She had never quite forgiven her mistress for encouraging the children of the household slaves to make cakes of spelt and salt to sacrifice to Ceres today. Already the horrible little sods were squealing in delight as podgy hands mangled dough into bread snails and bread mice to be laid at the altar of the gentle goddess. Nor was Drusilla alone in her tingles of alarm. Since Claudia always laid on outdoor feasts of sticky honeycombs afterwards, the cooks and the flowerbeds also feared for their sanity. Someone’s child, somewhere, would always throw up.
Wisely, Drusilla retreated beneath the covers and dreamed of hot sands and cold vermin in a land where it only rained moths. Claudia, dressed in white, the traditional colour for honouring Ceres, found her own escape from the bedlam was not quite as easy.
Erinna was sprawled across the stairs tacking up the seams of the tunic Ion would later rip off at the Temple, singing softly to herself.
The ballad wasn’t one Claudia recognized from any of the plays.
Erinna hadn’t bothered pinning her hair into a bun, and today it hung down her back, a glorious cloak of glistening chestnut. No doubt about it. With her clear skin, big eyes and hauntingly beautiful voice, she was one of Caspar’s finest assets.
‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there.’
She shuffled over to let Claudia past, and Claudia didn’t say that she’d been there some time, wondering what it was about Erinna’s voice that turned a few mediocre lines into something that made eyes prickle with tears.
Erinna bit off the thread with her teeth. ‘If you want to make a real impact outside the Temple, all three of us girls could wear tacked costumes if you like?’
‘No, no,’ Claudia said hastily. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
There was more than enough flesh on display with Erinna. Three volumptuous beauties would blind the crowd for a week.
And in any case, there was a quality in Erinna that brought a special dimension to the farce. For a show based entirely around smut, the word sophisticated might sound paradoxical, yet there was a stylishness about her which was lacking in the other girls. Not that they lacked sex appeal. Far from it. Jemima in particular had it in spades. Proud of her outsize assets, Jemima was the type who’d tumble men at the drop of a hat and leave them laughing afterwards. But even Adah and Renata had that special appeal that comes from the sure and certain knowledge that they were both desirable and desired-and so what, there were girls out there who were prettier, more shapely, more intelligent? Caspar had chosen his volumptuous beauties with care. The girls in his troupe were alive. Vivacious, vibrant, independent and self-assured, they lived for the day and milked life for everything that it sent them and through the medium of farce, they were able to project this to the world. If that isn’t sexy, what is?
What set Erinna apart was her couldn’t-care-less attitude. It emitted a different kind of sensuality, an effect that was all the more pronounced because Erinna was unaware of it. But none of this would have touched Claudia’s consciousness, had it not been for Skyles.
Maybe, she thought, slipping into the thick, warm, woollen mantle Leonides held out at the foot of the stairs, she was mistaken about what she had seen…
Maybe she was reading too much into it…
The litter bearers dropped her outside Ceres’s temple, just off the Cattle Market on the Aventine, in perfect timing for the start of the sacrifice. Adjacent to the shrine, in a great warehouse flanked by winches and cranes, stood the largest corn store in the city, and it was outside the Great Granary that the third, and final, advertisement for the Spectaculars was due to take place. Everyone, whether male or female, rich or poor, free or enslaved, wore white for the ceremony. Allowing Caspar’s rainbow troupe to steal even greater attention.
A large crowd had accumulated and fragrant incense wafted on the breeze. Apart from the farmers, whose patron Ceres was, many slaves had also gathered. Should they ever need it, the temple gave them right of sanctuary-and only a fool would wait until the moment was upon them before propitiating the one goddess who was prepared to shelter them.
Not an obvious choice of audience to advertise the Spectaculars, you might think. But you’d be wrong.
‘Make way,’ one of the temple acolytes shouted. ‘Make way for the penitent! Make way for Meno the Coppersmith.’
Meno the Coppersmith had unwisely attacked a tribune over a long-standing grievance about rights of way past his premises, and the penalty for assaulting the elected representatives of the people was harsh. Meno was immediately stripped of his assets, which were sold off and now the proceeds of that humiliating public auction were being assigned to the Temple of Ceres. Penitent, indeed. One foolish punch had wiped out a lifetime of work.
But. Sad as it was for poor Meno, there’s nothing quite like human tragedy to draw a crowd. Not only his fellow artisans were swelling the numbers, but like bees to a honeypot, businessmen were flocking to the precinct in droves. With his workshop sold and his stock liquidated, the only asset Meno had left was his talent. Like the good capitalists that they were, they came hoping to secure the coppersmith’s skills on the cheap.
‘O, Ceres, who first gave man bread,’ the flamen intoned, as the sacrificial pig was carved up and laid on the fire. ‘Who forced the first bulls to the yoke, that for the first time the upturned soil might behold the sun-’
Claudia’s mind wandered. With the temple doors wide throughout the ceremony, the works of the Greek masters whose artistry embellished the interior showed none of the ravages of the fire which had threatened to destroy the temple nearly twenty years before. Its skilful restoration notwithstanding, however, Augustus rated Ceres important enough in the pantheon to want the exterior of her temple clad in white Parian marble. Not so much to reflect Ceres’s purity, Claudia suspected, as Rome’s superiority. How much more imposing would the temple look, had the sacred pine grove that used to surround the building still been casting softness and shade across the precinct. Unfortunately, the grove had been completely consumed by the fire and such was the demand for housing and storage, there was never any chance of the grove being replaced. Public latrines now rose from the site, alongside a slaughterhouse, a fish-curing factory and a statue of one of the Muses. How much kudos, Claudia wondered, would be attached if she donated a fountain with marble pine cones in commemoration of the sacred grove? What a poke in the eye for the Wine Merchants’ Guild that would be!
‘Ceres delights in peace,’ the flamen was informing the yawning crowd, as flutes drowned out any evil spirits and libations of blood-red wine trickled across the stone altar. ‘Ye who are husbandmen and ye who are not, give thanks with spelt and with salt, for Ceres is content with little, so long as what she receives is pure.’
Purity did not seem to be the issue in the corner where Jemima was peering through her chunky ankles and asking the crowd what did they think they were looking at. Ceres could stick her salt and spelt.
The house, Claudia reflected, wouldn’t be the same after Saturnalia. Sure, there’d be more oil in the jars, more charcoals in the store, and yes you’d be able to hear the fountain babbling in the atrium again, listen to the birds in the aviary, walk without fear of tripping over ratlines and actors sprawled out as they practised their lines. Felix the dancer would no longer make your jaw drop with manoeuvres usually only undertaken by eels. There’d be no Ugly Phils in furry leggings and horns camping it up as the Satyr. No masked actors leaping out of the alcoves to frighten the slaves. No ‘plumptious’ thighs, no ‘volumptuous’ wobbles, no Doris with eyes darkened by kohl and bracelets jangling softly as he let himself in and out at all hours. Ion wouldn’t be found sitting alone in the kitchen at midnight with a tortured look on his handsome, bearded, god-like face, and the boards on the gallery would not creak from the processions of female flesh which passed through Caspar’s doorway. And, of course, there would be no bald Buffoons tickling the kitchen girls and making them fall in love with him…