‘You’re not still awake?’
Claudia mentally rolled the dice down her arm and began weighing it.
‘I was worried about you, Gaius.’
‘That’s very sweet of you.’ He eased his tunic over his head, then paused while his breath came back. ‘Jupiter, I’m getting old.’
He’d been having chest pains again. She could tell by the way he massaged his breast. ‘Rubbish,’ she countered.
‘No, no, Claudia, I feel myself teetering on the border of death-’
‘For heaven’s sake, Gaius, cut that out. You’re fifty-three, not eighty-three.’
Grunt.
‘Good grief, your mother’s across the hall-she’s knocking seventy and, Gaius, I swear Larentia will outlive the pair of us, just to spite me!’
Thank Juno, he began to chuckle. Claudia shook her mental dice and decided there was no better time for a roll.
‘Couple of things I meant to tell you, Gaius.’
‘Oh?’
There was an unexpected edge to his voice, which caught her off guard. She propped herself up on one elbow and forced a smile.
‘Yes. Business matters you asked me to handle in your absence, remember?’
‘Ah.’ The relief was unmistakable.
Claudia carefully recounted the gist of the meetings he’d entrusted her with, but her mind was only half on them. Something was up, she could smell it. The bed tilted as Gaius sat on the edge and kicked off his sandals.
‘And, Gaius, I’m afraid I’ve got a confession to make.’
His eyes bored into hers and suddenly the air was so heavy you could have sliced it up and served it with honey.
‘You know-’ Claudia cleared her throat and started again. ‘You know the shipment that was due the day you left?’
Again the ominous exhalation of breath. ‘What about it, my dove?’
There was a definite smell of fish in the air but Claudia chose to pass over it. There was an iron which needed to be struck while it was still red hot.
‘The captain called at the house to collect the three hundred sesterces outstanding on the account. I’m afraid I was terribly upset about Lucius, I mean you can imagine how it brought back my grief…’ She tailed off and sniffed. ‘Five years and it still seems like yesterday!’ She turned away and sobbed into the pillow.
‘There, there, I understand… What the hell did he mean, three hundred outstanding?’
‘That’s the point, Gaius. I was so distraught, I paid him on the spot. Then when I sent down to the wharf for a receipt, I realized we…I…had been conned. The ship was there, so was the captain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same man!’ She flung herself face down into the pillows. ‘I’m most terribly sorry.’
He was cross-Juno, was the man cross! — but thankfully not with her. Claudia let her breath out ever so slowly and peered out between her fingers. Dammit, had she known he’d take it this lightly, she’d have given Lucan five hundred. Too late now, but this was the time to get to the source of that fishy smell in the air.
‘Gaius, there’s something worrying you, isn’t there?’
‘As a matter of fact-’ He stood up and began to pace the chamber. ‘This is very difficult for me, Claudia, but the morning I left Rome, a letter arrived-an anonymous letter. It…it made some rather unsavoury accusations.’ So Gaius’s secret was finally out, was it?
‘About you?’
‘Um, no. About you, actually.’
Once, when she was very small, an earth tremor rocked the town where she was living. Nothing serious, no lives lost, just a couple of statues which lost their heads when they toppled over and a few shopfronts which tumbled down. But during the tremor, when the ground rumbled and buildings rocked, it had scared a five-year-old girl to her marrow.
‘You threw it straight on the fire, I hope. Pass me another pillow, will you, this one’s stuffed with old boots.’ Come on, Claudia. Force a laugh.
There was a tortuous silence as she forced herself to continue the feign of disinterest. Pillows were plumped, tried, replaced. Come on, Gaius, change the subject.
‘It-er, it suggested you were…’
‘Not spinning my own wool? Not sending your tunics to the fullers? Sneaking titbits for Drusilla?’ Thatta girl.
He chuckled. ‘Worse! It said you were-promiscuous!’
‘Prom-?’ Dear Diana, he must surely have heard the catch in her breath? ‘Promiscuous?’ She slapped his arm and fell back in a heap of pretended mirth. ‘What, when you and I don’t even share a bedroom?’
‘I know! The daft thing is, that damned letter had me worried for a while.’
Got you worried?
‘Of course,’ he began to sober up, ‘I suppose the writer meant with lots of other men.’
Deep breaths. One, two, three.
‘Gaius. If you start thinking along those lines, it’s a victory for the spiteful lunatic who penned the letter. Have you got it with you?’
He shook his head.
Bugger!
‘When you get home, throw it away and forget it, because if you can tell me where I get the time, running a house that size, to go gallivanting with hordes of lovers without arousing a single rumourmonger’s suspicions in the whole of Rome, I’ll eat your best tunic with onions.’
Claudia blew out the lamp and stared up at the ceiling in the darkness. By heaven she’d have to kill that lunatic soon and put a stop to both killings and rumours. It might mean finding other means for paying Lucan off, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. In the meantime, unless she was careful, she’d be needing a whole sack of onions if it meant eating one of Gaius’s tunics.
XIII
The face that stared back from the looking-glass was like nothing on earth. The bruises ranged in hue from yellow to green to purple, the bags below her eyes could have carried sufficient water to see a whole legion through a week’s campaign.
‘Ouch!’
If she’d told that stupid girl once, she’d told her a hundred times. Twist the curls to the left. Twist them both ways and you get knots!
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, get out and leave me alone! A blind man with a broken arm could make a better job of it than you.’
The slave, the one with the lisp, the one whose name she could never be bothered with, pulled a sulky face and slunk off as Claudia slumped in front of the mirror, her head in her hands. For all her making light of last night’s thunderbolt, the anonymous letter had unnerved her and no matter how many times she told herself she was hungry, she was tired, she’d had too much to drink, she was simply overwrought, nothing dissipated the deep-rooted feeling of anxiety.
All night long she’d tossed and turned, turned and tossed-but no matter how desperately she invoked it, sleep simply wouldn’t come. The same questions followed in the same sequence. Who sent the letter? What did it say? What was its purpose? The night was one of the longest she’d ever known, yet no sooner had the Great Healer finally heard her summons than the most atrocious racket started up right outside the window. She was bolt upright within seconds.
‘What the hell…?’
‘Relax! It’s only the dawn chorus.’
‘Well, bugger the dawn chorus, that’s all I can say.’
The couch had joggled as Gaius Seferius’s huge body shook with laughter. ‘You lie back and get some shut-eye,’ he’d said, rolling off the bed. ‘I want to check the vines.’
‘At this hour?’
‘Why not?’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Don’t think you’ve got a monopoly on unorthodox behaviour, my dove.’
Drusilla, who had been biding her time outside the window for Gaius to leave, had leapt on to the bed the moment he’d closed the door behind him, and, soothed by the cat’s purring, Claudia had fallen asleep. And with sleep had come dreams. Dark, diabolical dreams. There was Flamininus, the censor chained to the bloated corpse of Quintus Aurelius Crassus, urging her to whip harder because he’d pay her another quadran for every strike. A quadran’s not enough, she was saying, I need two thousand sesterces. Suddenly the corpse on the chain rolled over. ‘I’ll double that if you find my eyes,’ it said. ‘I dropped them with my sandals.’ ‘I sold ’em,’ Rufus piped up, ‘swapped ’em for a pig’s head.’ When Claudia turned to give him a clip round the ear the boy wore Otho’s scarred face and she had woken up sweating. Drusilla had snuggled closer and thanks to her rhythmic washing, Claudia had drifted off again. This time Gaius-on his back, naked and wriggling like a big, fat baby-was crying, ‘Help me, Claudie, help me,’ and while she watched, doing nothing, the tears dissolved his eyes into raw, red sockets and she had woken up again, shaking.