He sighed and thought, I should be in Frascati, where the air is fresh and pure and uncontaminated by plague, giving my wife another child and checking my boundary stones haven’t been moved by that conniving neighbour of mine, not sitting in this sweatroom of an office, sorting out this little bastard’s mess. And Janus bloody Croesus, what a mucking mess it was.
‘You ought not have gone to the army,’ the boy said.
‘You ought to have told me what you kept in that box,’ Tullus fired back.
‘You would not have agreed to undertake its safekeeping.’
’Too bloody right.’
But lock it up he had, and now Tullus was as deep in the shit as his nephew. How many times had his poor sister miscarried? They’d lost count after five, and when she was delivered, at last, of a son the whole family rejoiced. Had they but known. Tullus rubbed the dull ache in his chest. When this was over… By all the gods in Olympus, when this was all over, he’d string that boy up by his tongue and whip him till his gizzard popped out. But until then, of course ‘Has anyone discovered where the bitch is hiding?’ the nephew enquired.
Inexplicably Tullus wanted to laugh, and say his bet was on Naples, where she’d be spending his silver on dresses and jewels and placing outrageous bets on charioteers, because there was a whole lot of woman packed into Claudia Seferius, by heavens there was-then he remembered the contents of a certain little box and Tullus steeled his face. ‘Not yet.’
‘But you are taking steps to recover the…contents?’
Why is it, Tullus thought, that sounded just like a threat? ‘Of course I bloody am,’ he snarled. Did the boy take him for a fool? ‘I have agents on the job, up and down the country.’
Holy Mars, he wished the lad had never told him what was in that sodding box.
‘Good.’ The nephew stood up. ‘You will advise me, naturally, the minute you have news of her whereabouts?’
‘You can trust me to keep you advised,’ Tullus said, barely keeping the grimace from his face.
‘Oh, I trust you, Uncle.’ Thin lips formed a dead man’s smile. ‘I trust you implicitly.’
The door clicked silently behind him and inside Tullus’ chest, the eagle clawed in earnest.
VII
Claudia was running through the thicket of alders and Cal was crashing behind. ‘I remembered the cherries,’ he yelled, ‘honest I did.’ And she shouted back, ‘Go away, I don’t want the soup or the sex!’ And when she looked round, his hands had turned into live lobsters and he had a spear sticking out of his eye…
Drenched with perspiration, her teeth chattering like cups in an earthquake, Claudia jerked upright in bed. Disturbed by the jolt, Drusilla wriggled into the crook of her mistress’s arm, her tongue rasping Claudia’s skin as though she was scrubbing a kitten. Crooning to herself, as much as to the cat, Claudia stroked Drusilla’s flattened ears until both sets of eyelids grew heavy.
Dwarfed by the pillars which lined the Great Hall, Cal ran barefoot up the steps of the watercourse. He was laughing, because he’d discovered yet another secret, that he could fly, come and watch, better still, take his hand and fly with him. And Claudia was laughing, too, because the water was cool, icy cool, but then a bear reared out of the stream, snarling with a half-human face, and Cal said, ‘We can outrun the beast, we can fly,’ and suddenly they were up on the roof, but he wouldn’t let go of her wrist and then she was falling…falling…
This time when Claudia woke up, she knew with certainty that, unless she saw for herself the point from which Kamar said Cal had fallen, the dreams would torment her for ever. Sluicing water over her face, she calculated there was still an hour before dawn, yet despite the sultry heat of the night, she was shivering. By this time tomorrow, Cal’s ashes would be on their way home Crackling torches set in motion the ships which sailed the seascapes round the Great Hall and cast diamonds and pearls on the rippling watercourse. Pausing on the central footbridge, Claudia thought, this is madness. What the blazes do I expect to achieve? But just as there was no answer to her question, equally was there no turning back.
Her bare feet slapped the marble floor of the banqueting hall, but the pine doors to the sun porch slid open on silent greased runners. The veranda was not as she’d imagined it. Sure, she’d seen the gilding on the pillars from the lake this afternoon, and certainly the Parian marble on the walls had been used to spectacular and dazzling effect, but that was only part of its splendour. White roses blasted perfume into the torrid night air, climbing between box trees clipped to resemble camels, apes and giraffes. A bronze faun piped a tune in the corner and on the ceiling, six signs of the Zodiac had been picked out in gold.
It was, Claudia thought, a very lovely place to die…
With a hammer pounding in her breast, she climbed the wooden staircase to the upper storey. ‘How can you be certain he fell?’ she’d asked Kamar, as Cal was being laid on the stretcher. There was something about the body which niggled her.
‘Because I’m a doctor,’ he snarled. ‘The boy’s neck is broken.’
‘Yes, I know.’ The angle was hideous. ‘Only-’
‘Only nothing,’ he sniffed, twitching his fingers and making it obvious what he thought of women interfering with his professional judgement. ‘The injuries are fully consistent with a fall,’ letting his eyes pinpoint the spot from which he calculated Cal had fallen.
As the stretcher party had shuffled away across the shingle, Kamar strode off in the opposite direction and Claudia had had to run to keep up. ‘You’re not accompanying the corpse?’
‘The role of a physician is to tend to the living,’ he growled, weaving up the zigzag path towards the bath house. ‘Mosul the priest can take over from here.’
‘What do you suppose he was doing up on the sun porch that led to his toppling over the rail?’
‘Cal was an ungovernable show-off with a third of the sense he was born with,’ he snapped. ‘How the hell should I know?’ And before she could ask anything else, Kamar had collared a fat timber merchant and was enquiring after his bunions.
Cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch, Claudia reflected, lingering on the veranda’s darkened staircase. You’ll pander to the rich, they pay handsomely to have you oversee their phantom ailments, but when push comes to shove, we see you for what you really are, Kamar. A reptile without an ounce of compassion.
Upstairs were the same gilded columns, the same dazzling white walls, the ceiling studded with the remaining Zodiacal signs, Capricorn to Gemini, but instead of the back wall comprising sliding pine doors, it carried broad arches to light the banqueting hall below, and these arches were filled in with fine alabaster. A lone torch illuminated the balcony and, lifting it free of its sconce, Claudia held the flame over the rail. No one had seen Cal fall to his death, and why should they? They were too busy snoring their heads off. Claudia sighed. Kamar had called the boy reckless and whilst she herself would have preferred the term ‘spirited’, she had to admit it wasn’t impossible to picture him, leaping on to this rail to imitate the skills of the rope walkers. Had he overbalanced while waving to her, as she rowed out to the island?
Since no scuff marks marred the bright rail, Claudia wondered why she’d automatically surmised that he’d slipped from the upper balcony. The drop from the lower storey was still pretty steep! Descending the staircase, she wished she could identify what it was that troubled her about Cal’s body. Assuming he was wearing soft shoes, as everyone wore here, not only would they not leave a mark, they’d be all the easier to slip in…so what, exactly, made her suspect his death was no accident?
‘Janus!’ Claudia’s torch picked out the most amazing blue eyes, which twinkled and shone from a tiny wizened face.
‘Did I startle you?’ The sparrow of a woman smiled mischievously.