Marilyn Todd
Jail Bait
I
No one could say for certain quite how it started. Some blamed that pot-bellied quarrymaster, home from Numidia. Others suggested it was the legacy of two Lebanese flautists passing through on their way to Iberia. Who could say? But like the first blue wisp of a heath fire, it passed virtually unnoticed, for the citizens of Rome had more pressing things on their minds.
The first two weeks of May had been treacherously hot. A vicious reminder of why so few festivals were scheduled in a month set aside not for rejoicing, but for restraint. For purification rites rather than revelry. Some years the problem was cold, scorching the vines and wizening the buds. Other years rain, inducing the blight and the mildew and worms in the cattle. In fact, so grim were May’s auspices, marriages were rarely contracted and, as crops in the countryside shrivelled, cityfolk discovered that, virtually overnight, Rome was transformed from a glamorous metropolis into a stinking, fly-riddled furnace.
What use were great soaring arches, triumphal basilicas, if your children had no air to breathe? When the meat for your dinner turned rancid, fruit rotted and the poison from the quills of the wryneck bird could not hold back the rats? No longer confined to the slums, vermin scampered openly over the Forum and left droppings on tables and plates and on pillows. Sleep was impossible. And when people arose, crotchety and drained, their tunics would cling to their flesh regardless how often they bathed. Purple hollows formed under their eyes and even Old Man Tiber began showing his age. Dark brown and sluggish, his treacly current stank worse than the sewers, and although aqueducts fetched treasured water down from the hills, the channels were covered and this generated heat of its own.
Thus, as a million souls gulped tepid water and prayed to Jupiter for mercy’s sake, for all our sakes, please send a change in the weather, so the little blue wisp gathered strength.
At first it was just the wife of a carpenter. A slight hoarseness. A fever. A few livid spots on her chest. Crushed by the heat and mistrustful of doctors, she dosed herself with fenugreek and took to her bed, smug at the money she’d saved.
Then two small boys, the sons of a wheelwright, succumbed and their mother had no such qualms about medics. They had expelled her husband’s bladder stones, cured her sister’s colic and eased her father’s pain with henbane when he lay dying. But by the time the physician arrived at her home, four more cases had been reported on the Quirinal Hill.
And the little blue wisp that was Plague prepared to lay to waste its territory.
II
One hundred miles to the north the air was no less sultry, the heat every bit as oppressive, yet the plague was the least of Claudia’s worries. She’d needed out, and she’d needed out fast, and this luxurious spa was as good a place as any to lie low for a while. Only ‘Hrrrrow!’
Inside her cage, Drusilla, Claudia’s blue-eyed, cross-eyed dark Egyptian cat, took the opportunity to remind her mistress how uncomfortable it was inside this wooden crate and how long it had been since she’d had a proper mouse, adding that if Claudia had any decent feelings whatsoever, she’d stop buggering about and get the hell indoors.
‘Stow it, you flea-riddled feline,’ Claudia hissed back. ‘I could have left you in Rome!’ To contend with feral dogs scavenging the runnels, to be chased from the bakeshops, kicked aside by the hucksters, snarled at by beggars. ‘You, my girl, should count your lucky stars. Just look where I’ve brought you.’
Stretching out before them, the placid waters of Lake Plasimene shimmered in the haze, its reed-lined shores a blur, the wooded hills which sheltered them the merest blue smudge. In place of the multitude of sweating humanity all snapping, bumping, joggling their way through a maze of twisty lanes, day crickets rasped among the pines like blunted woodsaws and a spotted lizard scampered over the flagstones to disappear into a crack in the wall. Here, the air was redolent with bay trees and balm, and lavender and pinks filled the place of stale wine from smoky taverns and the sulphurous stench from the fullers’ yards.
From the corner of Drusilla’s wooden crate came a subdued ‘Mrrr’ at the pronounced absence of screaming children, the graunch of mill-wheels, the deep piles of mule shit.
‘I know.’ Claudia sighed in sympathy. ‘Hell, isn’t it?’
She paused outside the gold-painted gates to tip the lackey who had carried her trunk. It was not too late to turn back…
Oh, come on, who are you kidding? Thanks to the epidemic, half the city’s emptied out. There isn’t one goddamned bed from the Alps to the Sorrentine peninsula which has not been laid claim to, be thankful you’re booked in here! She shifted Drusilla’s crate to her other hand and passed through the archway. Nailed to the gate was a schedule of events and Claudia scanned the list. Thanks to Pylades the Greek discovering a spring on this cliff-like promontory which projected several hundred yards into the lake, all manner of diversions appeared to be on offer, from mud wallows to massage, perfuming to pedicures, and let’s not forget the spa waters themselves, but…
‘What’s on at the arena?’ she enquired of the janitor.
‘No arena.’ He sniffed. ‘Only the foundations dug out so far.’
Fair enough. ‘The theatre?’
‘Well, the walls is mostly up. I reckon first production should open, come autumn.’
Good grief, a girl could have popped her clogs from boredom long before then. ‘Then,’ Claudia lowered her voice, ‘where will I find the dice games?’
‘Dice?’
‘Yes, yes, I know they’re illegal.’ That never stops them. ‘Where can I join in?’
‘Ah,’ he said, scratching his beard, ‘there’s a choir performing tonight.’
‘Hrrrrroww.’ The sound might have come from Drusilla or her mistress.
With a depressing sense of foreboding, Claudia followed the travertine path towards the flight of red marble steps. Catering purely for the monied classes, Pylades had spared no expense in constructing this magnificent lakeside retreat, incorporating libraries and loggias, museums and great works of art… and choirs. Across the lake, a great crested grebe dived for molluscs and a black tern hovered over its reflection in the shimmering waters. Dammit, this exile into purgatory wouldn’t be necessary if she’d been given half a chance to explain! To point out that she’d looked upon that money as a loan. That come the end of the month she’d intended to replace those wretched coins, perhaps even add a spot of interest, should a certain Syrian charioteer finish first again.
I mean, the cash had been in a depository, for heaven’s sake. Who the hell checks their depository?
The answer, unfortunately, was one Sabbio Tullus, owner of said fortune. With the plague having no respect for status, age or gender, Tullus adjudged that now might be a prudent time to vacate the city and spend a few weeks overseeing his estate in Frascati and, fearing robbery in his absence, decided to take his silver along for the ride.
Claudia couldn’t say who was the more surprised. Tullus, finding a gaping hole in the repository wall. Or Claudia, loading up her satchel.
The instant that key had rattled the lock, she was out through the gap like an elver, but there hadn’t been time to reposition the loose block of stone. Tullus, goddammit, had seen her!
Typical that for all the resort’s opulence and splendour, there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. Not counting the gateman, the only other human on the planet appeared to be an immense Oriental, standing with his feet set solidly apart and his arms folded across his tight black leather vest, staring towards the misty blue hills which cradled Plasimene. Apart from a topknot on the poll, his head was shaved and glistening, and the only other outcrop of hair sprouted from his upper lip, which, like the topknot, hung disproportionately long. Pegging him as the sort of chap whose idea of releasing an animal into the wild meant kicking a cat off a cliff, Claudia reckoned he’d be just the sort Tullus would send to ask for his money back.