And the sun beat mercilessly on it all, pounding his head like a pestle.
Had it not been for that bloody wife of mine, he thought bitterly, I could be tucked up in bed with a poppy draught. And all for a paltry plot in Etruria. Yet the thought of the Seferius woman lifted his spirits and strangely the aches receded. By Jupiter, she could warm a man’s bedsheets, she could. Sly little bitch, mind-but he’d got her. This time he’d bloody well got her! Third time lucky, but lucky was just how Quintilian felt.
Maybe when the dust has settled and you realize women and business don’t mix, we could come to a different arrangement, eh? The Emperor was firm on the subject of single women. Within two years of bereavement they must wed again. Quintilian had never been sure about the legislation, although he saw no personal gain in opposing it, but, as with most laws, there was a loophole. Suppose a respected aristocrat (him for instance) became this woman’s guardian?
Despite his swollen face and raging jawache, he felt a stirring in his loins. Here? In the middle of the Forum? So outrageous was it, that his desire, so to speak, swelled and the prospect of making Claudia Seferius his mistress became even more attractive. No woman had ever had such a dramatic effect on him, not even in his youth, and Venus knows how active he was in the old days. Edging his way past a shoemaker, bent double under a roll of hides, he began to fantasize about love trysts whereby she would be waiting, naked, oiled, eager to show her gratitude at being spared a loveless marriage…
It was the loveless marriage bit that brought Quintilian back from the Elysian Fields. Thanks to his wife, his vines and his olives had been ripped out and replaced with bloody watercourses. The former had made him a fortune, the latter had cost him one.
He treated himself to a goblet of chilled wine from a street vendor. In theory senators were not allowed to dabble in trade, having to content themselves with their magisterial posts and, if that proved too dull, their estates. Few, though, walked within those lines and a blind eye was turned to surplus sold for profit, to the odd quarry managed through a middleman, to property bought and sold through an agent. He didn’t know what all the fuss was about. She’d run up debts and, to pay for her gambling, she’d put one of Seferius’ tenements on the market. Quintilian had bought it fair and square, yet the silly bitch went ape.
It was a hovel, for gods’ sake! He’d told her straight. Much better to throw the scum out, do the place up, give it a bit of class. You should know about class, m’dear, you’ve got it coming out of your ears.
My word, did you ever hear such language from a prettier mouth? Class my arse, she’d said, all you wanted was an income the size of your fat belly. He’d humoured her, reminding her that if she was such a philanthropist, why sell the building in the first place, but all the while she was shouting and wagging her finger (such a suggestive little finger, too), he could think about nothing else but straddling her. Perhaps, if he asked nicely, she’d use language like that in his bed?
Now that his wife had buggered up his Umbrian estate, he’d had to find land further afield and what started out as a straightforward deal escalated into a game of move and counter-move as once again he found himself pitted against the formidable Claudia Seferius. Could she have done what she did out of spite? Gazumped him to teach him a lesson? Who knows, but no sooner had she bought that bloody piece in Campania, she sold it again-and made a sodding great profit. That was the point when Quintilian decided to take action. The Campania Campaign might have been simple retaliation, but he could not afford to take chances.
He acquired himself a spy under her immaculately tiled roof.
Quintilian’s original intention was to discredit her. Remus, the very notion of women in trade was repellent enough, not only to himself but to every decent-minded merchant in Rome, but far from indulging in wild orgies or torrid lesbian affairs (as he’d very much hoped), her sole vice appeared to be gambling. In less than a week, she’d squandered the whole of the Campanian profit.
Several students were clotted round the golden milestone, virtually obliterating it in their efforts to hear their master’s rhetoric, even though this wasn’t a school day. That’s because the master was Pera, and Quintilian intended that his sons, when they were old enough, should also learn from Pera. He was truly inspirational, that man.
Unfortunately, although gambling wasn’t strictly legal, the senator was not prepared to pee in waters where his own friends swam. He had waited, patiently paying his spy and biding his time. When not at the races or the games, Claudia Seferius had spent a very dull winter poring over her accounts and when, divinely inspired, he put in an offer for the whole wine business (via a middleman, of course) he was incensed to his gills that she rejected it out of hand.
I’ll teach you, you arrogant, long-legged bitch, not to dabble in matters outside your sphere.
To that end he had sacrificed a pig to Mercury, well renowned for his chicanery in the world of commerce, and, exactly ten days later, Quintilian’s spy reported Claudia Seferius intended extending her estates in Etruria.
Hundreds of other plots were going begging up and down the country, but masculine pride was at stake. Quintilian could not afford to lose this round, and he made his enquiries. With the Seferius bint, it boiled down to a straight choice between Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, both neglected by their peasant owners for reasons stretching back to the civil wars, when conscription took men away for months at a time. With permanent peace came the disbanding of a staggering sixty percent of the army, leaving Augustus acutely vulnerable over his responsibility to his veterans, which he also had to balance against a huge number of prisoners-of-war and the problem of feeding an ever-swelling populace. Not for nothing was this man called a genius.
Many peasants, too poor, too weary, too battle-scarred to start over from scratch, leapt at his Land Purchase Scheme and happily upped sticks to Rome, where they could be housed and fed by the State and where someone else’s back broke under the plough. For others, like the owners of Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, it was more of a gravitational pull, but the Land Purchase Scheme kept on rolling, the answers to everybody’s prayers. So what if the rich got richer? So what if estates grew to obscene proportions? We’ve got slaves from the wars, haven’t we? Let them work my lands, I’ve deserved this break.
Ripe for selling, trilled the agents. Ripe for commission, thought Quintilian. Few were beyond a spot of doctoring-transplanting olive trees, piling the outhouses with grain and vegetables and jars of wine-when in reality the olives would be dead by the time you arrived, the borrowed stores returned to their rightful owners. A good surveyor-correction, an experienced and honest surveyor-could name his own price in cases like this, and this is where the Seferius chit came in.
Quintilian turned down a side street, then turned left again to where the buildings closed in.
Claudia had hired such a man to assess the two sites and make an expert recommendation. To the senator’s astonishment and admiration, she had done so with great secrecy, and it was only because of his spy that he found out.
The door that he stopped at abutted the aqueduct and was bolted.
‘Who is it?’ The voice was a boy’s in the process of breaking.
‘Ung.’
‘Eh? Oh, it’s you.’
Quintilian sidled through the small gap that appeared and followed the lad up the wooden steps to an attic stinking of tallow, cabbages and cat pee. In a corner, a short, squat cove with dirty fingernails and chapped lips prised himself off his pallet. Quintilian thought he saw something black scuttle under the bolster and turned his head.