Second Act (16 page)

They had come to the apartment block that her bodyguard had followed Marcellus to, to confirm Claudia’s suspicions about her brother-in-law. Prime site on the Aventine Hill, with the Imperial Palace directly opposite and the Circus down below, establishments in this part of town rarely came more exclusive. Exquisite frescoes in the corridors reinforced the notion, as did the ornate carvings on the wooden stair rails, the painted stuccoed ceilings. The strong scent of elecampane burning in wall-mounted braziers emphasized the status this building carried, and not a single window had been sheeted out by heavy felt or skins. They were all protected by proper glass. Claudia contrasted this with the moths having such a field day in Julia’s wardrobe.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to explain to my little rosebud why I’ve brought you along,’ Marcellus said, tipping the torchbearer.

‘Leave the talking to me,’ Claudia told him.

‘She’ll be surprised.’ With every stair, his eyes glistened with emotion. ‘I usually only pop in after I’m finished at the baths and before I visit the library.’ His face took on a sheepish appearance. ‘I, er, tell Julia I’m lunching with clients.’

By the time he rapped on the door, his face was flushed, his breathing shallow.

‘Cherub?’ he called softly. ‘It’s me.’

‘Marcellus.’ The door was opened a crack by a hard-faced woman in her twenties, whose hennaed hair was awry. Her tongue flicked apprehensively around her lips. ‘Look, do you mind if I don’t invite you in right now, darling? I’m really not feeling too well at the moment.’

‘Nothing serious, rosebud?’

‘Yes, I can see we’ve got you out of bed,’ Claudia said cheerfully.

The rosebud pulled a shawl over her bare shoulder and ignored the woman at her lover’s elbow. ‘Come back in about an hour,’ she cooed to Marcellus. ‘I’m sure my headache will be gone by then.’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘Not bloody likely,’ Claudia said.

‘
Please
,
Claudia
,’ Marcellus muttered under his breath. ‘You’re putting the poor girl in a very difficult position.’

‘I’m sure she’s used to that,’ Claudia breezed. ‘Aren’t you, cherub?’

The love of Marcellus’s life pulled her skimpy shawl tighter round her naked curves and glowered at her lover. ‘Who’s this cow?’ she asked.

‘Humour her, darling,’ Marcellus whispered, his face turning scarlet with embarrassment as Claudia barged past him. ‘She’s um—um—’

‘Your wife, is it?’ Rosebud rolled her eyes in disgust.

‘No wonder you’re divorcing the old bitch.’ She turned to Claudia, who was checking the rooms and even lifting the crumpled bedsheets to peer under the couch. ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, but you can bloody forget it. Marcellus. Get this old bag out of my flat.’ Her voice changed to a wheedle. ‘I told you, darling. I’m not feeling well.’

‘You poor love, I—’

Claudia punched the wooden shutter opening on to the balcony. The woodwork winced. ‘You can come out now,’ she told the shutter. ‘Besides. You must be freezing.’

A blanketed, cowering, shivering figure crawled sheepishly into the room. He could not be half as cold, Claudia thought, as the icicles which flashed from the cherub’s eyes.

‘I—don’t understand,’ Marcellus said. ‘Who’s this?’

‘He’s my brother, of course.’ A hard kick landed on a shivering shin.
‘Aren’t you, Paulus?’

‘I think you and your brother had better start packing,’ Claudia said.

Paulus didn’t wait. He grabbed his clothes from the balcony and shot down the stairs, flinging them on as he went. Claudia didn’t think lightning moved faster. Another married man, then. As for the rosebud, a few petals might have been knocked off, but the stem was holding firm. Without making any attempt to stop Claudia stuffing clothes into a trunk, she homed in on the weakest link, sidling up to Marcellus’s chest and nibbling his earlobe.

‘Now our relationship’s no longer a secret, you can leave that old bag and move in with me. We can be happy here, just the two of us.’

Marcellus might be gullible, but he wasn’t stupid. ‘You’ve been screwing him all along, haven’t you?’

The cherub blew in his ear. ‘You’re the only one I’ve been screwing, darling, and very nice it is, too. The old cow’s just trying to drive a wedge between us. Paulus really
is
my brother.’

‘Large family, is it?’ Claudia trilled, emptying the jewels from the casket.

The cherub snorted. ‘Don’t let her wind you up, darling. She’s just jealous, because I’ve won your heart in a way that she never could.’

Marcellus pushed her away. ‘You even smell of him,’ he said thickly.

With nothing left but her thorns, the rosebud pounced on the woman sorting through her bracelets and rings. ‘You leave them alone,’ she said, snatching the box back. ‘They’re mine. Marcellus gave them to me.’

‘Which means legal title remains with the owner,’ Claudia said smoothly.

Oh, goodie, there was an amethyst among the trinkets. Dear little Flavia might well have abandoned herself to impetuosity under Skyles’ craggy, sex-drenched influence, but she was nothing if not her father’s daughter. Come bedtime, that girl would be blubbing into her pillow for tossing a perfectly good amethyst down the well.

‘You have until midnight,’ Claudia informed the cherub, pocketing the keys of the apartment, ‘before the bailiffs move in.’

Behind her, her brother-in-law’s eyes were shiny with tears, there was a look of sheer agony on his pitted face.

‘Come on, Marcellus,’ she said softly. ‘We’re done here.’

*

The Digger dreamed. In the dream, the trees were clothed in their autumn riches. Golds, russets and amber. The air was warm, a stream bubbled nearby and butterflies filled the woodlands as they migrated south. In the dream, the Digger leaned on the spade and looked down at the newly covered grave.

Watched a hand rise up out of the soil.

As fast as the spade could shovel the leaf litter, the hand pushed, until it became an elbow, a whole arm, and suddenly the corpse was climbing noiselessly out of the hole. Black and crawling with maggots, it advanced, and over its face it wore an actor’s mask.

‘You think you can kill me, but I will never die,’ it said through the hole in its temple. ‘I will
never
die.’

Flesh fell away from the hand as it pulled off the mask, but there was a second mask underneath that, and a third. But when the corpse pulled off the grotesque grin of the comic, it was the face of the Digger that stared out from the decay.

And the body laughed. ‘See?’ it said. ‘You cannot escape me.’

And the leaves fell from the trees, and it was winter again. It is perpetually midwinter for killers.

Eighteen

‘You know the best thing about December?’ Claudia asked Drusilla, as they both stretched languorously in her bed. ‘Festivities virtually every day of the month.’

Some, like the Festival of the Lambs, were sombre occasions, while others, like Faunus earlier in the month, were exactly the opposite. Indeed, if anything, Faunus verged a little too much on the rumbustious, with all that rough wine and ungainly clomping the rustics called dance. But it was good fun, this country festival. A mix of goat roasts, boar hunts and blessings-of-the-motherland, basically an excuse for the locals to get drunk.

‘Where would our advertisements for the Spectaculars be without these festivities?’ Claudia murmured through a yawn.

‘Mrrr.’ Drusilla was less than impressed. Coming from Egypt, she hadn’t taken to these cold, damp, miserable winters. No amount of gaiety could turn the streets of Rome into sun-baked oases of hot mice and crispy spiders.

‘Fortune is smiling on us, poppet.’

The first commercial for the Halcyon Spectaculars took advantage of the Festival of the Lambs, the second capitalized on the Festival of the Seven Hills and now today, and without so much as a day off when people might forget, the gods had given Claudia yet a
third
chance to advertise her sponsorship.

‘Not necessarily the finest,’ she admitted, stroking Drusilla underneath blankets scented with chamomile. ‘But beggars can’t be choosers, and the masses do tend to flock to the Festival of Ceres.’

More pious than most of the other winter festivities, and nowhere near on the scale of the goddess’s bigger festival which took up such a large chunk of April with its theatres and games, this was still a day of happiness and rejoicing. Of giving back to this bountiful earth goddess some of the fruits of her labours, and the festival involved ceremonies and rituals in which even the lowliest plebeians and slaves could participate.

‘Hrrow,’ Drusilla growled, hearing the first excited shrieks from the kitchens below.

She had never quite forgiven her mistress for encouraging the children of the household slaves to make cakes of spelt and salt to sacrifice to Ceres today. Already the horrible little sods were squealing in delight as podgy hands mangled dough into bread snails and bread mice to be laid at the altar of the gentle goddess. Nor was Drusilla alone in her tingles of alarm. Since Claudia always laid on outdoor feasts of sticky honeycombs afterwards, the cooks and the flowerbeds also feared for their sanity. Someone’s child, somewhere, would always throw up.

Wisely, Drusilla retreated beneath the covers and dreamed of hot sands and cold vermin in a land where it only rained moths. Claudia, dressed in white, the traditional colour for honouring Ceres, found her own escape from the bedlam was not quite as easy.

Erinna was sprawled across the stairs tacking up the seams of the tunic Ion would later rip off at the Temple, singing softly to herself.

‘One day a stranger

Rode into our valley,

Ravaged with scars of hard battles long past.

His eyes, they were weary,

He was tired of running,

But the law was behind him and catching up fast.
‘

The ballad wasn’t one Claudia recognized from any of the plays.

‘Long
after the stranger

Rode out of our valley,

I bore him the daughter that he never knew.

I know not what befell him,

I hope he found freedom,

But I’ll always bear him a love that is true.
‘

Erinna hadn’t bothered pinning her hair into a bun, and today it hung down her back, a glorious cloak of glistening chestnut. No doubt about it. With her clear skin, big eyes and hauntingly beautiful voice, she was one of Caspar’s finest assets.

‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there.’

She shuffled over to let Claudia past, and Claudia didn’t say that she’d been there some time, wondering what it was about Erinna’s voice that turned a few mediocre lines into something that made eyes prickle with tears.

Erinna bit off the thread with her teeth. ‘If you want to make a real impact outside the Temple, all three of us girls could wear tacked costumes if you like?’

‘No, no,’ Claudia said hastily. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

There was more than enough flesh on display with Erinna. Three volumptuous beauties would blind the crowd for a week.

And in any case, there was a quality in Erinna that brought a special dimension to the farce. For a show based entirely around smut, the word sophisticated might sound paradoxical, yet there was a stylishness about her which was lacking in the other girls. Not that they lacked sex appeal. Far from it. Jemima in particular had it in spades. Proud of her outsize assets, Jemima was the type who’d tumble men at the drop of a hat and leave them laughing afterwards. But even Adah and Renata had that special appeal that comes from the sure and certain knowledge that they were both desirable and desired—and so what, there were girls out there who were prettier, more shapely, more intelligent? Caspar had chosen his volumptuous beauties with care. The girls in his troupe were
alive.
Vivacious, vibrant, independent and self-assured, they lived for the day and milked life for everything that it sent them and through the medium of farce, they were able to project this to the world. If that isn’t sexy, what is?

What set Erinna apart was her couldn’t-care-less attitude. It emitted a different kind of sensuality, an effect that was all the more pronounced because Erinna was unaware of it. But none of this would have touched Claudia’s consciousness, had it not been for Skyles.

Maybe, she thought, slipping into the thick, warm, woollen mantle Leonides held out at the foot of the stairs, she was mistaken about what she had seen…

Maybe she was reading too much into
it…

The litter bearers dropped her outside Ceres’s temple, just off the Cattle Market on the Aventine, in perfect timing for the start of the sacrifice. Adjacent to the shrine, in a great warehouse flanked by winches and cranes, stood the largest corn store in the city, and it was outside the Great Granary that the third, and final, advertisement for the Spectaculars was due to take place. Everyone, whether male or female, rich or poor, free or enslaved, wore white for the ceremony. Allowing Caspar’s rainbow troupe to steal even greater attention.

A large crowd had accumulated and fragrant incense wafted on the breeze. Apart from the farmers, whose patron Ceres was, many slaves had also gathered. Should they ever need it, the temple gave them right of sanctuary—and only a fool would wait until the moment was upon them before propitiating the one goddess who was prepared to shelter them.