Wolf Whistle

XI

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio emerged from the tavern, gingerly rubbing his belly and deliberating which direction to take next. Should he turn right and head for the Field of Mars, because if there was loose talk to be overheard, it was there at the baths and along the porticoes, amongst the running, wrestling and fencing? Or ought he to cut up to the Palatine, give his report to his boss and catch an update on policy and matters of state? He sighed. It was all very well, wanting to clap the Market Day Murderer in irons, but when the security of the Empire was at stake, a man had to be clear about his priorities. Nevertheless, there was a Scythian tattooist on the Vicus Tuscus, was there not, who might shed light on blue dragons…?

Having made his decision and with his thoughts firmly centred on a wild adventuress who made his heart turn somersaults, Orbilio went out of Silversmith’s Rise. Say what you like about the weather, it never affected life in the Forum. From the winter winds which blew straight off the marshes to sticky summers riddled with insects, the hucksters continued to go with the flow. On the wet, slippery steps of Concord’s temple, cloth merchants spread gaily coloured bales to tempt the ladies, while over by the basilica, fortune-tellers promised riches and happiness for the price of a meal, and four men carried a strong box to a depository.

‘Marcus!’ Every man within a half-mile radius must have halted, not just him.

Waving from a seat sheltered by the sacred lotus tree of Vulcan was his Great Aunt Daphne. Orbilio groaned inwardly. Rumour had it, his grandfather’s sister slept in a bath full of ice and thrived on a diet of cobbles and vinegar. Now she was bearing down like a trireme in battle.

‘Long time no see! Still playing Greeks and Spartans, are we?’

‘If you mean, am I still attached to the Security Police, the answer is yes,’ he smiled. Greeks and Spartans, indeed.

Behind her, four liveried slaves struggled with baskets and packages wrapped in oiled cloth. Rain could not and would not deter Daphne from her purpose. Knowing her, it moved out of her path.

‘I’m all for a boy sowing his oats while he’s single but now it’s time you got yourself a proper job, my lad. Your cousins have magisterial seats, and you’ve a lot of catching up to do, if you plan to take a seat in there.’

She pointed over his shoulder to the Senate House, with the famous letters SPQR engraved on its pediment. Smallest Problem Quick Retreat, he mused irreverently, or Superior Profile Questionable Reasons?

‘My career isn’t a game, Daphne-’

‘Your father never forgave you for turning your back on a good career in law. He’d spin in his tomb to think you were spurning the family tradition.’

A troop of soldiers marching at the double scattered street vendors and pedestrians alike, their armour jangling, their hobnail boots clanking in eerie unison. In the confusion, a porter’s pole caught the edge of a perfumer’s tray and fragrances of citrus oils and lilac, hyacinth and oakmoss exploded as his phials hit the flagstones.

‘There are alternative routes to the Senate,’ Orbilio explained patiently.

‘Come to dinner tonight, Marcus. It so happens your uncle will be entertaining a praetor as well as a retired consul and it will do you no harm to become acquainted with the men who have influence in this city.’

‘Tonight? Sorry-’

‘The praetor’s daughter is ripe for marriage and you’ve been single too long. You need a wife and a family. Marcus, these things count at election time.’

‘I’ve been married once,’ he reminded her. ‘She ran off to Lusitania with a sea captain, remember?’

‘Tch! I told your uncle at the time there was too much inbreeding in that girl’s lineage, but you’re divorced now, nothing to stop-’

‘Excuse me,’ a small voice piped up alongside. ‘Are you Mistress Lovernius?’

Marcus looked down. A sprite, no taller than his shoulder, her fair hair caught loosely in a bright cerise ribbon, smiled up at his great-aunt. Salvation came in the most unexpected packages, he thought cheerfully.

‘Who wants to know?’ she barked.

The sprite held her ground. ‘Mistress Daphne Lovernius?’ Clean clothes on a personable frame clearly passed muster with the older woman, because she nodded curtly. ‘Then I wonder, might I have a brief word?’ The scrubbed face turned speedwell blue eyes upon Marcus. ‘In private?’ Daphne pulled a face which suggested she supposed so and with a great sense of release, Orbilio turned towards the Vicus Tuscus where the tattooist plied his trade.

‘I’d be much obliged if you’d wait for me, Marcus.’

So this is what a thrush feels, caught in the hunter’s net. You could see a way through, but finding it was a different matter entirely…

‘Of course, Daphne.’ His professional smile encompassed the elfin creature as well, and although his great-aunt was clearly baffled by the young girl’s approach, Orbilio could hazard a strong guess. She was perfect for the job. Older than she looked, with her long fair hair and sing-song voice, that wholesome appearance would be her stock-in-trade.

He was damned if he’d loiter in the rain, so he took himself up the steps to shelter inside the soaring temple of Juno’s handsome father, god of agriculture and holder of the state reserves. Poor old Saturn. No sooner had his temple been restored after decades of neglect than it promptly burned down, but Augustus invested the proceeds from a Syrian campaign to create a majestic new building, with columns six times the height of a man and marble and gold in eye-watering abundance. The Great Laws of Rome, inscribed on bronze tablets and illuminated by torchlight, hung on the back wall for everyone to read, but below the shrine, secret and well guarded, sat the treasury. Many a thief had wandered round, paying his respects at the wooden feet of Saturn, working out how to get his hands upon those ingots. None had so far succeeded.

‘Diabolical child,’ Daphne thundered, marching down the aisle to join her nephew. ‘Of all the bloody cheek!’

‘Begging?’ he suggested amiably, his eye’s fixed on a sickle the height of a cartwheel in Saturn’s right hand. A hard-luck story from a well-dressed character often proved remunerative.

His great aunt shot him a glance. ‘I suppose I’d better tell you,’ she said sourly. ‘In your line of business, you’d probably find out soon enough, now that little bitch has aired it.’ She paused, looking up at the giant statue for a full thirty seconds before saying, ‘Walk me home.’

‘I-’ He thought of the coups and the murders and the crises rocking the Empire, and then looked at this proud, old woman, dwarfed by the temple. ‘I’d be delighted.’

As she slipped her arm into his, he realized that Daphne had been considerably rattled by the encounter. All her energies had been expended in bluster, and he was not surprised that she did not speak until they reached the Esquiline, that pocket of aristocracy known as Nob Hill, and even then it was not to him, but to dismiss her servants. Continuing past her own front door, she led him to the public gardens which, unsurprisingly on a day like this, were deserted. Why this urgent need for privacy, he wondered, passing the nodding purple heads of fritillaries and spikes of larkspur pushing up through feathery leaves. The air was heavy with the resinous scent of terebinth trees and with the sound of songbirds calling out their territories.

‘There.’ Daphne pointed past the elegant portico which, on a summer’s day, would cast shade on the rippling watercourses, then tersely addressed the gardener clipping the laurels. ‘Leave us.’

His protestations were cut short at the appearance of silver, and Marcus was steered towards an evergreen grotto of box, bay and myrtle, where even the marble seat was dry. Across the pond, a blackbird trilled from a birch.

‘I don’t suppose you remember Penelope?’ she said with a deep exhalation of breath.

And suddenly the reason for secrecy became clear. Marcus Cornelius felt his stomach flip over. For eighteen years that name had been taboo in his family.

‘Actually, I do.’ It was an effort to make his voice neutral, but he knew he’d succeeded. Penelope, the youngest of Daphne’s five daughters, had committed suicide when Marcus was too young to understand the meaning of the word scandal. But he cherished vivid memories. Her long, fair lashes making butterfly kisses on his cheek. Teaching him to climb trees. Playing tag in the garden. And she bought him a kitten, he recalled, which ran away two days later. ‘She was very beautiful.’

Daphne gave a bitter smile. ‘Perhaps if she’d looked like a carthorse, life would have run smoother for us all.’

A maelstrom of emotion surged up to engulf him. Feelings which, by necessity, he’d kept hidden for most of his life swam now before him. Penelope had meant more to him than his own mother. She’d been brother, sister, friend and conspirator rolled into one, a girl who never walked when she could run and whose laughter and lullabies brightened days like summer heather. For a boy of seven, her death-sudden and without explanation-was like the very sun had set for ever. Who would he chase butterflies with now? Or ride piggyback? The day Penelope died, his childish world became a darker, quieter, rather sombre place and just to speak her name could earn him a thrashing.

For years afterwards he had wondered, was it his fault she was dead? Had he, somehow, failed her?

Secretly, painfully, on each anniversary of her death, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio would consign a garland of poppies, Penelope’s favourite flower, into the Tiber where she’d thrown her weighted body.

He swallowed hard. ‘She’d be thirty-eight by now.’

‘What? Oh. Oh, yes.’ Daphne did not wish to be reminded of her own advancing years. ‘Anyway, the point is, that… that creature back there-’

‘Yes?’ he prompted, inhaling the soothing, aromatic mix of evergreens as a goldfinch searched the germanders.

His aunt gave an imperious sniff. ‘Penelope was touched from birth, singing like a common slave, and was there ever a girl for giggling. No decorum, that child. You won’t remember, of course-’

He saw no gain in contradiction.

‘-but we found her an excellent husband, son of a tribune from Crete. Or was it Mauritania? I don’t recall his name offhand, but he died somewhere in Gaul a year before Penelope…’ She cleared her throat. ‘What I’m saying, Marcus, is that it wasn’t as though she had nothing to show for herself.’

Orbilio felt his world spin. Was this a dream? A nightmare? After eighteen years of the strictest silence, was he really sitting in a sheltered grotto listening to his great-aunt talk about Penelope as though she was the butcher’s wife, and not her own flesh and blood? Did suicide bring such shame that Daphne could not recall things that even he, young as he had been, could remember in such detail? Or had she never cared how Penelope doted on her Cypriot husband? The devastation she’d felt at his death not in Gaul but Pannonia? And, tragically, how the news brought on a miscarriage?

‘I don’t know what got into my daughter,’ muttered Daphne. ‘As soon as we heard he was dead, I fixed her up with a merchant from Alexandria, and how did she repay me? Marcus, as much as I tried to beat common sense into that girl, she flat out refused to marry him and suddenly it was men, men, men. Couldn’t get enough of them, the dirty little slut. I said to your uncle at the time, she’s no child of mine… ’

Her indignation droned on, but Marcus failed to hear the diatribe and his heart cried back through time. He saw a vibrant young woman laid prostrate with grief, seeking love and affection wherever she could find it and whose frantic succession of lovers was her own way of mourning the loss of her soulmate, a means to forget. How hard was Daphne’s heart? Croesus, the girl was twenty, for gods’ sake! Had her parents no pity?

‘What has that to do with the girl in the Forum?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Her!’ Daphne snorted. ‘Crawls out of the woodwork this…this…Annia she calls herself. Tells me she’s Penelope’s daughter-’

‘ What?’

‘Expected me to take her in, you know. Eighteen years on, I ask you! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? I told her straight, you’re lucky to be alive, I said. If I’d had my way, you’d have been strangled at birth. Conniving little cow’s after money, that’s my guess.’

His thoughts were tumbling. He couldn’t take it in.

‘Is…is it true?’ Was that fair-haired sprite really his beloved Penelope’s child?

‘Probably,’ replied Daphne, without a shred of remorse. ‘She showed me the ring we’d tied round her neck when we handed her over. Not an heirloom, of course, just a cheap band.’

Annia. Her name was Annia. ‘She’s very pretty,’ he said carefully. Dammit, he wished he’d paid more attention to the girl. ‘Who’s her father?’

Daphne’s lips pursed. ‘Who indeed? Marcus, that baggage slept with half the men in this city, she could be anyone’s from a senator’s to a peddlar’s, and I can’t think why Penelope made such a fuss when we took the brat away.’

‘Wait!’ Wait a minute. ‘You’re saying she wanted to keep her?’

‘By the gods, Marcus, you should have heard the fuss she made. My baby, my baby,’ mimicked Daphne. ‘Anyone would think she’d planned the bloody thing right from the outset.’

Mother of Tarquin, it was worse than he thought! Distraught after the death of her husband, Penelope had sought to replace him with the love of a child. The same child who was snatched from its birth bed and handed to ‘Who fostered the child?’

‘Fostered?’ Daphne stared at her nephew as though he was covered in lime green spots. ‘Good grief, boy, you don’t foster creatures like that. I handed it over to some Babylonian slave dealer, forget his name now. He raises them like cattle, of course, but they have a decent placement at the end and you’ve only got to look at madam there to see we did the right thing.’

Did the right thing? Wrenching a longed-for baby from its pleading mother’s arms? Handing it over to be raised ‘like cattle’? Blind to the realization that life without husband or child was too much for a bereaved girl to bear…

Did the right thing-?

By the time the whirling eddy in his head had subsided, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was alone in the park. The goldfinch had gone, the blackbird had gone, but the scent of the myrtle had grown sickly and overpowering. He felt sick. Very sick. Putting his head between his knees until the nausea passed, he wondered whether he’d ever be able to speak civilly to Daphne again.

He could not say how many times he walked round the garden, past the swathes of blue Gaulish crocuses and the gurgling fountains. He did not hear the croak of the frogs in the water margins, or the piercing cry of the peacock in the aviary. He saw only a wood sprite, a fairhaired nymph with wide, blue eyes and slender white hands and felt a twist in his gut that he should have mistaken Penelope’s child for a con-artist. How closely Annia resembled her mother he had no idea. Eighteen repressed years had passed, precise features were no longer available to his memory, only vague images which involved sunshine and laughter. But Penelope, too, had had fine golden tresses, he would comb them while they sat on the river bank and she made flower chains and read aloud the poetry she composed for her husband fighting in the Balkans.

Was the shame of bearing a bastard worth the price of one life and the condemnation to slavery of another? The Egyptians had it right, Marcus thought, weighing a person’s heart against a feather for their place in the afterlife. Would Daphne bully her way through that trial as well?

‘Shit.’ Orbilio punched his fist into the palm of his hand.

It was his musing on foreign mythology that made the connection. From Egypt, his mind travelled to Babylon. From Babylon to its patron god, Marduk. And from Marduk to the dragon. The blue dragon tattoo! It could not be coincidence. Those girls who had died slashed to ribbons had been raised by the Babylonian, it was his brand that they bore.

And Annia would be branded the same way! Marcus Cornelius buried his head in his hands and prayed.

‘Help me, Penelope. Help me find your daughter.’

Before the Market Day Murderer does.