Second Act

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.

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

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.

Not an obvious choice of audience to advertise the Spectaculars, you might think. But you’d be wrong.

‘Make way,’ one of the temple acolytes shouted. ‘Make way for the penitent! Make way for Meno the Coppersmith.’

Meno the Coppersmith had unwisely attacked a tribune over a long-standing grievance about rights of way past his premises, and the penalty for assaulting the elected representatives of the people was harsh. Meno was immediately stripped of his assets, which were sold off and now the proceeds of that humiliating public auction were being assigned to the Temple of Ceres. Penitent, indeed. One foolish punch had wiped out a lifetime of work.

But. Sad as it was for poor Meno, there’s nothing quite like human tragedy to draw a crowd. Not only his fellow artisans were swelling the numbers, but like bees to a honeypot, businessmen were flocking to the precinct in droves. With his workshop sold and his stock liquidated, the only asset Meno had left was his talent. Like the good capitalists that they were, they came hoping to secure the coppersmith’s skills on the cheap.

‘O, Ceres, who first gave man bread,’ the flamen intoned, as the sacrificial pig was carved up and laid on the fire. ‘Who forced the first bulls to the yoke, that for the first time the upturned soil might behold the sun-’

Claudia’s mind wandered. With the temple doors wide throughout the ceremony, the works of the Greek masters whose artistry embellished the interior showed none of the ravages of the fire which had threatened to destroy the temple nearly twenty years before. Its skilful restoration notwithstanding, however, Augustus rated Ceres important enough in the pantheon to want the exterior of her temple clad in white Parian marble. Not so much to reflect Ceres’s purity, Claudia suspected, as Rome’s superiority. How much more imposing would the temple look, had the sacred pine grove that used to surround the building still been casting softness and shade across the precinct. Unfortunately, the grove had been completely consumed by the fire and such was the demand for housing and storage, there was never any chance of the grove being replaced. Public latrines now rose from the site, alongside a slaughterhouse, a fish-curing factory and a statue of one of the Muses. How much kudos, Claudia wondered, would be attached if she donated a fountain with marble pine cones in commemoration of the sacred grove? What a poke in the eye for the Wine Merchants’ Guild that would be!

‘Ceres delights in peace,’ the flamen was informing the yawning crowd, as flutes drowned out any evil spirits and libations of blood-red wine trickled across the stone altar. ‘Ye who are husbandmen and ye who are not, give thanks with spelt and with salt, for Ceres is content with little, so long as what she receives is pure.’

Purity did not seem to be the issue in the corner where Jemima was peering through her chunky ankles and asking the crowd what did they think they were looking at. Ceres could stick her salt and spelt.

The house, Claudia reflected, wouldn’t be the same after Saturnalia. Sure, there’d be more oil in the jars, more charcoals in the store, and yes you’d be able to hear the fountain babbling in the atrium again, listen to the birds in the aviary, walk without fear of tripping over ratlines and actors sprawled out as they practised their lines. Felix the dancer would no longer make your jaw drop with manoeuvres usually only undertaken by eels. There’d be no Ugly Phils in furry leggings and horns camping it up as the Satyr. No masked actors leaping out of the alcoves to frighten the slaves. No ‘plumptious’ thighs, no ‘volumptuous’ wobbles, no Doris with eyes darkened by kohl and bracelets jangling softly as he let himself in and out at all hours. Ion wouldn’t be found sitting alone in the kitchen at midnight with a tortured look on his handsome, bearded, god-like face, and the boards on the gallery would not creak from the processions of female flesh which passed through Caspar’s doorway. And, of course, there would be no bald Buffoons tickling the kitchen girls and making them fall in love with him…

The advertisement had reached the point where the director had quite lost control over his quarrelsome crew and insults were about to be exchanged for something more physical. Even Meno the penitent was distracted.

‘You never said,’ a girlish voice whined in Claudia’s ear. ‘If I’d known they were going to be here, I’d have come earlier.’

That was Flavia, whinge, whinge, whinge, and she hadn’t even had the common courtesy to wear white for the festival. Suddenly, though, her spotty little face brightened as Adah grabbed a handful of Jemima’s red hair and yanked downwards.

‘Look,’ she goggled. ‘There’s a cat fight outside the Granary.’

‘Good heavens, so there is.’ (Oh, come on. You’d hardly let someone like Flavia in on the secret, now, would you?)

‘They’re all pitching in,’ she said, her gasp lost among a hundred others as Ion lunged to Erinna’s aid and came away with her tunic.

And there it was. The thing Claudia hoped she had been mistaken about. What she’d prayed she’d read too much into yesterday and the day before that. Skyles. During the sacrifice of the ram outside the Temple of Janus, she couldn’t help but notice the way he’d been watching Erinna from the corner of his eye. Saw how he’d kept his gaze locked on her after the show. And, although Claudia had seen that same scene repeated at the Circus, she was more than prepared to give her other impressions the benefit of the doubt.

Until now.

For a man who gave the word intensity a whole new meaning, the expression on Skyles’ craggy face as Erinna’s tunic came off in Ion’s hands was completely blank. And that was the problem. When Claudia had gone to his room that first time and he’d offered her expensive cherries and cheap wine, it bore all the hallmarks of a seduction. Skyles throbbed with raw sex, yet all they did was sit on his bunk and sip wine from chipped cups in silence. Ditto yesterday. They had sat, widow and actor, alone in the semi-darkness of his bedroom, masculinity oozing from every pore, and on neither occasion had Claudia felt threatened, or felt anything other than under control. With Skyles, as she’d known from the outset, everything was an act. The monkey walk. The tripping over invisible objects. His riding imaginary horses round the garden to amuse the children. And if he wasn’t clowning with the slaves or chasing the maids round the kitchens, he was flirting with Flavia, playing another role with Claudia, yet another as he imparted the lurid details of his sex life to Periander.

Act. Act. Act.

Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

Beside the grain store, Skyles was whipping off his tunic to cover Erinna. Maybe it was what Flavia, like many others, perceived as a spontaneous act of chivalry that prompted the girl’s lower lip to drop open, but Claudia wouldn’t care to bet on it. Not the way Skyles was flexing his physique in a manner which appeared careless…yet highlighted every corded muscle, every thin, white scar.

Act. Act. Act.

Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

As the farce ground to its conclusion, the Buffoon’s gaze travelled round the crowd as though seeking someone, or something, out. When it alighted on Claudia, it stopped. Several seconds passed. Then he blinked, his intense expression relaxed, and he allowed his eyes to drop to the young girl at her side. Blushing to her roots because the great man winked at her, Flavia danced through the crowd to congratulate her hero on his gallantry. Skyles had made no effort to pull on the ‘spare’ tunic which Ion just happened to have at hand, even though the temperature down here by the river was freezing. Claudia watched, and admired, his performance as he accepted the accolades from his tongue-tied young female admirer. And noted that, even though his lips were addressing Flavia, his attention was very much elsewhere. On Erinna. Just like before, his blank eyes followed the girl who had not looked his way once.

Without waiting for the sacrificial pork to crackle to a crisp or even remind the crowd who was sponsoring these damned Spectaculars, Claudia shot round to her agent’s office behind the State Record Office on the Capitol. Her agent was out, but she left him a note on a wax tablet.

‘Find out everything you can about the actor called Skyles,’ the note read. ‘And treat this as urgent.’

*

Up in Frascati, the woodsman’s grisly find had caused quite a stir.

‘Who is she?’ the townspeople clamoured. ‘How was she murdered? What shall we do with her? When did she die?’

The woodsman, who knew all about nature red in tooth and claw, was able to provide some of the answers to the crowd which had packed into the tavern at the crossroads. From his experience with rotting remains, he pronounced sombrely, the victim had been in the earth a month at least. He did not add that his sole brush with buried corpses, as opposed to wild animal remains, came from accidentally digging up Xerxes’s predecessor when he was planting his cabbages. Instead, the woodsman allowed himself a refill of unwatered wine on the house.

‘The cause of death was definitely that spade we found on top of the grave,’ he added, wiping his callused hands down his hide leggings as though wiping away the memory of the hideous discovery. ‘Someone really clobbered her with it, too. Skull smashed like an eggshell.’ The woodsman pointed to the side of his head. ‘Right here.’

‘Poor cow,’ said the barber. ‘Let’s hope it were quick and she didn’t see it coming.’

The woodsman found images of her long black hair and shattered face haunting his every waking hour and preventing him from sleeping. His wife said he must tell someone about what he had found, but who was there to tell? Frascati had no army barracks nearby, no resident magistrate, he could hardly post a notice on the wall of his house. Found. One body. Please enquire within. In the end, he had summoned his friends to help him.

‘Spade, you said?’ The ostler from the post house frowned. ‘You know, now I thinks about it, some time around about the back end of October, I do believe some bugger stole one from right outside me stables.’

The ostler didn’t know it yet, but his role in the girl’s murder would haunt him for the rest of his life. Even though the post-house slaves dug carrots for the horses every day, he would come to think that he should have somehow ensured that the spade was locked safely away. Irrational and ridiculous, but the ostler would go to his grave feeling that he’d been responsible for the girl’s death, never forgiving himself for leaving the murder weapon out in the open.

‘Was she-’ The fuller cleared his throat. ‘Was she raped?’

A heavy silence fell over the tavern.

‘She were naked, weren’t she?’ growled the blacksmith.

This time the silence was even heavier. No one touched their wine.

‘At least we can rest easy that she weren’t one of us,’ the woodsman’s wife piped up at last. ‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s better for the town that both the victim and the killer were strangers.’

Terrible to say, yes. But natural. A murmur of guilty agreement rippled round the tavern. Heads hung down. Feet shuffled.

‘I suppose she was a stranger?’ the fuller asked.

‘Well, of course she was,’ the barber replied. ‘We’d have noticed if one of our own women had gone missing, you daft oaf!’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. I was just remembering that time when one of Senator Cotta’s slaves ran away. The one who screamed her bloody head off when they caught her.’

A different kind of silence gripped the tavern now.

‘She had long, dark hair,’ the fuller reminded everyone.

‘So do lots of women,’ the barber said carefully. But he, too, remembered her well from the fight she put up. Her screechings, kicks and protests had drawn a wagonload of attention that afternoon. Which, for a town at the junction of three main roads to Rome and long accustomed to drama, had to be quite a show to draw a crowd, especially when it came so hot on the heels of the old man blowing himself up, although it was before Senator Cotta had gone swanning off to Cumae to consult with the Oracle.

‘There was talk she’d run away a second time,’ the potter said.

‘So there was.’

Memories surfaced now. Of the Senator’s men searching high and low for a girl who had effectively disappeared off the face of the earth. Now they knew why. The earth itself had claimed her ‘If she was that important to him, I’d best send word to the Senator,’ the woodsman said. ‘Tell him we’ve found her body.’

But he wasn’t really concerned about how crucial the slave girl might or might not have been to Sextus Valerius Cotta.

The harrowing image of the hand plopping from his dog’s mouth refused to leave him, and it wasn’t much of a leap of the imagination to picture any number of pretty young women taking their last walk with this killer. A smooth operator, the woodsman thought, who could win a girl’s trust so completely that she’d followed someone wielding a spade meekly into the woods. What an actor that person must be!

What worried the woodsman more than the past, though, was the future.

That the killer had already marked out another victim. And was simply waiting for the right moment to strike.