'Asp me no questions and I'll tell you no lies, Larentia. Oh, and before you say something you might regret, don't forget you're in company.'
Claudia smiled radiantly at the rest of their party. The debonair playboy, looking particularly smart in his toga for this prestigious occasion. A well-turned-out Thalia in a green robe that complemented her eyes. And the little round man with the little round face that Claudia had met at the Festival of the Lambs. The future husband, she remembered. The one in the Cheese Merchants' Relay.
'Did you win?' she asked him.
'Second,' he said ruefully. 'Rex's team won by a considerable margin, even though he's a producer, not a merchant, and fielded a squad of army-trained runners. Still, it's those tactics that won us an Empire, so I'm not complaining.'
A decent, jolly little man, who didn't deserve to have Thalia foisted on him. Especially an edited version! Claudia studied her, empty-eyed and as quiet as she was yesterday in the Temple of Fufluns, and realized that Terrence must have upped his daily dosage. In the eyes of the cheese merchant, Thalia was a docile, maybe even heartbroken widow. In reality, her brother had drugged his sister into compliance…
And this was the man Claudia was supposed to announce her engagement to?
She glanced at the ring on her betrothal finger — sapphires, Mercury's stone — and her mind travelled back to a tall, darkhaired patrician being violently sick in the fishpond. She'd wanted to cheer him up by reminding him it was his idea to thwart Darius's takeover with a marriage of convenience, but pulled back in the nick of time. Girls with criminal backgrounds don't go blabbing to the Security Police that they've worked it so that their bridegroom jilts them at the altar! Dear me, no, but as Terrence said, there were sufficient loopholes in the law, providing one knows where to look — and he hadn't reached the ripe old age of thirty-eight and stayed single without looping himself dizzy. In the eyes of the State, though, betrothal was equal to marriage and once a sweet, innocent party has been jilted, it's back to square one in the eyes of authority. Game, set and match, she'd thought at the time, and honestly, had any woman looked more sincere when she'd promised the long arm of the law that she'd forsaken her criminal habits for ever?
But that was then.
I like grey. Yes, indeed. Why couldn't a thirty-year-old woman do something she wanted without constantly having to worry about other people's opinions? Yet Thalia wasn't even allowed to choose her own frocks, much less her own husband, and to ensure her obedience Terrence plied his sister with opiates. No wonder the poor cow rebelled whenever she got the chance! When Claudia married Gaius it had been a pact. A mutual agreement which (regardless of
Larentia's poison) both parties had entered with their eyes open. Having already palmed his sister off on an old man for reasons of political/financial/class alliance, which took absolutely no account of Thalia's feelings, Terrence was set to do the same thing again, and who knows how an honest cheese merchant might react once he realizes he's been duped by a self-centred neurotic shrew?
It was an absolutely ghastly marriage.' Eunice's words echoed back. 'Hubby was a banker, much older than her, and they were constantly at each other's throats, with Thalia never able to remember what the quarrel was about, while he could never forget.'
At the time, the notion of Thalia arguing with anybody struck Claudia as odd. Now she realized that they'd quarrelled because argument was the only way Thalia could express herself. That was why she couldn't remember what it was about. Nothing to do with forgetfulness or stupidity. She couldn't remember for the simple reason that it wasn't important. Fighting back was all that had mattered — the desperate need to exert some independence, prove she had some form of identity — until finally, between her husband, her brother and no doubt his father before him, the last flame of spunk was doused when the banker died at the hot springs. She hadn't killed him. His own ego had seen to that, drinking too much, eating too much, exercising too little. Yet Thalia had been so conditioned by bullies that she actually believed she killed him, simply by wishing him dead. How much had Terrence paid Tarchis, she wondered?
'Won't you join us, my sweet?'
When he planted a kiss on her cheek, Claudia felt her gorge rise. 'As much as I'd love to, darling, a problem's arisen with the shipping of last year's vintage.'
'Can't it wait till tomorrow?'
"Fraid not.' Fortune, there are times when I could kiss you! 'Here's my ride now.'
The hired gig clip-clopping over the cobbles wasn't hers, but Terrence wasn't to know, and as she ran off to hail a very confused driver, she saw Larentia knocked aside by three boisterous youths waving an upended wine jug. As her mother-in-law went flying, Darius rushed forward and lifted her to her feet, and while the others fussed over the shocked Larentia, brushing the splattered dregs from her robe and checking for bruises and grazing, Claudia noticed that Darius had taken off after the drunken trio. She watched him grab one by the scruff of the neck. Yanked him back. Forced him to apologize to Larentia.
'Cosa,' she told the driver.
No longer the confident, spiteful old battle-axe, was she? Just old. A frail old woman whose hands were shaking, whose hair had fallen loose and whose rouge stood out on her cheeks like ink spots.
'Sorry, missie.' The driver shrugged in apology. 'I'm booked to drive the magistrate's brother to his villa out in the country.'
Claudia slipped off a silver bangle set with mother-of-pearl. 'Is that a fact?'
'No, miss, don't reckon it is.' The bangle disappeared with a grin that showed every one of the driver's three teeth. 'Reckon the real fact is that my poor mule went lame and I couldn't make the appointment.'
As the mule cut a swathe through the actors and dancers, she glanced back. Above the bob of Etruscan caps and priestly mitres, Terrence's sandy mop towered over Darius's close Caesar-crop, Larentia's squiffy gold ribbons and his sister's immaculate coiffure. A day for theatricals in every sense, she reflected, as Larentia leaned on her fiance's arm. But wait!
Suppose Felix was innocent?
Suppose, for a moment, Tarchis was right and Felix ended up serving ten years down the silver mines for a crime he didn't commit? How bitter would that make him?
The driver chatted amiably as the gig passed through the city gates amid hordes of clamouring beggars, but for once his gossip fell on deaf ears.
Claudia began to draw up a picture of a man who started out labouring — daytime donkeying, the tavern-keeper called it — and rose to riches through farming oysters in the Bay of Naples. A man who didn't give up. When his first efforts off Cosa didn't succeed, he moved south, to where presumably the climate, the tides, the rocks were more suitable, and he'd stuck with his disastrous first marriage for fifteen whole years. Years, moreover, that weren't simply loveless but childless, and for a self-made man the desire to perpetuate his name must have been strong indeed.
As the gig trotted past the Temple of Fufluns, its bronze tripods gleaming in the sun that had now banished all clouds, she fleshed out her portrait of Felix. Coloured in the parts where loneliness and despair turned into joy with Mariana. How he moved his parents to Mercurium, one big happy family, even to divorcing Aurelia without acrimony. Hardworking, kind, caring, honourable. The picture grew — but there was a gap. A gap between the exhilarating moment, a mere few months after his divorce, when his new wife announces she's pregnant and when his world collapses at the trial.
Same old question: why would a man who had never been happier and was eagerly awaiting his first child dip his fingers into the Imperial treasury? The assets that the State seized after his sentence proved he hadn't needed the money. So what then? Not enough thrills in his life, he needed more? Well, he got them. Ten years' hard labour, during which his father commits suicide, his mother ditto, while his in-laws disown his shamed pregnant wife, who has to lodge with a neighbour before she dies giving birth to their stillborn child. If Felix was guilty, he'd got all the thrills any man would need in a lifetime. But if he was innocent…