Twenty

Gloomy and grey, daybreak brought with it an insidious damp to fill the vacuum left by the tramontana, chilling bones, wilting parchment and breeding mould on the walls and the bread.

‘Leonides.’ Claudia collared her steward on the landing. ‘This damp’s getting everywhere. I want the linens and blankets in the storerooms shaken then pegged out over the braziers, and when they’re fully aired, I want them refolded with alecost.’

‘Alecost?’ Leonides wrinkled his long nose. ‘Are you sure you want your clothes reeking of camphor, madam?’

‘More than I want bugs and mould in them,’ she retorted. ‘And in any case it’s a distinct improvement on the stinking hellebores which I notice you’ve strewn in the cellar to repel the vermin.’

She couldn’t be sure. Leonides might have muttered something under his breath to the effect that if he was stretched any thinner, the mistress would be able to cover books with him, but then again it might have been his guttural Macedonian accent. She watched him barking orders at the underslaves and considered the changes she intended making to the house.

Stuff endowing the Temple of Ceres with a fountain to commemorate the stand of pines! Claudia wanted to get ahead in business, and the way to do it was not through ostentatious gifts to the city, but by establishing a sound rapport with her clients. Staging the Halcyon Spectaculars was a good start, her standing would rocket, and that would get up the Guild’s noses. Like ghouls on a corpse, they’d hoped to pick over the cadaver of Seferius Wine after Gaius’s death and now, believing they had tied her up like a kipper with the Moschus/Butico fraud, the ghouls were hovering again. Only this time they weren’t waiting for the victim to die—

Claudia’s survival hinged on greasing palms and schmoozing and given that the former was out of the question, she was stuck with the latter. Unfortunately, schmoozing at this level required more than simply entertainment on an epic scale. She could throw all the lavish parties she liked, but no matter how many peacocks strutted round her peristyle, and no matter how many gilded gladiators she hired to slug it out during banquets, a woman in commerce was still anathema. Claudia Seferius needed an extra trick up her sleeve.

The merchants were accustomed to extravagance—tigers in cages, sinuous Spanish dancers—this was a buyer’s market, where profligacy came with the territory and they expected every night to be a night to remember. They would certainly be wise to contracts being flashed in front of them while they were still merry. The point to grasp was that these were dyed-in-the-wool bigots she was trying to sell to, and the trick up Claudia’s sleeve was to reel her fish in gently, without them knowing they were even on a line. The room at the end of her bedroom gallery was spacious enough to convert to a small, yet intimate, dining chamber and it was here that she planned to entertain a small, yet select, band of businessmen in style. The idea was to invite three or four firm supporters, plus one influential chauvinist who would be won over by good living and his peers. Softly, softly, catchee monkey. Hook them one at a time and—

‘Erinna?’

Skyles’ low rasp along the gallery cut short her schemings and Claudia realized that, standing behind the wooden support pillar, the actor hadn’t noticed her. His watchful eyes were flickering down to the atrium, to where Caspar was supervising the rehearsals, checking that none of the troupe saw him slipping away. Claudia felt her shoulder blades tensing.

‘Erinna?’ he rasped again. He put his head round Caspar’s bedroom door. ‘Oh, there you are.’

‘I’m making a new costume,’ she said, and it was obvious to Claudia, and therefore to Skyles, that she had heard him calling her name. ‘If I’m to play the Soldier’s Mistress, I thought it would be fun if I wore a legionary’s kilt and a bodice with stitching that resembled armour. Now the Soldier’s Mistress comes on stage looking like another soldier, only with bosoms.’

‘That,’ Skyles said, ‘is inspirational.’

From the shadows, Claudia expected him to make a bow or perform some extravagant comic gesture. Instead, she saw only a strained line round his jaw as he leaned against the door jamb watching her nimble fingers jab their needle at the fabric.

‘What did you want?’ she asked bluntly.

The strain stretched up his cheekbones to his eyes and he ran a hand over his smooth, shaven head. ‘Tomorrow’s the Festival of Consus. I was wondering if you’d like to go to the races with me? We could have a meal in that tavern on Tuscan Street, the one that always has a sheep roasting on a spit out on the pavement—’

‘No.’

In the doorway, Skyles frowned. ‘No, you don’t want to go out? No, you don’t like chariot racing? No, you don’t want a meal? No, you don’t like me? No, what?’

Clutching an armful of bright red fabric, Erinna squeezed past him on to the gallery.

‘Sorry, Skyles, that was extremely rude of me.’ She flashed him a radiant smile. ‘What I should have said was, no thank you.’

*

Waste disposal was one of Rome’s most illustrious achievements. What, not so many generations back, had been nothing more than a series of open, unconnected, stinking ditches had been converted into a network of jointed underground tunnels which were flushed with water from the aqueducts, and which were tall enough and wide enough to ride a hay cart through. Not that anyone had attempted such a feat, although from time to time bored schoolboys would take a boat inside to stick a river rat or two, egging each other on to see how far they could penetrate before the stench made them turn back.

The Great Sewer was their favoured choice, since it ran west below Tuscan Street then cut underneath the Forum, the current record holder claiming to have reached as far as the Julian Basilica, although the witnesses in this case were brothers aged no more than ten and could not be relied upon.

The shrine to the nymph who presided over this putrid underworld was round and built of Anio, a dull brown building stone, durable but ugly, and was capped by a marble rim. Since the structure lacked a roof and was thus open to the elements, many felt the shrine represented nothing more than a giant latrine and it was perhaps for that reason that Cloacina remained the most neglected deity in the pantheon.

Which is why the Halcyon Rapist had been able to subject his fifth victim to her ordeal in broad daylight.

No fear of interruption here.

He could take as much time as he liked.