Second Act (14 page)

Fifteen

‘There are many things I might have envisaged happening during the Festival of the Seven Hills,’ Claudia murmured to Drusilla. ‘But Flavia to come home laughing wasn’t one of them.’

‘Hrrrrow,’ Drusilla agreed.

We’re not talking smiling. We’re not talking grinning. We’re not even talking about a fit of adolescent giggles. No, for perhaps the first time in her life, Flavia was in the grip of genuine happiness. Well, well, well, will wonders never cease. Eyes which were normally twin balls of resentment set in a perpetual scowl shone like hilltop beacons, transforming her face into something approaching radiance. And not just her face, either. Happiness had loosened the slump of her shoulders, lifted her head, freed her spine from its withdrawn posture. In fact, Flavia looked exactly like a girl of fifteen
ought
to look. Young, carefree, with the world at her feet and a flower in her hair. Oh, and a ring missing from the middle finger of her right hand…

‘Bmp.’

‘I know, poppet. It was the one set with amethysts.’

But Drusilla wasn’t interested in what fate might have befallen Flavia’s jewellery. Tickles round the ear were nice, but they didn’t begin to compare with tormenting little jewel-coloured birds until they squawked themselves hoarse. With a lithe jump, she returned to her sentry post on the roof of the aviary and began to tweak at the wire with vicious hooked claws. Claudia slipped into a pair of fur-lined slippers warming underneath the brazier. Day Two of the advertising campaign had exceeded her expectations and not purely because of the increased crowd attendance at the Circus Maximus. The players were now established in their roles, firing off the banter that much faster, and Skyles’s chivalrous offer of giving Erinna his tunic happened so quickly that it never occurred to the spectators to question whether he couldn’t have asked someone for the loan of a long cloak instead.

Claudia couldn’t help but notice that the races which followed came as something of an anticlimax to those closest to the impromptu performance. Wheels might fall off, chariots overturn, drivers get thrown into the path of oncoming vehicles, but for those seated in the vicinity of Claudia Seferius, the antics of her sponsored actors had overshadowed anything the Circus organizers could hope to stage. Thanks to three well-upholstered females, there was enough gossip to see them through dinner parties for a month, and now it looked like war was being declared over who would sponsor the Spectaculars after Saturnalia.

‘Dear lady, I cannot thank you enough,’ Caspar glowed, as patrician fought merchant for the privilege of backing future performances. ‘A more fortuititious meeting between our two parties I could not have envisaged and I praise the day our humblesome group was evicted from that fleapit tavern on Silversmith’s Rise. The gods, I feel certain, smile on the Spectaculars.’

‘Not nearly as much as they smile on my strongbox,’ Claudia assured him. ‘I’m on twenty per cent of the takings for six months. Or hadn’t I mentioned that earlier?’

The feather in his turban reeled sideways. ‘T-twenty?’

‘All right, then, twenty-five.’ She squeezed his plump little arm. ‘After all, I
have
done all the groundwork.’ Once Caspar and his troupe had retired from the Circus—ostensibly to lick their moral wounds, but in practice because to linger would be to dilute the effect—Julia had forged her way through the crowds.

‘No shame,’ she hissed, plumping herself down on Claudia’s cushion. ‘None at all. Did you see what happened? No, of course you didn’t, you weren’t in your seat, but I saw the whole thing very clearly—’ she pointed six rows up, to the left ‘—and I tell you, those women are nothing but
strumpets.
’

‘It was hardly Erinna’s fault that her tunic came off when Ion rushed to help.’

‘Poor girl, of course it wasn’t,’ Julia agreed. ‘But afterwards, did the wench exhibit a single sign of embarrassment? She did not, and I ask you, what kind of woman is more concerned with cuffing the culprit round the ear than covering her nakedness? If it wasn’t for the decency of that nice chap with the shaved head, she would still be flashing her bazoomas round the amphitheatre and you want to watch yourself, sister-in-law, having floozies like that under your roof. You’ll end up being tarred with the same brush.’

Claudia thought of twenty-five per cent of the takings and decided she very much liked the aroma of tar. ‘Why didn’t Flavia come to the races?’ she asked.

‘Don’t be silly, I could hardly leave her mooning about the house, that child has gathered more wool than a whole crew of shearers lately. Of
course
I brought her along. Flavia? Come and say hello to—’

But when she turned her head, the seat beside her was empty. And that’s when they both realized that Flavia had sloped off with the actors.

‘Leave her,’ Claudia said. ‘Enjoy the chariot racing. She’ll come to no harm with Caspar.’

Which was true. She would have come to no harm with Caspar. Only Flavia didn’t stay with the maestro and his colourful troupe. According to Doris, while the troupe was still in the shadow of the Circus walls, Flavia slipped into the crumbling ruins of the old temple to Juventus. Which, by Claudia’s reckoning, was between four and five hours ago.

‘And she wasn’t alone,’ Doris had added, with a mischievous rattle of bangles.

Really? And what could a fifteen-year-old girl possibly have been up to that made her return home radiant with joy?

That didn’t have three letters and end with an ‘x’?

*

Claudia was sitting on the upper bunk, legs dangling, when Skyles breezed in through his bedroom doorway. She had counted it out in her head. One: drop Flavia at front entrance. Two: slip round to side. Three: flirt with a couple of the kitchen girls. Four: help self to something tasty off the griddle. A ham and onion rissole, from the smell of it.

He could, she thought, at least have feigned surprise at finding her in his room.

‘My compliments to the chef,’ he said, breaking off half the remains of the rissole and lobbing it over. ‘Absolutely delicious.’

Ham and onion it was—with a smattering of chives, parsley and just a smidgen of garlic. Craggy eyes didn’t leave hers. Not even when a strong arm reached behind him to pull the blue tapestry across the doorway. Curious how much sound was muffled by one piece of embroidered cloth. The clamour from the kitchens receded to a muffled hum. The rehearsals in the atrium to a distant drone.

Amazing how much light was blocked out from the torches that burned in the corridor, too. Plunged into sudden blackness, she heard him cross the tiny cupboard of a room without faltering. Felt the brush of air as his shoulder passed a whisker from her knees. Listened to him reach unhesitatingly for his tinderbox.
Fssst.
A sm
a
ll flame flickered on the rough wooden table between the two lower bunks as the tallow’s wick caught light.

It might have been as though his eyes had never left her.

‘Just so you know,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Any man who takes Flavia’s virginity can expect to wear his testicles for earmuffs and warble higher notes than Periander could ever hope to aspire to. Are we clear on that?’

His long, low chuckle echoed round the little room. ‘Doris wants to keep his mouth shut.’

He stripped off his tunic, leaned over the bowl on the table, splashed his face, neck and underarms and dried himself on the coarse linen towel hanging on an iron peg on the wall.

‘But if it sets your pretty mind at rest, the only cherries that interest me are these.’ He reached into ajar and tossed up one of the candied fruits he’d offered yesterday. ‘Flavia’s young enough to be my daughter.’

‘Or old enough to be your wife.’

He pulled on a clean grey tunic emblazoned with purple and gold, poured two mugs of coarse red wine and bounced up on the bunk opposite. ‘Then here’s to fortune-hunters everywhere.’

Damn. And Drink-Me-Dry had acquired another chip since yesterday, too. ‘Don’t you ever stop acting?’ she said.

‘You ask a lot of questions for a woman alone with a man in the dark.’

‘I’m sure you’re used to questions in the bedroom, Skyles.’ The women would all want to know the same things. Where did he get those scars on his back from? Did the wounds bleed much? Do they hurt? Can he feel it, when they do this…?

He chuckled, a low dirty sound which came from deep in his throat. ‘You’re right, I am, but not to the type of questions you ask. Oh and, if you’re interested, I always tell them the same thing when they get curious about how I acquired these.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the scars. ‘From my last lover’s husband, I say.’

Very funny, yes, and the women would laugh, but Claudia knew it wouldn’t matter a damn to them, because they didn’t care. They only wanted the salacious details. The pain, the blood, the humiliation. It was all part of the turn-on. They wouldn’t want to know what he had done to receive such a lashing. Only that he’d passed out, to be brought round time and again, and tell me again how you’d bitten through the wood they put in your mouth. His conquests would be aroused sexually by the wheals, not roused to compassion. Who knows, maybe Skyles had deserved a good thrashing? But Claudia would not bet her house and her vineyards on that. No man would need to act round the clock, if he was all bad.

Or was that just another layer to the act?

Because hadn’t she seen similar patterns on shoulder blades before? From a man who got sexual kicks from self-flagellation?

‘Thanks for the wine,’ she said, jumping down. ‘Although you should be able to afford better quality now on the proceeds from Flavia’s ring. Amethysts buy a jolly good vintage.’

Skyles leaned back on his elbows and stared at the dull, painted ceiling. ‘The girl just needs to breathe, Claudia. Feel she’s lived a bit, before she settles down and starts turning out babies like pots from a kiln.’

‘I have no problem with Flavia breathing,’ she said. ‘Just bear in mind what I said about earmuffs.’

Dammit, Flavia’s virginity was about the only bargaining power the family had left.

She was halfway back to the atrium when a deep voice called down the corridor after her.

‘By the way, you don’t have to worry about amethysts being wasted on the likes of me,’ Skyles said. ‘Flavia didn’t give me that ring.’ He timed his pause. ‘She threw it down the disused well outside the Temple of Juventus. An offering to the god of youth.’

Sixteen

In his office covered with hunting trophies and memorabilia, Sextus Valerius Cotta looped his thumbs into his belt and stared across the peristyle, listening to the orchestral sounds made by the rain. The drumming as it landed on the large leaves of the castor oil plants. A tinkling as it hit the ivy on the trellis, the percussion as it bounced off fan palms and the lavender, the deeper plopping noises as it dripped from the bare branches of the pomegranate tree.

With space on the Palatine at a premium, his house was smaller than many of his colleagues’, who preferred the grandeur of the Esquiline—the garden poky, if you like, in comparison. But prestige is measured in quality, rather than quantity, and Cotta’s bronze discus thrower and rearing marble horses, like the furniture in his house, were prized antiques and the craftsmen he employed were the finest in Rome. The artists, for example, called every March to perforate the stems of that tinkling ivy to release a gummy sludge which they’d mix with wine and urine then boil to produce the blood-red pigment used to colour the walls of Cotta’s office. There was, he decided, no substitute for detail. None whatsoever.

It was this attention to detail which had won him his victories in Cisalpine Gaul, among others, and had later honed his skills as a tactician in the Senate. He thought about the boar that had terrorized the Umbrian hills and whose head still snarled in defiance, only now it did so above his office chair. He recalled riding out across the Syrian desert to spear the panther whose glistening pelt he wore home as a cloak, like Hercules, and whose fangs hung round the neck of his youngest son. He remembered the lion he took on single-handed and whose skin made a nice warm rug on his floor, its head a comfy footrest beneath his desk. Attention to detail. Without it, the boar would have sunk its tusks in his belly, gutted him like a sardine. Every victory, every triumph, from Gallic uprisings to the guile of the panther, had been engineered through painstaking plotting. Even in emergencies, Cotta hadn’t rushed into anything, but had pored over the plans, rethinking, redevising, unafraid to scrap previous strategies and start again.

It would be the same when he blew up the Senate.

He opened the lime-wood box with an ornately carved hinged lid that sat on his desk. The box had belonged to his father, and Cotta had lost count of the number of times he’d praised the old man’s good sense in keeping it in his bedroom rather than taking it to the west wing when he’d conducted his final experiment in the search for immortality.

Lined up side by side within the box, like dolls in a cot, lay several kid-skin pouches, separating the ingredients for the fabled elixir. Cotta untied the string from one of the pouches, dipped his finger in the ruby red powder and examined it in the light. Realgar. What the Arabs who fetched it up from the bowels of earth called
Fire of the Mine.
He sniffed carefully, but did not make the mistake of licking his finger, instead wiping it clean with a cloth. Realgar was a form of arsenic.