Marilyn Todd - Sour Grapes

'A large jug of your best vintage wine, and a hot pie if you have one.'

Ordinarily he was a big man, a jolly man, the life and soul of the place, she suspected. Today his eyes sat in black hollows and the skin hung slack round his jaw.

'Reckon I can do you the pie, ma'am. Wine went off again in the night.'

'All of it?'

He shook his head sadly. 'Fufluns has cursed me, that he has, milady. Don't rightly know why, but I sure do know how, and though I've hung prayer ribbons outside begging him to pass me over — '

And here was her, thinking they were there to add gaiety!

' — and made every offering you can think of to appease Fufluns' wrath, his curse descended upon me while I made revel last night, and Tarchis says if the gods decide vengeance, vengeance cannot be avoided.'

Good old Tarchis. Nothing like a dyed-in-the-wool zealot to lift flagging spirits.

'Then I'll have a jug of your best vintage water, landlord. And don't forget that hot pie!'

'You sure?' The tavern-keeper looked at her as though he'd been covered in spots and she'd catch a bout if she stayed another five seconds.

'Absolutely.'

Claudia pulled out a small, round stool from under one of the tables and sat down. Many of the wall paintings seemed so achingly familiar — satyrs chasing maenads, maenads chasing satyrs, all amid much cymbal clashing and upending of goblets — that she wondered whether Bacchus mightn't be another Etruscan trophy that had been off to Rome in triumph.

'I was going through my husband's old papers when I came across notes of a trial that took place several years ago, and… well, Gaius wrote about you in such glowing terms that I simply had to come and meet you myself

'Me?' For a big man, he turned ever so coy. 'Gaius Seferius wrote about me?'

As he rattled off to stoke the wood-fired oven in his kitchen, he was beaming from ear to ear and she knew then it was just a matter of time.

'Look what I found!' He returned with a flagon painted with garish purple grapes that he'd filled to the point of overflowing. 'It's white wine, milady, but I suddenly remembered squirrelling it away in the corner, even though there's not much call for white round these parts. But I've just broke the seal and tested the quality.' He winked. 'Reckon it's only red wine old Fufluns has a beef with.'

Divine providence? Or a saboteur also failing to notice that particular amphora tucked away in the dark reaches of the cellar?

'Pie'll be along shortly, and I've got herbed chicken legs fried in olive oil… well.' He grinned as his natural bonhomie bubbled back to the surface. 'Not me personal, like! My legs is more hairy!'

He pushed out a plate of relishes to go with the wine. Claudia pushed out a stool for him to join her.

'Gaius spoke very highly of your cheerfulness and wit.' Idly she wondered whether acting was in the blood. 'As he did about your honesty and integrity at Felix's trial.'

'Felix?' The landlord rolled his eyes. 'Now there's a name I never expected to hear again this side of the Styx.'

Claudia poured wine into her glass and filled one for him. 'Treason, the notes said.'

'Aye, though you'd never think it to look at him, ma'am. You'd have taken him for honest as the day was long, but there he was, embezzling funds from the Imperial Treasury, and between you and me, milady, he was lucky to get off with ten years.'

Hear that, Darius? Lucky to get off with ten years.

'Gaius was rather more specific,' she said. '"Guilty as hell" were his words.'

'No question of it, milady.' The landlord leaned his elbow on the table, rested his head on his hand and stretched out his legs to make himself comfortable as he related the story.

Felix, he explained, wasn't from around here. He came from Cosa, which Claudia happened to know well, being the Etruscan port where Seferius wine was still shipped from. The Gaius connection started to fall into place. According to the tavern-keeper, Felix didn't inherit his wealth. He came from a poor but freeborn family and started life as a daytime donkey (which she assumed to mean porter) on the quay down at Cosa, working his way up to become an oysterman, and eventually farming them for a living. Only two other men had ever tried farming oysters, he added, and though Felix's initial efforts off the coast here were none too successful, he discovered that the Bay of Naples was infinitely more conducive to the cultivation of his little molluscs.

Naples. Another cog clicked into place. Naples was the port where Darius shipped out his famous racehorses. No wonder he was so familiar with the south.

'Why would a man who was so successful want to embezzle funds from the Treasury?'

'Search me.' His big shoulders shrugged. 'Guess when you're born with no money, you can't never have enough.'

How very true. 'What I don't understand, though, is why a man born in Cosa and farming oysters in Naples would be tried for treason in Mercurium.'

'Oh, that'd be his marriage, milady.'

The tavern-keeper switched elbows and launched into a reminiscence of Felix's marital history. How he'd married the blacksmith's daughter when he was very young, for the simple reason she told him she was pregnant and he wanted to do the honourable thing by her.

'But she wasn't, I assume?'

No wonder Darius wasn't amused when Claudia cracked that joke about Larentia on market day. Too close to home for comfort, that one!

'False alarm, she said, but people who knew Felix back in them days said he knew straight off he'd been conned. Set out to trap him right from the start, she did, but them marriages never work out. It was a sham from the beginning; he never loved her, and that's why folk believe he worked such long hours. To take his mind off his loveless marriage, because there was never any question of his wife going to live with him in Naples.'

But then, the landlord said, after fifteen years, Felix visited Mercurium on business and here he met Mariana.

'Love at first sight for both of 'em. Soul mates, milady, no other word, and the very first thing Felix did was ride over to Cosa and divorce… cor, what was her name? Ophelia? Emilia? Aurelia! It's all coming back now. Felix divorced Aurelia before you could blink, bought a house here and hardly set foot in Naples again. No one said it was fair on the first wife, but I knew Mariana, milady. Lovely girl. Absolute angel. And a man can't help how he feels, can he? You only get the one life.'

Not if you're a Gaul. They were firm believers in scourging themselves to make it better for their incarnation. Live tough and live miserably, that was their motto. Because when you die you can do it again.

'How did Aurelia take to being usurped?'

'Not a peep out of her, and let's face it, she couldn't have been any happier in her heart than Felix, and you have to remember they was both young still. Pretty girl in her prime with a hefty divorce settlement? Probably the best thing that happened to her in the long run.'

While he broke off to fetch the pie, the hot crispy chicken legs and to refill the wine jug, Claudia wondered what had happened to turn Felix into a monster. Had he still been trapped in a disillusioned marriage, she could have understood bitterness gnawing away down the silver mines. But here he was, the archetypal working-boy-made-good, starting over with a girl who adored him. It didn't make sense. Felix was rich. Felix was happy. Felix was in love. Why risk everything by stealing from His Imperial Majesty's coffers? Burrow into a bank vault, steal your neighbour's money chest, break into a merchant's house and rob him of his valuables, by all means! You get caught, you make restitution, you compensate the victim for any distress, blah-blah-blah, then you spend two years on somewhere like Capri or in Athens in what is supposed to be exile. After which, you come back with a tan, a few new experiences, some good tales to tell, then — hey presto — it's business as usual.