Man Eater

XX

Outside the tavern, Claudia ground her heel into a weed growing up through the flagstones and wished it was Orbilio’s nose.

‘I suppose you’ll be sticking to me like a tick from now on?’ she had asked ten minutes earlier, smoothing out the creases in her scarlet gown as he sorted the bill and thinking, now that will have set me up for the journey.

‘Front or back, which would you prefer?’

The look she gave him could have turned grapes to raisins, but Marcus Cornelius seemed to be adjusting the purse on his wrist with immense detail.

‘I was referring to the element of trust. You see, when it comes to me, yours appears filigree thin.’ That’s it, shame him into leaving you alone, that way you can slip away while his back’s turned.

‘I can’t imagine where you got that idea from.’ Orbilio was nonchalantly tossing a key in the air.

Claudia looked round in mock agitation.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking for the rat I can smell.’ Not for nothing had that key materialized out of nowhere.

‘You’ll thank me in the end,’ he said, taking care to keep his eye on the metal object flipping into his hand. ‘I’ve been doing you a favour.’

Like hell. ‘Like what?’

‘Like…keeping Drusilla out of the midday sun.’ The key had disappeared deep into the folds of his tunic. ‘Like…knowing how frightened she’d be without Junius to keep her company-’

His voice trailed off into the gutter where it belonged, and much to Claudia’s disappointment, this aristocratic prig did not break out in the mass of suppurating sores that she prayed so violently for. He simply winked and strode off.

Now, as Claudia ground another weed into juice, there was a bubbling sound in her ears as her blood reached boiling point. Godsdamnit, Orbilio, this is not your manor. You can’t go locking up people’s cats willy-nilly, or banging up their bodyguards whenever the whim is upon you.

But no matter how intense her fury, no matter how numerous the curses she visited upon him and his family, his house, his job, indeed anyone who’d ever spoken to him in their entire lives, the fact remained.

Claudia Seferius was grounded.

So just what does a girl do when she’s stuck in this dead-end town for the rest of the afternoon? She digs out the grubs who ran her off the road, that’s what. Before she takes the skin off their backs to hang on her walls for her to paint pictures on.

Across the street a young mother, a child at her hip and another clinging to her skirts, helped her one-legged husband up the steps of the public baths. An old man, as thin as Barea, hobbled to the barber’s for a long overdue shave and outside the fuller’s yard a frizzy-haired washerwoman made sheep’s eyes at the temple warden when any fool could see she was wasting her time, it was boys he was interested in. A random slice of Tarsulae life, Claudia thought, which succinctly sums up this town. It shows the two very separate divisions, those who have little option but to stay on, to eke a living where otherwise they could find none and whose only alternative was the Emperor’s dole. And those who make a living from these proud, possibly stubborn, survivors.

She clapped her hands to cleave a path through a gaggle of pecking hens and feared not only for the future of the townspeople, but for the soul of the town itself. Tarsulae was degenerating fast. And as she began her search for the yobs, she pondered which of the two categories Fronto had fitted into.

‘How old yer say?’ The hunchback clipping his donkey with a pair of iron shears shook his head. ‘Nah! No young men left nowadays, they’ve all found work in Hispellum or Narni.’ Which is rather what Claudia had concluded, but it didn’t hurt to double check.

‘Don’t know of no one with a birthmark like that.’ Ankle deep in sawdust, the wizened carpenter worked on smoothing a yoke. ‘Couldn’t have made a mistake, could you, lass?’

After a while, Claudia began to think well, yes, maybe she had. Maybe that ginger thatch had been dyed, maybe that birthmark was no more than paint. Then she remembered the third boy.

‘Eyes like a frog?’ The bone-worker shook his head. ‘Not from round here. Fancy them dice, do you? All four for a brass sesterce?’

As the shadows made their inexorable progress across the forum, Claudia sat on the steps of a bronze mounted hero and tried to come up with a feasible alternative to the monstrous thought that kept swelling and swelling inside her head. Any minute, and I’ll explode like an overripe pumpkin, because it can’t be true, it can’t, it can’t. Those boys have to be local. What other explanation could there be? She dare not admit, even privately, that they might have been hired in Narni or Hispellum. Or that the prospect of returning to the Villa Pictor, to share her roof with a murderer, was more than she could cope with…

There are, of course, ways to combat fear and the swell of nausea that comes with it. You tense all your muscles, then release them. You take little breaths, and sigh them away very slowly. And you do this while reciting an epic poem backwards, preferably one of Virgil’s. Claudia was halfway through the sack of Troy before she felt able to attack the practicalities of her situation.

She moved round the statue to follow the shade. Firstly, since the chances of another getaway seemed unlikely, the hiring of a lawyer became paramount. The man she wanted-correction, the man she intended should represent her-was middle-aged, lived on the Esquiline and took an equal interest in horseflesh and beekeeping. He won an average of seven cases out of eight, charged exorbitant fees for his services, and was, somewhat predictably, fully booked for months in advance.

But this lawyer would come to Narni on Wednesday.

In an effort to conceal her vast gambling debts from her husband while he was alive, Claudia had taken to offering certain services to men rich enough to pay for such exclusivity. How well she remembered the lawyer’s love of horses. In fact, the number of times he’d whinny and neigh while she led him around by a bridle beggared belief. Damn right, he’d be here on Wednesday

Then there was the little matter of the land sale in Etruria. With the auction just two days away, she had no intention of allowing Quintilian to win this round by default. Best write to her agent, telling him…

Having rooted out a scribe shifty enough to ask no questions and having entrusted her scrolls to a multi-scarred army veteran whose appearance was forbidding enough to deter even a hardened thief, Claudia drew a deep and satisfied breath then rapped at Fronto’s iron-studded door. The house was an impressive affair of gilded stucco and far too many servants, but why oh why, she wondered, wasn’t she surprised to find Marcus Cornelius Orbilio waiting in the atrium, one leg flung over the other, his hands folded behind his head, as he leaned his chair against the gaily painted wall?

‘Great minds think alike,’ he remarked to the room in general, and Claudia stuck her tongue out just at the point Fronto’s major-domo arrived, flanked by two of the ugliest infants you could hope to find in a freak show. The lady of the house was not home, he apologized, and again Claudia was not surprised. Had she been married to the dung-beetle, she, too, would have been out celebrating. The steward, however, suggested the widow might be found at her father’s clothes shop on Pear Street, he would be happy to furnish the guests with directions.

Orbilio had been busy, he told Claudia, linking his step to hers as they hiked up the hill. At the time Macer took over the prefecture, Fronto had been working in what some called civilian and others a mercenary capacity, though whether Macer decided external help was unnecessary or whether it was a straightforward personality clash, no one could say for certain. But one thing was sure. Fronto was off Macer’s payroll faster than a comet through the night sky. Moreover, Fronto was not only celebrated for taking backhanders in the army, but since retiring he’d acquired the reputation of a Master Fixit among certain unsavoury orders of the Tarsulani. In other words, Orbilio said, if anyone had been able to arrange for a group of hooligans to run Claudia off the road, that man was Fronto.

‘I think what I’m saying,’ he said wearily, as they turned left at the Shrine of Ceres, ‘is that every goddamned person on Pictor’s estate could know about this scumbag’s activities.’

After that, they walked to Pear Street in silence, where clothes shop, Claudia discovered, was something of a euphemism.

‘Be charitable,’ Orbilio whispered. ‘The old man who owns it sees plenty of life in those rags yet.’

‘I know,’ she hissed back. ‘I just saw one jump.’

Balbilla’s father had the sweet breath of the terminally ill, although one didn’t need to get that close to see how it was with him. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ was all he managed to get out before their voices brought an overweight, spotty creature in ill-fitting mourning clothes clambering down the rickety steps from the garret.

‘What is it you’re looking for?’ The lump wiped her tear-swollen face and began to pick over the rags.

She obviously thought nothing of two well-heeled strangers standing at the dilapidated counter. But then you rather got the impression she didn’t have the necessary equipment to think with.

‘Balbilla?’ Claudia hoped her blank look passed unnoticed, because whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this.

Something about the visitors seemed to click. ‘Are you here about Fronto?’ She sniffed noisily. ‘They say he were in bed with some rich bitch and she stabbed him, but it’s not true,’ she gulped. ‘He adored me and them babies, did Fronto. He’d never do nothing like that.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t,’ Orbilio said smoothly, as Claudia intently examined some blue cloth that wasn’t even fit for dusters.

‘There’ll be better men than him along for our Bill,’ the old man put in, his palsied hand patting hers. ‘She’ll find one, you’ll see.’

Balbilla, as you’d expect of the recently bereaved, did not share her father’s opinions and expounded at such length on her husband’s generosity, his devotion to work, to his family, to his Emperor that Claudia doubted she had the faintest inkling of how Fronto earned his living.

‘I had such important news for him, and all,’ she wailed, repeating it over and over as she rocked back and forth. ‘Dead important, it were.’

Claudia’s pulse leapt.

‘Can you tell us?’ Orbilio urged.

‘Now he’ll never know.’

‘Know what?’

‘She’s expecting again,’ her father explained, his grey face contorting with pain, and then his features softened slightly and he managed a smile. ‘When the leaves begin to fall, I’ll be holding another grandchild.’

A shiver ran down Claudia’s arms. Before the leaves began even to turn, Balbilla would have watched another pyre burn…

With nothing to be gained from prolonging the meeting, Claudia and Orbilio walked silently back along the main street. They were just passing the baths when a horseman came hurtling through the Julian Gate, his mount steaming, foam streaking its flanks. Curiosity had ceased to be a characteristic of the Tarsulani, but it had not dimmed in Claudia. Without appearing to hurry unduly, she followed the rider to the back of the law courts, her stride outstripped by a certain policeman.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked. Something was seriously amiss, you could tell by the horseman’s pinched expression.

‘No idea,’ Orbilio replied, taking her elbow and leading her round the corner. ‘But we should be able to find out from here.’

His police training had done him proud. On the other side of the wall, she could hear the rider as clearly as if he was addressing them personally.

‘Agrippa’s dead! Marcus Vispanius Agrippa is dead!’

Wide-eyed, Claudia and Orbilio stared at each other. Agrippa was the Emperor’s right-hand man, they were closer even than brothers. Sweet Jupiter, you couldn’t count the years they’d been together, the gentle aristocrat and the low-born man of action, the battles they’d fought, the victories they’d won, and the peace that was proving even harder to keep.

‘Now what?’ she said.

Despite being the same age, Agrippa was also the Emperor’s son-in-law, Augustus having married his friend to his silly, capricious daughter to tie up the loose ends of his complex administration. By adopting the result of their union as his heir and effectively making Agrippa Regent, Augustus thought he’d succeeded. But now, with his general dead and his grandson barely eight years old, what would happen if Augustus died?

More than at any time since the end of the Republic, the Empire had been plunged into a state of crisis.

Anything could happen.

Anything at all.