by Marilyn Todd
‘Bring the curtain up on this vile trade, of course, and even if it means pulling his toenails out to obtain a list of his confederates, you can be sure that by the time I’m finished, not only Pul and Cyrus, but every rotten apple in the pile will have been rooted out and pulped. Hop in.’ Claudia’s legs could not have moved if they’d wanted to. ‘Orbilio…’
‘That’s me.’ Only the top of his head was visible as he stashed the basket underneath the seat.
‘What would be the consequences of not compiling that list?’
‘Hmm.’ He puffed out his cheeks as he considered the prospects. ‘I suppose the extortion would ease up for a while, but with so many mechanisms still in place and built on such solid foundations, even with the army being vigilant, I don’t see how you could stop it opening again two or three months down the line.’
As the light began to fade, pictures appeared before her in the water. The tear-stained faces of women forced into prostitution. Children, made old before their time, stripped of their innocence as they slaved in sweatshops to pay off the thugs.
A flash of white lightning shot down the valley.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Marcus breezed. ‘We’re quite safe on the water.’
Like Virginia was safe? Claudia leaned over the stream and brought up the pies and the apricots and quite possibly yesterday’s breakfast. When she held out her arms, they were quivering. Holy Jupiter, what had she done? Not only had Spes, the goddess of hope on whose virtues this town had been modelled, abandoned her people, Claudia had contrived to kick them while they were down. Her stomach turned somersaults.
The evidence had been there all along and she had chosen, yes chosen, to disregard it and for what reason? Simply because she hadn’t believed Tarraco capable of cold-blooded murder. Well, at least there was a core of truth in that. The bastard employed minions to do his dirty work.
She leaned over and was sick a second time. From the outset, Tarraco had manipulated her to lure her in and win his trust. His trust!
Barbed lightning flickered, reflecting double in the oily waters of the lake and thunder echoed, low and distant, round the wooded crucible. Her tunic was sticking to her body like a second skin, but despite the heat from the celestial inferno, she found herself shivering. Sometimes, Claudia Seferius, you can be a very silly cow.
Her memory clock flipped back to that first night on the sun porch to where, out on the island, shortly before dawn, a light had sprung up. Instinct told her at the time it was a signal and sure enough, shortly afterwards wasn’t Tarraco hauling on the oars of his little grey rowboat, heading home? Right back then, Claudia had sensed he’d been visiting some kitchen wench with dimpled cheeks and a heaving, ample bosom, the pair of them rolling like puppies in the hay, and now it made sense more than ever. To counteract the shrill and desiccated Lais, Tarraco would tumble with girls who asked for nothing in return and left behind only a smile, to restore the masculinity and pride sucked out by women such as Lais and Virginia. But suppose his wife had got wind of the affair? How would that make her feel?
To try and comprehend what made him flip and snuff out her life with such brutality, Claudia put herself in the other woman’s shoes. Tuder had brought her out to Plasimene, and in an instant Lais had been upheaved from a bustling, lively environment in Rome to an island on which she was virtually marooned. With Spesium not yet in existence and Atlantis in its mere infancy, what desolation must Lais have felt? Then, when Tuder dies, she sees in the mirror a middle-aged woman with twenty long and lonely years ahead. Desperation sets in. She tries to turn back the years with dyes and cosmetics and girlish attire—and then, whoosh, Tarraco drops from the sky. Brooding good looks apart, Lais is charmed by his attentions, flattered by the court he pays her. He’s rich. He can’t be after her money. Which leaves only one scenario. Tarraco must love her for herself.
She doesn’t question his comings and his goings, she adores him. He heaps wealth upon her, upon the island. Peacocks appear on the scene, bronzes, splendid works of art—demonstrations, surely, of his fidelity. His love. Until one day she finds out about the kitchen wench. Tormented, she follows him and sees the laughter, the romping, all the things she never shared with him…
Desperate and betrayed, she confronts him. Mocks his lack of education, his lowly birth, perhaps even his lovemaking skills. Years of low self-esteem burst their banks. Tarraco flips. And too late Lais discovers the true meaning of the phrase drop-dead sexy—
‘We need to get going,’ Marcus said. ‘It’s not safe to be under trees with lightning about.’
His warning passed over her head. Like Lais, like Virginia, she’d been conned by cheap tricks, though it was easy to see why women fell for him. Not his muscled good looks, not even his arrogance. It was the irresistible aura of danger. They would have sensed it, as Claudia had sensed it, but men and women reacted so differently. Marcus, she recalled, had shown instinctive hostility. But this was no time for self-flagellation. To acknowledge that, due to her stupidity, he’d go to ground until it became safe to strike up again. When it would be innocents, not Claudia, who’d pay…
‘Suppose Tarraco couldn’t talk?’ she asked.
‘Ha!’
‘No, really. Suppose, for some reason, he wasn’t able to? Pul or Cyrus could still provide the list of confederates, right?’
Marcus laughed. ‘Pul is not the type to buckle under interrogation, not even torture, it would be a matter of honour with him, and Cyrus, I can tell you now, will fall on his sword the second he sees us coming to arrest him, it’s patrician creed. But have no fear, my pretty damsel, I know human nature. Our little Spanish captive will sing like a linnet.’
‘Actually.’ Claudia smiled a sickly smile. ‘There might be a problem with that.’
‘Trust me, he’ll sing. Now what are you hanging about for, we need to get back to the jailhouse.’
‘I tried to tell you when we arrived…’
Preoccupied with shipping his oars, Orbilio merely grunted a ‘huh?’
‘The thing is,’ she drew a deep breath, ‘I paid a visit to Tarraco yesterday.’
‘And?’
‘And…’ She swallowed hard. ‘I let him out.’
XXX
As Jupiter shook his great cloak of storm clouds, Livia, wife of the Emperor, Augustus, beckoned her servant across. The window of her private, upstairs chamber was shuttered. A single flame burned from the lampstand, casting two shadows across the polished cedarwood boards, one tall and slender, the other stumpy and misshapen.
‘You have done well, Spaco,’ Livia said. ‘But then,’ she added with a smile, ‘you usually do. What enticing cocktail did you serve up this time?’
‘Aconite, baneberry.’ The dwarf smiled in return. ‘The odd dash of hemlock, our old friend rock cedar…’
‘He suspected nothing?’ she marvelled. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘Right up to his last living breath, he believed it to be an illness brought on by the tension. Even the hallucinations I managed to convince him were the product of too little food for his system to work on.’
‘Surely the doctor…?’
The assassin spread his hands in a simplistic gesture, and Livia nodded in mutual understanding. The plague may have peaked, but bodies were still piling up. What careworn physician would think twice about the nephew of Sabbio Tullus succumbing to dysentery in this heat?
Despite the lateness of the hour, the crisis which ravaged the Empire meant that the clamour of a hundred bawling scribes, petitioners, justices and heralds still drifted up from below. Livia heard all of them and listened to none. Around her, on the walls, Dido and Aeneas played out their bitter tragedy in paint and on an inlaid tortoiseshell table a crystal bowl shaped like a duck perfumed the chamber with its candied contents.
‘Your loyalty, Spaco, will not be forgotten.’ The chamois drawstring purse chinked when it changed hands. ‘And you say there is more?’
‘Oh, yes. Just as your majesty
predicted, there was no question of him not falling for that ploy of a burglar breaking in expressly to steal his papers and, as my lady also predicted, he set his own assassin on the trail to kick over the traces. First, his uncle; then his uncle’s agent—’ ‘The chit who broke into the depository?’
‘According to the fat man,’ Spaco replied, ‘the situation in Atlantis is—and I quote—under control. I think we can safely agree on what that means, the man was no slouch. In fact,’ he sniggered, ‘so desperate was he to retrieve his client’s property, he returned with this.’
With his tongue pressing out a lump in his cheek, he handed over the letter sent to Orbilio from the Head of the Security Police, mistaken by the fat man for the genuine article, and watched the face of the Emperor’s wife crease up with laughter. ‘Fools, the pair of them,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Nothing, but fools.’ She popped a candied cherry in her mouth and turned her considerations to the deeper implications of her servant’s report. ‘What plans have you for this fat man?’ she asked eventually.
‘Already disposed of,’ the dwarf replied airily. Popped his very last cardamom. ‘No loose ends remain, trust me.’
‘I do, Spaco,’ she said softly. ‘I do.’
With his ugly face suffused with pleasure, the diminutive assassin hammered his fist against his heart in salute as he retreated towards the trapdoor at the far end of the chamber, but her imperial majesty had already seated herself and was occupied with distaff and spindle when her husband popped his head round the door.
‘Spinning again?’ he mocked gently.
She simply smiled and said, ‘You know how it relaxes me, dear.’
It was unlikely, she decided, preoccupied as he was with the business of reining in the Empire, that Augustus would have heard the dwarf’s footsteps on the secret, wooden staircase.
Come to that, it was doubtful a mouse could have heard them.
*
Out along the Athens Canal, the heat throbbed like a brickworks kiln as Claudia leaned her arms on the balustrade and watched forked lightning dance across a sky the colour of driftwood. Why don’t you rain? Get it over with. But she knew in her heart, as another thunderclap drowned out the gurgling from the marble nymphs’ jugs, that this was yet another twist of Fate’s knife. Another spoke in her wheel of personal fortune.
‘You let him go?’ Orbilio had said slowly. ‘You set Tarraco free?’
They had been rowing back to shore and Claudia deliberately trailed her fingers in the water to avoid catching his hang-dog expression and explained that she didn’t, at the time, think he’d killed Lais.
‘Half of that I can’t quibble with,’ Marcus had replied so quietly she had to strain for the words. ‘The part where you didn’t think.’ She heard him sigh as he pulled on the oars, and wished to hell he’d shout at her, or swear or throw a tantrum. Instead he shook his head sadly from side to side. ‘Oh, Claudia. Why must you always rush in feet first to follow your heart?’
‘Wouldn’t one have to be curled in a ball to go feet first and still follow one’s heart?’ That ought to do the trick. Spur him into anger. But Marcus Cornelius did not rise to the bait.
‘Why not hang on for a while? Even—dare I suggest it—talk it over with me first?’
What could Claudia say? That if she’d waited, Cyrus would not have granted her permission to visit the prisoner? That, if she lived to be five hundred like the ancient Sibyl of Cumae, she could never justify to this high-born policeman her faith in a low-born Spanish gigolo?
Now, as the storm lowered itself on its hunkers over Plasimene, smells of roasted duck and game from the banqueting hall became entwined with the colonnade’s scents of marigolds and bay, and the clatter of knives on silver platters made music with the thunder along the Athens Canal. The combination of pleasure and oppression made her feel faint.
That she had believed in Tarraco was what made it so bloody hard to swallow! Eight years of acting the role of, what did he call it, ‘pleasure boy’ had honed his acting skills and with hindsight, Claudia saw that, after killing the bear, he was not just reading her character. The professional had been sizing her up.
With a violent shove, a terracotta pot filled with white, scented lilies went flying off the balustrade, to smash into a thousand smithereens. By admitting his crimes, actually even stressing his guilt (‘The evidence is overwhelming, is it not?’), Tarraco had manipulated her into believing him innocent, and now, thanks to her, he was free. Free. To keep his head down until the dust had settled. To slither back when the furore died down and step up his filthy campaign.
Croesus, he was going to get away with it, too.
Claudia’s hands raked her hair. With any number of caves and hidey-holes dotted round these wild, Etruscan hills, he could be anywhere. Him and his cronies, biding their time—and how long before the authorities stopped searching? If, indeed, they began. Claudia sent another pot crashing to its doom. As long as the gang remained at large, the townspeople would be too terrified to testify against them for fear of retribution, which begged the question, on what evidence did this conspiracy exist? The hunch of a young investigator whose ambitions were widely recognized? Backed up by a woman whose double-bedded accommodation he was paying for? A woman, moreover, connected to a potential treasonable theft?
Goddammit, were Tarraco to spend a week holed up in those hills, he’d be lucky.
Well. Claudia swiped the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. All the fragrant lilies in the world lying shattered on that path won’t solve the problem, but maybe—just maybe—there was another way to fell this mighty oak. It all hung on the courage of one old olive grower, who might or might not be being poisoned…
In the Great Hall, where the air was artificially cool, the hard-eyed, ravaged harpy for whom Claudia’s nickname of Stonyface seemed never more appropriate came bearing down on her. But not in greeting, the way she had the night she’d been conferring with Kamar behind the statue. Lips pinched, eyes narrowed, Stonyface thundered down the stepped marble floor, her snub nose set to the ground and seemingly oblivious to the sparkling watercourse, the guffaws of laughter from the dining hall, and also, it seemed, to pedestrians.
‘Out of my way, you stupid—’ preoccupied features suddenly leaped back into focus ‘—Oh.’ The hand which was about to barge Claudia aside froze in mid-air and the concrete jaw forced itself into some semblance of a smile. ‘I thought you were a slave girl.’
Claudia’s reciprocal smile told Granitepuss how she felt about that.
‘Only I imagined everyone was at dinner,’ the woman snapped in what presumably passed for an apology, before brushing past and slamming the door in her wake. But not before Claudia had caught the full force of the stewed walnut liquor which had freshly dyed out her grey.
Dear me, can’t she see, at her age, that less is more? If she fell into that watercourse right now, all you’d see would be her feet, the sheer weight of cosmetics would keep her under! No, no; subtlety’s the key in middle age. The hand that paints on those eyebrows should be light, and playing down her snub nose would make her infinitely more winsome than the girlishness she insisted on trying to achieve. Yet such was the haughtiness surrounding this old bag, it suggested not so much a blindspot as hardline inflexibility. In fact, so preoccupied was Claudia with wondering what turned perfectly attractive women into dogs that she almost failed to note the significance of what Lavinia was doing as she flung wide the door—
‘NO!’ she cried. ‘For gods’ sake, Lavinia, no!’
The little sparrow of a woman lay propped up on her daybed, her fleece of white hair cascading over the strawberry damask bolster, her wig sitting in her lap like a docile, curly lapdog. One wrinkled hand held a red medicinal phial, the other held the bottle’s clear glass stopper.
Claudia flew across the room. ‘Don’t drink that!’
‘Tch.’ The old woman raised the phial to her lips. ‘You can’t win in this place,’ she said, although
there was no punch in her voice and those mischievous eyes twinkled like sapphires in the sun. ‘One minute they tell you to finish off your medicine, the next they try and stop you. Well—’ half a second before Claudia reached the wheeled couch, she tipped the contents down her throat ‘—Lavinia has a mind of her own.’
Now what? Oil of lavender burned in a brazier and beside a board set out for Twelve Lines, a silver bowl sat heaped with candied fruits. Much to the delight of a shiny black beetle. A roll of thunder crashed overhead, rattling the counters.
‘I need to talk to you,’ Claudia said.
Lavinia peered down the end of her nose. ‘You didn’t come just to intervene, then?’ If anything, the eyes were brighter than ever.
With slow deliberation, Claudia moved one of the onyx soldiers to a different square on the chequerboard. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she said, ‘yes.’
As the storm rumbled round the cupola that was Plasimene, she perched on the edge of Lavinia’s couch and gave the old woman a summary of Tarraco and the racket he was working. The figure on the couch didn’t stir, except to fold her arms across her narrow chest. It won’t take long, Claudia calculated. It won’t take long for the medicine to kick in, and then I’ve lost Lavinia until tomorrow. We must move fast.
But for two long minutes after she’d finished speaking, Lavinia remained in silence, and Claudia wriggled as a rivulet of sweat drizzled down her backbone. Two more trickles followed it before the sparrow finally spoke.
‘That’s all very interesting,’ Lavinia said. ‘But I don’t see where I fit in.’
‘Through this.’ Claudia picked up the red glass phial and thought, here goes. We arrive at the moment of truth. ‘With your testimony and the contents of this little bottle as evidence, we can build a case against Kamar and—’ she drew a deep breath ‘—your son.’
‘My son?’
‘All we need is one stepping stone, just one, and from there the investigation will avalanche.’ Tarraco’s associates would squeal like rats in a trap, he’d be back in that cell before the end of the month.