‘It’s not decent-’
‘And then rub in salt to stop it knitting together.’ She snatched up her purse, but the drawstring wasn’t tight and coins spilled over the floor. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
Marching down the atrium, she had to clap twice before her bodyguard materialized.
‘And you two,’ she hissed, smiling graciously at Urgulania as she passed, ‘will be cleaning toilets if you can’t move faster than that.’
‘I’m sorry-’ the Cilician began, but Claudia cut him short.
‘Get out there and hire me a car. Here!’ She fished a silver denarius out of her purse. ‘A nippy, two-wheeled job, Kleon, and make sure it’s not pulled by some sullen nag with a bent back who can barely lift a hoof. And tell the driver to take the tilt off. I want to feel the wind in my hair. Dear Diana, are you still here?’
Kleon blinked rapidly, thought to ask a question and then thought better of it. He was back so quickly, Claudia wondered whether he’d turfed someone out of a passing vehicle and, if so, resolved to promote him the instant they returned home.
‘Get that awning off!’ she commanded the driver.
‘I’m afraid it’s not detachable, milady.’
‘Do you want the damned fare or not?’
The driver stood his ground. ‘I do, milady, but I’m not prepared to wreck the vehicle for-’
Claudia drew a small knife from the folds of her stola and cut the rope. The tilt collapsed at the same speed as the driver’s expression. ‘Hop on,’ she instructed her slaves.
The driver held out his hands. ‘Please, milady! There’s only room for me and one passenger.’
Claudia studied the vehicle. ‘They can sit on the bar at the back.’
‘The car would tip over,’ he said querulously, ‘the mule couldn’t pull-’
Claudia jumped in and adjusted her skirts. ‘Junius. Kleon. Take the day off. And you-’ She turned to the driver, his face contorted with misery. ‘Get some speed up.’
The last thing Kleon heard as the car rattled down the street and out of sight was his mistress shouting, ‘Faster, you idle oaf!’
‘Wouldn’t fancy changing places with that poor sod,’ he said, jovially. ‘D’you reckon she was serious?’
‘What about?’
‘The day off, you daft bugger.’
The young Gaul kept his eyes on the road. ‘You’re new,’ he said, ‘so the quicker you learn Mistress Seferius means precisely what she says, the easier life will be.’
‘Yeah?’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Well in that case, I’m not hanging around this bleeding street any longer. What do you fancy?’
Junius shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what to do,’ he said, staring in the direction the car had taken.
Kleon nudged him in the ribs and pointed. ‘There’s a tart in that tavern who looks tasty. All long legs and big tits. Fancy a nibble?’
‘Not me. Thanks all the same.’
The Cilician leaned closer. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘I’ve heard about her, she’s good. Charges ten asses, but she’ll do us together for fifteen.’
‘No. Really.’
‘It’ll be fun. They say she’ll do anything, so if we use our imagination…’
‘What?’
‘You know.’ Kleon gave an exaggerated wink and nodded back towards the house. ‘We can pretend it’s the Mistress.’
He didn’t see the punch which laid him out.
XXII
The problem of her virginity was one which had occupied Acte’s mind for most of her adult life, but now, she thought, closing the orchard gate behind her, the matter was finally settled. And while the prospect of marriage at any age is exciting, a proposal at her age-coming out of the blue-made it ten times more thrilling.
She paused at the clipshed, deserted this time of year apart from its recent occupation by the fortune teller and her brother, but resisted the temptation to slip inside. Oughtn’t she to distance herself from the house? Find space to think? To make sense of this enormous change in her circumstances?
In a matter of days she, like Miss Sabina, would be able to wear the bridal veil, the betrothal ring, the saffron-coloured sandals, the Knot of Hercules. Her heart skipped a beat. Except she would be free to discard hers afterwards, and wear two bands in her hair instead of one.
Pinching her nose against the sulphurous fumes as she hurried past the bleaching yard, resembling a giant beehive with its circular frames over which the whitened wool had been stretched, Acte thought that virginity was probably the only thing she’d had in common with Miss Sabina. Especially since Miss Sabina remained a virgin through service to Vesta, whereas Acte’s circumstances were pretty well unique in the whole of the Roman Empire. Women, even slaves, were seldom allowed to remain single, the marriage laws being what they were. It was only through the Master’s intervention, his rigid enforcement of the Chattel Rule (which said a man’s slaves were his possessions, he could do what he liked with them), that she wasn’t foisted off on some uncouth lout as breeding stock.
Giving the dyeshed as wide a berth as possible, Acte turned her eyes to the ground. She’d left the Master having a massage with Diomedes, so the small amount of time she had to spare was precious. She couldn’t afford to waste it on chitchat if the inevitable happened. Which it did.
‘Got a minute, Acte?’
The voice of Nikias, the foreman, carried across the yard and she felt bad about pretending she hadn’t heard him. He was a nice man, Nikias-a widower, solid and dependable-and she supposed she could have married him, had she wanted. There was nothing to stop her from choosing a husband of her own, only-
From the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth twist in disappointment. Too bad. Today his arms were black to the elbow from the privet dye, last week they had been yellow from the rowan bark. Sure, Nikias was nice. But who wants a man with multi-coloured arms in their bed at night?
Acte’s first choice today would have been Pharos Point, but since it took a full half-hour to reach the lighthouse she turned left instead. To every other slave, going to the birch grove was tantamount to visiting a leper colony, a place to be avoided at all costs on account of how it was haunted. Acte despised them for their narrowmindedness, but chose never to disabuse their talk of ghostly apparitions walking and moaning and generally doing their damnedest to spook people. It guaranteed her privacy there-and privacy, for a slave, came second only to freedom.
The climb was energetic, the heat intolerable, and by the time she reached the grove her tunic was sticking to her skin. The clouds were low, trapping the heavy, humid, sultry air. She could barely breathe. The leaves, thin and papery and yellow, hung limp. Mostly the grove comprised silver birch, graceful and airy, but theirs was not an exclusive colony. Cobnuts, for instance, had fallen around the smooth brown bole of the hazel, red shiny fruits hung on the haw. Spotty red toadstools fed off the roots of the birch. Acte settled herself against the grey, scaly bark of the solitary charcoal-oak, its evergreen canopy incongruous among the falling leaves of its fellows. A blackbird flew in and began systematically to strip the berries off a rowan.
In the middle of the copse, the flat white rocks of this limestone outcrop lay like so many fissured tables waiting to be set for a picnic. Acte used her fingertips to pull her damp tunic away from her body and began to flap it like a fan. Fancy thinking this place was haunted! True, a man, a Collatinus slave, had been killed here some years ago. Stabbed in the back by his jealous lover, a girl from Sullium, freeborn and with the finances to buy him his own freedom, and Acte spared little sympathy for the man who had squandered everything for a roll in the hay with a kitchen maid. Except…well, maybe it said something for his qualities as a lover, and since she had no experience on that score, perhaps she oughtn’t to judge him so harshly?
Occasionally (but only occasionally) she’d been tempted herself to indulge in a quick fling with one of the men-and weren’t there some handsome devils about? — in order to learn what it was the other women enjoyed so vocally and she was missing out on. Except too much was at stake. Suppose she got pregnant? The Master demanded total commitment, and Acte would not put her job at risk, although often over the years she had regretted not forming a romantic attachment. It was an unfortunate by-product of the education the Master had given her that she saw the workers for what they were-coarse, ill-mannered, uneducated bumpkins. Fifteen years ago they might have been for her, but not any more.