Claudia thought of twenty-five per cent of the takings and decided she very much liked the aroma of tar. ‘Why didn’t Flavia come to the races?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be silly, I could hardly leave her mooning about the house, that child has gathered more wool than a whole crew of shearers lately. Of course I brought her along. Flavia? Come and say hello to-’
But when she turned her head, the seat beside her was empty. And that’s when they both realized that Flavia had sloped off with the actors.
‘Leave her,’ Claudia said. ‘Enjoy the chariot racing. She’ll come to no harm with Caspar.’
Which was true. She would have come to no harm with Caspar. Only Flavia didn’t stay with the maestro and his colourful troupe. According to Doris, while the troupe was still in the shadow of the Circus walls, Flavia slipped into the crumbling ruins of the old temple to Juventus. Which, by Claudia’s reckoning, was between four and five hours ago.
‘And she wasn’t alone,’ Doris had added, with a mischievous rattle of bangles.
Really? And what could a fifteen-year-old girl possibly have been up to that made her return home radiant with joy?
That didn’t have three letters and end with an ‘x’?
*
Claudia was sitting on the upper bunk, legs dangling, when Skyles breezed in through his bedroom doorway. She had counted it out in her head. One: drop Flavia at front entrance. Two: slip round to side. Three: flirt with a couple of the kitchen girls. Four: help self to something tasty off the griddle. A ham and onion rissole, from the smell of it.
He could, she thought, at least have feigned surprise at finding her in his room.
‘My compliments to the chef,’ he said, breaking off half the remains of the rissole and lobbing it over. ‘Absolutely delicious.’
Ham and onion it was-with a smattering of chives, parsley and just a smidgen of garlic. Craggy eyes didn’t leave hers. Not even when a strong arm reached behind him to pull the blue tapestry across the doorway. Curious how much sound was muffled by one piece of embroidered cloth. The clamour from the kitchens receded to a muffled hum. The rehearsals in the atrium to a distant drone.
Amazing how much light was blocked out from the torches that burned in the corridor, too. Plunged into sudden blackness, she heard him cross the tiny cupboard of a room without faltering. Felt the brush of air as his shoulder passed a whisker from her knees. Listened to him reach unhesitatingly for his tinderbox. Fssst. A sm a ll flame flickered on the rough wooden table between the two lower bunks as the tallow’s wick caught light.
It might have been as though his eyes had never left her.
‘Just so you know,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Any man who takes Flavia’s virginity can expect to wear his testicles for earmuffs and warble higher notes than Periander could ever hope to aspire to. Are we clear on that?’
His long, low chuckle echoed round the little room. ‘Doris wants to keep his mouth shut.’
He stripped off his tunic, leaned over the bowl on the table, splashed his face, neck and underarms and dried himself on the coarse linen towel hanging on an iron peg on the wall.
‘But if it sets your pretty mind at rest, the only cherries that interest me are these.’ He reached into ajar and tossed up one of the candied fruits he’d offered yesterday. ‘Flavia’s young enough to be my daughter.’
‘Or old enough to be your wife.’
He pulled on a clean grey tunic emblazoned with purple and gold, poured two mugs of coarse red wine and bounced up on the bunk opposite. ‘Then here’s to fortune-hunters everywhere.’
Damn. And Drink-Me-Dry had acquired another chip since yesterday, too. ‘Don’t you ever stop acting?’ she said.
‘You ask a lot of questions for a woman alone with a man in the dark.’
‘I’m sure you’re used to questions in the bedroom, Skyles.’ The women would all want to know the same things. Where did he get those scars on his back from? Did the wounds bleed much? Do they hurt? Can he feel it, when they do this…?
He chuckled, a low dirty sound which came from deep in his throat. ‘You’re right, I am, but not to the type of questions you ask. Oh and, if you’re interested, I always tell them the same thing when they get curious about how I acquired these.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the scars. ‘From my last lover’s husband, I say.’
Very funny, yes, and the women would laugh, but Claudia knew it wouldn’t matter a damn to them, because they didn’t care. They only wanted the salacious details. The pain, the blood, the humiliation. It was all part of the turn-on. They wouldn’t want to know what he had done to receive such a lashing. Only that he’d passed out, to be brought round time and again, and tell me again how you’d bitten through the wood they put in your mouth. His conquests would be aroused sexually by the wheals, not roused to compassion. Who knows, maybe Skyles had deserved a good thrashing? But Claudia would not bet her house and her vineyards on that. No man would need to act round the clock, if he was all bad.
Or was that just another layer to the act?
Because hadn’t she seen similar patterns on shoulder blades before? From a man who got sexual kicks from self-flagellation?
‘Thanks for the wine,’ she said, jumping down. ‘Although you should be able to afford better quality now on the proceeds from Flavia’s ring. Amethysts buy a jolly good vintage.’
Skyles leaned back on his elbows and stared at the dull, painted ceiling. ‘The girl just needs to breathe, Claudia. Feel she’s lived a bit, before she settles down and starts turning out babies like pots from a kiln.’
‘I have no problem with Flavia breathing,’ she said. ‘Just bear in mind what I said about earmuffs.’
Dammit, Flavia’s virginity was about the only bargaining power the family had left.
She was halfway back to the atrium when a deep voice called down the corridor after her.
‘By the way, you don’t have to worry about amethysts being wasted on the likes of me,’ Skyles said. ‘Flavia didn’t give me that ring.’ He timed his pause. ‘She threw it down the disused well outside the Temple of Juventus. An offering to the god of youth.’
Sixteen
In his office covered with hunting trophies and memorabilia, Sextus Valerius Cotta looped his thumbs into his belt and stared across the peristyle, listening to the orchestral sounds made by the rain. The drumming as it landed on the large leaves of the castor oil plants. A tinkling as it hit the ivy on the trellis, the percussion as it bounced off fan palms and the lavender, the deeper plopping noises as it dripped from the bare branches of the pomegranate tree.
With space on the Palatine at a premium, his house was smaller than many of his colleagues’, who preferred the grandeur of the Esquiline-the garden poky, if you like, in comparison. But prestige is measured in quality, rather than quantity, and Cotta’s bronze discus thrower and rearing marble horses, like the furniture in his house, were prized antiques and the craftsmen he employed were the finest in Rome. The artists, for example, called every March to perforate the stems of that tinkling ivy to release a gummy sludge which they’d mix with wine and urine then boil to produce the blood-red pigment used to colour the walls of Cotta’s office. There was, he decided, no substitute for detail. None whatsoever.
It was this attention to detail which had won him his victories in Cisalpine Gaul, among others, and had later honed his skills as a tactician in the Senate. He thought about the boar that had terrorized the Umbrian hills and whose head still snarled in defiance, only now it did so above his office chair. He recalled riding out across the Syrian desert to spear the panther whose glistening pelt he wore home as a cloak, like Hercules, and whose fangs hung round the neck of his youngest son. He remembered the lion he took on single-handed and whose skin made a nice warm rug on his floor, its head a comfy footrest beneath his desk. Attention to detail. Without it, the boar would have sunk its tusks in his belly, gutted him like a sardine. Every victory, every triumph, from Gallic uprisings to the guile of the panther, had been engineered through painstaking plotting. Even in emergencies, Cotta hadn’t rushed into anything, but had pored over the plans, rethinking, redevising, unafraid to scrap previous strategies and start again.