Marilyn Todd - Widow's Pique

'Orbilio, I don't know whether you've been smoking those hemp seeds again or it's a question of blood being thicker than water and you being thicker than both, but let me spell it out for you. There's a conspiracy here, whether you like it or not, and Mazares is at its heart.'

Ticking the deaths off on her fingers, she started at the beginning.

'Brae, the King's older brother, a young, fit, nineteen-year-old, newly married and with a full life ahead, suddenly dies of a fever.'

'Gosh, you're right. No one's ever died of a fever before.'

'Not when you're the King's son surrounded by physicians and, dare I say it, pretty red-headed herbalists. Did you hear those children at Zeltane the other night? Brac be nimble, Brac be quick, Brac jump over the candlestick. Brac jump long and Brac jump high, or Brac fall into a fever and die.'

'Your point?'

'My point is that his death was so sudden that it was instantly absorbed into folklore. Tell me that's a common occurrence! Then we have the King's father, a man called Dol. Dol the Just.'

'Yes, I met him once, when I was small.' Orbilio reached for another blade of grass to gnaw on. 'He did a lot of good things for this country.'

'Apparently so, but he died, to quote your dear friend Mazares, suitably young.'

'Claudia, it was a lung complaint. Pleurisy, pneumonia, I don't know exactly, but hundreds of people die from lung complaints every year.'

'Not when they're a king and surrounded by physicians and, dare I say it, pretty red-headed herbalists. Is a pattern starting to emerge here?'

'You don't seriously believe Salome poisoned Brac and Dol?'

'With Mazares's help, I bloody know she did. Anyway, things settle down for a while. Delmi, Brac's widow, has been palmed off on the new heir to the throne, a situation that suited neither of them, but they put on a brave face and are now the proud parents of two healthy children, a boy and a girl.'

This was the hard part.

'The girl was twelve when she died.'

Claudia's knuckles turned white as she recalled the story recounted by Broda's mother.

'The girl is a sickly little thing, prone to bouts of illness that confine her to her bed, but this only binds the relationship between mother and daughter. They become closer than ever.'

She swallowed.

'One day, the family set off from Gora to propitiate the spirits of the lake. I don't have all the details, but it's something to do with creatures like the Sirens-'

'Ruskali,' Marcus said. 'Beautiful maidens who inhabit lakes and rivers, but whose loveliness disguises their real purpose, which is to lure victims into the water, where they hold them under until they drown and then feast off their flesh.'

Wherever you turn on this wretched peninsula, there are ghouls, vampires and demons.

'Well, that's what happened to Delmi's daughter,' she said. 'Her body was washed up many weeks later and, superstitious to the end, the Histri still believe the Ros-?'

'Ruskali!

'-Ruskali got them. As far as Delmi was concerned, it was irrelevant, of course. Her beloved daughter was dead and by all accounts, the mother's spirit died alongside.'

A hand covered her own and squeezed gently.

'Weak lungs are inherited, Claudia.'

She snatched her hand away and wondered why the horizon had blurred.

'Anyway,' she said briskly. 'A couple of years pass and Delmi's son marries an elfin creature called Lora, a beautiful child with waves of walnut hair that cascade down to her waist, and whether Lora reminds Delmi of her dead child I have no idea, but Delmi perks up and the feeling, apparently, is mutual. Lora adores her mother-in-law in return.'

As the sun moved round, lifting the shade from the rocky cove, Claudia turned her face towards it.

'Then, surprise surprise, her only surviving child is out hunting when he's disembowelled by one of his own mastiffs and, racked with grief, Delmi takes her own life by swallowing hemlock. Or so the story goes.'

Orbilio sat up and turned her round to face him.

'Claudia, I'm well aware of all this-'

'Oh, and then the King gets bouts of sickness, as well.'

'Listen to me. Just because one family experiences one tragedy after another doesn't mean it isn't just that. Tragedy.'

He swiped his hands through his unruly mop.

'It happens. It happens all the time, and it happens more often than most people can cope with. Claudia, Delmi isn't alone in ending her own life that way. Hundreds of people beaten down by disaster do the same thing every day, because, like it or not, the gods don't dole out life fairly, and they certainly don't distribute joy and catastrophe evenly. Sometimes one just has to accept the obvious: that an accident is an accident is an accident.'

'It makes me sick to my stomach to agree with you, but for once, my dear Marcus, I do. There are times when one has to accept the inevitable…'

She stood up and paddled out to her knees, careless of the salt water saturating her robe.

'… but this is not one of those times. Orbilio, I saw a man die. I saw a funny little man who couldn't stop sneezing have a noose thrown round his neck and I watched helplessly while someone throttled the life out of him.'

Every time she closed her eyes at night, she saw his heels drumming impotently against the rocks. Every time she opened her eyes in the morning, she felt the cold thud of failure, that she had not saved his life.

'Raspor would not have been killed if those accidents were just that. He was silenced to prevent the King hearing his evidence, and even though I suspect that evidence was flimsy in the extreme, his killer wasn't prepared to take that chance.'

'Do you seriously think the King can't put two and two together by himself?'

'Maybe he's too close. Maybe it needs someone from outside, someone with objectivity, as a certain little priest lost his life to point out, to see the absurdity of what's happened. Correction, of what's still happening. The illness that prevented him from coming to Rome. Has anyone questioned that to his face? Or asked how well he knows Salome, and whether there's a connection between the lovely widow's visits and these inherited weak lungs?'

She waded back to the shore, anger blazing from every pore now.

'Ask yourself, Marcus, who might make that connection — and if the answer is, well, maybe a doctor might make that connection, you might find that your next question is, where is the royal physician? Followed by, do I actually believe that ridiculous story about him bunking off for a bit of rumpy pumpy with a burly boat builder? The same boat builder, incidentally, who disappeared the night a small girl called Broda was traumatized by the sight of Nosferatu strangling his victim. Oh, and don't forget while you're asking yourself all these questions, Orbilio, that Broda was woken in the first place by the sounds of whispering in her own house. And if you happen to conclude that one of those whisperers was her uncle, the very same boat builder, who lived with them, then you might also conclude that he, too, was silenced to prevent him speaking out.'

'By Mazares?'

Claudia wrung the drips out of her skirt.

'It was a full moon the night Broda caught Nosferatu in action. Admittedly she only saw a play of shadows on the wall — a fluke of fate which I know damn well saved that child's life — but allowing for the distortions from the moon, there's one aspect that Broda's adamant about. The head. Nosferatu's oversized, lolling head.'

In other words, an aureole of thick and glossy curls that fell down to his shoulders, the kind that would mislead the eye in the dark.

'Actually,' he said, his eyes still closed and his hands making what looked like a very comfortable pillow on the rock, 'there are two things Broda was adamant about. The head was one, but the other was the hands. She insists Nosferatu's hands were giant claws, and I'm afraid you can't pass one off as fact and dismiss the other as the product of an overactive imagination.'