Dammit, she needed to know what Orbilio had on her, because it wasn't just blocks of falling masonry that had kept Claudia awake this past week. Heaven knows what that little snake Burto had confessed to, but she had a horrid feeling that he'd blabbed everything about their lucractive venture then embellished it tenfold in order to cut a deal and save his skinny hide at the expense of her, and she knew it was fraud he was investigating, because Marcia had said so.
'He doesn't confide the full details,' she'd said, tapping the side of her long pointed nose. 'Discretion personified, that man, but yes. Quite a high-profile case from the sounds of it.'
'What do you think, poppet? Would you consider the fraudulent activities of the only female wine merchant in Rome to be high profile?'
Particularly when one has evidence that said female wine merchant had inveigled herself into marriage with a man above her station who'd died a violent death and is therefore living off a will which is illegal? There was only one course of action left open. Throw herself at his mercy and hope for the best! Shutting the door on Drusilla, Claudia was surprised to find herself colliding with Tarbel on the gallery. What on earth was he doing in the upper-class quarters?
'So sorry, I didn't recognize you without your armour,' she breezed.
Chestnut eyes stared down at her for a beat of perhaps three. 'But you recognize the Mistress's livery?'
Ah. Wearing Marcia's colours made his skin itch, after all. So what made him stay on, she wondered? Was the motive purely financial, as he claimed? Purely, therefore, mercenary! Or was there another — more personal — reason?
'Why is every dog in Gaul camped in the courtyard?' she asked him.
Tarbel shrugged. 'The Mistress has it in her head that if she can track down the Scarecrow, it will bestow even more kudos on her.' He paused. Shifted position. Folded his arms over his massive chest. 'It seems another local woman has gone missing. No trace of the girl, no signs of a struggle and the villagers are starting to fear that Death himself stalks these woods.'
'Maybe he does.'
'Anything is possible, si,’ the Basc said. 'But I am a soldier. I do not hold with shapeshifters and superstition. That scarer of birds is flesh and blood, nothing more, and it is flesh and blood that I fight.'
'Or rather don't,' she said sweetly. 'As we've already established, you're unarmed and unarmoured.'
Something rumbled deep in his throat, and it didn't sound like a laugh. 'The Mistress has ordered me to stay at her side.'
'And you're a soldier, as you said, so you obey orders.'
'Si',' he snapped. 'I obey orders.' Turning on his booted heel, he strode down the corridor, leaving a smell of dense, cedary forests in his wake.
'It's fascinating what one stirs up when one mixes a brew,' a voice cackled from the shadows.
'How much of that did you hear, Koros?'
He stepped out from behind one of the tapestries that hung on the walls, stroking his long white beard. 'My lady, a man can hear everything around here,' he said, with a shrug of his bony shoulders. 'Provided he knows where to stand.'
Claudia tried to count the wall hangings and gave up. 'Then maybe you can tell me who told Marcia about the connection between the missing girls and the Scarecrow?'
Koros's wizened face creased into a grin that was, for once, neither all-purpose nor meaningless. 'I may have overheard a conversation between the Mistress and the Arch Druid to that effect.'
'Vincentrix?' The impression Vincentrix gave Claudia was that he very much wanted their disappearances to be played down.
'Those two are closer than you might think, my lady.'
Was that a hint of malice that sparkled in his rheumy eyes? 'You're a wicked old man,' Claudia told him.
'It's why you like me.'
'Doesn't it trouble your conscience, prescribing Marcia daily enemas?'
'Why should it?' The twinkle in his eye clicked up a notch. 'Or do you take issue with my diagnosis that the Mistress's bile duct is blocked?'
Claudia tried to imagine what might happen if Marcia's bile built up any more and decided old Prune Face had a point. All the same. 'Forgive me for being blunt, but I'm detecting a certain deficiency in the loyalty department.'
In a blink, the humour was wiped from his face, instantly replaced by a sober expression and neat, empty smile. 'My loyalty to the Mistress is undying,' he insisted, bowing so deeply that his long white robes swept the floor. 'What she asks for, I give. I am hers to command.' When he straightened up, the piety had gone again, to be substituted by a sly and slanting smile. 'You see?' He spread his bony hands and laughed. 'I am what she wants me to be.' Koros paused, sombre once more. 'We all are.'
'Actors,' she asked, 'or magicians?'
'Both,' he said woodenly, making a farewell gesture with his hand that Claudia recognized as Eastern, but beyond that couldn't place. Hell, though. Maybe that was phony, too. Everything else was around here.
Cocking an ear in the direction of the baying of the hounds, the Scarecrow detected an increase in their numbers from packs in previous hunts and this was coupled with a sense of urgency that had also been missing in the past.
A chill rippled up the Scarecrow's spine. It was the chill of a net that was closing in. There was no time to waste.
Wrapping a few precious belongings in his ragged cloak, he kicked over the traces of his camp fire, collapsed his makeshift tent of yew branches and hides, and buried it beneath a mound of leaf litter.
Grimacing at the painfully low level of liquid in his little blue phial, the Scarecrow headed down towards the river at a run.
'I thank you most humbly for permitting me to ride with you into Santonum,' Padi murmured in his ingratiating lisp. 'The Great Mistress does not permit us to travel free on personal business.'
As the gig clip-clopped along the forest track, Claudia thought how typical of Marcia to make a few extra coppers by charging her own people for transport into town! But then the traumas of her past would be a driving factor in her obsession to amass wealth, because, in her book, money equalled stability.
'You're from the Indus Valley?'
'In a manner of speaking.' His rosebud lips pursed. 'We Padaei are a nomadic people, which makes our children easy pickings for fast horseback raiders.'
A scene flashed before Claudia's eyes. A serene and tranquil place, where men water humped cattle in the river as the women pound clothes on the rocks and children splash each other in play. Suddenly there is a thunder of hooves, and before the Padaei have time to wonder what's happening, a group of riders charge down, their curved swords flashing in the sunlight, and while the tribespeople run for their lives, the children are snatched at the gallop. Far away before their mothers know they are missing…
And what did that say about Marcia? she wondered. It was like Claudia being sold into slavery and being called Roma. Degrading wasn't the word.
'Tell me, Padi, do your rods see Marcia's beauty lasting? Will she find love?'
'Undoubtedly,' he assured her in his soft, sibilant undertone. 'The Stones-That-Talk speak of a long and happy life for the Great Mistress, and a tomb that will ensure she is venerated for immortality.'
'Really?'
'Indeed, Mistress Claudia. They foresee excellent health enjoyed in the company of a strong man, who is prepared to lay down his life for her, such is the depth of his affection. My stones speak clearly of such things.'
Looking down at the soothsayer's little plump face, his eyes wide with sincerity, she thought his lies were so transparent, she wondered why he bothered.
'How…' Padi wriggled on the uncomfortable seat. 'How are your soil tests coming along?'
So that was what this morning was about! The lying little toad didn't have personal business in town. Marcia had sent him to bleed Claudia dry, because she knew that if a wine merchant had found the soil unsuitable for vines, as Claudia had claimed, she wouldn't be wasting time in Aquitania, but would be on her way back to Rome to oversee this season's vintage.