*
In her office, Claudia was going through her accounts with a fine flea comb. Sending Butico those three thousand bronze sesterces had literally drained her coffers dry. How on earth was she supposed to fund her Saturnalia banquet now? There was no quick way to liquidate her assets. That brickworks on the Via Tiburtina wouldn’t sell this close to Saturnalia. Rents on her properties could not be collected until New Year’s Day. To be seen selling off the silver and gold plate would start alarm bells ringing.
It was enough that her fellow wine merchants had conspired with Butico and were, through him, turning the thumbscrews. She couldn’t afford to have anyone else get wind of her financial troubles.
What a bloody mess.
She drained a glass of warm, spiced wine and went through the accounts again.
*
Julia’s husband hadn’t been able to face his scrawny, sourfaced wife after the scene in the apartment on the Aventine. Couldn’t bear to hear another whine from her thin lips, another of her sanctimonious opinions. Pleading the necessity to work on his portfolio, he had returned to his own house and now, in the darkness and the cold, he had never felt more alone in his life.
His darling. His rosebud. His precious cherubkins.
My, how she must have laughed when he told her (time and again!) that making love with her went beyond the mechanical release of bodily tensions.
‘For the first time in my life,’ Marcellus had confided, ‘I know what it means to give someone my soul, my heart, my very being through the act of making love.’
He felt the prickle of salt behind his eyelids, felt the pillow dampen under his cheek. Trust him to have fallen in love with a whore. A cold-hearted whore, who had rented the most expensive flat on the Aventine, demanded it be furnished to the highest standard, redecorated, and all at Marcellus’s expense. Claudia would have flayed him alive, had she realized that the stuff she’d repossessed was less than half what he’d given the slut. She’d been selling it on, salting away the proceeds like the good little whore that she was, but what hurt, what really hurt, was that she hadn’t cared about him at all.
Another stab of pain ripped at Marcellus. She’d already be latching on to another poor sap, flattering him with her weasel words, seducing him with her body (her beautiful, beautiful body), preparing to suck another man dry like the parasite that she was.
That Claudia, of all people, should have seen through her was the ultimate in humiliation. She hadn’t pulled any punches, either. She’d exposed him to the truth in brutal fashion, emasculating him completely. She would never look him in the eye again. Jupiter’s balls, was she blind? Couldn’t she see that his beloved had been the image of her, with her bold, thrusting breasts and dark, flashing eyes? Did she not realize that his affair, at least in the beginning, had only taken off because he saw his mistress as a substitute for the real thing?
Another spurt of salt water squeezed between his eyelashes and dribbled its way down to his pillow. Now he was little more than a eunuch in Claudia’s eyes. A middle-aged gullible fool. Even his rosebud would have forgotten him six months from now.
He thought about the things he had said to her. The words she had said in return. That’s all they were, he thought bitterly. Words. I love you, Marcellus. The memory clawed at his heart, ripped it out with both hands. No one had ever said I love you to Marcellus in his life. Not his parents. Not his siblings. Not Flavia. Not even his wife.
His darling, his rosebud, his precious cherub.
He would have married her, too.
*
Sextus Valerius Cotta was not asleep. Beside him, in the wide double bed cast in solid bronze and covered with a damask counterpane scented with lilac, slept Phyllis. As beautiful and undemanding a mistress as he had ever taken. Skin the colour of cinnamon, the texture of silk, and with a laugh as soft as summer rain, she understood her status and behaved accordingly. Cotta was extremely fond of Phyllis. Much more so than his wife, in fact. His wife had the brains of a sheep. With his beautiful mistress, Cotta could indulge in his love of poetry, his passion for horseflesh. She sang as he strummed the lyre. More than any woman he’d known, Phyllis understood the complexities of politics, but Cotta was careful about what he disclosed. He didn’t believe Phyllis was a spy, but a man could not be too careful these days. In any case, as an ex-general and military tactician of some standing, he was used to making decisions unaided.
Many considered leadership to be the loneliest job in the world, a sentiment Cotta neither shared nor understood. Patrician to his core, he appreciated the value of propitiating the gods, paying careful devotions to his family shrine of a day, pouring libations, intoning the prayers, leaving sacrifices of salt cakes and honey. With every success, whether political, military or domestic, Cotta followed up with a hefty donation to the temple of whichever divinity had looked after him and then offered sacrifices in the deity’s honour. Look after the gods, and the gods look after you was his motto.
Despite what people thought, it was not the hand of Mars which guided the dashing Arch-Hawk. He was no war-mongerer, regardless of what they might say. Cotta didn’t relish Roman blood being spilled, or anyone else’s, come to that. A simple look at the records would show that his tactic had always been to strike swiftly and to strike sharply. Catch the enemy when and where they least expected it to minimize casualties and maximize the Eagle’s authority. Given that Cotta believed in justice as much as decisiveness, his protector was none other than the King of the Immortals, Jupiter himself.
Jupiter represented the honour and integrity that Cotta himself tried to live by. All he wanted-all he had ever wanted-was for Rome to fulfil her true potential. That her people should enjoy the riches that they deserved.
Sonofabitch, what the hell was wrong with that?
In a room littered with the paraphernalia of travelling players, the Digger also lay awake in the darkness, listening to the settlement creaks of the house, the soft snorts of sleeping companions. The house smelled of beeswax and venison, mulled wine and frankincense, with just a hint of fuller’s earth from where the clothes had come back from the cleaner’s. Homely smells. Homely sounds. Out in the street, carters geed up their mules and two tomcats squared up to each other up on the roof.
The killer was thinking about the scene in The Cuckold, where the Miser ambushes Cupid (played by Periander, now that the dwarf had decamped with the rival company), in a bid to force Cupid to make the Miser’s Wife fall in love with her husband. It was a very funny scene. The point of Cupid’s arrows is that, once they’ve hit their target, the victim will fall in love with the first person they see. Tricked by the Miser into firing off three arrows just to make sure his Wife gets the message, Cupid retaliates by closing his eyes as he shoots. Consequently, the flying arrows cause chaos. One lands on Jemima’s bottom. Startled, she jumps up and who’s the first person that she sees? The Miser’s Wife. The Miser’s Wife, meanwhile, gets the full force of an arrow in her back, which sends her sprawling into her lover’s open arms. Whilst the third arrow ricochets off the wall on to the Miser, who has been watching developments in the mi rror, so that the first person he sees is himself.
The audience would be in hysterics, the Digger thought. The kidnapped victim’s hilarious revenge. But there was nothing comic about ambush Vulnerable people are easy to lure. They have so many mixed emotions swirling around inside their heads that they cannot thi nk straight. Do not seek to question. Vulnerable people are easily led.
Easily led off the road.
Easily led into the woods. Fragile and emotional, they are susceptible to any old sob story going.
Staring up at the ceiling, listening to the rhythmic breathing of the others in the bedchamber, it seemed both yesterday and a lifetime ago that a young woman with a cloak of dark hair had run, laughing, down the embankment towards the stream at the bottom.