What had they said?
She ran it back through her mind. Orbilio bemoaning the miserable fate awaiting kids due to his stupidity, and Curvy Thighs telling him that it took two. The worms in her stomach were replaced by something else.
'I can't stop thinking about how we could have prevented this poor child-'
'Too late to worry about that now, Marcus, my lord,' Curvy Thighs replied briskly. 'We'll just have to make sure there won't be no more.'
Claudia's fists clenched white.
'I wish you'd be more careful, Zina.'
Claudia watched as he turned round in the chair to look up at the girl with big black eyes and even bigger bosoms.
'You've really got to take precautions.'
'Well, you're a fine one to lecture people!' The black eyes rolled. 'I don't recall you thinking much about precautions the other night! Oh, no, not you! You just went at it like nothing else mattered in the world, and I'm all for passion, Marcus, my lord, but when there's consequences like this kid-'
Claudia couldn't stomach any more.
Throw herself at the feet of this arrogant patrician, who goes round getting local girls pregnant then puts the onus of responsibility on them? The sun could freeze over and Hades ring with laughter before that day came to pass! She stomped down the stairs, straightening her girdle and pinching her pleats black into place. Orbilio could whistle for his bloody fraud. Just let him damn well try and nail her for it. Just let the bastard try!
Orbilio heard the clump of footsteps on the stairs and shot out of his chair. Shit. He hadn't shut the door properly after Zina had let him in, and he knew he was dog tired and probably overreacting, but suppose the boatbuilder or one of his accomplices had grown suspicious of him and/or Zina and had followed one or other of them here, overheard them talking, then gone back to report?
In the corridor, he caught the whiff of a distinctive spicy Judaen perfume and, leaning his head over the balustrade, was just in time to see a familiar coil of ringlets flouncing out the door. What was eating her? She knew about this apartment and since she'd already misread the situation (a common practice among women entering this establishment, it appeared!) Claudia was hardly likely to conceive a sudden disapproval of what she'd perceived as his amorous activities. Jealousy, unfortunately, was out of the question, so what on earth made her come here in the first place, then storm off in a huff?
From the balcony, he watched her elbow her way through the crowded street and thought, hell, you could chargrill cutlets on Claudia Seferius at the moment. He shook his head, and wondered if he'd ever crack the mystery that was Women.
After all, it wasn't as though she was involved in the paedophile gang; her exploits in the world of forgery and fraud were solely confined to what she considered 'victimless' crimes, and it wasn't as though he and Zina had been engaged in anything untoward. Mother of Tarquin, they'd only been discussing…
Oh, shit. He slumped against the door jamb. Holy, bloody shit.
'Whatever's the matter, Marcus, my lord? Are you ill?'
'Zina,' he said, 'if I die, promise me you'll burn my bones. I know how much reincarnation means to you Gauls, but please, please, please don't let me come round again.'
The thought of enduring this hell for eternity was simply too dire to contemplate.
Eighteen
Semir was bending earnestly over what appeared to be an empty flower bed as Claudia rounded the corner of the peristyle.
'If it's your modesty you're looking for, you left it in the atrium,' she said. 'And your mother should have warned you that wearing loincloths that tight plays hell with the circulation.'
'Thank you, Mistress Clodia.' The Babylonian grinned. 'I shall bear eet in mind.'
'As long as that's all you bare.' Those seams were stretched to breaking point.
'Eet iss my crocus I want people to gasp at,' he laughed, 'but I am hopeful.' He probed the soil with a gentle finger. 'They will flower next month, during first rains of autumn, very pretty, and over time will colonize thiss whole bed, eef eet is kept properly watered.'
'With wine?'
Semir wiped an errant braid out of his eye. 'And thees,' he said, pointing to the massed ranks of blue vervain, 'Hor say thees flowers spring from tears of his Egyptian Isis. I think maybe goddess was unhappy, yess?'
What about Hor? she wondered, sweeping on. Was he unhappy, yess, or did the artist famed throughout the whole of Alexandria find fulfilment working like a mole, with skivvies rather than trained artisans for his assistants? The closer she drew to the stream, the louder the chip-chip-chip of chisels as Paris supervised his equally unskilled labour force — but wait. It was unfair to write off Marcia's enslaved workforce as amateurs. Many were just labourers, true, but that tomb was more precious to her than anything else and she was never going to compromise immortality for the sake of workers lacking in qualifications and experience. Marcia might want the project finished quickly, but she was shrewd enough to grasp that there was nothing wrong with a well-supervised production, provided the end product was of sufficient quality. So what if Hor painted what he was told to paint and Paris shipped in mass-produced torsos and simply stuck a head on to personalize the statuary? This was what Greek sculptors had been doing from the dawn of time, and if the artwork on this tomb propelled them up the social ladder then good luck to both of them.
Near the pool, where flamingoes dabbled and sacred ibis stood in all their stately ugliness, a small girl with golden hair and big blue eyes was playing with a kitten.
'Qeb says I can keep her when she's old enough to leave her mother,' Luci said, as the kitten chased the ribbon that should have been tying the girl's hair back but was now torn to shreds. 'I shall have to smuggle her into my bedroom, though, cos Mummy says there are already too many mouths to feed as it is, and I heard her tell Uncle Hanni that half the time she's not sure she isn't raising a clutch of cuckoos, we're growing so fast.' She scooped the kitten into her arms and it started to rattle. 'I like Qeb,' she announced, 'don't you? He strokes my hair-'
'Oh, does he.'
'Yes, and it feels really nice, too, but can you keep a secret?' She put the kitten down and cupped her hand to Claudia's ear. 'He keeps a cheetah in his bedroom. I've seen it. It's lovely and smooth and has blue lizards round its neck, but Mummy says I'm not allowed in there, so you won't tell her, will you?'
Claudia tickled the kitten's little grey ears and thought about a grown man stroking a small child's hair and what exactly made Mummy ban her daughter from his quarters…
'No, I won't tell her,' she promised.
'And you're not to tell her that Qeb lets me feed live mice to his snakes, either,' Luci said. 'Shall I show you how it's done? It's ever so easy, you just hold them by the tail and drop them in the cage, then the snake eats them and you can see a big bulge where the mouse is in its tummy.'
In her arms, the kitten squirmed and Claudia didn't blame it at all.
'Maybe you can show me later,' she said. 'There's something really urgent I have to do and I'm afraid it can't wait any longer.'
A week had passed since the attempt on her life in the Temple of Augustus. A week in which her would-be executioner believed she thought she'd had a lucky escape from a freak accident, because, hey, that's building sites for you, these things happen. The hell they did. But revenge, as women everywhere will tell you, is a dish that's best served cold, and what better time to start dishing up than when the target is off guard? Waiting was the hard part. When someone tries to kill you and you not only know who, but also why, there's a great temptation to rush in and start tearing livers and lungs out with your bare hands. It had taken every ounce of Claudia's self-control to let the killer think they'd got away with it, but the time had finally come to turn the tables. However, before those tables could start moving, there were three things she had to lay her hands on first.