The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits (21 page)

“After tonight, Arlon, I promise you won’t see it again.”

She might not have spoken. “And then you woo me and pursue me until I fall helplessly in love at your feet, and promptly withhold all your treasures.”

He was right. She had used every trick in the book, every feminine wile, to win Arlon over. It hadn’t been easy. It had taken weeks of relentless and painstaking effort, ensuring she was accidentally seated beside him at the theatre, at the
Circus, at banquets, at parties, coincidentally bumping into him at temples, libraries, in the Forum, on the Field of Mars, by the bonnie, bonnie banks of the Tiber. But Claudia knew her man. Had researched him like a thesis. Knew exactly which strings to pull, and which to let go . . .

“Then it’s time I gave you my final three gifts,” she whispered. From the depths of her gown, she withdrew the onyx phial. “First,” she said, removing the delicate glass stopper. “Balm of Gilead.”

“Claudia!” he gasped. “That’s the most precious oil in the world.”

“If it was good enough for the Queen of Sheba to give Solomon, then it’s good enough for my bridegroom,” she said. “Lie back while I rub it over your chest.”

His muscles were hard from working out in the gymnasium, his flesh firm. He groaned in pleasure as she applied the pungent oil.

“Next comes the mead.” She held out the engraved silver hip flask. “Brewed by a small tribe in the Peloponnese, its principal ingredient is fermented honey. What the Immortals call nectar,” she added.

“Something of an acquired taste,” he grimaced, and then grinned. “But to paraphrase a certain young lady, if it’s good enough for Ganymede to serve to the King of the Gods, then it’s good enough for the bridegroom.” He upended the flask and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That, my darling, is one strong brew they mix up there in Greece.”

You don’t know the half of it. My darling.

“This is the old country proverb, isn’t it?” he said. “When it comes to oil, the oil scooped off the top is the best. With honey, the sweetest lies at the bottom. But wine –” he reached out to her, but his hand missed “– of wine, it is the middle which is unsurpassed.” He tried to prop himself
up on his elbow, but his body seemed weighted. “God, I can’t wait to taste Seferius wine. Take your clothes off. Let me gaze at the vessel.”

“In your dreams, you bastard.”

Consternation flickered in his eyes. He couldn’t decide whether he was hearing correctly. Venom? From the luscious lips of his beloved? Surely not. “Enough teasing tonight, Claudia. Come to bed.”

There was no mistaking, however, the snort of derision. The contempt which blazed from her eyes. “Arlon, I would go to my grave before I went to your bed.”

Again, he tried to sit up. Again, his muscles failed him. “I – I don’t understand.”

“See this bowl?” She pushed the bronze into his face. “It’s a begging bowl, you bastard. It belongs to a crippled, broken, old woman, blind in one eye, who is unlikely to live to see another full moon.”

And the story came out.

It was April. Colder than usual, wetter than anyone could ever recall. Claudia had been hurrying along the Via Nova, the part where the road narrowed into a high, vaulted passage, when she almost tripped over the beggar. Hardly surprising. They tended to cluster there, as well as under the porticoes and aqueducts, to shelter from the rain. She was about to move on, when there seemed something familiar about the voice of the cripple. She stopped for a closer look.

“Phyllis?” It was. It was one of
her
slaves. “Phyllis, is that you?”

The weeping sore that was the woman’s one good eye narrowed to focus. “Mistress Claudia?”

And another story came tumbling out.

A story that started on the day of Claudia’s Saturnalia banquet –

As she told the old hens, she’d invited a select band of merchants, with a view to converting them to the produce of her vineyards. The idea was simple. Lay on lavish entertainment, ply them with gourmet food, unlimited vintage Seferius wine – dear me, the contracts had been drawn up long in advance, they were all ready to be witnessed and signed!

Certainly, marble merchants with quarries dotted over Africa and the Aegean were high on Claudia’s priority list. Especially when those merchants had access to hundreds of contacts in the racing world, too! But it was no joke, despite what she’d told the old hens. Arlon’s first words to her were indeed,

“
How much would you take for your cook?
”

And her reply was exactly what she’d repeated to Orbilio on the bench. “
I can’t sell just one slave. If you want my cook, you’ll have to take his wife, his three daughters, his mother-in-law and an aunt. I won’t have the family broken up
.”

Arlon hadn’t bought Seferius wine, but he did pay a good price for the slaves, and Claudia had thought no more of it. Before handing them over to their new owner, she had established that none of his slaves, not even those in the quarries, were harshly treated. The subject had passed from her mind, especially since the cook had been a stand-in for Verres, her permanent chef, who had been laid up with a broken leg at the time.

But the tale Phyllis told had made her blood run cold.

Phyllis was the cook’s mother-in-law, sold as part of the family unit. Grandmother to his three young daughters, aged nine, eleven and thirteen. Arlon, she quickly discovered, had no need of a cook. The first thing he did was despatch the poor man to Africa, his wife to Chios and the aunt to Alexandria. The old woman he did not think would be a problem. He merely sent her to Apulia in the south.

The three children he took to his stud farm in Lucania. Stud being the operative word . . .

“You like them young, don’t you, Arlon?” Claudia said. As he struggled to bring his vision into focus, she pressed on. “Oh, not you personally. Your tastes are far too refined. But you know plenty of men who like little girls. Officials at the Circus, for instance. Magistrates, judges. Those who decide who wins by a nose – and who doesn’t.”

As she said, know your enemy. Claudia had done her homework on Arlon. Didn’t take a broken old woman’s word. She had checked up on the men who officiated and judged the race winners. Those who were in a position to dope Arlon’s competitors.
For a sweetener of their own
–

“From a position of respectability, you procured innocent young children and passed them to men who abuse and debauch them without conscience, and have no conscience about the foul deed yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” he gulped. “You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. To grow up in the slums, half-starved, wearing rags, watching your siblings die in the cradle, your parents grow old before their time.”

Don’t I? Claudia swallowed. Said nothing. And had the small comfort that at least her parents hadn’t suffered from premature ageing. They were both dead before they’d reached thirty.

“I vowed to myself, that I’d never be poor again. Never,” he said. “That I’d do anything,
anything
, not to go back to the gutter.”

How rich does a man have to be, she wondered? How high is the price of a man’s soul?

Arlon recoiled at the contempt in her eyes. “I love you,” he insisted.

“Purely because I fed you drugs that would make you addicted to me.”

Or the smell of her, to be precise. (Oh, she had a lot to thank those cunning Orientals for!) But Arlon, completely indifferent to his Saturnalia hostess, could not possibly become addicted unless Claudia contrived to be regularly by his side, slipping the drug day after day into his wine –

“Your mistake,” she said, “was sending Phyllis to another stud farm. You should have sent her to Africa with the others.”

In his complacency, he had forgotten the overlap among the racing fraternity. Gossip quickly spread to Lucania about the scandal that had to be hushed up. How the cook’s middle daughter fought, and died, for her virtue. Prompting the eldest to hold a pillow over the face of the youngest, before slitting her own wrists. At thirteen . . .

“Phyllis confronted one of the paedophiles, and his idea of remorse was to have her beaten and left for dead. But Phyllis is an indomitable old woman. She survived.”

For how much longer, though, was debatable. Her lungs were ulcerated, she was coughing up blood, growing weaker and weaker every day. But at least she was growing weaker under Claudia’s roof, with the attentions of Claudia’s physician. And, Juno willing, she would not die before the ships docked, bringing her daughter and son-in-law home.

“You can’t prove it,” Arlon said, and his voice was weak now, his limbs leaden. “You can’t prove any of this.”

“I know. Just as I can’t prove that you killed your wife or that fifty other small girls have been raped and defiled before conveniently disappearing.”

He must know. Orbilio must know about this. He called him a fiend. A monster. Oh, he knows –

“Then what do you gain by this betrothal?” Arlon asked.

Claudia stood up, shook out her sleeves, adjusted her girdle. “Haven’t you guessed?”

The moon was still full, but this was the shortest night of the year. Already the sun was starting to rise, prompting the birds in the aviary to sing their hearts out.

“Well, you’re a clever man, Arlon. You worked out the country proverb, and I’m sure you’ll work this out, too.” She tucked the phial and the hip flask back in the folds of her gown. “Sooner or later.”

Nine days later and the heat had not abated. The moon, shrinking fast, still cast a silvery light over Claudia’s garden, accentuating the feathery foliage of the wormwood, but now the constellations could be seen bright in the heavens. The great bear, the little bear, the dragon, the lynx. And from the northern horizon to the east, the great white swathe of the Milky Way stretched into infinity.

Claudia sat on the edge of the pool with her gown hitched up to her knees, dangling her feet in the cool water. Beside her, gnawing on a fresh sardine, her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat, Drusilla, stiffened. Half a sardine dropped from her mouth, and a low growl emitted from the back of her throat.

“I know, poppet.” Claudia stroked the hackles flat. “I smelled him, too.”

Sandalwood among roses and pinks.

His tall frame cast a shadow over the papyrus as he untied his high, patrician boots and eased himself down on to the marble rim adjacent to Claudia, his toes making slow ripples over the surface of the pool. Moths fluttered round the night stocks and herbs, and Drusilla fused with the night.

“You didn’t attend the funeral, then?”

“Prostrate with grief,” she replied.

“It must be tough,” Orbilio said, and it might have been
the moonlight, but she could have sworn she saw a flash of white teeth.

“You have no idea,” she said honestly. Stuck indoors for nine days, she’d missed out on the Festival of Fortune, two days of bull fights and the Celebration of the bloody Muses.

“Still.” He plucked an orange marigold and twirled it slowly between his fingers. “The period of mourning is up now. I’m sure you’ll be fully recovered by tomorrow.”

“Sarcasm,” she said, snatching the bloom out of his hand, because the significance of its colour hadn’t escaped her, “doesn’t suit you.”

He snatched it back. “Any more than black suits you. Which,” he added mildly, “I presume is the reason the grieving bride-to-be isn’t wearing it . . .?”

“Cut to the chase, Orbilio. What do you want?”

His eyes took a leisurely journey over the tumble of dark curls round her shoulders as he inhaled her spicy Judean perfume, watched the rhythmic heave of her breasts. “What do you think I want?” he murmured.

“Oh, I rather imagine it entails handcuffs and chains. Things like that.”

He pinged a pebble into the pool. “I never do bondage on a first date,” he said. “But you should have come to me with your suspicions about Arlon, not take the law into your own hands.”

Claudia held out her hands, first palms downwards, then palms up. “I see no law.” Several minutes passed, cicadas rasped, and the heat of the night intensified. “Are you going to charge me?” she asked, and her voice was so quiet, and so much time elapsed, that she wondered whether he had heard her.

“With what?” he asked eventually. “Arlon died alone in his own bed on midsummer night, choking to death on his own vomit after drinking too much.”

But he knew, she thought. He knows everything. And in the moonlight, she waited.

“It was a dangerous ploy, Claudia.” Marcus stretched out on his elbows on the marble path, his legs still dangling in the pool, and stared up at the night sky. “It could have backfired, and badly.”

“What could?” she asked innocently.

“The honey trap you set for Arlon.”

Classic in its own way. Girl lures man. Sets him up. The perfect entrapment. Like a fly in amber, there’s no escape. Men are such fools when it comes to sex.

“Honey
moon
,” she corrected, stretching out beside him. Up there, Polaris twinkled the brightest.

“Whatever,” he laughed. “But it was clever. Immoral, mind you. But clever.”

Pfft. How can rubbing a pungent oil on a man’s chest to disguise the bitter soporific with which she’d laced his mead compare to the terror of fifty young children? Immoral, my eye! Yes, of course she knew Arlon would choke. Everyone saw how much he’d drunk, it might have happened anyway, all it needed was a slight nudge. One less scumbag, fifty children avenged, hundreds more spared the same sickening fate.

The celestial zoo tramped across the heavens. A pink light began to tinge the sky to the east. The first blackbird broke into song from an apple tree already swelling with tiny green fruits.

“Let me at least reimburse you for the expense,” Orbilio said sleepily.

“No need,” she replied.

Rugs? Gold medallions? Balm of Gilead? Ivory chairs? Cheap at half the price, she reflected, as the first bees began to buzz round the lavender.

The State understood grief. Accommodated the bereaved. Made allowances.

Thanks to one bright orange veil, a noisy procession and an ostentatious plighting of her troth, Claudia Seferius had two more fabulous years of freedom stretching ahead of her.