‘Wrrrf.’
As the woodsman leaned down to pat his ears, a human hand plopped at his feet.
‘Wrf-wrf.’
Amiable as ever, Xerxes was more than willing to share his find. With a sour taste in the back of his throat, the woodsman followed the dog to where some creature, a fox in all probability, had already unearthed the remains. He could see gnaw marks on some of the bones. But one thing was clear.
‘This ain’t no barbarian burial.’
The grave was too shallow for one thing. Too far off the road for another. Also, he knew of no pagan ritual where loved ones were despatched to the afterlife naked. And another thing he couldn’t help noticing.
‘Death weren’t from natural causes, neither.’
The skull had been caved in at the temple, most likely by the spade whose wooden handle protruded from under a thin layer of litter.
‘Poor little bitch,’ he said over the grave, as he made the sign of the horns to avert the evil eye. ‘Didn’t deserve to end up like this, did she?’
He wondered what had lured her into the woods. Sex? Was she some prostitute who’d ended up taking her last walk with a pervert disguised as a punter? Or was he looking at the outcome of an execution, the body stripped to prevent identification? Had she suffered? Was she scared? Whatever the circumstances of her murder, she must have been a bonny lass, the woodsman thought. Her long black hair still streamed round her shoulders.
Eleven
Hearing that Moschus was in custody was a development Claudia hadn’t envisaged, and Orbilio’s announcement had caught her right off her guard. If the old sea dog talked… So far, his mouth seemed to have stayed shut tighter than a clam, but if Moschus was put to the torture…
Claudia shivered. There was only one option open to her now. Prevent the bastard from talking.
Two hours after the Festival of the Lambs had wound up, she returned home to find a problem in the boiler house filling the atrium with clouds of steam. Swirling in and out of the vapour, like ships in a fogbank, Caspar’s Spectaculars rehearsed with scripts that resembled limp lettuce and did not turn a hair. As Claudia tossed her cloak in the general direction of the porter, Drusilla, her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat, jumped down from the roof of the aviary. ‘Mrrrow.’
‘Yes, I know, poppet. Not much fun for you, is it, all these strangers over the house?’
Not much fun for the birds in the aviary, either. Furious that her territory had been usurped, Drusilla had vented her spleen by taking up sentry duty on top of the bird house. There were several advantages here. First, she was out of range of cat-strokers, although in truth these were few and far between. (Those individuals who’d naively imagined that Drusilla would benefit from their endeavours reeked of the opobalsam with which their wounds had been dressed.) Secondly, from her lookout on the top of the aviary, Drusilla maintained the territorial advantage in that she could still follow everything that went on in her domain. And thirdly, and by far the most rewarding, was the effect her presence had on the aviary’s twittering inmates.
‘Prrrrrr.’
As Claudia’s nails raked Drusilla’s backbone, she glanced across to where Caspar was putting the cast through their paces. The squawking in the aviary had subsided as the birds regrouped and preened their ruffled feathers, so that the words of the castrato came as sweet and clear as a mountain stream. Accompanying him on the flute was Renata.
‘Prrrr,’ Drusilla repeated, rubbing her head under her mistress’s chin.
‘I know,’ Claudia replied. ‘Isn’t his the voice of an angel? And just look at Felix!’
The bleached blond had reached the point in his balletic mime where Paris was weighing in his hand the golden apple engraved ‘To the Fairest’. That one human body could express so many emotions without the aid of speech was utterly amazing. Fear: of snubbing at least one, possibly two goddesses at the risk of divine retribution. Pride: the privilege of being asked to judge the contest. Anxiety: that he might make the wrong decision. Nor was Claudia the only person mesmerized by Felix’s performance. No mosaic had been swept more meticulously, no bronze statuette ever polished harder, no niche and crevice dusted quite so often. Small wonder the boiler house had set off so much steam, with no one in there to attend the fire.
Claudia took a piece of bacon that Doris had left on his trencher and fed it to Drusilla, while she drank the libation from the household shrine (and now the slaves would have another excuse to pass through the atrium slower than a sleeping snail) and nibbled on Ion’s chive bread.
‘Mrrr.’
Stuffed with ham, plus a few prawns that her mistress had found underneath the chive bread, Drusilla rearranged herself round Claudia’s neck to wash her whiskers. Up on the gallery, Ugly Phil appeared to be chiselling lumps out of the support rails to secure the pulleys for the backdrops. Claudia tried not to think about the cost of repairs, and turned her attentions to her Saturnalia banquet.
The festival covered four full days from the seventeenth to the twentieth of December, with the morning of the seventeenth devoted to the Great Sacrifice outside the Temple of Saturn in the Forum. Schools, law courts, even shops closed on this day, and the whole of Rome gathered to propitiate the God of Agriculture in the hope that the seeds already in the ground plus those about to be sown would flourish into a bountiful harvest. Afterwards, many citizens would join in the famous public banquet, where they’d dress up in funny hats, gorge themselves stupid, drink until they were ill, play party games and generally have a bloody good time. The merchant and noble classes celebrated in pretty much the same style, only they had the good sense to do it in the warmth and comfort of a private home. Preferably not their own. Otherwise, how could they expect to collect five to six pounds of silver plate from every supplier?
Claudia had given a lot of thought to the theme of her own Saturnalia banquet. ‘What do you think about setting it round the zodiac?’ she asked Drusilla.
‘Prrrr.’
‘Yes, I thought so.’
Beef to represent Taurus, the bull. Crabs for Cancer, mutton for Aries, mullets for Pisces and so on.
‘But it probably won’t do to serve spit-roasted virgins or stuffed water bearers,’ she told the cat, draining the last of the sacrificial wine. ‘This is where I’m relying on the expertise of our illustrious Cook.’
Aromas of smoked garlic, honeyed hams, poached pears and yeasty bread met her in the kitchen doorway. In the flurry of activity, bronze ladles clanged against baking pans, earthenware pots clunked together, baskets scraped the tiled floor. Someone winced, cursing in a guttural Teutonic tongue as they burned themselves on the water heater as they passed by, and voices became raised as two of the slaves fought over who should clean the cauldron, it was their turn yesterday, and who should get the job of pickling onions, you know it makes their eyes water. Twenty extra mouths were taking their toll, then. Not, perhaps, the most judicious moment to raise the subject of zodiac banquets with the Cook. Especially when that happened to be his guttural Teutonic tongue cursing the water heater back there. But this was the eleventh and there wasn’t time to spare.
Suddenly, she felt Drusilla stiffen against her collarbone. The purring stopped.
‘Hrrow.’
Her expression was that of a leopard on a fresh kill who had just spotted a lion approaching. Claudia followed Drusilla’s gaze and saw one of the actors sidling in through the back entrance, pinching the bottom of one of the kitchen maids before snatching a leftover rissole and skipping out the door to the slave quarters.
Skyles, of course.
Skyles, who had taken off his tunic in the Forum, ostensibly to spare Erinna’s modesty.
Skyles, who’d left the Forum two hours ago with the maestro and the others.