married to an Etruscan who is fiercely proud of his ancestry, and the Empire might look down its nose on what I’m doing today, but I don’t regret a single moment.’

  Lars took his wife’s hand in both of his. ‘I never asked this of you, Eunice, and I never expected it either,’ he said huskily. ‘I’m proud of my heritage, mighty proud, but I’m prouder today than any man has the right to be and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the way you’ve honoured me this morning. And that’s true? You’ve no regrets?’

  ‘All right, one.’ She leaned towards Claudia. ‘Not only does it take an age to paint this wretched stuff on,’ she scratched at her forearm, ‘but the dye is one stage down from indelible. By the time I’ve finished scrubbing, my skin will be just the same colour as when I started, I’ll be that bloody sore.’

  Lars rolled his eyes. ‘And to think we’re hanging on to this tradition!’ He turned to Claudia. ‘You’ll be at the Dance?’

  ‘Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away,’ she assured him. ‘This is the moon that’s going to launch a thousand pruning shears across my vineyards.’

  Their laughter was still ringing in her ears as they moved arm in arm on through the crowd, and she watched long after Eunice had turned and shot her a broad, conspiratorial wink over her shoulder.

  Is any man better placed to dose his wife with extra minerals every day?

  Claudia thought of Eunice screwing her face up as he forced her to sip the vile brew.

  It’s no great science. You pulverize herbs, turnips, lettuce and broccoli until you’re left with the juice. Oh, don’t twist your face, woman. With a pinch of mustard, it’s practically palatable.

  Would he still be cracking jokes as his rich wife tried to lift her arm and discovered it would not move? That she could no longer swallow? Or speak? Or breathe? Would he still take her hand in both of his as Eunice slowly suffocated to death, her heart and her brain still healthy and fighting and keenly aware of what was happening to her? Would Lars kiss his wife’s paralysed eyes and tell her how proud he was then?

  As the sun began to push through the clouds, Claudia left the main square and wandered through the twisting narrow streets, where herbs and flowers had been strung between storeys in gaily coloured ropes and pennants flapped in the breeze. On every street corner, musicians thumped drums or clashed cymbals and Claudia thought she would either go deaf or return to the main square, but as she turned the corner by the basilica, well, well, well, guess who?

  ‘That’s why they play those percussion instruments,’ Larentia said, and once again Claudia was struck by the skilfully dyed hair, the fine golden fillets that had been woven through her exquisitely pinned curls, the pleated and flattering gown. ‘To drive away evil spirits.’ Larentia sniffed down her long nose. ‘Obviously the system is effective.’

  ‘Ren,’ Darius chided through a throat full of gravel. ‘It’s too early in the day to be catty.’

  ‘No, no, that’s quite all right,’ Claudia breezed. ‘Talk to any snake charmer and they’ll tell you that they need to squeeze the venom out before they can get any charm.’

  Larentia’s neck shot forward like a tortoise’s out of its shell. ‘Did you just call me a…?’

  ‘Asp me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Larentia. Oh, and before you say something you might regret, don’t forget you’re in company.’

  Claudia smiled radiantly at the rest of their party. The debonair playboy, looking particularly smart in his toga for this prestigious occasion. A well-turned out Thalia in green robe that complemented her eyes. And the little round man with the little round face that Claudia had met at the Festival of the Lambs. The future husband, she remembered. The one in the Cheese Merchants’ Relay.

  ‘Did you win?’ she asked him.

  ‘Second,’ he said ruefully. ‘Rex’s team won by a considerable margin, even though he’s a producer, not a merchant, and fielded a squad of army-trained runners. Still, it’s those tactics that won us an Empire, so I’m not complaining.’

  A decent, jolly little man, who didn’t deserve to have Thalia foisted on him. Especially an edited version! Claudia studied her, empty-eyed and as quiet as she was yesterday in the Temple of Fufluns, and realized that Terrence must have upped his daily dosage. In the eyes of the cheese merchant, Thalia was a docile, maybe even heartbroken widow. In reality, her brother had drugged his sister into compliance…

  And this was the man Claudia was supposed to announce her engagement to?

  She glanced at the ring on her betrothal finger—sapphires, Mercury’s stone—and her mind travelled back to a tall, dark-haired patrician being violently sick in the fishpond. She’d wanted to cheer him up by reminding him it was his idea to thwart Darius’s takeover with a marriage of convenience, but pulled back in the nick of time. Girls with criminal backgrounds don’t go blabbing to the Security Police that they’ve worked it so that their bridegroom jilts them at
the altar. Dear me, no, but as Terrence said, there were sufficient loopholes in the law, providing one knows where to look—and he hadn’t reached the ripe old age of thirty-eight and stayed single without looping himself dizzy. In the eyes of the State, though, betrothal was equal to marriage and once a sweet, innocent party has been jilted, it’s back to square one in the eyes of authority. Game, set and match, she’d thought at the time, and honestly, had any woman looked more sincere when she’d promised the long arm of the law that she’d forsaken her criminal habits for ever?

  But that was then and this was now...

  I like grey. Yes, indeed. Why couldn’t a thirty-year-old woman do something she wanted without constantly having to worry about other people’s opinions? Yet Thalia wasn’t even allowed to choose her own frocks, much less her own husband, and to ensure her obedience Terrence plied his sister with opiates. No wonder the poor cow rebelled whenever she got the chance! When Claudia married Gaius it had been a pact. A mutual agreement which (regardless of Larentia’s poison) both parties had entered with their eyes wide open. Having already palmed his sister off on an old man for reasons of political/financial/class alliance, which took absolutely no account of Thalia’s feelings, Terrence was set to do the same thing again, and who knows how an honest cheese merchant might react once he realizes he’s been duped by a self-centred neurotic shrew?

  ‘It was an absolutely ghastly marriage.’ Eunice’s words echoed back. ‘Hubby was a banker, much older than her, and they were constantly at each other’s throats, with Thalia never able to remember what the quarrel was about, while he could never forget.’

  At the time, the notion of Thalia arguing with anybody struck Claudia as odd. Now she realized that they’d quarrelled because argument was the only way Thalia could express herself. That was why she couldn’t remember what it was about. Nothing to do with forgetfulness or stupidity. She couldn’t remember for the simple reason that it wasn’t important. Fighting back was all that had mattered—the desperate need to exert some independence, prove she had some form of identity—until finally, between her husband, her brother and no doubt his father before him, the last flame of spunk was doused when the banker died at the hot springs. She hadn’t killed him. His own ego had seen to that, drinking too much, eating too much, exercising too little. Yet Thalia had been so conditioned by bullies that she actually believed she killed him, simply by wishing him dead. How much had Terrence paid Tarchis, she wondered?

  ‘Won’t you join us, my sweet?’

  When he planted a kiss on her cheek, Claudia felt her gorge rise. ‘As much as I’d love to, darling, a problem’s arisen with the shipping of last year’s vintage.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’ Fortune, there are times when I could kiss you! ‘Here’s my ride now.’

  The hired gig clip-clopping over the cobbles wasn’t hers, but Terrence wasn’t to know, and as she ran off to hail a very confused driver, she saw Larentia knocked aside by three boisterous youths waving an upended wine jug. As her mother-in-law went flying, Darius rushed forward and lifted her to her feet, and while the others fussed over the shocked Larentia, brushing the splattered dregs from her robe and checking for bruises and grazing, Claudia noticed that Darius had taken off after the drunken trio. She watched him grab one by the scruff of the neck. Yanked him back. Forced him to apologize to Larentia.

  ‘Cosa,’ Claudia instructed the driver.

  No longer the confident, spiteful, old battle-axe, was she, Larentia? Just a frail old woman whose hands were shaking, whose hair had fallen loose, and whose rouge stood out on her cheeks like ink spots.

  ‘Sorry, missie.’ The driver shrugged in apology. ‘I’m booked to drive the magistrate’s brother to his villa out in the country.’

  Claudia slipped off a silver bangle set with mother-of-pearl. ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘No, miss, don’t reckon it is.’ The bangle disappeared with a grin that showed every one of the driver’s three teeth. ‘Reckon the real fact is that my poor mule went lame and I couldn’t make the appointment.’

  As the mule cut a swathe through the actors and dancers, she glanced back. Above the bob of Etruscan caps and priestly mitres, Terrence’s sandy mop towered over Darius’s close Caesar-crop, Larentia’s squiffy gold ribbons and his sister’s immaculate coiffure. A day for theatricals in every sense, she reflected, as Larentia leaned on her fiancé’s arm. But wait!

  Suppose Felix was innocent?

  Suppose, for a moment, Tarchis was right and Felix ended up serving ten years down the silver mines for a crime he didn’t commit? How bitter would that make him?

  The driver chatted amiably as the gig passed through the city gates amid hordes of clamouring beggars, but for once his gossip fell on deaf ears.

  Claudia began to draw up a picture of a man who started out labouring—daytime donkeying, the tavern-keeper called it—and rose to riches through farming oysters in the Bay of Naples. A man who didn’t give up. When his first efforts off Cosa didn’t succeed, he moved south, to where presumably the climate, the tides, the rocks were more suitable, and he’d stuck with his disastrous first marriage for fifteen whole years. Years, moreover, that weren’t simply loveless but childless, and for a self-made man the desire to perpetuate his name must have been strong indeed.

  As the gig trotted past the Temple of Fufluns, its bronze tripods gleaming in a sun that had finally banished all clouds, she fleshed out her portrait of Felix. Coloured in the parts where loneliness and despair turned into joy with Mariana. How he moved his parents to Mercurium, one big happy family, even to divorcing Aurelia without acrimony. Hardworking, kind, caring, honourable. The picture grew—but there was a gap. A gap between the exhilarating moment, a mere few months after his divorce, when his new wife announces she’s pregnant and when his world collapses at the trial.

  Same old question: why would a man who had never been happier and was eagerly awaiting his first child dip his fingers into the imperial treasury? The assets that the State seized after his sentence proved he hadn’t needed the money. So what then? Not enough thrills in his life, he needed more? Well, he got them. Ten years’ hard labour, during which his father commits suicide, his mother ditto, while his in-laws disown his shamed pregnant wife, who has to lodge with a neighbour before she dies giving birth to their stillborn child. If Felix was guilty, he’d got all the thrills any man would need in a lifetime. But if he was innocent…

  If he was innocent, he’d have plenty of time to ask himself who set him up. And if six stalwarts of the community had independently testified in open court that they’d seen him taking money that he hadn’t taken, surely, he’d argue, it must be to cover their own tracks? Felix wouldn’t know why and by the time his ten years were up, he’d care even less. In fact, after ten years breaking rocks it’s doubtful he’d care about anything. He’d be released devoid of feelings, of all emotions, save one. Revenge. Revenge, which he plots like a draughtsman as he sets out to destroy those who destroyed him.

  Nice hypothesis, she thought as they approached the hot springs, only there was a problem. Darius has money. Lots of money, in fact, and this wasn’t the first time she’d questioned his wealth. One of her earliest actions had been to check on the artisans who’d carried out the renovation work and confirm that the bills hadn’t been charged to her. But no. The men had been paid cash for their efforts. (An opportunity Felix would surely not have overlooked, had the poor man but known he could have bankrupted what was left of Gaius’s estate!)

  Fine. If Darius is who he claims to be, his hands might well be as tough as those of a man who’d spent the last decade mining ore, and his skin might well be naturally tanned, rather than quickly brought up to colour quickly after being bleached from living underground like a mole. But if Felix was masquerading as Darius, how did he get his hands on so much cash? Felix’s assets had been stripped from him, every last copper quadran. It’s why his parents were thrown out of their h
ome. Why Mariana couldn’t afford a place of her own, or pay for a physician to guide her through childbirth. It was money, or rather lack of it, which cost her life and probably that of her child.

  And there lay the root of the problem. The Felix who stood trial twelve years ago could not possibly afford to install Candace in Larentia’s life, much less fund major renovations at the villa. Plus changing names, appearance, indeed planning every last detail entailed an awful lot of hard work and effort for a man who was guilty. So could Claudia be wrong about Darius? Could Felix be innocent after all?

  Yes, of course.

  And the sun would shine right through the night, and the moon would drop out of the sky!

  Claudia leaned back in the gig and stretched her feet out on the buckboard. This ought to work out quite nicely. Swap Felix for a clean sheet and I’m home and dry on the Security Police front. Not that she’d wanted to spring Felix on him as a total surprise. Humiliation is never an asset in one’s quest for a deal. But she was proud of the way she’d laid the foundations.

  If you were a seasoned soldier, a general for instance, how would you kill somebody on a dark, stormy night?

  By raising the question, it would occur to Marcus Cornelius sooner or later that, had Rex wanted to kill Lichas, he would have killed him. No messing, the boy would have been dead. None of this stab ’em and dump ’em stuff. Rex would claim self-defence and who wouldn’t have believed his story? Even Rosenna couldn’t be certain her brother hadn’t picked a fight with the wrong man. Same with Tages. He jumped me, I killed him. Quite right. National heroes do not hide murder. Rex would have left the bodies in the open as proof.