His lips pursed instinctively whenever he thought of Marcus Cornelius Orbilio. Everything about the man screamed class. Class and breeding, and he hadn’t realized Claudia knew him so well until he saw the two of them together on Thursday night-Orbilio in his fancy scarlet cloak, Claudia in that sensuous midnight blue creation.
Impossible to find words to describe the sense of loss, of failure, that he experienced in that split second. They were two of a kind. Same class, same background-what chance did a Greek physician stand?
That night Diomedes had prayed to Aphrodite-oh, how he had prayed-for help, and to his utter astonishment the goddess dismissed Orbilio the very next day, demonstrating in that one Olympian gesture that there was no stigma attached to being a doctor. It’s a respectable profession, Aphrodite was telling him, requiring skill and qualifications well beyond the abilities of the average man. You should not feel shame.
Thus his spirits lifted and his confidence soared with them.
But however buoyed up he was by Aphrodite’s support, Diomedes appreciated it was far too soon to moot the subject of marriage. Nevertheless, he worked on it as skilfully as he worked on his remedies. Claudia was young, beautiful, suggestible even, and Diomedes more than most understood the immense power of sex. It could pull a person against their will, draw them like a fish on a line-and women, especially, were susceptible. His Claudia would be no different.
Content with progress on both his love life and Antefa’s troublesome boil, he decided it was time to stretch his legs. Automatically patting the little stone statue of his healing god, Asklepios, he turned left to follow the dusty track up the hill. The view from his quarters might not be the worst in the world, but even a physician grew sick of certain smells and the stink of urine from the adjacent fuller’s yard was one of them.
The scenery was breathtaking, the air redolent with pine and spurge and wild rosemary. The African Sea, today as blue as forget-me-nots, tickled the sands under a cloudless sky while sheep bleated contentedly beneath the noonday sun. He would miss this land, he thought, but come spring it would be time to move on. To move on, the way he had always moved on, forever seeking his sacred goal. So often in the past he had been on the point of giving up, fearing his aim to be as unattainable as immortality itself-but now, since meeting Claudia, he was not so sure. He felt his fists clench. If only-
The raucous cry of a jackdaw cut in and he paused to look down on the villa, its red roof dwarfed by the distance between them. Miniature figures dashed hither and thither, always at someone else’s beck and call. So many of them! When he took on the job, Diomedes had no conception of the size of the Collatinus empire, nor that he would be required to doctor the entire contingent of slaves single-handed. For the most part, his previous positions had entailed little more than pandering to the problems of over-indulgence by prescribing fresh air and exercise and a decent diet. Well, excess was no problem in this family, quite the contrary, but he hadn’t expected to have to earn his living as a slave doctor. Diomedes plucked a blade of grass to chew on and continued his climb.
These rocks, these coves, these shrouded mountain ridges seemed to him more Greek than Roman, even down to the reserved and sombre townspeople, and he felt very strongly that the island ought to have remained in his countrymen’s hands. Instead it had been wrenched from their grasp, and it was unfortunate that the very people who had founded democracy should have taken this rugged and beautiful island from the Sicels and then promptly allowed it to be ruled by a succession of tyrants. As a result it fell under Roman dominion and now his own land, too, was a Roman province. He was taught as a child to be proud to be a part of the Empire. Well, he wasn’t. He was Greek, and as such he was viewed by Romans-especially Romans like that arrogant bastard Orbilio-as second rate. Diomedes pursed his lips. We shall see, he thought. We shall see who’s top and who’s not.
A fat, stripey bee came buzzing up to check whether this newcomer was a walking pollen factory, decided he wasn’t and buzzed off elsewhere.
One thing had been bothering him these past two days. A small matter, but it nagged him like an obstinate itch.
Someone had been in his room.
In the few months since his arrival, Diomedes had become aware that someone was regularly filching one of his eye drugs. Minute quantities were being taken at a time, but he had quickly noticed that one particular copper vessel was getting gradually lighter and now he weighed it once a week on his balances to prove it. This didn’t bother him. Someone in the house had poor eyesight but was shrewd enough to correct it and stealthy enough to ensure no one else found out. Sooner or later the supply would run dry and the culprit (he suspected it was Senbi) would be forced into the open. Diomedes was content to wait.
The other business was altogether different.
It was Thursday, the day it rained. He had been in Sullium on a private commission, checking on the lead beater’s daughter who had swellings in her neck. During his absence his room had been searched.
The minute he returned home, he knew he’d had a visitor. The rain had cleared the air outside, sharpening his sense of smell, and the instant he opened the door his nostrils picked out the recent burning of lamp oil over and above the usual and familiar medicinal scents. The eye-drop thief called only during the daytime but it was possible an exception had been made, so Diomedes had weighed the little copper container on his balances-and found no change. Immediately on his guard, he checked his drugs and poisons before moving on to his instruments, but these were where he had left them, neatly facing outwards or upwards to suit his requirements.
It was only when he opened the box in the corner that he made his discovery. His old (and indeed blunt) double-ended scalpel, the one with the bronze handle, was lying upside down. It could not have been a mistake on his part-he always laid his instruments in a precise manner and since this was a dissection scalpel, never used, its position never varied. The handle end doubled as a spatula, and as such faced up. The person who had gone through the box was a layman and would be unaware of this when he replaced it…spatula down.
No, there was no mistake. The question was, what should he do about it?
As he paused to catch his breath, Diomedes realized he was almost upon the exact spot where Sabina had been killed. The flattened grass, parched and yellow, had sprung up again after the rain, there was absolutely nothing to suggest anything sinister had taken place, yet in spite of himself and his profession, he shivered.
Claudia was of the opinion that the family were not touched by their kinswoman’s death, but she didn’t know them the way he knew them. Sabina had been away for thirty years, they had practically forgotten her existence and when she did return they neither liked nor understood her. They might not be driven by grief, but they had been undermined by another emotion. Fear.
Fear of what, he didn’t know. Fear that because Sabina’s sanity had left her, the same might happen to them? Fear of a monster on the loose? Perhaps just fear of the unknown? Even as their doctor he was unable to plumb those intimate depths, but the Collatinus clan did what many families do in times of crisis.
They pretended nothing had happened.
To his right, a small bird warbled from the top of a thorn bush. He ought to be getting back, he thought. One of the weavers was calling about his infected toe, Dexippus had promised to repay those two denarii, and the Penates ceremony was scheduled for dusk. But the Greek’s eyes remained fixed to the place where Sabina had died.