'I know you're eager to see my vines,' he said, as the ship docked in the only deep harbour on the island.
Claudia flashed him her eager-to-see-vines smile as she checked out the beaches.
'And I know you'll be equally keen to get back to supervise your own estate.'
Claudia flashed him her keen-to-supervise-estates smile as she checked out the delightful rocky coves.
'But I'm rather hoping I can persuade you to stay on until after my marriage festivities.'
'We-ell. I suppose I could stretch a week or two more.' Even then you'd need a chisel to winkle me out. 'After all,' she added happily. 'Rome is rather hot at the moment.'
So there you have it. While Rome sweltered under a vile and viscous heat, and Greeks chased shadows and the Security Police chased their own tails, Claudia Seferius would be sunning herself amid a harmonious unity of rocks, sea and fragrant pinewoods enrobed by sapphire seas in a sumptuous villa at the courtesy of a tall, dark, handsome aristocrat for the summer.
A dirty job, but hey — someone has to do it.
And besides. What's the point of having double standards, if you don't live up to both?
Three
The demon stirred. Its sleep had been long, but in its sleep it had grown restless. The pull of the island was strong. The island of Cressia was part of Illyria, a great land stretching from the Alps in the north across the mountains to the east, as far as the border with Thrace. A thousand years ago, the Greeks believed Istria, the heart-shaped peninsula which separated Italy from the arid shores of Dalmatia, to be the edge of the world. It was there, they thought, that the Daughters of the Evening Star dwelt in the walled Gardens of the Hesperides, protected by the hundred-headed serpent who guarded a tree of golden apples.
A gentle legend, for a gentle country teeming with lush valleys and forests bursting with game. But the living on Istria was easy. On Cressia, as with the twelve hundred other islands in the Adriatic, life was a constant struggle for survival and there was no room for myth. Only fact.
Cressia's history ran heavy with blood. Every inch of her soil was steeped in treachery and drenched in betrayal, chronicling stories of murder, trickery and revenge…
The demon stirred and licked its lips. The pull of the island was strong. Too strong to resist any longer. It had smelled the blood of her past in its dreams. Now it wanted to taste it.
Four
Paradise is all very well, with its forests of laurel, cypress and beech, its wild ginger, sandy beaches and bottomless freshwater lakes, but paradise is also prone to serpents.
'Touch me up once more, you odious little pusboil,' Claudia said, 'and I don't care how old you are, you'll be chewing your own chitterlings for supper.'
Beside her on the dining couch, Volcar's rheumy eyes shone like twin beacons. 'Now, now, gel. Surely you wouldn't begrudge an old man one final walk down mammary lane?' 'Remind me again how you spell "yes".'
'Trouble with you, young lady,' he chortled, 'is that you have no sense of indecency.'
'Trouble with you, old man, is that now you've discovered where the grass is greener, you're too old to climb the bloody fence. This lawn's private property.'
Volcar had heard about the notion of a man's four score years and ten — and had promptly spat in its eye. Shrivelled, bent and with a face like a pickled walnut, his appetite for life was undiminished. Rumour had it, the furthest he had ever been from a drink in his life was twenty paces.
'Can't blame a fellow for trying,' he said, smacking gums as hard as mussel shells as liveried slaves filed in with the first course of baked eggs, cheeses, asparagus and truffles. 'They say a man's only as old as the woman he feels, and at my age so long as I can feel something, I know I'm still alive.'
'You'd feel something, if you try to scale my fence again.' 'Y'know, I like you,' Volcar said. 'You've fire in your belly, gel, and I've always had a hankering for women with spunk. Not like that frosty faced fossil over there.'
He used an asparagus spear to point to Leo's sister-in-law, the exquisite, immaculate, glacial Silvia, whose age was the same as Claudia's — twenty-five — whose plucked eyebrows arched in perfect symmetry. And whose honey-coloured ringlets wouldn't dare to droop, no matter what the circumstances.
'Wouldn't think, would you, seeing them tiny tits, that Silvia was a mother of three? Here's another thing I'll bet you didn't know.' Volcar lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'For all her airs and graces, madam there daren't show her pretty face in Rome.'
Didn't show it much round here, either. In the week that Claudia had been on the island, she'd barely exchanged a dozen words with the only other female in the villa. 'Because…?' she asked.
'Don't know, and to tell the honest truth, gel, don't care to know more about the prissy bitch. To listen to her, though, you'd think she owned the bloody place. Huh. Gets right up my nozzholes, does Silvia.' He chewed on a succulent white truffle. 'Mind, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say, wouldn't you, that abandoning her children might have a bearing on the scandal.'
'You, Volcar, are a wicked old man.'
'One who's too old for flattery, gel. Why don't you just let me feel your bum instead?'
The small man sitting next to Silvia leaned over to his host's couch, tapped him lightly on his forearm and mumbled something Claudia couldn't hear.
'Oh, not again!' Leo muttered. He turned to Volcar. 'Llagos tells me you're up to your old tricks again, Uncle.'
'Me, lad? Never laid a finger on the lassie.'
Scepticism expressed itself in a twist of the lips. 'Sorry I've left you to the randy old sod's mercy,' Leo told Claudia, as the dishes for the first course were cleared away. 'Only as the wedding draws ever closer, conversation tends to be more progress report than witty repartee.'
Looking round the couches, Claudia tried to imagine any of the assembled party being remotely amusing. Silvia? Too selfabsorbed to waste her energies on exploring the philosophies of the meaning of life. Saunio? The fat, pretentious but brilliant artist reserved his animation for his work, while Nikias, the famous Corinthian portrait painter, would never use one word when none would do. Llagos the priest might be capable of levity, but his accent was invariably too heavy to follow and in any case, when he laughed, his protruding front teeth had a tendency to spit. Which just left Shamshi, Leo's personal astrologer-cum-augur. And the less that man said the better!
Persian by birth, Shamshi retained the traditional garb of knee-length baggy trousers and shoes which tied in a bow. Like most of his people, he wore thick bands of gold in each ear, though Shamshi went one stage further and drew attention to his earrings by shaving the whole of his head apart from a small cap of black hair right on the top. What really made the hairs of Claudia's neck stand on end, though, was the way his soft, sibilant, girlie voice seemed to caress every inch of her skin. With Volcar, you knew where you were: he was forthright, outrageous and funny. Whereas Leo's human channel to the future was as slimy as you can get without leaving a trail.
'So if I'm neglecting you, I apologize,' Leo told Claudia as the main courses were ferried in on steaming silver salvers. 'But I'm concerned the building work won't be completed in time for the wedding. Any idea when the atrium will be finished, Saunio?'
'Tomorrow,' Rome's most illustrious artist announced pompously. 'Tomorrow you may go in and have a look at the finished artistry, if you wish.'