Marilyn Todd - Widow's Pique

She giggled like a schoolgirl.

'But Stephanus, he starts to back off. Tells me no, no, he'll call back and get my mother to fix it, but in his clumsiness he turns and walks wham! into a table. Claudia, I have never heard a yell like it! "So, the wound's high on the front of the thigh," I say, and of course he's squirming with embarrassment — I mean, a fully grown man yelping like an infant and in front of a woman as well! — and it doesn't help that I'm laughing. "Oh, come here," I say. "Don't be such a cissy." So I whisk up his tunic, and then it's my turn to turn purple. "Well, it's hot in the desert," Stephanus says lamely. "Wearing a loincloth just makes it worse.'"

Salome wiped the tears from her eyes.

'Stephanus always told people how I saw his potential long before I saw his face.'

She blinked rapidly.

'He was a good man, my Stephanus. A good man.'

Who'd have been — what? — thirty-seven when they first met. How would that twenty-year age gap and wide cultural differences affect their relationship, Claudia wondered. And Salome had said a good man. Not, I loved him so much, or, I miss him, or, what a tragedy he'd died so young. A good man…

'Talking of men,' Claudia said sweetly. 'How come you employ so few?'

On a farm this size there'd be hundreds of tasks that brute strength would sort out in a jiffy, but would tie up two, possibly three women for half a day minimum.

'Sad to say, Claudia, I've found there are very few men who can cope with equality. Even those who claim they have no problem feel intimidated once they confront it.'

Salome sighed.

'Men seem to have this constant need to prove themselves. Bragging. Swaggering. Demonstrating their physical superiority first by chopping wood then by making advances to girls who aren't interested. I don't turn men away, Claudia, but frankly I'm not sorry to see them leave.'

Her voice softened as she glanced out across the rainbow of Amazonia.

'Those who do stay, though, are real treasures. Tobias, for instance, coaxes flowers out of thin air, which means that, when we take our stuff to Pula market to sell, we can offer a much wider range of wreaths and chaplets than our competitors.'

Claudia had noticed the commercial flower beds on the way in. Violet delphiniums beside pale pink gladiolus, deep pink hollyhocks next to pure white lilies, plus a whole painter's palette of roses. She'd noticed, too, the scowling individual who tended them and decided that, rather than coax the plants into producing their magnificent blooms, he most likely threatened the flowers.

'Tobias has a secret weapon,' Salome said, handing over a goblet of golden liquor that was denser than wine, fragrant and sweet, warm on the tongue, hot on the stomach, and which slithered down as smooth as cough syrup.

'He makes it from honey and calls it hydromel, and I'll only blush if I tell you how much we sell that for in Pula.'

However much it sold for, it was worth double and if this wasn't the nectar that the gods sipped, then the gods were being short-changed on Olympus.

'You probably saw Silas on your way in,' Salome continued. 'Old man with a white beard? He introduced the art of espaliering to the farm, so now we have apricots, plums, pears and peaches to sell at market, as well.'

Claudia dragged her pleasure zones away from the heavenly nectar and remembered the worker clipping away at the fans trained against a row of trellises, his hands stained orange-red from the soil, and remembered thinking that he looked more like a kindly philosopher than a cross-pollination expert, and that was another odd thing. Unlike the women, who were uniformly young, the men covered all age groups.

But then everything in this country came with two faces.

The sea, sometimes blue, sometimes green, looks serene but has deadly undercurrents.

Politics, in which one side is desperate to get into bed with Rome and the other plots to revolt.

The coastal dwellers who lived off the sea, the hunters and farmers of the hilly interior.

Then there was Mazares. Debonair on the outside, yet devious and cunning as a wolf on the inside…

And now Salome. Who portrays herself as the grieving widow doing her patriotic duty and digging for Rome — but where are the statues of the gods she claims to worship? Where are the portraits of her late husband? And why, if she wants to hang on to this farm, doesn't she give the land a legal heir?

As Claudia knew only too well, one of the consequences of a slave population that outnumbered its citizens four to one is that no widow of childbearing age was allowed to remain unmarried for more than two years after her husband's death. For herself, she'd lost count of the tricks she'd had to resort to, to thwart this imperial order, but the law was the law, and even though Rome might not know about Salome's freed slaves, there would be a record of Stephanus's death. Which meant that someone, somewhere, would have followed this up… and would keep following it up until Salome remarried.

'Sorry to interrupt.'

An elfin face framed by a cascade of waist-length walnut waves poked itself round the door.

'But the tanner's wife is back.'

'Jarna?' Salome's face dropped. 'Don't tell me he's been beating her again!'

The elf nodded grimly. 'Only this time she's pregnant.'

'Lora assists me in the treatment room,' Salome explained. 'Lora, this is Claudia, who's come all the way from Rome to consider the King's proposal of marriage.'

An unspoken message flashed between the two women before Salome turned to Claudia and tutted over the beaten wife's plight.

'And the Histri still cling to the theory that if a woman has a husband, she's made!'

For someone who believed in equality and freedom herself, there was nothing Claudia could say. Especially since she needed to maintain the pretence of weighing up the King's proposal.

'I'm going to have to see to this poor woman,' Salome said, rising from the couch, 'but you're welcome to come along, if you like.'

Claudia could not have been any closer behind her, had she been Salome's shadow.

The treatment room turned out to be a converted cattle shed.

At one end, a panopoly of leaves, petals, roots and seeds were in varying stages of being decocted, infused, macerated or pulverized, while at the other end shelves were stacked shoulder to shoulder with jars, bottles, phials and pots, and beneath the shelves stood a table on which ointments and poultices were in the process of being mixed from recipes anchored down at the corners with stones.

It was to these tasks that the elfin Lora returned, pausing only to tickle the ears of a grey kitten snoozing on a pile of cypress or occasionally stroke the plump, black torn curled up on the stool. Indeed, she barely glanced at the bench on which a pale creature sat with her bloodied and swollen head bent, and where two small, frightened children clung to each side.

'Jarna, Jarna, Jarna,' Salome chided softly, kneeling at the woman's feet and taking both hands in her own. 'One of these days that bastard's going to do some serious damage, you know that.'

'As long as iss only me,' Jarna lisped through her cut lip. As long as he don't start in on me kids, I can cope.'

'Can you indeed,' Salome replied, tilting the woman's chin to examine the cuts and swellings. 'Show me your ribs, please.'

The children stared at their feet as their mother pulled down her tunic to reveal a torso with barely an inch of undamaged skin.

'He drinks,' Jarna told Claudia, as though that explained everything.

'He wouldn't be able to swallow, if I got hold of the bastard,' Claudia replied, as Salome laid on a compress of decocted dewcup leaves to reduce the inflammation. 'Why don't you leave him?'