Virgin Territory (18 page)

Could her reluctance to go, he wondered, his heartbeat increasingly rapid, have any connection with himself?

There was one other hint, the most solid yet. If she wasn’t interested in him, why spend so much time in his company?

Flimsy excuses. First she needed balsam, then she was back to enquire as to the efficacy of chalk in bathwater. She’d even demonstrated a close interest in the tools of his trade, selecting a pair of forceps with long, slender handles, hollowed jaws and interlocking teeth and asking, ‘What’s this for?’

When he told her they were pilecrushers, it was truly comical to note the speed with which she dropped them.

Another time she said, ‘They found that child, you know,’ and he pretended not to know about the missing kid. That way she was forced to spend yet more time with him as she recounted the story of the child—a boy, as it turned out—who had been frightened by the storm, ran for shelter then got himself hopelessly lost. He was eventually found over in Fintium by an old fisherman whom he cajoled into taking him out next day, little suspecting there was a storm of a very different kind awaiting his return.

Diomedes had smiled at the way she’d ended the story by saying, ‘I’d have scalped the little bugger if he’d been mine.’ She injected such energy into things!

Had he been born either wealthy or aristocratic, it would have been easy. Instead, as a Greek, he was acutely aware of the disadvantages weighed against him. Setting the cook’s horehound infusion to one side, he moved across to his desk and opened an envelope of papyrus. Shaking a dozen or so tiny oval seeds of fenugreek into his mortar, he began to pound them with his pestle. In a poultice, they should sort out Antefa’s boil once and for all. Yes, if only he’d been born patrician!

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.

Many people had seen the corpse in its raw and shocking state, not only himself and Claudia, but when the news was out, the entire family clambered up here to gawk.

Yet there was something very wrong about Sabina’s corpse.

Diomedes wondered who else had noticed the discrepancy.

XVII

The ceremony of the Penates was an annual event, a sacrifice to the gods of the household store-cupboards who watch over and protect the stocks for the winter. In Rome this took the form of a morning ceremony up on the Velia, after which families gathered for private celebrations. A quick check of the kitchen, a generous toast; on to the grain stocks, a generous toast; down to the cellar, a generous toast. By the time it came to making the actual sacrifice, everyone was pretty well oiled and it ended up a wonderfully festive occasion hugely enjoyed by one and all, if the hangovers were anything to go by.

Claudia had no idea why, in the Collatinus house, it should be celebrated at dusk. If celebrated was the word, and she had her doubts here.

She tapped her foot impatiently. There was still a half-hour to kill, and she categorically refused to spend more time with these people than was necessary. Dear Diana, a girl daren’t set foot outside her own room these days for fear of tripping over hovering physicians. Then there was Portius poncing on about ‘his’ poetry, Matidia banging on about those bloody cushions for the banqueting hall or else it was a summons to Eugenius.

Eugenius! Any more stories about that damned war and she’d scream. All right, so the island had been in decline for the last quarter century and maybe its towns and villages
had
decayed into nothingness, but you couldn’t blame Sextus for every crumbling ruin or every bankrupt landowner.

‘He incited the slaves to rise up,’ Eugenius had argued. ‘Without that, we’d all have remained prosperous.’

Whinge, whinge, whinge. Good life in Illyria, the man was as rich as Midas, what more did he want? He’d come through the war unscathed, which is more than many could boast. Penalties for supporting the wrong side were harsh—in many cases, whole towns were razed—and as for the slaves, could you blame them for fighting for freedom? They had prayed to Feronia, goddess of liberty, and believing she’d sent divine help in the form of Sextus’s rebellion, they flocked in their droves to Sicily. But, Juno, how wrong could you be? When Augustus clawed his province back, some thirty thousand fugitives from the mainland were rounded up and returned to their owners, leaving a staggering six thousand unclaimed. Six thousand souls on whom Feronia turned her back.

They had been impaled, every last one of them.

And Eugenius Collatinus had watched.

In fact, he’d turned it into a right bloody picnic and taken the whole damned family along.

A gong clanged in the atrium outside her door, frightening the kittens and alarming their mother. Claudia spent twice as long soothing them as was necessary, indeed anything to postpone the time when she would have to stand among these ghouls and smile and be polite and witty and charming. When, finally, she could no longer put off the evil moment, she found the whole family assembled on the far side of the pool. Lamps flickered, bringing the farming friezes to life. Lambs gambolled, bees swarmed, corn was threshed. Rich unguents scented the room, herbs were strewn on the floor.

There was Linus, his distinctive forehead shining in the artificial light, looking bored. Portius, weighed down with jewels, nibbled a broken nail. Matidia, in yellow wig and crimson stola, looked like a candle and you could hardly see Corinna for cloth—it was draped up her neck, down her arms, over her head, presumably to hide the bruises from children who showed no interest in her whatsoever. Paulus amused himself by pulling Popillia’s hair out of its clips. Marius stood proudly to attention beside his uncle Fabius, who today wore a scowl to match Popillia’s.

Eugenius was apparently unwell and couldn’t attend, so it was Aulus who clapped his hands, took one majestic step forward—and stumbled. His eyes were glazed, his jaw loose. Claudia reckoned he must have been drinking solidly since daybreak.

Behind him, the slaves, factory as well as household, hung back in the shadows. They stood stiffly, exchanging the occasional glance, biting the occasional lip. Considering Sabina had been murdered on Tuesday and buried on Wednesday, it was hardly surprising they were still jittery on Saturday. Gossip was rife enough—a maniac lurking in mountainous crevices, waiting to pounce on helpless women—without Marius pitching in with tales dear old Uncle Fabius had told him. Like how in one battle the centurion had thrust his sword deep into a barbarian’s throat, up through the top of his skull and blood had gushed out of his eyes…dear me, who wouldn’t have dropped the sacrifice?