Marilyn Todd - Second Act

‘Be a good boy while Mummy’s gone.’

With luck, the little ’un wouldn’t stir until she got home, and whilst she didn’t like leaving him on his own, it wouldn’t be for long. But today was the Festival of Consus, another public holiday, and she had chores which would not keep. He ought to sleep through for another hour yet.

Striding out along the Via Sacra, she noticed that there were very few people around at this time of the day. As dawn clawed its way through the heavy grey sky, the last of the delivery carts would be rumbling out of the city, the gates closing behind them, and there were no farmers this morning to set up for market.

Public holidays meant very little to this young mother. As the wife of a hot-food vendor, there was just as much work servicing the needs of the crowds who flocked to the Circus Maximus as there was meeting the daily demands of their regulars. No more work, but certainly no less, and that’s exactly how she liked it.

Predictable income + predictable outgoings = domestic serenity.

Turning off the Via Sacra opposite the Regia, she thought she noticed someone hesitate at the entrance to the narrow passageway. She smiled grimly to herself, well aware that she fitted the pattern of the rapist’s victims. She was young-twenty-two in a range of ages varying from sixteen to twenty-four-and she came from a respectable, though hardly wealthy, background. Those same attributes, however, applied to several hundred other women all around the city. Why should he pick her? Nevertheless, the vendor’s wife had chosen a route this morning where, should anyone be following her, she’d quickly know about it and be able to thwart him with evasive action.

Emerging from the passageway, she checked left then right before setting a brisk pace between the high-rise tenements which dominated this commercial quarter of the city. Secure in the district’s respectability, the young woman finalized her plans for Saturnalia. Four days with no work, just Shorty and her and the baby, was nothing short of a dream come true, and although the baby was too young to understand the garlands and the gifts, she and Shorty would take great pleasure in watching the little ’un’s face light with pleasure at the sculpted candles and painted clay dolls. Shorty had carved him a wooden donkey on wheels to pull along on a rope and She stopped. Glanced back over her shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old man coming out of a doorway and hobbling away down the hill.

Ridiculous! Whatever would Shorty say, the mother of his child being spooked by an old man! She marched on up the Esquiline, planning her Saturnalia party, just the three of them, with them all wearing funny felt hats, green for her, blue for Shorty and a mustard-yellow miniature one for the baby that would tie beneath his fat, dimpled chin. Engrossed in the games they would play, she did not notice that the old man had straightened up, turned round and become someone else altogether as he followed her cracking pace up the hill.

The baths were just opening when Sextus Valerius Cotta arrived. Divesting their master of his heavy striped toga, his luxurious woollen tunic, his soft undershirt and helping him into thick-soled wooden sandals so his feet would not burn on the hot mosaic floors, his slaves then handed over his valuables to the attendants for safe-keeping and took themselves off to the gymnasium.

‘You’ll be the only one in the sweat room, Senator,’ the usher apologized, leading the way through the thick, swirling steam.

‘Good.’

The handsome mouth of the Arch-Hawk pursed in approval. He couldn’t cope with chit-chat and gossip today. His mind was reeling from the devastating news he’d received from Frascati. Choosing a seat in the corner, he leaned his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands.

Dead? Sonofabitch, she couldn’t be dead. Not the girl who knew the formula to make saltpetre explode.

‘Boy!’ He snapped his fingers and an attendant materialized out of nowhere. ‘Hot room.’

The baths were filling up fast. Vaulted halls rang with grunts of massaged pleasure, the slap-slap-slap of pummelled flesh, the clomp of wooden clogs as attendants puttered back and forth with linen towels and strigils, scented massage oils and tweezers for plucking eyebrows and unwanted hair. Along the lofty promenade, lined with works of art looted from Greek temples, a group of youths had organized a raucous competition rolling iron hoops with hooked sticks round the twenty-foot-high marble statues, first one past the Minotaur is the winner.

‘Will you be wanting a shave after the massage, sir?’

‘What?’

His mind was still in Frascati. Had somebody killed her for the secret of the saltpetre?

‘Oh, shave. Yes, and I’ll have bergamot in the rub.’ ergamot oil was renowned for its uplifting properties and Jupiter alone knows, he needed a boost at the moment. Had it really all come to nothing? The Arch-Hawk closed his eyes as the attendant scraped his back with the bronze strigil. He might not have the backing of the Senate, but for many months, he’d been cultivating support among the plebeian community. With the working classes and the gods behind him, he had truly expected to see the eagle soaring to its true heights. But now…?

Cotta flipped over to lie on his back. Tense, he was no better than useless. He needed to clear his mind. Think. Rethink. Then think again. As the massage relaxed the knots in his muscles, his mind drifted back to his visit to Cumae.

Had he been ruthlessly conned by that shrivelled old crone sitting on her throne in the half dark surrounded by swirls of evil-smelling smoke? Or had he really looked into Hades? Spoken with the shades of his ancestors?

In truth, he hadn’t held out much hope when he set out after the funeral, but hope was all he had left. The servant girl who had the formula for the explosion had run away and this time the Senator’s men couldn’t find her. Now, of course, he knew why. Some bastard had caved her skull in with a shovel. But he hadn’t known that at the time, and in any case it didn’t make a scrap of difference. What mattered was that he had the chemicals and no formula, and desperate times require desperate measures.

Cotta knew he had to try everything in his power-everything-to get his hands on the formula, and he’d heard the Oracle put people in touch with their ancestors. Ludicrous? Maybe. But the Arch-Hawk had nothing to lose.

Had the priest added drugs to the smoke, or slipped them in the wine he had given him? Cotta didn’t know, but with music coming from nowhere then fading again, he had felt strangely disconnected from reality when the white-robed acolytes guided him along the eerie corridor of light and shadow that led to the Sibyl’s dark lair. Black eyes glittered from the ancient face as she considered his request. Finally she agreed, and huge sums of gold were handed over before he was led outside, blindfolded, and taken on a short overland chariot drive to the black mouth of a tunnel.

‘This way,’ lisped the priest, removing the blindfold.

Cotta was still cynical at this stage. Wary of theatricals and vast sums of money. But it was so bitterly cold inside the rock, and the tunnel was blacker than jet and after four hundred paces of stumbling behind the priest in a hillside that resonated with sighs and moans, and following a sharp bend in the tunnel, which suddenly dropped a hundred, maybe two hundred feet, to a great chamber through which oily waters gurgled and swirled, Cotta’s doubts vanished. There was no uncertainty at all in his mind that what he was looking at here was the River Styx.

‘Do not be afraid,’ the priest intoned solemnly, and his voice was brushed by a thousand whispering echoes.