Marilyn Todd - Virgin Territory

Now there was a wily old cove.

Claudia could not actually recall her husband mentioning Eugenius (which wasn’t to say he hadn’t done so, since she’d rarely listened to Gaius unless his words happened to impinge on her own activities). However, from receipt of his letter to arrival at the Villa Collatinus, she felt she’d built a good mental image of Eugenius-an image shattered the instant she met him.

Yes, he was old. Old and thin (indeed who in the household, apart from Fabius, wasn’t verging on the emaciated?), but wiry rather than weak. Yes, you could see the blue veins stand out on his hands, hands which if you held the light behind them might well show you their bones if you asked nicely, but any concession to age ended there.

‘Well?’ Black eyes had glittered like obsidian glass.

No greetings, no words of introduction, no platitudes for the grieving widow. There was nothing bland about Eugenius Collatinus.

Claudia had responded in kind, silently scrutinizing walls which were crammed floor to ceiling with life-size figures jostling for shoulder space. Tempted to grin, she forced herself not to, well aware that wasn’t the reaction he either wanted or expected. Hers was not the blushing maidenly gasp followed by downcast and averted eyes. Hers was the shrewd eye of the former courtesan who had seen, if not performed, every act on this jam-packed, pornographic frieze. The only difference was in the men. Instead of portraying muscular heroes, these were a ragged collection of hunchbacks and dwarves, lepers and cripples, their ugly faces further distorted by leers. Or maybe contorted by virtue of their gigantic and presumably excruciatingly painful erections.

‘Well?’ The voice was as sharp as the eyes. ‘What do you think?’

Part of a hand, she thought it might be a knuckle, followed the rounded contour of her bottom. Claudia swatted it away.

‘What I think,’ she said slowly, ‘is that Sullium frieze painters are braggarts and liars with a very inflated opinion of themselves.’

The old man chuckled. ‘Every other woman who’s seen this room has been shocked into silence.’

They were interrupted by the arrival of his thick-lipped secretary, Dexippus, with several letters under his arm, followed by Acte, carrying a steaming bowl of something which resembled cabbage water and smelled worse. Claudia quickly excused herself, but the ice had been broken and she felt an affinity with Eugenius which had not been possible with the rest of the bums and stiffs in his family.

The sun had moved round, throwing the water trough into shade. As Claudia shook the folds in her tunic and adjusted her stola, her attention was caught by a young woman darting furtively along the colonnade across the street. Her hair was dark and wild, her cheeks flushed as she flitted from pillar to pillar in short rapid steps. One-two-three, stop. One-two-three, stop. Not surprising, Claudia thought. The family’s barking, why not the locals. And this was a local woman, you could tell by her costume, torn and disarrayed as it was. As Claudia headed back towards the mercer’s, the woman rushed over to her.

‘Have you got kids?’

Claudia rolled her eyes to heaven and moved on, but the woman followed.

‘I’ve got to know!’

Although her eyes were glistening feverishly, underneath there seemed a genuine concern, so much so that for a fleeting moment Claudia thought about mentioning her own fictional brood, invented to hook Gaius. But since they were also fictionally dead, there was no point.

‘No.’ She brushed the woman’s hand off her arm.

The woman darted in front of her, blocking her way outside the harness maker’s, and one breast fell out of her torn tunic, staring at Claudia like a malevolent eye.

‘You’ve got to keep a close watch on ’em. My little girl was stole away, no kid’s safe.’

Claudia felt a rush of sympathy for the pathetic creature, obviously mad with grief at the death of her child, and pressed two brass sesterces into her hand. To her amazement the woman, poor as she was, refused them.

‘You think she’s dead, don’t you, I can see it in yer eyes.’

‘Um-’

‘She’s not dead. Not my little Kyana. He stole her.’ She jerked her head to a point over Claudia’s left shoulder and against her will yet mesmerized by the woman’s desperation, Claudia turned. Harnesses jangled from their hooks, the smell of leather was overpowering. Her gaze turned upwards. A hand’s span away, under the eaves of the shop, the most enormous black spider sat in the middle of its web.

‘Euch!’ Claudia recoiled in horror. She’d seen mice smaller.

‘That’s right, you be afraid of spiders. He was collecting ’em when he stole my little Kyana.’ Her face took on a wistful appearance and tears welled in her eyes. ‘You’ve got to watch ’em so carefully.’

Leaving the local woman sobbing on her knees in the gutter, the sesterces lying forgotten beside her, Claudia turned the corner just as Matidia was emerging, empty-handed, from the mercer’s.

‘I do hope that awful Hecamede hasn’t been bothering you, dear, she’s quite deranged you know.’

Claudia bit back the retort about black kettles and pots as Matidia elaborated.

‘Went that way after her daughter disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? She didn’t die, then?’

‘Kyana? Oh no. Well, that’s to say her body’s never been discovered, but the child was five and you know what they’re like at that age, forever getting into mischief.’ Somehow Claudia could not imagine Sabina, for instance, getting into mischief, but bit that back as well, concluding that today she had set something of a record for holding her tongue. It didn’t come easy. Probably because it was such a teensy-weensy thing, you didn’t notice it had run away until it was too late.

‘The worst part is,’ Matidia was saying, ‘three other women have now latched on to the notion of someone stealing their babies. Hysterical nonsense, which one does well to ignore, lest it spread right out of hand. Now tell me honestly, do you think I should have bought the red cushions?’

Claudia glanced at the mercer, wiping his brow with his handkerchief and shaking his head, and felt little pity for him as she heard herself saying:

‘Matidia, dear, why don’t you go and have a look at the coloured ones again, just to be on the safe side?’

Watching the shopkeeper’s face turn ashen as Matidia disappeared into the back of his shop, she telegraphed him a silent message. It’s you or me, chum, and I’ve had four days of the old windbag.

The one good thing about a small town like this was that you could dispense with the bodyguards and the litter and the conventions, and just be yourself. Claudia paused to pass a critical eye over the work of the bronzesmith (really quite good, she might come back and buy that lantern, it would set off the front entrance). Lingering to watch a Syrian glassblower, her senses were aroused by the commerce around her. The acid tang of rope-making fought for first prize with the sharp smell from the paint seller’s before both were knocked out of the ring by the skills of the herbalist. The air was filled with the cries of the fishmonger, his live catch splashing in the tank, together with the agonized squeals of axles begging for grease, the grinding of the millstone and the braying of the donkey that worked it. A doorway draped with greenery signified a tavern, a cracked and smoke-blackened wall stood testimony to the presence of a cookshop. Claudia was passing the stall of the root-cutter, the man who supplied roots and rhizomes to apothecaries and the like, when she spotted the Collatinus family physician.

Blond, athletic and classically handsome, Diomedes could be nothing but Greek. Not a Greek from the north like her own lanky steward, this man hailed from Achaea in the south, and it was tempting to ask whether his income came solely from serving the needs of the sick. A good many matrons in Rome would pay lavishly for his services, women in the rudest of health. With emphasis on the word rude. He wore the pallium, too, revealing a muscular shoulder and tanned chest which bulged in all the right places.