Which was odd, considering that network of scars. ‘Keep looking,’ Claudia had replied, reminding him that this was still urgent.
Turning now to Doris, swinging the wicker basket through the crowds with nonchalant ease, she said, ‘What’s your real name?’
They had reached her front door, where a tantalizing smell of cooking greeted them, and Claudia could almost hear the rissoles sizzling on the open griddle and pullets turning on the spit. She’d spotted red mullet for sale in the Forum and hoped the Cook had seen them, too. Stuffed with soft cheese, prawns, parsley and chives and drizzled with garlic and olive oil, they were the sort of dish any hostess would be proud to serve to oleiculturists with a wealth of connections and an interest in her stepdaughter for a wife.
‘My real name?’ His hand froze as he returned her basket, and an expression she hadn’t seen before crossed his face. No longer the happy-go-lucky young fool, something feral flickered behind those cornflower-blue eyes. ‘Do you really want to know?’
Claudia felt a chill in the air which wasn’t down to the weather. ‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll tell you,’ he whispered. ‘But this is our secret. Yours and mine, understood?’
‘Understood.’
Doris looked over his left shoulder, then his right, then checked the landings upstairs. ‘Daphne,’ he said and then, with a cluck of his tongue, the old expression was back and he was joining the Spectaculars with a series of athletic cartwheels.
Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies…
But before she could consider the implications of the sea change which had descended on Doris, Julia burst through the vestibule door behind her, rubbing her hands and tossing her mantle to a slave to dry off.
‘Sister-in-law!’ Either Julia was in the grip of chronic indigestion, or that was a smile on her face. ‘I tried calling you in the street, but you didn’t hear me. Isn’t my oleiculturist simply wonderful?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen him.’
‘Tch, poor fellow! Exhausted from travelling, I suppose, but he looked absolutely wretched when he arrived and I said to myself, that dear man is in no fit state to go courting our Flavia, so I insisted he went straight up to bed. Do you know, the darling boy had only been here ten minutes when Marcellus came rushing in, gushing about all the contracts he’ll be getting in the New Year. Now tell me the oleiculturist has no connections!’
‘Did you just say “darling boy”…?’
A thin claw grabbed Claudia’s arm and drew her close. ‘Forget what I said about Marcellus playing around. Nothing of the sort.’
‘I suppose he’s simply been working long hours?’
‘Exactly, and last night, you should have seen him! Worn out with the strain, he was. Still.’ Julia was quite unperturbed by her husband’s apparent exhaustion. ‘He made up for it by presenting me with this wonderful bracelet. Garnets, of all things, and my dear it’s not Saturnalia for another three days. You know, he actually admitted he hadn’t been paying me sufficient attention of late-’
‘Apologized that he’d been preoccupied with his work?’
‘Absolutely.’ Marcellus ought to apply to Caspar for a job. He’d learned his script off pat.
‘And he gave me this sweet little scent bottle. Look, he’s even put some perfume in for me.’
Claudia dutifully sniffed the floozy’s overblown scent. Typical Marcellus, though. Hadn’t even bothered to have it filled up to the stopper, but what the hell. The main thing is, Julia’s happy, the allowance is going where it ought to be going and Marcellus, with luck, might actually be earning his own supper for a change. If Julia felt that was all down to some washed-out olive-oil man, who cares? Claudia made a mental note to up the schmoozing stakes over dinner. Get him to sign up Flavia for a wife and Claudia need never see her in-laws again!
So heady was the prospect that she barely noticed Caspar bearing down on them. No mean feat, considering the little man was decked out in orange, blue and yellow and with a dark-green bejewelled turban bouncing sideways on his head.
‘Dear lady.’ He performed an elaborate bow at Claudia’s feet and remained there. ‘We have reached the point in our Spectaculars where we are ready to put on a full dress rehearsal. Would you, madam, be so gracious therefore as to honour us with your presence, both as critic and spectator this evening?’
I would have expected nothing less. ‘I would be delighted,’ she replied.
Caspar rose to his feet, miming a comical stiffening of the joints, and turned to Julia. ‘And you, ma’am, if I may be so brash, look younger and more fair with each hour that passes underneath this roof.’
‘Oh. Well. Well, I-’ Blushing to her roots, Julia blinked coyly. ‘ Heavens!’
Caspar seized her hand, pressed his rosebud lips to the skin and kissed it passionately. ‘Such fragrance,’ he sighed, inhaling the floozy’s perfume that Julia had dabbed on her wrist. ‘Oh, such splendiferous fragrance!’
‘Dear me.’ Julia fanned herself after he’d gone. ‘Such a gallant fellow, what? So terribly earnest that one can almost overlook his night-time philanderings.’ She lowered her voice to a girlish whisper. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many times his bedroom door creaks open and shut, and my word, at the strangest of hours.’
‘I’ll get the hinges greased.’
‘I tell you, sister-in-law, that oleiculturist has really brought me and Marcellus good luck,’ Julia trilled. ‘How delightful, if some of it were to rub off on you.’
*
In her bedroom, Claudia ran a tortoiseshell comb through her curls, formed her pillow into a representation of Julia’s face and punched it till its feathers flew. Take that, you ungrateful, ill-mannered, selfish, toffee-nosed bitch. Sometimes, she thought, moving her attack to the bolster, she wondered why she bothered with Gaius’s revolting family. Marcellus was too lazy to put himself out to get work. Julia was so absorbed with her upturn in fortunes, in bracelets and perfume and overblown flattery, not to mention the olive grower’s illustrious connections, that she hadn’t even noticed that Flavia was welded to Skyles like a boil. If they had feelings for anyone other than themselves, this couple, a surgical probe was required to locate them.
Feeling better for venting her anger and frustration, Claudia slipped into a cherry-pink linen gown and, with snowflakes of swansdown still drifting on the air, set off to consider the conversion of her guest room into an intimate dining chamber. She could almost picture the finished result. Gilded stucco on the ceiling. Scenes from the vine harvest inlaid on every couch. Bacchus frescoes painted on the walls. A tad wine-laden, perhaps, but all’s fair in love and commerce, and although the merchants would be coming here ostensibly to pass a cosy social evening, never underestimate the effect of subliminal messages. The bastards would sign up one way or another.
She eased open the door. With the shutters closed, the room came across as gloomy and depressing, but light, she decided, would be a feature of this upstairs dining chamber. Holes could be knocked in the wall to enlarge the current windows, a new one opening up on the far wall, the balcony extended by stone corbel supports to ‘Room service is improving,’ the bed said.
Typical Julia, reallocating the accommodation and dammit, she might at least have told Claudia she’d moved the oleiculturist into here. ‘Terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize- You!’
The tousled head which appeared over the top of the coverlet nodded. ‘Me,’ it confirmed, and there was a flash of white teeth in the shadows.
‘You told Julia you were an olive merchant!’
‘Oleiculturist,’ Orbilio corrected mildly. ‘Your sister-in-law has a penchant for long words.’
‘She is under the impression that you intend to put a lot of business her way.’