Jail Bait

XVII

In the dark, dry serenity of Carya’s grotto, Claudia munched on a hunk of Sarsina cheese, redolent of the lush Umbrian fields of its homeland, and paused from time to time to pour water down her throat, either inside or out, it didn’t matter, both were sensational. Here, the slope of the cave muffled any eerie howlings which came from over the lake, filling the void with the hypnotic drip-drip-drip of the water nymph’s tears, and soon Claudia’s eyelids became weighted…weighted with lead…

‘Are you deaf as well as stupid, boy?’

The nasal whine, shriller still in anger, jolted her into wakefulness and instinct made her retreat into the corner where it was too dark to make out much more than reflected ripples on the wall and the white blur of Mosul’s priestly garb, but the slap did not need to be seen. Neither was it necessary to see Leon’s face to appreciate the impact of Mosul’s wrath, the lad’s groans were expressive enough.

‘How dare you’-thwack-‘come down here’-thwack-‘when I have forbidden it.’ Mosul was puffing from effort, Leon was gulping back sobs. ‘Out, you little shit, before I take the buckle end of this belt to your hide.’

‘I only wanted to help-’

‘Out! You hear me?’ Another octave higher and Mosul’s voice would have shattered glass. ‘Out!’

Memories blasted back, crushing hearing, sight, every known sense. Bitter memories. Of a leather strap biting in flesh. Of pain. White-hot pain. And an uncle, her mother’s brother, beating obedience into a small, orphaned child…

In the darkness, Claudia cringed and curled herself into a ball. Go away. Go away. But the uncle would not go away, not until his arm tired, although if she made herself small, she could hide. Hide inside herself and seek refuge against the bristly cheek of her father and it didn’t matter he was dead. Tight in a ball, she was his again. Safe and protected…

Through the tears-stinging tears, salty tears, not the make-believe tears of a nymph-Claudia became aware of Leon, stumbling out of the cave, whimpering like a whipped mongrel. Of the mole-eyed priest, glancing several times over his shoulder before leaning into the cistern. Finally, his hands swished the water, then he, too, was gone and soon the dancing ripples moderated their rhythm and Carya’s grotto was calm once again.

Scrubbing her face with the back of her hand, Claudia crawled out of her hiding place and cupped trembling hands in the water, but the water was sour and the darkness no longer a haven. Nevertheless she counted to twenty before striding out of the cave, and when the tub of a priest glanced up from the shrine, he saw a young woman skipping up the red marble steps without a care in the world, tossing back her curls as she improvised silly words to a popular festival tune.

*

‘You’ve got a bloody sauce.’

He was leaning with one shoulder against the window embrasure, his arms loosely crossed, staring towards the orchard of cherry trees and damsons, where pink piglets squealed over fat, contented sows and where blossoms fell like snow on the grass, and he did not look round when she entered, though the rush of air must have alerted him, even if the door slamming on its hinges did not.

‘Well, let me tell you now, you duplicitous son-of-a-bitch, you can stick your apologies where the sun-’

‘Uh-uh.’ Still he did not turn his head, and just like on the island the day before yesterday, his expression was veiled by the mane of dark hair. ‘I am not here to apologize, merely to explain.’

‘Forget it, Tarraco,’ Claudia said coldly, ‘the game’s over.’

‘Game?’

Sorry, I was forgetting. For you, this is deadly serious, isn’t it? ‘Allow me to spell it out in words even a simple Spaniard can understand. You’ve lost, Tarraco. Give in gracefully, because,’ she flashed a wicked smile, ‘I’m nowhere near as wealthy as I make out.’

His head snapped round so fast, Claudia wondered whether it would spin off altogether. ‘Is that what you think?’ he hissed, and the sinews in his neck stood out like clewlines. ‘You think I am after your money? Tcha!’ He flicked his thumbnail against his front tooth. ‘You have seen my island, do I look poor?’

‘But how much is enough for you, Tarraco?’ she fired back. ‘Where does greed draw the line?’

‘You sneer at me, because I pursue rich, lonely women, yes? Is better to slog from dawn to dusk in the wheatfields, to spend a life underground in the silver mines? Which would you do, my so-upstanding maiden, when uprooted from your home and family and shipped in chains to foreign land? Stoke furnaces? Scrub pots? Pour wine yes-sir-no-sir for the scum who put manacles around your ankles and sell you as slave?’

Fury had distorted his features, colouring his skin and blazing bolts of white lightning from those charcoal-dark eyes.

‘I am eighteen, have no skill, only muscles to be sold by the pound at an auction. Then I catch eye of rich lady and wonder, hmm…? So I flirt with her from the block, rich lady buys me, all is fine until her husband finds out, then-rich lady stripped of her status, thrown into the gutter and spat on by those who once called themselves friends. But Tarraco?’ He let out a bitter laugh. ‘Suddenly this ignorant Spaniard is in great demand, for what does he have, the fine ladies wonder, that is worth losing everything for?’

Outside the crickets buzzed with irritating regularity, and inside the room, the sweltering heat threatened to squeeze the breath from Claudia’s body. That, surely, was her reason for holding it in? A heady blend of pine and woodshavings drifted across on the air and the gold on his tunic, fish, leaping round a navy-blue hem, shimmered in the sunlight.

‘So they had an itch and you scratched it?’ she snapped. ‘Think I give a damn?’

Tarraco turned back to gaze out of the window, where the hills had disappeared in a blue smoky haze, hiding pines grown to tap for their resin and myrtles grown for sweet-smelling garlands.

‘You look down on me because I am gigolo, but what-’ he paused to spike his mane out of his face with his fingers ‘-if I am woman in same situation?’

Carefully (very carefully) Claudia poured herself a glass of wine.

‘My husband, I admit, might have been one or two years older than myself.’ Thirty, if you’re picking nits. ‘However, I married him because he was a witty and entertaining man-’ this was not the time to mention he’d been an ageing lardball with poisonous bad breath ‘-and good points too numerous to mention.’ All of them inside his moneybox. ‘I was utterly bereft when he passed away.’ Her voice dared him to call her a liar, yet when the Spaniard turned to face her, the blood pounded at Claudia’s temples as dark, demanding eyes peeled back the layers of her past, laying bare memories only she could possibly know…

It was no mean feat, staring him out/ ‘At least I didn’t kill him to get my hands on his money.’

Tarraco’s laughter came out as a snort through his nose. ‘Is that what the gossips put out? Because Virginia drowned in the lake? It was dark, there was a thunderstorm, I told her not to row out alone, but like you,’ he flashed her a glance, ‘she is stubborn.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Knows it all.’ Then the grin slipped away. ‘Next morning, her boat is in pieces and Virginia floats face down on the water.’

‘Rich, was she?’

‘Comfortable enough to afford long and regular visits to Atlantis,’ he conceded. ‘Is how she became friendly with Lais, and when Tuder died, it seemed natural for me to…comfort the grieving widow.’

‘As only you knew how?’

In a flash the Spaniard leapt over the room, grabbing Claudia’s wrists in his hands and jerking her round. With a crash, her goblet smashed into a thousand sparkling smithereens and the strange thing was, neither of them noticed.

‘I have worked hard to achieve my ambitions,’ he spat. ‘The gold and the marble, lush grounds, a big house. But I have done nothing without honour, you hear? Nothing I am ashamed of.’

He released her and pushed her away.

‘First you believed I was a slave, who ingratiated himself with Lais and Tuder. I tell you otherwise, but still you suspect me of wrongdoing. I know nothing about the banker, how he came to die, and I do not think it is any of your business, either, but if you really want to know, why don’t you ask Lais?’

Congratulations. I thought you’d never get round to her.

‘Lais of the harebell-blue gown, you mean?’

Tarraco’s chin jutted out, but it was his only reaction. There was a pause, then, ‘I wanted,’ he said simply, ‘to give you a present. Was spontaneous, and that robe was-oh, Claudia, that gown was-’ his eyes closed in pleasure ‘-just perfect on you.’

Silver-tongued bastard.

‘It was probably perfect on Lais, as well.’

‘No, no, no. Lais is a fine woman, but she is fifty-six. Of course,’ he spread his hands, ‘she thinks herself twenty years younger, never allowed me to see her without her cosmetics, but when a man makes love to a woman… ’

Unable to meet his smoky gaze, Claudia reached for another glass to fill with thick, heavy wine. ‘Don’t tell me. You found it a chore.’

‘I tell you the truth, Claudia, as I have told no living soul. It was bloody hard work.’ There was no anger in Tarraco’s voice, only sadness. ‘Desiccated flesh, sagging breasts, face whitened with a ton of chalk. Every day you live with her eyebrows painted on, the brow itself long since fallen out, you steel yourself to put your tongue in a mouth where it probes round missing teeth. Do you start to get the picture?’

Claudia recalled the pinched and petulant middle-aged woman conferring with Kamar in the early hours of this morning and thought, yes, that’s the type he means. Self-obsessed and self-absorbed, the likes of Stonypuss couldn’t understand why a dashing blade wouldn’t want to court them.

‘Can you imagine making up to old women as though they were virgins? Playing day in and day out the role of their pleasure boy? Flattering, cajoling, learning to lie with the utmost conviction, yet knowing all the while your livelihood depends on the size of your muscles and the strength of your stamina in bed?’ His voice was little more than a whisper, and it seemed to be addressing Lake Plasimene. ‘I defy you to tell me I haven’t earned what I own.’

A long silence followed, and when Claudia finally broke it, her voice was as soft as a breeze in a poplar. ‘How, exactly, is it that you come to own Tuder’s island, Tarraco?’

‘I am Lais’ husband,’ he huffed. ‘Is mine by right.’

Really? Claudia drained her glass and refilled it. Of course, the law was unequivocal. A woman’s property automatically transfers to her husband upon marriage; that was Lavinia’s point. On the other hand, it was a naive Senate which imagined it could outwit a wealthy woman and virtually unimaginable that a rich banker’s wife would not be cognisant of loopholes. Rather, Claudia imagined, rolls and rolls of legal parchment would have been invested to ensure wealth on that scale remained in Lais’ title…unless…unless…

Claudia phrased her next question carefully. ‘How long since Lais left you?’ she asked, with almost indecent politeness.

‘Wednesday. Why? You imagine I take you to my bed, while the marriage still stands?’

No. I am just remembering that Cal was killed the following afternoon…

‘You did not take me to your bed,’ she reminded him. ‘And I’d be intrigued to hear what happened on Wednesday.’

Tarraco threw his hands in the air in what Claudia had, until then, assumed to be a purely Gallic gesture. ‘We have row, she walk out. End of marriage, end of story. Claudia, this took place before you arrived.’ He crouched at her feet, one knee bent, the other touching the ground, the way he’d knelt before the dead bear. ‘I swear this is not adultery, I am not after money, you must believe this.’ He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. ‘On the island, when I see the bear chasing you, I knew-’ He broke off and stood up, and as so many times in the past, let his hair hide his face. ‘You saw it,’ he said thickly. ‘When I lifted you up, you saw how I felt. There was nothing I could do, neither,’ he added slowly, ‘did I wish to fight what I have never before felt in my life. Claudia.’

He turned round to face her, his face twisted in pain.

‘I must know,’ he rasped. ‘Do you believe me?’

Claudia stood up and there were white water rapids coursing her veins. ‘Not one single word.’

He was a liar, a cheat, but worse, here was a very dangerous man.

‘And this,’ she hurled the contents of her glass in his face, ‘is for presuming a soiled frock would get me into your bed.’

*

Down by the jetty, Marcus Cornelius watched the dandified Spaniard bound down the steps from Atlantis. By his reckoning, the sun had moved fifteen degrees in the sky, and that, in his opinion, was a bloody long time to pass in a lady’s bedroom simply playing chequers.

A lion clawed his stomach from the inside, and the pain was the worst that he’d known.

Then he noticed, as the Spaniard drew closer, that a scowl disfigured his face almost as badly as the stain which disfigured his shirt. As Tarraco approached the jetty, there was a distinct spring in Orbilio’s step as he reached over to untie the rope to Tarraco’s boat.

‘Allow me,’ he said cheerfully.

The Spaniard accepted the favour with a grunt and, as he did so, Marcus leaned over and sniffed.

‘Let me guess.’ He sniffed again. ‘Vintage-eight, possibly nine years old. Fine, rich bouquet, with a hint of wild blackberries-’ (sniff) ‘-ripe figs-’ (sniff) ‘-and, yes, I do believe oak.’ He straightened up and passed the rope across. ‘At a stab, I’d say that’s an amusing little Campanian soaking into the cotton.’

‘Actually, it’s Falernian,’ the Spaniard growled, snatching at the oars.

‘Well, whatever,’ Marcus acknowledged. ‘It’s still amusing.’