I, Claudia (14 page)

‘About you?’

‘Um, no. About you, actually.’

Once, when she was very small, an earth tremor rocked the town where she was living. Nothing serious, no lives lost, just a couple of statues which lost their heads when they toppled over and a few shopfronts which tumbled down. But during the tremor, when the ground rumbled and buildings rocked, it had scared a five-year-old girl to her marrow.

‘You threw it straight on the fire, I hope. Pass me another pillow, will you, this one’s stuffed with old boots.’ Come on, Claudia. Force a laugh.

There was a tortuous silence as she forced herself to continue the feign of disinterest. Pillows were plumped, tried, replaced. Come on, Gaius, change the subject.

‘It—er, it suggested you were…’

‘Not spinning my own wool? Not sending your tunics to the fullers? Sneaking titbits for Drusilla?’ Thatta girl.

He chuckled. ‘Worse! It said you were—promiscuous!’

‘Prom—?’ Dear Diana, he must surely have heard the catch in her breath?
‘Promiscuous?’
She slapped his arm and fell back in a heap of pretended mirth. ‘What, when you and I don’t even share a bedroom?’

‘I know! The daft thing is, that damned letter had me worried for a while.’

Got
you
worried?

‘Of course,’ he began to sober up, ‘I suppose the writer meant with lots of other men.’

Deep breaths. One, two, three.

‘Gaius. If you start thinking along those lines, it’s a victory for the spiteful lunatic who penned the letter. Have you got it with you?’

He shook his head.

Bugger!

‘When you get home, throw it away and forget it, because if you can tell me where I get the time, running a house that size, to go gallivanting with hordes of lovers without arousing a single rumourmonger’s suspicions in the whole of Rome, I’ll eat your best tunic with onions.’

Claudia blew out the lamp and stared up at the ceiling in the darkness. By heaven she’d have to kill that lunatic soon and put a stop to both killings and rumours. It might mean finding other means for paying Lucan off, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. In the meantime, unless she was careful, she’d be needing a whole sack of onions if it meant eating one of Gaius’s tunics.

XIII

The face that stared back from the looking-glass was like nothing on earth. The bruises ranged in hue from yellow to green to purple, the bags below her eyes could have carried sufficient water to see a whole legion through a week’s campaign.

‘Ouch!’

If she’d told that stupid girl once, she’d told her a hundred times. Twist the curls to the
left.
Twist them both ways and you get knots!

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, get out and leave me alone! A blind man with a broken arm could make a better job of it than you.’

The slave, the one with the lisp, the one whose name she could never be bothered with, pulled a sulky face and slunk off as Claudia slumped in front of the mirror, her head in her hands. For all her making light of last night’s thunderbolt, the anonymous letter had unnerved her and no matter how many times she told herself she was hungry, she was tired, she’d had too much to drink, she was simply overwrought, nothing dissipated the deep-rooted feeling of anxiety.

All night long she’d tossed and turned, turned and tossed—but no matter how desperately she invoked it, sleep simply wouldn’t come. The same questions followed in the same sequence. Who sent the letter? What did it say? What was its purpose? The night was one of the longest she’d ever known, yet no sooner had the Great Healer finally heard her summons than the most atrocious racket started up right outside the window. She was bolt upright within seconds.

‘What the hell…?’

‘Relax! It’s only the dawn chorus.’

‘Well, bugger the dawn chorus, that’s all I can say.’

The couch had joggled as Gaius Seferius’s huge body shook with laughter. ‘You lie back and get some shut-eye,’ he’d said, rolling off the bed. ‘I want to check the vines.’

‘At this hour?’

‘Why not?’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Don’t think you’ve got a monopoly on unorthodox behaviour, my dove.’

Drusilla, who had been biding her time outside the window for Gaius to leave, had leapt on to the bed the moment he’d closed the door behind him, and, soothed by the cat’s purring, Claudia had fallen asleep. And with sleep had come dreams. Dark, diabolical dreams. There was Flamininus, the censor chained to the bloated corpse of Quintus Aurelius Crassus, urging her to whip harder because he’d pay her another quadran for every strike. A quadran’s not enough, she was saying, I need two thousand sesterces. Suddenly the corpse on the chain rolled over. ‘I’ll double that if you find my eyes,’ it said. ‘I dropped them with my sandals.’ ‘I sold ’em,’ Rufus piped up, ‘swapped ’em for a pig’s head.’ When Claudia turned to give him a clip round the ear the boy wore Otho’s scarred face and she had woken up sweating. Drusilla had snuggled closer and thanks to her rhythmic washing, Claudia had drifted off again. This time Gaius—on his back, naked and wriggling like a big, fat baby—was crying, ‘Help me, Claudie, help me,’ and while she watched, doing nothing, the tears dissolved his eyes into raw, red sockets and she had woken up again, shaking.

‘There’s a perfectly simple explanation for all this,’ Claudia Seferius told her reflection. ‘You’re hungry, you’re tired, you drank too much last night. What do you expect, you silly cow?’

Expert fingers began to cover the bruises with chalk, drawing a thin (but steady!) line of antimony round her eyes and rubbing ochre into her cheeks and lips. By the time she’d stuck the last bone pin into her curls, Claudia Seferius was equipped to deal with any obstacle in her path, and had she come face to face with the Minotaur himself raging on the other side of her bedroom door, her stride would not have been broken. Unfortunately, as it happened, it was Marcellus she bumped into.

‘Remus, Claudia, you look like shit.’

‘Why, thank you, brother-in-law, you look terrific yourself.’

He was, she noticed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

‘Did you want me?’

Marcellus flashed a lecherous grin. ‘Any time, darling, any time. Although, at this particular moment, it’s your old man I’m after.’

She jerked her head towards the fields. ‘At dawn, would you believe? He went off to potter round his precious vines. Could be anywhere by now.’

She wondered what Marcellus wanted. In fact, she wondered why an architect embroiled in the restoration works was at the villa at all. He seemed edgy, that was certain. Claudia quickly forgot him and followed her nose in the direction of freshly baked bread.

‘So you’ve condescended to join us at last.’

Her mother-in-law, lips pursed, forehead puckered, didn’t even bother to look up.

‘Larentia, darling! Lovely to see you again.’

Claudia swept over to her and planted a loud kiss on her mother-in-law’s withered cheek.

‘And good morning to you too, ladies.’ Julia, Flavia and Valeria were also reclining in the dining room.

Larentia snorted. ‘You’d best throw another salt cake on the fire,’ she said to the slave hovering at her shoulder. ‘I’ve already put one on today, madam.’—

‘I know,’ Larentia replied dryly, darting a reptilian glance at Claudia. ‘But Vesta will need a damn sight more than that to appease her.’

The slave bowed and went off to toss another offering on the sacred flame. Claudia inspected a pear and, pretending she’d missed the jibe, turned to Valeria.

‘How are you doing, kid?’

‘Can’t complain.’ The girl patted her swollen belly. ‘This baby’s been thumping half the day and all of the night since Lucius died.’

‘You’ll call him after his father, I presume?’ Julia stared at the bulge under Valeria’s tunic.

‘Not if it’s a girl,’ she replied with a chuckle, ‘and besides, I never cared for the name. Antonius has a nice ring to it.’ Flavia’s expression darkened, so she added quickly, ‘As has Sylvanus.’ She turned to Claudia. ‘That was my father’s name.’

‘I like that, Sylvanus.’

Pulling off a chunk of bread, Claudia decided Valeria didn’t strike the traditional pose of a grief-stricken widow. It was common knowledge, of course, that Gaius had arranged the marriage purely to advance the Seferius cause, though Lucius and Valeria seemed to have knuckled down and made the most of it, as indeed most young couples did. Uppermost in both their minds was the provision of an heir, and this was their fourth try. The tally so far ran to two miscarriages, plus one stillborn.

‘I wouldn’t call my son after my father.’ Trust Flavia to muddy the waters. ‘Anyway, I’ve told Antonius, I don’t want babies.’

‘Flavia!’

Julia was scandalized. It wasn’t something you ever said aloud, even if you meant it. Times were hard enough, as Valeria could testify, and the Empire sorely needed more stout citizens. Wasn’t Augustus imposing financial penalties on couples having less than four children or on men who remained single?

‘I think your aunt is trying to tell you that a global shortage of babies is something to be deplored, rather than encouraged.’

Flavia turned to her stepmother. ‘Well, I don’t want them, so there. What’s more, I shan’t sleep with Antonius—’

The slap that rang out stopped everyone in their tracks, including the slaves. Flavia blinked at her aunt in momentary disbelief, then burst into her usual flood of tears and ran out. Surprised and mortified by her unaccustomed outburst, Julia apologetically gathered up her skirts and went after her. Larentia chewed her lower lip as she stared at Claudia.

‘Don’t look at me, Larentia. You can’t be putting the right cakes on the fire.’

‘They’re the right ones, just not enough of them when you’re in the house. Didn’t have no trouble till you arrived.’

Claudia rolled her eyes and turned to Valeria. ‘So you think the little one might come early?’

‘Yes, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if—’

‘My daughter was right, though. You
will
call him Lucius.’

Both women’s eyes turned to Larentia, who was presiding over the dining room like a judge over a trial. Valeria, Claudia noticed, had turned quite pink. No doubt without her husband to stick up for her, she’d been in for a rough ride of late.

‘She’ll call her baby what she damn well pleases.’

‘Got nothing to do with you, keep your stuck-up nose out of my family affairs.’

‘Valeria’s her own woman, let her make her own decisions.’

‘She’s carrying my great-grandchild and if it’s a boy she’ll call him Lucius, won’t you, Valeria?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake stop bullying the girl. Valeria, why don’t you lie down, love?’

Valeria flashed a brief smile of gratitude and tottered off. Claudia pitied her, poor little bitch, suffering six years under the same roof as this imperious old cow, and if Gaius was entertaining any thoughts about inviting his mother to live with him in Rome he could damned well think again!

‘Ach, there’s always trouble when you’re around.’

Claudia settled herself deeper into the couch, concentrating on the new frieze whereby each wall represented a different season. If that scraggy old bag of bones believed she could cower Claudia Seferius with her poisonous tongue she was in for a surprise.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, either.’

Claudia continued to ignore her and broke off a piece of crumbly yellow cheese.

‘You won’t get away with it.’ She spat the words out, syllable by syllable.

Slowly Claudia laid down her goblet and dabbled her fingers in the bowl of water. ‘Something on your mind, Larentia?’ she asked sweetly.

‘Bitch!’

Claudia smiled. ‘Don’t suppose you could be a little more specific?’

Of course! She hadn’t considered this old harpy when she was looking for the writer of a poison pen letter but who else? Weren’t anonymous letters always written by women? And who better equipped with venom?

‘Whore! You’re nothing but a vain, idle, good-for-nothing, gold-digging harlot!’

Unless Julia watched her ways, she’d end up the very image of her mother in thirty years’ time. Crabbed and bony, with claws for fingers and only spite to keep her going. With a jerk of her head, which sent two curls loose from their moorings, Claudia indicated to the slaves in no uncertain terms to get lost and stay lost.

‘What really interests me is, did you write it yourself?’

A puzzled frown bit into the old woman’s forehead. ‘Write what?’

‘Come, come, Larentia. I know. And you know. And Gaius knows. But he’s thrown it away. Thinks it’s a load of old codswallop, if you must know. Doesn’t believe a word of it.’

‘Thrown what away? Codswallop? What are you going on about?’

‘Don’t play games with me, Larentia. I simply wondered whether you wrote it all on your own, or whether you brought in a third party to write it for you.’ Everyone knew Larentia had very little schooling, and what she had she wasn’t very good at.

‘Don’t try and sidetrack me, you scheming hussy. It won’t work, I tell you. I know what you’re up to, and I’m warning you here and now, you won’t get away with your nasty tricks any longer.’