Urgulania frowned. ‘Oh? Doesn’t he like them?’
‘Marcus? He loves them, would have a houseful of the little beggars-if only he could.’
‘Well, that’s easily settled. A healthy young girl like Mucia will be pregnant in no time.’
‘Uh-uh,’ Claudia said. ‘I mean…’ She held her hand out horizontally, then let it fall limp. ‘He can’t.’
Urgulania looked puzzled. ‘But surely-’
‘That’s why,’ Claudia cut in quickly, ‘his first wife threw herself in the Tiber.’
‘Are you certain of that? He told us she ran off with a common sea captain.’
Claudia gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Yes, yes, of course she did.’
The older woman’s lips pursed. ‘Do you mean he invented that story to cover up his wife’s suicide?’
‘Urgulania, please. If that’s what Marcus says, I insist you take his word for it.’
‘Mmm. Excuse me a moment, my dear, I’d like a quiet word with my husband.’ Orbilio, as was due a fellow patrician and potential son-in-law, had been given pride of place beside Julius on the top table. When he glanced over at Claudia, she noticed a slight crease in his brow. She smiled and raised her glass to him. It was entertaining the way his frown didn’t go away. It merely deepened-the way a frown would, if it suspected you were up to something behind its back.
Claudia beckoned over the slave with the wine jug.
‘Fill this up,’ she said, holding out her glass. ‘I feel like celebrating.’
*
There seemed no end to the festivities, and what started out as refreshing hedonism quickly descended into profligacy. There were only so many flamingo tongues one could eat, so many oysters one could swallow, and after twenty-four hours, the rattles and the pan pipes and the horns began to grate. At least, that’s how it was for Claudia. The others were revelling like there was no tomorrow.
‘It’s barbaric,’ she told Drusilla, slipping her a morsel of sucking pig. ‘They eat till they’re sick, they drink till they’re sick, and then damn me, they go back and start all over again.’
She and Drusilla were lucky, having a bedroom to themselves with this horde milling round the house, but for some strange reason none of the other women had fancied sharing.
‘I just pity the poor slaves whose job it is to mop up the vomit.’
‘Mrrr.’
These excesses reminded her of Diomedes’s lament about how the wealthy made themselves ill by constant over-indulgence in fatty foods and vintage wine. He’d have made a good living here in Agrigentum, she thought, with his purges and his bloodletting-why take a job at the Villa Collatinus? What did he mean when he said he’d found peace there?
‘And I tell you something else,’ she said to Drusilla, as one of the kittens burrowed under the flounce of her tunic, ‘there’ll be a good influx of babies nine months from now.’
Hardly a slave girl passed unmolested, most of them taken in the shadows of the prefect’s pink marble pillars with the same delicacy his guests showed towards their other physical needs. Claudia pursed her lips. Randy old goats she could understand. Hadn’t she spent her teenage years pandering to their sexual fantasies? They wanted. They paid. Fair enough. But these girls were treated like herd animals, and suddenly Claudia was sick of Sicily.
Sick of its decadence, its over-the-toppery, its fat cats creaming off the goodies in a way Roman citizens, no matter how rich or privileged, would never dream of. She was sick of the brooding superstition which clung to the island, she was sick of the Collatinuses and the callous way they ignored the violence of their kinswoman’s death, almost as though it was a way of life for them.
The kitten began a death-defying climb up the north face of her tunic. Claudia would never know, now, where Sabina had spent the past thirty years. Her original theory, bunking up with a distant relative, was knocked on the head as she remembered the sun-darkened skin, the dirty nails. No relative would expect (or indeed allow!) her to work for her keep. On the other hand, Sabina did not give the appearance of a woman who’d had to graft in order to survive. What happened when she went to Rome all those years ago? Why continue the pretence of being a Vestal Virgin? It didn’t surprise Claudia that none of the family had visited, they were far too absorbed in their own lives, although Matidia mentioned a regular exchange of letters. The most curious point, however, was why Sabina chose to return at the precise time the real senior Vestal was retiring. Why not stay where she was?
‘Too late now,’ Claudia said aloud to no one in particular. Drusilla was chomping on a flatfish, and Slingshot here was on the horns of a dilemma. Should he continue the ascent or quit while he was ahead?
Cypassis flung open the door and began dashing round. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, madam.’ She collected Claudia’s tunic and sandals and put them away, refilled the water bowl and lit four more lamps all more or less at the same time.
Claudia unhooked the squealing mountaineer and placed him amongst his siblings, who were blotto on the blanket. ‘Slow down, slow down.’
She was in no great hurry, anyway. There was, after all, a limit to the number of castanet-clacking Arabian dancers a girl could cope with over dinner and frankly, that last lot of breast-wobbling came too close to her custard for comfort.
As Cypassis began to heat the curling irons in the brazier and ease the pins from her mistress’s hair, Claudia noticed a silver bangle round her wrist.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘One of the magistrates.’ The Thessalian girl’s cheeks darkened to the colour of half-ripe bilberries. ‘Did I do wrong?’
Claudia let out a throaty chuckle. ‘Let’s just say you didn’t do badly. Now for gods’ sake, get those bloody tongs out before they get too hot to handle.’
Of all the revelries which Julius Domiticus Decianus had planned, tonight’s feast was to be the pinnacle. Urgulania had ordered everything from peacocks’ brains to ostrich steaks, bear cutlets to stuffed crane, and entertainments ranged from full-blown political satires to high camp female impersonators. It promised to be quite a night.
‘I’ll wear the white.’
The hairpin froze in Cypassis’s hand. ‘The white, madam?’
‘Does silver make you deaf? I’m talking about the outfit I bought today.’
She knew what was going through the girl’s mind. Slaves wore white. Noblemen wore white. Noblewomen, most assuredly, did not wear white. Especially not to a banquet given by a city prefect. But since when did etiquette count? All that concerned Claudia was that, when everyone was reclining on the couches, eyes would be exactly where she intended them to be. On the widow of Gaius Seferius, now the owner of a large and prosperous wine business. When transaction time came (and it would) Claudia wanted to be absolutely certain they remembered her.
She ate little and drank less as she scanned the hall for potential clients, but each time her eyes made the tour they were caught by the intensity of one young man in particular. He was wealthy, you could tell from the cut of his tunic, the rings on his fingers, although he was neither patrician nor equestrian or he wouldn’t have been stuck at the back. You couldn’t say he was good-looking-his brow was too low, his eyes too small-but in any case, the look he gave her was not sexual. Just unblinking. Hell, the whole idea was to get noticed, she could hardly complain…
The heat in the banqueting room was fast becoming intolerable and she excused herself to take a walk in the peristyle. Darkness had fallen and yesterday’s drizzle had turned into a steady downpour, but there was no breeze and the colonnade offered shelter enough from the elements. The rain hammering on to the herbs sent up a heavenly waft of bay and rosemary, lavender and roses, while the fountain gurgled and chuckled in the darkness. The statuary here was exquisite, far superior to anything Gaius had commissioned, and she was admiring the compact marble buttocks of a naked warrior when a familiar voice broke the silence.