Our foreheads touched gently. ‘I’ll not breathe a word of it. Why would I want to share this good secret? I’ll happily come back and pay double for private dances. Triple even.’
‘I didn’t think the Drakenfelds were the type to come to such places.’
‘Admittedly this isn’t my usual night out. It was Senator Veron who brought me here. For a moment I was worried he was going to drag me into a brothel.’
‘I’ve heard about him,’ she replied. ‘The senator who spends more time at dinner parties than engaged in Senate business. He comes here a lot.’ She paused for a moment, her anger gradually diffusing. ‘So what are you doing back in Tryum? I thought you’d gone for good.’
‘I came to attend my father’s funeral,’ I said.
Titiana’s expression grew sorrowful and for a moment she seemed lost for words. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss. I heard he had passed away. He was a good man. But how long have you been back?’
‘Only a few days. I’ve since been attached to the Lacanta murder.’
‘Really?’ Her awe came and went like a puff of wind. ‘So, you’re still with the Sun Chamber…’
There was a bitterness in her voice. Conscious she was hardly wearing anything, I took off my cloak and put it around her.
‘We should not be here, Lucan. What if somebody sees us?’
‘This is one of the least suspicious acts in the vicinity of this tavern. What if someone saw you in there?’
‘I take such a risk each night.’
‘Why do you need to work here?’
‘Because of the money. It pays well and there isn’t as much danger as you’d think. I’m an attractive woman and all I have to do is dance and occasionally speak pleasant words to gullible but rich old men. There’s nothing else involved – people go down-city for more.’
‘I know the types that come to these places. You’re a smart woman – you could be doing something safer for the money.’
‘I could have, but not after what you did.’
The guilt hit home, but I tried to ward it away in my mind with the logic that ultimately she was the one who had broken the law. ‘Let me take you out for something to eat tomorrow. I want to speak to you more. That’s all I want. Simply to talk.’
‘Then what?’ Titiana snapped. ‘Sleep with me until you’re satisfied, and leave me in the middle of the night?’
‘You know that’s not what I would ever intend to do, and if I did when I was young, that was because it was mutual, and we didn’t want anyone to find us together.’
We said nothing for a while, though it wasn’t awkward and didn’t seem to matter. The contours of her face seemed so familiar, which in itself was a strange sensation.
‘I must go,’ she whispered eventually.
‘Tomorrow. You know my old house?’
‘I can’t exactly forget it,’ she replied.
‘You’ll come then?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow evening, at sunset.’
‘OK.’ Titiana opened the door behind her. ‘But I really must go.’
With that she disappeared back inside the tavern, closing the door behind her.
Veron was standing outside waiting for me, his hands in his pockets, and he was grinning like a child who had just discovered the taste of sugar.
‘So,’ he declared, ‘finally there is a woman who gets the blood pumping through the veins of Lucan Drakenfeld. And a dancer, too! Now I’m jealous. You know, I was starting to think you possessed the libido of a statue.’
‘You’re going to want to know who she is, aren’t you?’
‘I am.’
‘I thought you might,’ I replied. I looked up and down the street, and it was busy with evening activity. ‘Let’s go back to mine – it will be a lot quieter there.’
‘As long as there is wine to go with this story of yours, I do not mind.’
Nostalgia
In the calm sanctuary of my garden, we sat on the edge of the fountain, regarding the shadows beyond the regularly spaced columns. Leana had gone out for the evening, and Bellona decided she would light some cressets and candles on our behalf. Despite saying that we didn’t mind the darkness, she was terribly keen to impress our visitor.
Class divisions weren’t that noticeable during my time in Venyn, but in Tryum I felt guilty every time I spoke with Bellona. For many, to see a senator, king or queen could seem like walking with gods. It wasn’t right, it was something which even Polla had disapproved of, but how could an entire culture be changed?
We settled in. I gathered my thoughts.
Senator Veron reached down to scoop up the cup of wine by his feet and, once he’d taken a couple of gulps, he motioned for me to tell the story, as if I had become his entertainment for the evening. ‘When you’re ready, Drakenfeld.’
My mind travelled back all those years, to simpler times, when all I cared about was my studies, listening to a good tune played on a lyre and feeling the body of one girl in particular against my own.
‘Everything I know about love I learned from Titiana,’ I began.
‘Just the one teacher?’ Veron smiled.
‘I was twenty summers old, and she was seventeen. I’d completed my third year of training for the Sun Chamber that very year and was shadowing my father on some of his minor work, when our paths crossed at a festival celebration. She was the daughter of a cleric who worked under Licintius’ father, and came from a reasonably well-to-do family. Her father made the mistake of being caught in private discussions with a non-royalist faction of the Senate, and found himself booted out. That meant Titiana and her family were soon fighting for their status. So her father lined up Titiana for marriage to the son of a senator.
‘That didn’t stop our affair, however. Perhaps I hoped we could be something more, but that was not for us to say – that was for our mothers and fathers to decide. My mother might not have minded had she been alive. She was from Locco, near the deserts, and attitudes on sexuality were more relaxed there. If you loved someone, you could choose to marry them, as strange as it sounds. Anyway, the life of someone attached to an official of the Sun Chamber is not always a happy one given our often constant movement about the continent. Our passions were confined to sudden, discreet moments, wherever we could find them. We knew it was wrong.’
‘That often makes it all the more interesting,’ Veron commented.
‘I don’t know what it was about her that appealed so much. There were so many qualities. Perhaps it was her stubbornness, a wish to be her own person, a refreshing change for the families of this city. Perhaps it was the way we could converse about the great poets of the past, as well as speculate on the meaning behind the stars. Perhaps it was—’
‘The fact that she possessed the beauty and body of a goddess?’ Veron interrupted.
I smiled. It was some effort to pretend I was above all that, but that would have meant lying to myself. ‘You never got to see her eyes. Such big oval eyes. You’d think they were the colour of chestnuts at first, but there were so many shades beyond. I could stare at them all day and never reach the other end.’
‘My gaze didn’t get that far,’ Veron replied.
‘So there we were,’ I continued, ‘two young lovers of Tryum doing the things that young lovers do.’
‘And what happened to this great passion?’ Veron asked. ‘She was betrothed to someone else and that was that? You left the city, jaded, never to return?’
‘Not quite,’ I replied, and sipped my cup of wine.