Jail Bait

VI

Sabbio Tullus surveyed his nephew (the one who was related by marriage to a second cousin of the Emperor’s wife), through well disguised distaste. A fleshy man himself, he considered rotundity an encapsulation of all things good, all things healthy both in mind and spirit, yet here he was facing a young blade twenty years his junior with a face like a weasel and dead man’s eyes.

‘Are you certain of this?’ Tullus asked, and when a rivulet of sweat ran down his backbone he was not sure it was entirely due to humidity.

‘Positive,’ the nephew replied, in that singular grey monotone of his.

Tullus twisted in his chair, and trusted that the creaks were the basketweave, not his discomfort manifesting itself aloud. He reached for his goblet and gulped at the apple juice. Bloody quacks! Putting him on fruit juice and sherbets. What did they think he was, dying? They were only a few chest pains, for gods’ sake. Indigestion. Nothing to do with the theft from that bloody depository… When a second twinge clawed at his heart, it was the wine that he reached for. Bloody quacks. The liquor glowed inside him like a log fire on a February night and he leaned down to pat the wolfhound panting at his feet, its long, pink tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. And still that bloody nephew of his hadn’t moved so much as a muscle. Cold-blooded little toad, thanks to him, I’m right in the shit.

‘Are you feeling well, Uncle?’

The question was phrased out of courtesy, not concern, and Tullus snorted. How could his plump little pigeon of a sister have produced a desiccated bag of bones such as this? Their father had arranged the marriage, of course, Tullus never even met the husband, but from what his sister had told him, he believed he would have liked the fellow. The second time he snorted, it was from rage. How dare the bastard leave his sister in the lurch. Falling from his horse and breaking his bloody back, what a stupid way to go, and the widow eight months pregnant! Silently, yet with infinite variety, Sabbio Tullus cursed his father for contracting the marriage. His brother-in-law for dying so selfishly. His sister for birthing a reptile. His nephew for landing him in this bloody mess. But most of all, Sabbio Tullus cursed himself. For agreeing to look after that mucking casket in the first place.

He sighed and thought, I should be in Frascati, where the air is fresh and pure and uncontaminated by plague, giving my wife another child and checking my boundary stones haven’t been moved by that conniving neighbour of mine, not sitting in this sweatroom of an office, sorting out this little bastard’s mess. And Janus bloody Croesus, what a mucking mess it was.

‘You ought not have gone to the army,’ the boy said.

‘You ought to have told me what you kept in that box,’ Tullus fired back.

‘You would not have agreed to undertake its safekeeping.’

’Too bloody right.’

But lock it up he had, and now Tullus was as deep in the shit as his nephew. How many times had his poor sister miscarried? They’d lost count after five, and when she was delivered, at last, of a son the whole family rejoiced. Had they but known. Tullus rubbed the dull ache in his chest. When this was over… By all the gods in Olympus, when this was all over, he’d string that boy up by his tongue and whip him till his gizzard popped out. But until then, of course ‘Has anyone discovered where the bitch is hiding?’ the nephew enquired.

Inexplicably Tullus wanted to laugh, and say his bet was on Naples, where she’d be spending his silver on dresses and jewels and placing outrageous bets on charioteers, because there was a whole lot of woman packed into Claudia Seferius, by heavens there was-then he remembered the contents of a certain little box and Tullus steeled his face. ‘Not yet.’

‘But you are taking steps to recover the…contents?’

Why is it, Tullus thought, that sounded just like a threat? ‘Of course I bloody am,’ he snarled. Did the boy take him for a fool? ‘I have agents on the job, up and down the country.’

Holy Mars, he wished the lad had never told him what was in that sodding box.

‘Good.’ The nephew stood up. ‘You will advise me, naturally, the minute you have news of her whereabouts?’

‘You can trust me to keep you advised,’ Tullus said, barely keeping the grimace from his face.

‘Oh, I trust you, Uncle.’ Thin lips formed a dead man’s smile. ‘I trust you implicitly.’

The door clicked silently behind him and inside Tullus’ chest, the eagle clawed in earnest.