by Marilyn Todd
It was here, in the central courtyard redolent with hyssop, wormwood and borage, which reinforced the notion that Sergius was having no problems with his investment portfolio. And it was here, in the gardens, with the mist fast dissipating, that Claudia made her resolution.
Don’t get mad. Get one up.
I will sue you to Hades and back for what you’re putting me through. I will take your fountains which sing and dance and make rainbows in the sunshine. I will take your parrots which perform antics with such insouciant charm. I will even take their topiaried counterparts which spread box and laurel wings to shelter white marbled busts and mythic bronze beasts. Which, of course, will also be mine.
She poked her tongue into the corner of her mouth. How did Sergius make his money? Bruised and bleeding as she was yesterday, and long before she saw the pens of exotic animals, Claudia was aware that there were neither vines nor olives to suggest traditional rural income. One thing, though. Sergius sure was a man to maximize his potential. None of the outbuildings (and there were scores of them) encroached on this narrow, precious fertile finger, but where herds of cattle might walk, gazelle grazed. Where sweeps of wheat might grow, row upon sprouting row of lupin and vetch, clover, bracken and spelt flourished as animal fodder. What, she wondered, waggling her finger through the bars of the parrot’s cage, is going on here?
Her gaze fell beyond the archway to the wild, untamed hills beyond. Thanks to the fog, this was her first real view of them, and what a contrast to the broad skies and rolling terraces of her Etruscan vines. Well aware that Umbria oozed streams galore and was positively bursting with natural springs, woodland floors carpeted with hellebores and spurges, anemones and violets were not for Claudia. She felt her shoulders slump. How long, Drusilla, before I can leave this godforsaken wilderness? Come to think of it, what on earth possessed her to leave Rome? Bloody Rollo. He was her bailiff, for gods’ sake, he was paid to sort things out!
‘I ask you!’ She addressed the parrot. ‘What’s the point of employing a chap if he can’t handle the odd spot of arson?’
‘Erk?’ The feathers on the bird’s crest perked up.
‘You heard. Arson.’
When news of the attacks first filtered through, Claudia had blithely dismissed the whole sordid business You’d be surprised at the number of people who get a thrill from sending flaming arrows into a fully stocked barn or tipping a pot of blazing naphtha over a neighbour’s thatched roof. Hence some pea-brained moron torching olive groves was by no means noteworthy. Until he started in on vineyards. Not any old vineyards, either. These, if you please, stood adjacent to her own.
Now arson isn’t difficult. Not with barns, not with roofs and especially not with olives. That lovely oily bark flares up in next to no time, and if you synchronize your blaze with a nice strong wind, you’ve got a fireball whipping through the groves like breath from a dragon. But vines?
‘That, my little lovebird, is where our friend came a cropper.’
The bird stretched out a shiny black wing and tipped its head on one side.
‘Arson in a vineyard is a labour-intensive exercise. It takes time to hack through the thick thorn hedge, time to smear oil on the newly pruned vines and even more time to stop and fire each one individually.’
In consequence, although he hadn’t been caught, a good description of the arsonist was circulating. So what was Rollo’s problem? What was behind that scribbled, secretive note, ‘Urgent, come at once’?
With April fast approaching, a month almost entirely devoted to games and festivals, Claudia had been loath to leave, but Rollo was not a man to cry wolf. However, if this was purely a request for personal approval to prune a few vines—in other words, if I’ve been run off the road by a gang of rowdies, had my bones battered, my flesh pulverized, my cat scared to death and a corpse thrown at me, all in the name of administration—then you can kiss your giblets goodbye, Rollo, and that’s just for starters.
‘Ouch!’
She snatched her finger back and sucked at the point where the beak had nipped, but the parrot merely winked in a particularly coarse manner then bobbed up and down on its perch.
‘I’ll have you know, you red-beaked budgie, it’s not easy being a widow.’
Good life in Illyria, she hadn’t married her husband for his looks! He was old, he was a ball of blubber and the state of his dental work left a lot to be desired, but the wine merchant had one massive thing in his favour. He was rich. Filthy, stinking, rolling-in-it rich and when he’d done the decent thing and shuffled off his mortal coil rather earlier than expected, Gaius had then done something to exceed even Claudia’s happy expectations. He’d bypassed his whinging relatives and willed the entire estate to his twenty-four-year-old widow.
Really, she thought, she had been very fond of the old chap.
Bless him, he’d left her enough money to last her a lifetime, provided, at the rate she was spending it, she did not expect to see thirty. Unfortunately, even that inheritance would come to naught unless she extricated herself from this trial fiasco. Dear Diana, so many problems had piled up in the seven months since her husband popped off, they were multiplying faster than rabbits in warm weather and she was hanging on by her fingernails as it was. She certainly had no intention of watching the business go under simply because some turnip got himself knifed on her doorstep.
‘You enjoy my breakfast, yes?’ The voice in her ear made her jump. It belonged, she saw now, to the same man with long shaggy hair and check pantaloons she’d mistaken earlier for a servant.
‘I am Taranis.’ Vertical crevices appeared in his wide cheeks, which one had to assume was a smile. ‘I am Celt.’
‘About your breakfast…I thought—’
‘Ach.’ He dismissed it with a slicing motion of his hand. ‘You think I am slave? I let you into secret, you are not the first.’
No, she thought, probably not. Slaves would be forced either to shave orgrow a proper beard, whereas she had a feeling this stubble was a regular feature. Also, slaves would be steered towards the bath house now and again.
‘You no recognize me from murder scene? I understand. Dead man come as shock. Me, I am friend of Tulola. You?’ Black eyes loitered on the fullness of her breasts, made more prominent since the borrowed tunic was a tad tight across the bosom and therefore tended to emphasize the curves.
‘Just passing through.’
His eyebrows met in the middle. ‘You are lost?’ Claudia explained about her clash with the thugs. ‘Savages!’ He spat in the dust. ‘They rape you, yes?’
‘They rape me, not on their bloody lives.’
‘Oh.’ The gleam went out of the Celt’s eyes. ‘I need to piss.’ He made a cross between a bow and a hop, no doubt the sort of gesture that had evolved in those Barbarian climes to imply courtesy but which, in reality, was probably just another means to keep warm.
Since the parrot was now engrossed in preening its mate, Claudia moved across to the fishpond, where graceful filaments of algae floated in the margins. Minerva’s orchestrating this, she thought wryly. Yesterday was her festival and while artisans and doctors, scribes and schoolmasters left votive offerings up on the Capitol, and white-robed priests led young heifers to the sacrificial blade by their gilded and beribboned horns, forceful, striding Minerva was playing practical jokes on those who’d displeased her. Claudia dabbled her fingers in the fishpond and decided that, if not top of the goddess’s hit list, she probably ran a close second.
The ripples that nibbled the surface were reminiscent of the ones that lapped Genua harbour in the days when she used to dance for a living. Days when a tunic of this quality, regardless of colour, would have been an object to die for. Kill for, even. The sort of tunic that, had one come into her possession, she could have sold for her keep for a month. A whole month without leers and jeers, sticky hands and mouthed obscenities… She shuddered involuntarily. Thank the gods, those days were way, way behind her. A spot of forgery here, a new identity
there, topped by marriage to a fat and unsuspecting wine merchant—what could go wrong? Claudia rested her chin in her hands. Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, that’s what. What is it with life, she thought. You map it all out, bury your past so deep that, in comparison, the Emperor’s Spanish silver mines are mere scratches on the surface…then along he comes. High in the Security Police and with a nose like a truffle-hog, that damned patrician (born rich, born respectable, what does he know about life in the gutter?) comes snooping and discovered that dancing wasn’t the only way she’d earned her living.
A squad of blue tits descended to search the burgeoning leaves for grubs as Claudia’s deliberations projected themselves into the future. Should this Macer fellow prove unequal to the task of investigating violent deaths, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he invites the Security Police to help—and I can do without it being made common knowledge, thank you very much, that there were certain other services on offer in Genua, apart from the dancing. Oh yes, she thought, as the tiny birds twittered and quarrelled and performed their acrobatics, the very last thing I need in my well-ordered life is the intrusion of some wavy-haired aristocrat with a twinkle in his eye who thinks that if he covers his mouth with the back of his hand, no one notices he’s laughing. Not that Claudia remembered what he looked like, of course. Good gracious, no, it was just that…
A shadow fell across the fishpond and a second reflection appeared in the water. Dark, sultry, her heavy breasts heaving, the girl who’d hung around the atrium yesterday leaned low over the sweet-smelling flags. The ripples on the water could take no blame for the contortions in her face.
‘I know what you’re up to,’ she hissed. ‘But you won’t get away with it.’
Pretending to study the irises, Claudia watched the scowling reflection for several seconds. Presumably another sister—nine, ten years younger than Tulola?—but, in true Pictor style, no one had bothered to introduce them and any reluctance on this madam’s part wasn’t down to shyness.
‘You just watch me,’ she replied evenly.
Sulkyboots was unfazed. ‘No,’ she rasped. ‘You watch me.’ She kicked a pebble into the fishpond and both reflections disintegrated.
Then suddenly the girl’s breath was hot on Claudia’s cheek and she smelled sweet aniseed from her mouth.
‘Interfere and I’ll kill you.’
A small obsidian blade was suddenly thrust in front of Claudia’s eyes.’
‘I mean it,’ she spat. ‘Fuck with me and I’ll kill you.’
III
Balbilla squeezed past the counter and peered up the main street for the umpteenth time. That fog had lifted, you could see a long way, but there was still no sign of Fronto. She chewed her lip and frowned.
‘What’s wrong, love?’
‘Nothing, Dad.’ Umpteen times they’d had that exchange, too.
High noon and market day at that, the street was as busy as it ever got. Word was, once you could hardly move through the crush, leastways, not without getting your bum pinched, but Balbilla had been spared that indignity. When the Emperor diverted the road, she was just eight years old and it had been left to her father to explain why folk didn’t travel this way no more. And, later, why her family and friends had moved away.
‘We won’t have to move, will we, Dad?’
Her mam had died giving birth to her brother, so it had been just the three of them, Balbilla and her Dad and the baby, and even he’d died before he turned three. She didn’t want to have to move on.
‘Course not, Bill.’ She remembered the way her father had ruffled her hair. ‘We’re Tarsulani, we don’t go no place.’
And so they hadn’t, but the trade from his shop had dwindled. Once, long ago, he ran a profitable clothes dealership. Then he moved into the second-hand market. And five years ago, around the time she met Fronto, he’d been reduced to selling rags.
Her nose wrinkled as she squinted into the sun. All around Tarsulae the same daily scenes were being enacted. Kiddies playing, dogs grubbing, spits turning, gossips embroidering the meagre news. There were mingling smells of over-used cooking oil, badly tanned hides, temple incense and yeasty bread. By the Mausoleum Gate, the little beggar girl who’d been blinded by her mother so she could earn more rattled her bowl, and opposite the Temple of Vulcan, the brickmaker was bad-mouthing his pregnant wife, taking out on her the fact that he had no livelihood left in this ramshackle town. Sneaking out from the basilica was the advocate’s bow-legged secretary, off to tup his boss’s wife while the lawyer was engaged with a client, and down by the tavern was that new Prefect, she’d forgotten his name, adjusting his chinstrap before clambering into the saddle. But no Fronto.
‘Dad, I’ve got to nip home, all right?’
It was one of his bad days, she felt awful at leaving him, but she just had to know. Besides. There was something she had to tell Fronto. Something important.
‘Want me to close up?’
Her father shook his grey face vigorously. In all his life, he’d never shut during the day and he wouldn’t start now, sick or not.
‘Well, I’ll be back soon as I can.’
Chances were, no customers would call to bother him, and if they did he wouldn’t notice. He spent a lot of time sleeping now she’d got him that draught from the herbalist.
‘Why don’t the old sod give up like any normal bloke?’ Fronto had been most indignant when she’d told him she intended to help out in the shop. ‘Croesus, I’ve offered him dosh enough to see his days out, he don’t need to work.’
‘It’s charity, love, and you know how Dad feels about hand-outs.’ Stubborn was too kind a word. Many’s the time she’d begged him to move in with them. (Well, she could clear it with Fronto later, couldn’t she?)
‘You’ve got a nice place, Bill, and don’t think I don’t appreciate the offers but this here’s my home. Was my father’s before me, and his father’s before that.’
Balbilla sighed. Four generations had slogged to build up the business and a whim of the Emperor’s knocked it flat. Just like that.
Not that Fronto let the matter rest. ‘What’ll it look like, Billi, my wife working in a dump like that? Jupiter alone knows where half those rags have come from, and you know what tongues are round here. Look at Fronto, they’ll say. Can’t keep his young wife satisfied.’
Balbilla giggled. ‘Well, I know better, don’t I!’
The age gap never bothered her, even with him being nearly as old as her Dad. The only thing that made her self-conscious was him having a position and all. She paused at the gate. Even if she weren’t quite sure what that position was… All the same, she thought, hurrying on, this was her father they were talking about.
‘I can’t leave him in the lurch.’
‘Of course you can, you soft dollop.’ Whenever Fronto scooped her into his arms, she felt six years old, loved and protected. ‘I’ve worked my balls off to give you the best, Billi. Tell him to sling his bloody hook.’
How could she, though? She’d stood by while his family, his town, his business and now finally his health had trickled away. She owed her father that much.
Dad’s right, though, Balbilla thought, stepping into the cool of the colonnade. It is a nice house. Grander than anything I ever expected, but then Fronto was in the army twenty years, he was bound to have a stash put by, stands to reason. Each time she looked around she felt the same tingle of excitement. A garden of her own! Servants, fancy linens, rings for every finger. Even a wet-nurse for the twins! And you wouldn’t have thought it of Fronto, not to look at him.
Yet for all the gilded stucco and pretty mosaics, the house was nothing without her husband. Balbilla swallowed hard. It was dead important, too, what she had to tell him. She searched around for a rough edge of her nibbled nails to chew. He’s never gone off without saying nothing before. Idolizes them babies, he does, always tucks them up when he can—or at least said so when he can’t. She thought back to yesterday. What was it he’d said?
There was work a bit north, that’s right. Nothing much, and he’d be back by supper time. She remembered that last bit. Back by supper time. Because he liked his food, did Fronto, and she always tried to give him a good meal to go to bed on.
When he was home, that is. Since the army he didn’t really have a job—not what Dad called a proper job, any road. Private commissions Fronto calls them. Nothing regular, but he always treats his Billikins to a new tunic or a silver bangle when he comes home, and adds a bit to the house—a bust or a frieze or something—so it pays handsome. Whatever it is.
Well, I suppose I’ll have to wait before giving him me message. Balbilla shrugged her shoulders, kissed her sleeping infants then trudged back up the hill towards her father’s shop. I expect he’s got held up, she thought as she passed the flushed face of the advocate’s secretary sneaking back into the law courts, and we’ll have a good old laugh when I tell him how worried I was.
‘You daft pudden,’ he’ll say. ‘You know I gets called out all hours.’
Oh, he was a popular man was her Fronto. She just wished she knew why he hadn’t come home last night.
*
Watched pots never boil, this is a fact. They simmer gently for hours and hours, then the instant you turn your back, over they go, leaving a godawful mess for some poor sod to mop up. So staring into space with your fingers crossed is unlikely to improve a cat’s navigational facilities. Neither, Claudia acknowledged ruefully, is self-imposed starvation. While the midday meal had come and gone, who knows, there might be scraps in the dining room?
Well, there was a scrap. Of sorts. On the couch beneath the window a knot of squirming limbs and tangled linen writhed like serpents, and a man’s doughy buttocks rose and fell in the grip of long, hennaed talons. Claudia spun on her heel, but a woman’s voice restrained her.
‘Don’t rush off, sweetie. I’ve been meaning to catch you.’
Claudia’s fingers remained gripped round the door latch as she considered Tulola’s definition of the verb ‘catch’. ‘Gooseberries were never my favourite fruit,’ she said to the woodwork. ‘You can join me in the garden when you’re not quite so…busy.’
