by Marilyn Todd
‘Tell me something,’ he said softly. ‘What were you and Sabina up to?’
‘Orbilio, you’ll travel to the Senate a lot faster if you get your damned facts straight.’
‘You’re saying there was no collusion?’
‘You’re the detective. Detect.’
A long silence followed, in which the drumming of the rain on the tiles played accompaniment to the splash of water in the fountain. The scent of pinks filled the cool night air, and a large-winged moth took advantage of the shelter to find nectar in a mallow. Whatever response she might have imagined, it wasn’t to hear him tell her:
‘Your curls have come loose again.’
‘What?’
‘They always do when you shake your head like that.’
This man was so irritating. ‘Come to the point, Orbilio.’
‘Ahem.’
The sound startled them both. Orbilio straightened up and nodded politely. Claudia had to peer round the warrior’s hips to see the intruder. The boy from the banquet? How odd.
‘Claudia Seferius?’ he asked.
She looked him up and down before replying. There was no emotion on his face, only that strange intensity. ‘So?’
Her reaction didn’t throw him. He merely stepped one pace forward and she could see a small mole on his chin. ‘Might I have a word? In private?’
Claudia drained her glass and positioned it carefully, end up, on top of a clipped laurel. ‘You can talk in front of Supersnoop here. He’ll only be eavesdropping in the background otherwise.’
Again no jolt to his confidence, not even a glance at Orbilio. ‘I thought it was time we were acquainted,’ he said casually.
‘Oh, and why’s that?’ she asked.
‘Because my name is Varius Seferius,’ he said. ‘I’m your late husband’s son.’
XXI
The rain might have moved on, but the air stayed thick and heavy, the clouds low and oppressive. The windows were wedged open, their hangings fixed back, yet still no breeze found its way to Agrigentum. Every minute of the night threatened to suffocate her and by morning Claudia’s shift was soaked through. Even the wine was warm.
She leaned over to fan Drusilla. The kittens, eyes rheumy like old men’s, were heady with their recent transition from wiggling to wobbling and were transmitting squeaks which ranged from smug look-at-me’s to frantic helps and back again, all within the space of five seconds. Their mother was content to let them learn the hard way. Claudia was not.
‘Come on, Smallfry, back to mum.’
She scooped up a little lost wanderer and placed the squirming, bleating bundle on the blanket, where he homed in on a warm, secure teat. Claudia swore Drusilla poked her tongue out deliberately.
‘What about that Varius insect?’ she asked, flapping the ostrich feathers over the cat.
‘Meowr.’
‘No, not a real insect, poppet, pay attention. I’m talking about that little creep who thinks he can pass himself off as my stepson.’ His visit last night had shaken her to the core, although she was far too experienced a trooper to let it show.
‘Why, that’s wonderful.’ Fountains and spring water couldn’t gush more profusely. ‘Did you hear that, Marcus? My dear, dear Gaius didn’t die in vain, he has a son to carry his name and father his heirs. Oh!’ She dabbed at her eye with her handkerchief. ‘I’m quite overcome, you must…(sob)…excuse me.’
Now that was acting. None of those wild, extravagant gestures made in the theatre, where it’s merely a question of throwing your voice and adopting the odd mannerism. This was the genuine article.
‘The question is, what do I do about him?’
Drusilla began to wash Smallfry’s ears as roughly as she could to teach him a lesson for wandering. Claudia could hear the rasp of her tongue on his tiny head and felt for Smallfry, the way he was jerked up and down, poor soul.
‘Mrrrr.’
‘That?’ Drusilla’s ears had pricked up at the scraping sound outside the door. ‘That’s just Urgulania’s slaves dragging the extra tables back out of the banqueting hall.’
She didn’t envy them their job of clearing up, and although the festivities might have peaked, they showed no signs of abating. All this for a local deity whose name began with a C or an F or something.
Cypassis returned, staggering under the weight of a large jug of fresh water. Juno be praised, it was cool. Claudia tipped the whole lot over her head.
‘What’s scheduled for this morning?’ she asked, drying her hair on a towel.
‘Hopscotch and darts, madam.’
The very thought of watching a large party of portly folk playing hopscotch with tunics hitched to their thighs and sweat pouring down their bloated faces, was too dire to contemplate.
‘Shall you be going in to breakfast, madam?’
Claudia pulled on a mint green sleeveless stola. Her face did not show the revulsion her stomach felt at the prospect of food, or the churning inside from her fear of what Varius might do. Think, girl, think! Blame the heat, blame the humidity, blame the noise of moving furniture, whatever the reason, Claudia’s brain had died and gone to heaven. Only the heart-thumping, gut-churning, sweat-inducing fear remained.
‘You stay here and fan Drusilla.’ She picked up Smallfry and kissed him noisily between his spiky, bedraggled ears.
‘Oh, madam! You’re not going out alone?’
‘I shall have Junius and I shall have Kleon,’ she snapped, replacing the kitten amongst its siblings. ‘I shall hardly be alone.’
‘But without a female attendant—’
‘Another word and I’ll slit your tongue clean up the middle.’
‘It’s not decent—’
‘And then rub in salt to stop it knitting together.’ She snatched up her purse, but the drawstring wasn’t tight and coins spilled over the floor. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
Marching down the atrium, she had to clap twice before her bodyguard materialized.
‘And you two,’ she hissed, smiling graciously at Urgulania as she passed, ‘will be cleaning toilets if you can’t move faster than that.’
‘I’m sorry—’ the Cilician began, but Claudia cut him short.
‘Get out there and hire me a car. Here!’ She fished a silver denarius out of her purse. ‘A nippy, two-wheeled job, Kleon, and make sure it’s not pulled by some sullen nag with a bent back who can barely lift a hoof. And tell the driver to take the tilt off. I want to feel the wind in my hair. Dear Diana, are you still here?’
Kleon blinked rapidly, thought to ask a question and then thought better of it. He was back so quickly, Claudia wondered whether he’d turfed someone out of a passing vehicle and, if so, resolved to promote him the instant they returned home.
‘Get that awning off!’ she commanded the driver.
‘I’m afraid it’s not detachable, milady.’
‘Do you want the damned fare or not?’
The driver stood his ground. ‘I do, milady, but I’m not prepared to wreck the vehicle for—’
Claudia drew a small knife from the folds of her stola and cut the rope. The tilt collapsed at the same speed as the driver’s expression. ‘Hop on,’ she instructed her slaves.
The driver held out his hands. ‘Please, milady! There’s only room for me and one passenger.’
Claudia studied the vehicle. ‘They can sit on the bar at the back.’
‘The car would tip over,’ he said querulously, ‘the mule couldn’t pull—’
Claudia jumped in and adjusted her skirts. ‘Junius. Kleon. Take the day off. And you—’ She turned to the driver, his face contorted with misery. ‘Get some speed up.’
The last thing Kleon heard as the car rattled down the street and out of sight was his mistress shouting, ‘Faster, you idle oaf!’
‘Wouldn’t fancy changing places with that poor sod,’ he said, jovially. ‘D’you reckon she was serious?’
‘What about?’
‘The day off, you daft b
ugger.’
The young Gaul kept his eyes on the road. ‘You’re new,’ he said, ‘so the quicker you learn Mistress Seferius means precisely what she says, the easier life will be.’
‘Yeah?’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Well in that case, I’m not hanging around this bleeding street any longer. What do you fancy?’
Junius shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what to do,’ he said, staring in the direction the car had taken.
Kleon nudged him in the ribs and pointed. ‘There’s a tart in that tavern who looks tasty. All long legs and big tits. Fancy a nibble?’
‘Not me. Thanks all the same.’
The Cilician leaned closer. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘I’ve heard about her, she’s good. Charges ten asses, but she’ll do us together for fifteen.’
‘No. Really.’
‘It’ll be fun. They say she’ll do anything, so if we use our imagination…’
‘What?’
‘You know.’ Kleon gave an exaggerated wink and nodded back towards the house. ‘We can pretend it’s the Mistress.’
He didn’t see the punch which laid him out.
XXII
The problem of her virginity was one which had occupied Acte’s mind for most of her adult life, but now, she thought, closing the orchard gate behind her, the matter was finally settled. And while the prospect of marriage at any age is exciting, a proposal at her age—coming out of the blue—made it ten times more thrilling.
She paused at the clipshed, deserted this time of year apart from its recent occupation by the fortune teller and her brother, but resisted the temptation to slip inside. Oughtn’t she to distance herself from the house? Find space to think? To make sense of this enormous change in her circumstances?
In a matter of days she, like Miss Sabina, would be able to wear the bridal veil, the betrothal ring, the saffron-coloured sandals, the Knot of Hercules. Her heart skipped a beat. Except she would be free to discard hers afterwards, and wear two bands in her hair instead of one.
Pinching her nose against the sulphurous fumes as she hurried past the bleaching yard, resembling a giant beehive with its circular frames over which the whitened wool had been stretched, Acte thought that virginity was probably the only thing she’d had in common with Miss Sabina. Especially since Miss Sabina remained a virgin through service to Vesta, whereas Acte’s circumstances were pretty well unique in the whole of the Roman Empire. Women, even slaves, were seldom allowed to remain single, the marriage laws being what they were. It was only through the Master’s intervention, his rigid enforcement of the Chattel Rule (which said a man’s slaves were his possessions, he could do what he liked with them), that she wasn’t foisted off on some uncouth lout as breeding stock.
Giving the dyeshed as wide a berth as possible, Acte turned her eyes to the ground. She’d left the Master having a massage with Diomedes, so the small amount of time she had to spare was precious. She couldn’t afford to waste it on chitchat if the inevitable happened. Which it did.
‘Got a minute, Acte?’
The voice of Nikias, the foreman, carried across the yard and she felt bad about pretending she hadn’t heard him. He was a nice man, Nikias—a widower, solid and dependable—and she supposed she could have married him, had she wanted. There was nothing to stop her from choosing a husband of her own, only—
From the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth twist in disappointment. Too bad. Today his arms were black to the elbow from the privet dye, last week they had been yellow from the rowan bark. Sure, Nikias was nice. But who wants a man with multi-coloured arms in their bed at night?
Acte’s first choice today would have been Pharos Point, but since it took a full half-hour to reach the lighthouse she turned left instead. To every other slave, going to the birch grove was tantamount to visiting a leper colony, a place to be avoided at all costs on account of how it was haunted. Acte despised them for their narrowmindedness, but chose never to disabuse their talk of ghostly apparitions walking and moaning and generally doing their damnedest to spook people. It guaranteed her privacy there—and privacy, for a slave, came second only to freedom.
The climb was energetic, the heat intolerable, and by the time she reached the grove her tunic was sticking to her skin. The clouds were low, trapping the heavy, humid, sultry air. She could barely breathe. The leaves, thin and papery and yellow, hung limp. Mostly the grove comprised silver birch, graceful and airy, but theirs was not an exclusive colony. Cobnuts, for instance, had fallen around the smooth brown bole of the hazel, red shiny fruits hung on the haw. Spotty red toadstools fed off the roots of the birch. Acte settled herself against the grey, scaly bark of the solitary charcoal-oak, its evergreen canopy incongruous among the falling leaves of its fellows. A blackbird flew in and began systematically to strip the berries off a rowan.
In the middle of the copse, the flat white rocks of this limestone outcrop lay like so many fissured tables waiting to be set for a picnic. Acte used her fingertips to pull her damp tunic away from her body and began to flap it like a fan. Fancy thinking this place was haunted! True, a man, a Collatinus slave, had been killed here some years ago. Stabbed in the back by his jealous lover, a girl from Sullium, freeborn and with the finances to buy him his own freedom, and Acte spared little sympathy for the man who had squandered everything for a roll in the hay with a kitchen maid. Except…well, maybe it said something for his qualities as a lover, and since she had no experience on that score, perhaps she oughtn’t to judge him so harshly?
Occasionally (but only occasionally) she’d been tempted herself to indulge in a quick fling with one of the men—and weren’t there some handsome devils about?—in order to learn what it was the other women enjoyed so vocally and she was missing out on. Except too much was at stake. Suppose she got pregnant? The Master demanded total commitment, and Acte would not put her job at risk, although often over the years she had regretted not forming a romantic attachment. It was an unfortunate by-product of the education the Master had given her that she saw the workers for what they were—coarse, ill-mannered, uneducated bumpkins. Fifteen years ago they might have been for her, but not any more.
Thus the conundrum persisted, and long nights passed dreaming of a man to hold, this terrible ache for the touch of a hand, the brush of a kiss, the whispers, the glances, the ecstasy. Well, the problem was solved now. Maybe not the way she’d hoped for and certainly not the way she’d expected, but solved it was. And what a thrill! What a change!
Her ears picked up a rustle on the autumn floor and she peered round the trunk of the oak.
‘Hello?’
The blackbird, fully gorged on rowan berries, flew past her and Acte smiled. Fancy a bird making you edgy! She was getting tense, the very thing a bride shouldn’t do. She’d have to snap out of it before she faced the Master, because she intended to stay calm and collected when she told him about her decision. Heaven knows, it wouldn’t be easy!
Sixteen years ago, when she arrived, she’d been terrified of him. Daily his leonine roars threatened to shake the very foundations of the villa and she, little more than a child, had been forced to cope alone. Matidia, just turned forty and no less vapid than she was now, was clueless when it came to handling a situation whereby the Master was still master of everything except his body and Aulus was no help to anyone. He made it clear from the outset that as far as he was concerned, it was a disaster the old man hadn’t been killed by the horse that threw him. His only consolation lay in the hope that his father’s days might be numbered in single figures.
All this Acte had picked up within her first few weeks before she gradually realized the Master’s bellows were born not of temper, but of frustration. This still-handsome and vigorous man had, by one cruel stroke of the gods, been reduced to the level of a turtle locked inside an immobile shell, and she began to recognise that his insults and his rantings were simply rage against himself.
Imperceptibly, the roles began to change until it reached the stage where Acte supe
rvised his diet, his medicine and his rest periods with unprecedented strictness, while spending every waking moment as his companion, his eyes and ears to the outside world. In return Eugenius taught her to read and to write, to discuss philosophy and politics, to appreciate art and music and poetry and literature.
He had, in his way, set her free.
Not, she reflected wryly, that it was all plain sailing. All too often he’d pinch her bottom, tweak her nipples, slide his hand up her skirt, and because she was a slave and therefore unable either to refuse or to retaliate, she found recourse in pretending not to learn the lessons he so painstakingly taught her. Of the two, his sexual frustrations proved less important than his intellectual frustrations, and so Eugenius Collatinus made his choice and the pornographic friezes on his wall became his compromise. Here he could indulge his passion for past appetites, his imagination doing the work his poor manhood could not.
When, later, the groping began again, Acte had frustrations of her own and the next time he cupped his hand round her breast, they both knew her protests were more for propriety than for anything else. Lying alone at night, desperate to feel the pulsations of love inside her, she wondered how it was that this old man, with his crinkled face and papery hands, could bring her to the brink of heaven just by fondling her breasts and kissing her nipples?
Not that it went further than that. She made it clear, when he first tried parting her thighs, that he could touch her only through her tunic, she wouldn’t let him play with her as he wanted. At the time she didn’t quite understand why (it certainly wasn’t from a moral standpoint, there were times she’d have given her right arm for gratification!), but her instinct had guided her well. Had she given in, she’d have had nothing left to bargain with and above all Eugenius Collatinus was a businessman. Negotiation was a currency he understood.
A crackle of twigs on the far side of the rocks interrupted her thoughts. It was probably a snake, sluggish and sleepy, heading back to its hole, but—
‘Hello? Who’s there?’
Not even a leaf rustled in the heat and the stillness, and Acte’s ears strained for sounds.