Second Act

Twenty-Five

‘Won’t be long, sweetie.’

The young woman planted a kiss on her baby’s cheek, soft and flushed with sleep, and combed his silky hair with her fingers.

‘Be a good boy while Mummy’s gone.’

With luck, the little ’un wouldn’t stir until she got home, and whilst she didn’t like leaving him on his own, it wouldn’t be for long. But today was the Festival of Consus, another public holiday, and she had chores which would not keep. He ought to sleep through for another hour yet.

Striding out along the Via Sacra, she noticed that there were very few people around at this time of the day. As dawn clawed its way through the heavy grey sky, the last of the delivery carts would be rumbling out of the city, the gates closing behind them, and there were no farmers this morning to set up for market.

Public holidays meant very little to this young mother. As the wife of a hot-food vendor, there was just as much work servicing the needs of the crowds who flocked to the Circus Maximus as there was meeting the daily demands of their regulars. No more work, but certainly no less, and that’s exactly how she liked it.

Predictable income + predictable outgoings = domestic serenity.

Turning off the Via Sacra opposite the Regia, she thought she noticed someone hesitate at the entrance to the narrow passageway. She smiled grimly to herself, well aware that she fitted the pattern of the rapist’s victims. She was young-twenty-two in a range of ages varying from sixteen to twenty-four-and she came from a respectable, though hardly wealthy, background. Those same attributes, however, applied to several hundred other women all around the city. Why should he pick her? Nevertheless, the vendor’s wife had chosen a route this morning where, should anyone be following her, she’d quickly know about it and be able to thwart him with evasive action.

Emerging from the passageway, she checked left then right before setting a brisk pace between the high-rise tenements which dominated this commercial quarter of the city. Secure in the district’s respectability, the young woman finalized her plans for Saturnalia. Four days with no work, just Shorty and her and the baby, was nothing short of a dream come true, and although the baby was too young to understand the garlands and the gifts, she and Shorty would take great pleasure in watching the little ’un’s face light with pleasure at the sculpted candles and painted clay dolls. Shorty had carved him a wooden donkey on wheels to pull along on a rope and She stopped. Glanced back over her shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old man coming out of a doorway and hobbling away down the hill.

Ridiculous! Whatever would Shorty say, the mother of his child being spooked by an old man! She marched on up the Esquiline, planning her Saturnalia party, just the three of them, with them all wearing funny felt hats, green for her, blue for Shorty and a mustard-yellow miniature one for the baby that would tie beneath his fat, dimpled chin. Engrossed in the games they would play, she did not notice that the old man had straightened up, turned round and become someone else altogether as he followed her cracking pace up the hill.