Dark Horse (10 page)

'Neptune,' she said, leaning her palms on the thick drystone wall where, on the other side, a pair of eyes as big and as bright as a rabbit's peered out of a filthy little wedge-shaped face. 'I was asking him to protect Leo and the
Medea.'

'Can Neptune hear you?' Somewhere beneath all those ingrained layers of grime was a girl of nine, maybe ten, on her scrawny knees pulling up roots.

'Why shouldn't he? You did.'

'Personally, I don't bother with that praying lark,' the girl said, with a sad shake of her matted curls. 'What's the point? The gods only answer the prayers of the grown-ups.'

Claudia was not about to disillusion her by disclosing that the gods don't always bother with that. 'Should you be out on your own?'

'I much prefer my own company,' the child said. 'It's so noisy at home.' She pulled up another plant and shook the soil off its roots. 'Kids,' she muttered. 'Who'd have 'em?'

Claudia blinked.

'If they're not squabbling, they're bossing each other around.' The girl clucked. 'Sometimes I don't know how I manage to cope.'

'Lots of you, are there?' Claudia sucked her cheeks in hard.

'Thirteen or fourteen, I suppose.' The girl shrugged. 'You lose count after a while.'

Maybe that explains the rabbit eyes, Claudia thought, debating whether perhaps the child was also concealing a powder-puff tail underneath her cheap cotton shift. 'What are you picking?' she asked. The stonework was searingly hot through her skin, and a green lizard darted into a gap in the wall near her foot.

'Alkanet.' Little hands tugged up another root and examined it carefully. 'Nanai’ wants to dye blankets for winter, only she won't let us pick them while they're in flower, she says it's a waste of a pretty blue life.' Her small dusty faced tipped to one side. 'We'll still be here, you know. In the winter.'

'Yes. I'm sure you will be.' And now it was becoming impossible for Claudia to stifle her laugh.

'No, I mean it. I heard Nanai tell Lydia. "He can't throw us to the wolves," she said. "It's not fair, turfing us off like we were ticks on a sheep", but Lydia said there was no contract, nothing in law, and Nanai said, "That doesn't matter because Leo swore on his oath".'

Ah, so that was it. The poor child's absurdly large family was a pawn in some tradesman's dispute. Connected no doubt to Leo's massive renovation programme, for reasons unknown (bad workmanship probably) Leo had served the family notice to quit. At her feet, the girl was still chirruping on in her

world-weary voice as she stuffed more alkanet roots into her tightly clenched fist.

'Lydia told Nanai’ to be careful. Leo's word couldn't be trusted, she said, he was a bastard down to his core. But Nanai laughed, and said she was used to handling bastards.'

Claudia wondered what the odds were that other people had conversations with ten-year-old minnows who gossiped like fishwives? But then, moving house would be a subject very dear to little hearts. Stability is everything to children and by relating the conversation between Nanai and Lydia, this dusty bag of bones could convince herself that nothing was going to change in her tiny world. That they
would
all still be here, come the winter.

'Do you know what "having no leverage" means?' she asked Claudia, screwing her grubby face into a frown.

'You lose your bargaining power.'

The little face relaxed. 'Ah, so that's what Lydia meant when she told Nanai that if Leo tossed us out, she wouldn't have any leverage. Not that Nanai was worried. She told Lydia she had no intention of waiting until we got thrown out. In a few days, she said, there wouldn't be a problem, we'd be safe.'

Claudia felt a chill of alarm prickle her skin. Was that a threat she'd just heard repeated from those tiny lips? And if so, just how substantive was Nanai's warning? Then she looked at the bony-kneed scrap, burrowing around the dusty stone wall, and decided this was getting too fanciful. Her nerves were upside-down-inside-out thanks to the fire, the charred body, the scalp-mongering pirate - and (admit it) because she was scared stiff Leo would not come home. Rattled nerves do not make for rational thought!

'Does Lydia often visit your mother?' she asked, changing the subject.

'They've been friends for ever,' the little girl said. 'Only now Lydia comes more often because she hates that little white house Leo built for her on the point and she hates Leo and she hates having no money and hardly any servants, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. If Leo wants a baby so badly, he can have one of ours, we've got loads and Nanai won't miss one, I'm sure. Oh, and you've got it back to front about Nanai, but if you want to know more, I'm afraid you'll have to come home with me. You see, I haven't got time to hang about nattering. My bread's ready to come out of the oven.'

The tavern was a typical harbourside tavern, filled with fishermen, BO, tall stories and splinters. Orbilio, in a knee-length linen tunic tied with a woollen belt, had to raise his voice for his call for a second jug of wine to be heard. The wine was coarse, like the people who drank it, but at least in these rough drinking dens where he searched out information, the darkly lit bearpits, the rowdy bordellos, people were honest about who and what they were. He spiked his hands through his fringe. It was more than he could say for himself.

Croesus, what made him take Margarita like that? A pain shot through his body, violent and searing. The cheap truth of it was, he had made love to her (if that was the term) because the woman he wanted was out of his reach and, in one rash moment, he had consumed his yearnings in animal lust. He shuddered with the shame of the memory. Mother of Tarquin, what devils had possessed him to take a woman who was shallow, uncaring and whose looks had all but faded simply to assuage a different hunger?

'Ooh, darling,' Margarita had purred afterwards. 'I shall settle for nothing less than sex spelled with four Fs from now on. Frequent, fast, frivolous and
frenetic!
You tiger, you!'

What terrible depths had he sunk to?

Around him, men talking in the local cadence laughed, threw darts or moved bone counters over an oakwood table marked into squares. Heavy-set wenches swapped badinage and gossip while they served food on square wooden trenchers and the landlord, the florid-faced husband of a small, prune-faced shrew, turned a blind eye to a flea-bitten tomcat stealing a pilchard. Through the doorway, Orbilio watched a weary black

donkey grinding wheat on a treadmill as fishermen stropped the points of their harpoons.

Margarita had seen nothing sordid in that bleak exchange of body fluids. What had once been a succession of dazzling affairs for her had congealed into casual sex as a substitute for affection, and as much as he would like to attribute her depressing transformation to remarriage to the Senator, that was wishful thinking. Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had been as instrumental in her downward slide as Margarita had been herself. As a wife and mother, she'd represented fun without judgement, sex without commitment when he'd been at a low ebb. He'd simply accepted the affair as it came, on a plate, without considering how it might affect Margarita, being loved then discarded as a matter of course. Today, she was one step short of becoming an old bag. An old bag whom he'd laid in a rabid desire for somebody else!

Still. He drowned another goblet of wine. The school of hard knocks had taught him yet one more bitter lesson in this sorry episode. At least he knew this craving he had for Claudia Seferius wasn't love. If nothing else, yesterday's sordid session had shown him how to recognize lust when he saw it. That pain, that tearing passion, that burning need for fulfilment which ripped him apart might have many names, he reflected bitterly. But love wasn't one of them.

Croesus almighty, though. Doping thoroughbred racehorses! He knew why she was doing it. She'd climbed out of the gutter, inveigled herself into marriage with a rich wine merchant who'd then died and left the young widow the lot. Clearly, if a girl was to continue living in the manner to which she's grown accustomed, then adjustments had to be made - and since she wasn't able to offload the business assets, it stood to reason that, with Claudia, not all of those adjustments would be legal. Typical of the woman to mix business with pleasure. She never could resist a gamble! Even though betting was against the law. At least in theory.

Augustus was a wise old owl when it came to his people. Although most of Rome's wealthier citizens had absconded to the hills or (like the Senator and Margarita) to their seaside villas to escape the torrid summer, nearly a million souls had

not. Worse, while they were effectively incarcerated in the city, irritable from the heat and bored to the nines, their incomes had plummeted from loss of trade.

'A people that yawns is ripe for revolt,' the Emperor had been heard to murmur on more than one occasion.

He had decreed that it might not hurt if the controls on gambling were eased during the hot summer months. Augustus, bless his campaign boots, understood that the poorer the individual, the more money they bet, simply because they had the most to gain. So he introduced the idea of bronze raffle tickets with food prizes for the winners. What pittance they earned might disappear on liquid pleasures or a horse's hoof, but a shoulder of mutton and a brace of hare stops them from crossing the line into stealing.

Orbilio tuned in to the local chatter in the tavern. Already he had picked up a good deal, either from conversation or from eavesdropping, information he would never have acquired in patrician garb. Across the room, he nodded acknowledgement to a man in his mid to late forties, greying at the temples, a fish out of water if ever there was one in this flyblown harbourside dive. Fish out of water always made his instincts twitch. The fellow wasn't high born, but he wasn't poor, either, and one of the first things Orbilio had noticed were the long, spatulate fingers. The type of fingers which could tell gold from gold plating and recognize fine works of art in rich men's houses when they felt them.

The man smiled, a warm and uncomplicated smile, his eyes meeting Orbilio's full on before he turned into the town square where children sang and played hopscotch and dogs dozed in the shade. Hmm. The stolen items had been carefully targeted. Jewellery, silverware, carved ivory statuettes. And with none of the fences buckling under the strain of a sudden influx of precious goods, Marcus had a suspicion that, instead of being sold, the ivory was sent for recarving, the metals melted down for recasting, the gems prised out of their settings and recut. This wasn't a simple case of smash and grab and pocket the loot. A lot of money would be changing hands in a sophisticated organization planned like a military campaign

involving people who wouldn't blink twice at eliminating nosy investigators.

Perhaps Margarita had the right idea after all, he thought wearily. Toe the family line. Settle down, practise law, sire sons. Not wait for a knife to slip between his ribs in some dreary back alley.

Marcus gulped down the last of his wine, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and slipped out of the tavern's side entrance which, as it happened, opened into one such dreary back alley. He spiked his hands through his fringe. Croesus, what a choice. Running down cut-throats, thieves and assassins in the stinking stews and the ghettos; or making policy and laws in the Senate? He squinted along the dark passage, straining for sounds in the shadows.

No contest, old chap.

No contest at all.

Claudia must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, dusk was casting its soft cloak over the Villa Arcadia.

As much as a spot of light relief would have gone down rather well after the trauma and tragedy earlier, she had decided against accompanying the olive-grove nymph back to her over-populated home. If her theory was wrong - and Jason's intention was indeed to kill Leo out on the water -then the villa would be wide open to attack and Claudia had no intention of straying far from her escape route.

Thanks to plunging cliffs, much of Cressia's indented coastline was inaccessible. But not all. A great sweeping bay to the east sheltered the island's principal town and only deep harbour, though rocky coves and pretty sandy beaches proliferated. Plenty of places for a determined warship to put in. Plenty of places for a small rowing boat to be secreted, ready for a strapping bodyguard to row his mistress across to the mainland.

The pearl in a necklace of interconnected islands, Cressia was a long, narrow tongue of land forty miles long but rarely more than three miles wide. Craggy limestone mountains rose almost vertically out of the sea to the north, attracting squalls in winter and a pall of grey cloud even in summer. It was a place for only the brave, the foolish and the vultures, and much of the central hills were equally intractable, an untamed wilderness of oak, sweet chestnut and scrub. But where the landscape softened, so the climate changed, also. Here, rich pasturelands, olive groves and vineyards flourished. Warm in winter, but without the searing summer heat that bleached the Dalmatian coast to the west, deer and rabbits were hunted for

game, trees coppiced for firewood, hives set up for the yellow bees which feasted off the nectar of wild herbs and produced such incomparable honey.

Heading homewards along the ridge of a hill, Claudia understood what attracted Leo to this extraordinary Island of the Dawn. The soil might be too thin, too dry, too starved of nutrients to make a fortune out of the estate, but who could blame anyone for settling here? What a bloody shame Lydia had not been able to give him the heir he so desperately wanted.