Dream Boat

Chapter Ten

Why use a tinderbox to start a fire, when Claudia's temper would do the trick? The little bitch, she stormed. The nasty, spiteful, unprincipled bitch! There had been no satisfaction in finding her conjecture proved correct, only anger, and Claudia was shaking with rage.

Flavia, the devious, self-serving little cow, had invented her role in the Serving Women drama as a smokescreen to fool her snobby foster parents. Deep breaths. Dee-eeep breaths. That's better. Keep calm, keep rational. Conserve your energies for roasting Flavia over a fire and to setting her screaming to music!

Screaming. Strange. Claudia could hear it clearly, as she approached her own front door. Screaming. Wailing. Screeching 'What the blazes-?'

I've been gone less than two hours, suddenly all hell's broken loose! Moans and sobs seeped from every rafter of her household, wails came from the cellars, from the kitchens, from the gardens.

'It's Junius, madam.' It fell on her lanky Macedonian steward to explain. 'He's-'

Claudia's stomach flipped somersaults. 'He's what?' She wanted time to stop, go backwards, so she wouldn't hear the answer… her heart beat like a kettledrum.

'He's-' Leonides swallowed and could not meet his mistress's eye. 'He's in prison.'

'Jail?' Is that all? Mentally she pulled up her sleeves and prepared for battle. Arrest my bodyguard? I do not think so. 'On what charge?'

'Wearing the toga,' Leonides said. 'He was caught in the act…' The sentence trailed off into silence.

Claudia's blood froze in her veins. She became a living statue. 'When?' A frog croaked the question. The same frog which hopped up and down in her innards.

'Shortly after noon.' Leonides' own voice was a rasp. 'Someone apparently recognised him in the Camensis, dressed in a toga and surrounded by "his" slaves-'

'And felt obliged to report him to the authorities?' Around her, the atrium tumbled.

'Yes, madam.' His voice was barely a whisper as they both pictured the scene.

Soldiers clanking through the Camensis, their armour reflecting like gold in the sunshine. The detail would halt, surround the young buck and his happy band of picnickers. Junius would be hauled to his feet and clapped in irons. Shackled together in a neck brace, Junius, the hired whores and the other three members of Claudia's bodyguard would be marched off to the dungeons, pelted along the way with dung and rotten fruit.

Mighty Juno, tell me this isn't true. That this is Leonides' idea of a practical joke. That Junius will come bouncing out of the cellar any second. But Juno remained silent, and the cellar door remained shut.

And Claudia was forced to swallow the bitter pill of truth. That in her haste to save Flavia's life, she'd sent her own bodyguard to his doom.

The penalty for impersonating a Roman citizen is death.

In her mind, Claudia replayed their earlier conversation in this very hall. His protest. Her reply. 'Not what would happen if you're caught, rather what I'll do to you if you don't.'

'The whores were released after several hours' questioning,' Leonides explained. 'That's how the story got out, but the men remain under lock and key.'

He went there, he said. Straight away. But the Dungeon Master was refusing all access to prisoners, the cells were already too full, and all he could glean (and only then with the transfer of silver) was that the three henchmen would get off with a public flogging, whereas the Gaul — here Leonides drew a graphic finger silently across his throat.

On behalf of his mistress, the steward had proffered a substantial bribe and, when that failed, had lodged a protest. The stepdaughter of the Widow Seferius had been kidnapped, he explained. Junius was acting solely on instructions, they were setting a trap. But his pleas had bounced off the thick prison walls.

'Reasons don't matter, mate,' the Dungeon Master had sneered. 'A slave's a slave, as you well know, and the penalty for impersonating a citizen is death. Ain't no exceptions. Next case!'

Shit.

For several long minutes, Claudia stood alone in the gloaming, her mind whirling like a millrace. To stop by the dungeons would be a complete and utter waste of time. The death cells permitted no visitors… What should she do? What could she do? She had never felt so impotent in her life.

She paced, she wrung her hands, she sat, she paced some more. There must be something I can do. Frustration grew. Solidified into a heavy ball inside her stomach. A ball which answered to the name Defeat.

Wait, though, a little voice said. Aren't balls made to be kicked? Claudia obliged, and when the ball had disappeared into space, a small flame of hope kindled in its place. She might be powerless herself, but there was someone… Perhaps the only someone in the whole of Rome capable of pulling the right strings to get Junius off the hook. His name was Marcus Cornelius Orbilio. The question, though, wasn't could he, but would he?

The last time he'd called, she'd brandished a sharp little gelding knife, threatening to barbecue his bunions and make jam of his jawbone, saying that if he ever came near her again, she'd report him for harassing a poor grieving widow until finally it seemed Supersnoop had got the message: keep out and stay out, I do not want you in my life, not even on the periphery!

Because there was something about him which unsettled her. Not the hard muscles which strained against the linen of his tunic, or the way he turned unscheduled laughs into a cough. The emotion plumbed deeper, murkier waters. Waters where she had never swum before. Orbilio was the only person who made her feel… safe. That was the word. Marcus Cornelius made her feel safe and the feeling was strange to her. She distrusted it. For what it did to her insides, to her sleep, to her heartbeat. So she'd evicted the nuisance like an unwelcome lodger, and had discharged him from her life. There was no reason on Jupiter's earth why he should help her.

But for Junius' sake, she had to try.

'Fuss over nothing, in my opinion,' Flea scoffed, as Claudia clapped the manacles back on. 'Once you plead for Junius at his trial, the jurists will absolve him in a jiffy.'

'Jiffies are for free men,' Claudia snapped back, hauling the girl into the street. 'What you've conveniently forgotten is that because Junius is a slave, there will be no bloody trial.'

Don't think about it. Don't think of the innovative execution options facing that young bodyguard: crucifixion, trampling by elephants, being pitched against a bear in the arena, tied to a stake among a pack of starving hyenas…

'Well, it ain't my fault,' Flea whined, as Claudia hailed a passing charioteer to cadge a lift across town. 'You told him what to wear, not me.'

A millstone dropped in Claudia's stomach. 'Thank you, Flea, that point had not escaped me.' She looked deep and coldly into the girl's eyes. 'But remember it was Flavia, your accomplice, who shopped him! You two are in this together.'

Wait till I get my hands on that bitch.

The sky was dark, the air muggy when Claudia and Flea alighted from the chariot. Ordinarily the Argiletum was far enough away from the Tiber to be free of its pungency, but tonight the cloying heat intensified the stench of rotting fish, of bloated animals floating down the river, of its stinking yellow mud — and the viscous breeze was generous enough to ensure that everyone received their fair share of it, even the patricians who made the hill she was aiming for their home because the air there was reputed to be the purest in the whole of Rome.

'Thanks.' She proffered a coin at the scarred charioteer who'd so generously given her and her 'maidservant' a lift, but the old man waved it away.

'When you're accustomed to having ugly old warhorses on board, m'dear, two lovely ladies is a treat,' he said gallantly, before adding, 'Even if one of them does have a legionary's tongue on her!'

Flea stuck it out at his retreating back. 'Smarmy git.'

'Listen to me, you little wretch,' Claudia hissed. 'If you'd have been half as philanthropic with the truth as you are with your insults, Junius would not be facing death.'

'You can't pin that on me,' Flea protested sullenly. 'It weren't my fault.'

'Oh, wasn't it!' Claudia jerked on the shackles, making the girl wince at the red weal which formed as she was spun round to face her. 'Thanks to your stupid, selfish lies, a good and innocent man is being sent to the arena! Do you understand that, Flea? Junius is going to die!'

'I ain't no bleeding fortune-teller,' Flea began, 'how-'

But Claudia was sickened by the girl's irresponsibility, her refusal to shoulder any blame. 'You selfish little bitch,' she stormed. 'You think only of yourself, and then no further ahead than where your next meal's coming from.'

She drew them into a doorway to let a wagon past, then set a cracking pace up the Via Cavour, skirting wagonloads of sacks and crates and a cart of hide destined for the quayside. She spun right, down one of the narrow sidestreets, to avoid a brawl. Someone was ripping a shutter off the oculist's shopfront to act as a makeshift stretcher to carry home a battered, bleeding stevedore.

'Look, I'm sorry.' Flea jerked at the long frock which, because she was accustomed to wearing short tunics which left her skinny legs bare, tangled round her ankles. 'I thought it was a laugh, a bit of a joke, all right? I never expected it to backfire.'

A joke? Helping Flavia stage her own abduction? Claudia could have kicked herself for not paying sufficient attention at the beginning. Goddammit, it was obvious, she should have seen through it straight away. Who knew the family well enough to know Marcellus and Julia would jump to ransom their niece? Flavia! Who'd think it funny to give her foster parents the run-around? Flavia. And who knew damned well they'd swallow that cock-and-bull story about her being invited to take part in the Serving Women drama without question? That was the bit Claudia should have picked up on. Janus, Croesus, no one in their right mind would ask Flavia to lead a dog, much less a civil performance before a crowd of hundreds!

'What did she promise you, eh? A share of the booty?'

Flea suddenly became preoccupied with picking her way through the debris scattered along the tangled network of slopes and alleyways, the broken toys, the running gutters, slops and meatbones and greasy cobblestones.

'Well, I hope the pair of you choke on the pebbles!'

'What d'you mean, pebbles?'

In the darkness, Claudia smiled. It had been a gamble, of course. A game of bluff and double-bluff, but with no way of raising two thousand gold pieces (and it had to be gold, the note insisted!), it was a simple question of expediency. Claudia had filled the ransom chest with rocks. A quick visit to the goldsmith ensured that only the thinnest smear of gilt covered the top layer of stones and hey presto, a box full of 'gold'.

'You rotten bitch,' Flea growled. 'What if Flavia really had been kidnapped?'

As I said. Bluff and double-bluff…

Torch-bearers appeared as though conjured up, lighting the way of those who could afford it, and laughter echoed out of a brightly lit tavern on the corner at the punchline of a joke, that hoary chestnut about the centurion and the barber's wife, hilarious no matter how often one had heard it. From the serried ranks of the balconies above came arguments and sneezes, meows and bedtime tears, the smell of frying mullet, onions and stale garlic. Slowly, though, the landscape changed. Cramped and overcrowded tenements gave way to spacious houses, whose inner secrets were muffled by high windowless walls, and the aromas were more of roasting boar and incense, fresh paint or the polish from the armoured vigilantes.

'I've never been up here before,' Flea marvelled. 'They,' she indicated the vigilantes, 'always ran me off.'

They would! Private security organised by those who inhabited these exquisite mansions ensured no crime took place in this district on the Esquiline. One glance at their mighty clubs, studded with nails, and you realised it wasn't called Nob Hill for nothing!

Outside the shops, the pavements still glistened where the shopfronts had been swabbed down at dusk and the gentle strains of a harpist drifted from one house, while doves crooned in their sleep from the courtyard of another.

'Some gaff, innit?'

Flea's eyes were the size of temple censers as Claudia stopped outside a white-fronted house of modest proportions, which screamed breeding and good taste. The door was highly polished, you could smell the beeswax even in this clammy heat, the bronze unicorn knocker gleamed in the light of the brands which burned either side the doorway in blacked-up iron brackets. 'Whose is it? Family or friend's?'

'Neither,' Claudia replied tartly.

Let people close and they hurt you.

Her hand hovered over the unicorn, then withdrew, uncomfortably aware of a churning in her stomach, the fluttering of a whole flock of starlings inside her ribcage. Anxiety — what else? Watched by half a dozen tough looking vigilantes, she lifted the knocker and pounded the unicorn with such force, it was a wonder Neptune himself didn't rise up out of the ocean to see what the fuss was about.

Suddenly, as the door swung silently open on its well-greased hinges, a fish hook tangled deep inside her and began to pull. Damn his eyes, why couldn't Orbilio be married, bald, fat or ugly, why did he have to have a twinkle in his eye? Bloody unfair that the Fates had bestowed on him an easy lope and that sceptical, lop-sided grin, because sometimes, when she couldn't sleep at night or when her mind drifted at the baths, Claudia would find herself musing on what it would be like, his lips on hers, his strong hands exploring nooks and crannies — although equally quickly she'd snap out of it. He was patrician, rich and clever, with integrity all but tattooed on his cheekbones. She came from an altogether different class and walked a tightrope between what was legal (very little) and what was not.

And as any rope walker will tell you, the last thing they need is some berk yanking on the balance pole, no matter how tall and wavy-haired and rugged!

Besides. Any lustful feelings were on her side only. He'd never even made a move, in all the months she'd known him, in all the adventures they had shared together.

His sights were on the Senate, not her bed!

In the shadows she noticed a small shape, dark and shifting. It slithered forward. Bending down, she scooped it up and thrust it in to Flea's disbelieving arms.

And as Claudia Seferius swept into Orbilio's lofty vestibule, she couldn't help wondering what propitiation the gods of this magnificent cedarwood threshold demanded.

She had a feeling it would be one colossal slice of humble pie!