‘He already has fish for brains, Jovi. You bring back anything that looks nice.’
As his little feet pitter-pattered up the atrium, Marcus sluiced water over his matted hair. ‘Why, Claudia Seferius, I do declare you’ve been unfaithful in my absence.’
Claudia froze in her tracks. That was the trouble with Supersnoop. He disturbed her. He disturbed her and she resented him for it, and when she turned there was ice in her eyes. ‘Don’t get ideas above your station, Orbilio. Didn’t you know this is National Stray Day? I’m merely doing my bit for the Empire.’
He studied her lazily for several seconds. ‘How much are you in for?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The loan sharks. How much are you in for?’
Claudia brushed an imaginary speck off her pale-lemon tunic. ‘Nasty crack on the head you sustained. Makes you ramble.’
‘My steward informs me’-Orbilio winced as he combed out his tangles-‘that a moneylender called at my house recently. Apparently he required to speak with a lady by the name of-well, I forget what she called herself, it really doesn’t matter.’
‘If it doesn’t matter, why are you telling me?’
‘Now my steward is a cautious type of chap. He’s Libyan, you know, and they’re instinctively suspicious. He wondered whether this might be a ruse, to find out who lived there with a view to burglary, or perhaps casing the goldbeater’s opposite. You do know there’s a goldbeater’s opposite?’
‘Opposite where?’
‘The point is,’ he continued amiably, ‘my steward, being Libyan and extremely quick off the mark, realized at once that the description of this mystery woman fitted you down to the ground.’
‘Rubbish. He’s only seen me once.’
‘Once, Claudia, is enough,’ said Orbilio. ‘So I’ll ask you a third time. How much are you in for?’
Claudia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Mind your own business,’ she replied, sweeping out of the bath room.
‘That much, eh?’
She pulled up sharp by the family shrine and drew out a handkerchief. ‘With my dear, sweet husband,’ she sniffed, ‘still warm in his grave-’
‘Claudia. You married Gaius because he was old and filthy rich, and unless he’s interred over a volcano, it’s unlikely his ashes have stayed warm for seven whole months.’
There was, she decided, an unseemly twinkle in his eye for a man addressing the recently bereaved.
Claudia let the handkerchief fall. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. ‘Orbilio, I do not go into debt lightly.’ (Hell no, I sail in fully laden.) ‘At the moment I admit, I have a short-term cash-flow problem.’ (When I die, it’s finished with.) ‘So while we’re in the business of repeating things, I’ll say it again. Mind your own damned business.’ The lanterns flickering from their bronze and silver stands brought the painted songbirds to life. Greenfinches. Goldfinches. Goldcrests. An oval fountain splashed and danced, a marble athlete considered his next throw of the discus and in a vase on a podium, two dozen Syrian tulips found their slender stems could not support the weight of their rose-red heads.
‘I was offering to help,’ he said, scanning the crocodiles and papyrus plants on the great Nile fresco which covered the east wall of the atrium.
Any second now, Leonides, Cypassis or one of a dozen lesser servants could come wandering out of the slave quarters and Claudia did not want eyebrows raised at the lies she would be required to tell. As Orbilio turned his attention to a yawning hippopotamus, she swept the vase of flowers on to the floor.
‘I don’t need your bloody patronage.’
His shoulders stiffened. ‘That’s entirely your prerogative,’ he said, and though the tone remained mild there was no laughter left in his eyes.
‘Damn right,’ she snapped. ‘Just because I gave some bloodsucking usurer the wrong house number doesn’t give you the right to come tramping in and out of my home whenever you’ve the odd hour to kill.’
‘You know, Claudia,’ Orbilio sighed and leaned down to collect a single rose-red tulip, ‘for once,’ he sniffed in vain for a scent, ‘you may be right.’
With a farewell salute, he tucked the flower into his bloodstained tunic and stepped over the debris to disappear into the night.
The atrium seemed bigger, suddenly. The ceiling higher, the columns colder, the galleries darker, and the finches and the warblers were no longer three-dimensional. Claudia hurled the libation jug at the Nile fresco and an ibis turned red with the wine. Bugger Egypt. Bugger Rome, come to that. And-she threw a votive cake at a po-faced sphinx-bugger you, too, Marcus Casual Liaisons. I hope you’ve got concussion.
‘Has he gone, then, the man in the frock?’
Jovi’s arrival made her jump. Well, so what if he’s gone? Who gives a shit?
‘Was there a fight in this room, was it the man in the frock?’
A miracle, thought Claudia, no one else heard the crash and came running.
‘Did he chase off some burglars, were they trying to kill you?’ Jovi held up the pies in his fists. ‘What’ll I do with these, can I eat them?’
‘Maybe one,’ she said absently.
‘I don’t think they’ll give me the burps, not like those honey cakes, so can I have both? Ple-ease?’
Claudia peered down at his scrubbed and eager face. ‘What are you? A gannet?’
Jovi fell on to his knees. ‘No, I’m a bear.’ He stuffed the last corner of the pie into his mouth and scampered round the floor. ‘A big, brown mountain bear-watch me. Grrr!’
But Claudia wasn’t watching. Her eyes remained fixed on the vestibule door, where the image of a man with still-damp tendrils round his forehead remained imprinted on her retina and whose sandalwood ungent lingered persistently. She heard again the gentle drop of the latch as he left, and the street sounds he’d momentarily admitted-the plod of an ox, the rumble of a barrel being unloaded echoed repeatedly inside her head.
Oh, sod it.
‘Call that a bear?’ she said, turning to Jovi. ‘I’ll show you bears.’ Looping up her arms, she made claws of her fingers and chased him round the fountain. ‘Arrrrr!’
I have a wine business, I have a house, I have a villa and vineyard in Etruria. What more, Claudia asked herself, diving round the pedestals and podiums, could I possibly want?
*
In a dingy garret boasting ill-fitting shutters and a damp patch on two walls, a stinking tallow burned low. There was no incense to sweeten the air here, no joyful frescoes, and the only window faced a blank wall. Because you had to really crane your neck to see the street below, it was easier to lift your eyes to the roofs all around you. You could see whose tiles were missing, who had sparrows under their eaves, who was superstitious enough to grow houseleeks to ward off Jupiter’s thunderbolts.
The man in the garret rarely looked out. The sounds rising upwards didn’t touch him-not the rattle of chariot wheels, nor the crank of the building cranes. Hunched in his creaky chair, he dipped the nib of his reed pen into the inkwell and wrote carefully.
He did not wish to blot.
Satisfied with his efforts, he paused and looked round his walls. In pride of place over his bed-where else-he had nailed the original. Every day he dusted it, lightly, with an ostrich feather stolen from the market, and every day he examined it for signs of deterioration. If the paper curled, he would push a small tack in, but already the edges were ragged; brown marks were creeping relentlessly. Not that there was anything wrong with the ink. Top quality, imported from India, it withstood the test of the elements. The words, and he knew them by heart, still stood out clear. But he could not take chances.
He had only received the one letter from Claudia Seferius. He had no intention of losing it to mishap.
Pursing his lips in concentration, he returned to his work and the only sound he heard was the scratching of the nib. He did not smell apples baking in the apartment below, he did not hear the giggles of the newly-weds next door, he did not feel the damp from the Tiber meet the damp from the low clouds and creep its way into his bedding.