Wolf Whistle

III

The second Claudia set foot through her own front door, she was swamped. Could she enjoy the fragrances of lavender and myrrh wafting from the censers? Could she ease up and relax among the tall, marble columns, the gaily painted friezes, the array of potted ferns? Could she hell.

First Leonides, her beanpole of a steward, thrust his way forward. Then Cypassis, her big-boned maidservant, all but throwing her arms around her mistress with relief. Junius, the head of her bodyguard, his handsome face unaccustomedly drawn, appeared at her elbow, urging Claudia to next time please, please, not leave him stationed two streets back. Finally Drusilla, her blue-eyed, cross-eyed cat, saturated with anxious vibrations, launched herself to cling round her neck, a living fur collar. Claudia’s ears buzzed with the babble of voices-male, female, human, feline-until suddenly they all stopped at once,

Drusilla’s reaction was to dig her claws deep into flesh. Leonides’ was rather more pragmatic. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose.

‘That,’ replied Claudia, carefully extracting the cat, ‘is a Jovi. To whom I have promised a hot pie, a hot bath and a dish of honeyed apricots, so Junius? Would you mind?’

‘Me?’ The young Gaul jumped as though scalded.

‘Come, come, the fleas’ll wash off. And I did promise our friend here a lesson in martial arts. When he grows up he intends to guard the Emperor personally, don’t you, soldier?’

‘Yes, ma’am!’

Since Jovi had not yet learned how to jump to attention and salute simultaneously there was an awkward sprawl of limbs, yet in the short time it took for Junius to scoop the wee lad off the floor, the Gaul had been won over. Dangling him backwards over his shoulder, he carried his mucky, chuckling charge away to the kitchens.

Claudia turned to Cypassis. ‘Stop snivelling, girl! Rumours about setting dogs on me? Utter rubbish. I was simply making arrangements for Gaius’ aunts, you know how fussy they are.’

Personally she’d order funeral biers for the whole damned lot, but she presumed that was out of the question. The Thessalian girl sucked back her tears and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘That’s better. Now, fetch my pale lemon tunic, the one with long sleeves, and a fresh set of underwear, then meet me in the bath room. Oh, and bring a wrap, will you? My sunflower yellow one.’ Heaven knows, I need something cheerful after those gloomy alleyways. ‘I’ll need a comb and the mirror with the lotus-shaped handle, and my skin feels dry, so that little alabaster pot, the one which smells of camomile when you open the lid, fetch that, too.’

A long soak, a dab of scent, what more could a girl ask for?

‘A slab of ham and some sausage would go down well, and there’s bound to be a crusty loaf hanging about. I’ll need wine, red please, to wash it down, one of the fruity ones for preference, and see whether the cook’s managed to get his hands on one of the new season’s melons, will you? They should be in from Egypt by now.’

As Cypassis disappeared, repeating the list aloud to herself and omitting an item each time, Claudia looked up at her steward. ‘What do you think you’re laughing at?’

The Macedonian tried, without success, to straighten his face. ‘Nothing, madam. Will that be all?’

‘All? Good heavens, man, I’ve only just started. Once I’m done with my bath, I want to catch up on that huge pile of correspondence-’

‘You called it twaddle earlier, said to throw it in-’

‘Don’t interrupt, Leonides, it’s rude. You just bring those scrolls along to the peristyle in an hour’s time, there’s a good chap.’

As Claudia swept along the atrium towards the steam room, the lanky Macedonian smiled to himself. This was a grand house. Two upper galleries, well designed gardens and a magnificent banqueting hall. When the master was alive, the household ran like clockwork, lunch at this hour, dinner at that, guests were regular, quiet, and impeccably mannered. Much of the routine changed once Master Gaius married Miss Claudia (that bloody cat, for a start!), but since she became mistress in her own right, he could not recall a single dull moment under this roof. For Master Gaius, Leonides would have bent over backwards and done handstands. For the young mistress, he would lay down his life.

In her bath room, Claudia dismissed the attendants with a clap of her hands and sank into the luxurious hot water, where flowerheads of hyacinth and cyclamen and pink-lilac sea stocks bobbed about like ducks, wafting out their fragrance as they passed. Gradually muscles stopped screaming, lungs ceased to burn, and Claudia’s thoughts turned to the moneylender. Or rather, to the reason she had needed him in the first place. Where had it gone wrong? For the average woman, of course, dragging themselves out of the gutter and marrying, for his money, a man who obligingly pops his clogs when you’re still twenty-four would have been ample. Unfortunately when you’re not Miss Average but are addicted to thrills, the path is more often prickled than primrose and when danger is no longer around to seduce you, the buzz has to come from somewhere. Hence the fall of the dice, the pluck of the gladiators, the fluke of the turn for a chariot. All too quickly, though, Claudia discovered Luck was no reliable investment counsellor. Gambling debts mounted, her inheritance dwindled, the dealings with moneylenders increased. She crumpled a marigold in her fist. Worst of all, the wine business Gaius had left her was ailing, purely because men refused to deal with a woman! Somehow she’d rectify that, but until then…youth comes but once, so why waste it?

Refreshed and replete, she hooked the door to with her toe, grappling with wraps, jars and mirrors under one arm and a jug of Falernian wine under the other. There were two honey cakes in her right hand and a goblet, half full, in her left. The tortoiseshell comb she gripped with her teeth. The atrium, thank heavens, was deserted, affording privacy, air, space to breathe, time to appreciate the birds captured in silent song by the artist’s brush, to What was that?

Claudia tipped her head on one side. There it was again. Three knocks at the vestibule door. Not hard, not soft, but certainly not tentative. Curious, she decided against calling the porter back from his break and, after a valiant juggling act with her burdens, eased open the door herself.

The comb spat from her mouth.

The man leaning in the doorway would have been taller still, had it not been for the stoop where he was clutching his stomach. His hair was dark, with a tendency to curl, although right now most of it was matted with dark, sticky blood, which trickled down the side of his face to join the growing stain on his once-white tunic. His left eye was red and swollen and closing fast.

‘Lovely evening,’ he rasped. ‘Don’t you think?’

With unexpected grace, he slithered slowly down the door jamb into unconsciousness.

*

Claudia’s instinct was to slam the door in his face. By the gods, she didn’t need this! She threw down her wrap and the jug and the mirror, but not in order to play nurse. This man (correction, this human ferret) was the only person in Rome who knew the truth about Claudia, the single weak link in an otherwise sturdy chain. And now he turns up here! The honey cakes bounced, but the fall of the alabaster pot was broken by a heap of yellow cotton. Look at him. It wasn’t the first time they’d crossed swords, but every time it was akin to tossing water on to acid. Explosive. Tentacles of grey mist coiled up the street, bringing with them a conglomeration of onions, damp donkey fur and the sickly scent of pomegranates fallen from a cart. Lips pursed, Claudia prodded the comatose lump. He’d been worked over by experts, but the damage was purely superficial. Hell, let him bleed on his own wretched doorstep!

From a distance she heard a voice saying, ‘As far as I am aware, the gods of this threshold do not actually require a blood sacrifice.’

Incredibly, the voice appeared to be hers.

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio spluttered his way back to the land of the living. ‘When I give, I like to give generously,’ he said. At least that’s what it sounded like. It was hard to tell with his lip so puffy. ‘And anyway, you should see the others.’

Dammit, thought Claudia, if I wanted to laugh, I’d go watch a comedian.

‘Another of those quiet nights out with the boys?’ she asked, pushing him roughly towards the bath room.

‘Not exactly.’ His smile turned into a grimace of pain as she dabbed at his forehead. ‘They were Nerva’s men.’

‘Really?’ The cut was deep, but she did not believe it needed stitching. ‘They look pretty damn confident to me.’

‘Not nervous.’ Orbilio gripped his ribs, because it hurt like hell when he laughed. ‘Nerva.’

He smelled of sandalwood and wine, and you could tell his tunic had been aired over rosemary, even through the coarser scents of mud and blood. Claudia pressed harder on the cut. ‘The aedile responsible for restoring the Temple of Neptune?’

‘The very same. Only instead of dipping into the sea for inspiration, he’s been dipping into the State Treasury. That’s an exile offence, so he set his thugs on me. Four of them to be precise.’

Claudia shuddered. This was a night for foursomes, she thought, recalling the Midden Hunters trawling the slums. Funny, but she could have forgiven them, perhaps, had they been dirty and down-at-heel, skulking in the shadows. Instead she remembered the lavish embroidery, the cultured voice, and the bearded man with the horseshoe-shaped scar.

The wounded warrior was making a brave stab at humour. ‘I taught one or two of them a lesson, I think.’ Claudia examined the lump on his head and applied a compress.

‘They didn’t need extra tuition, Orbilio, they were doing perfectly well on their own. Will you sit still?’

‘That hurt!’

‘Don’t be a baby.’ It was only vinegar to flush out the wounds. ‘What happens next?’

‘Oh, I’ll have them in irons by midday, and then they can decide for themselves whether the money they were paid was worth the price of their lives.’

Claudia debated whether to tell him she was reaching for the salt and decided it would only make him fidget even more. ‘Actually, I was enquiring, in my usual polite and roundabout way, whether Nerva’s heavies had followed you here. Are we, for instance, needing to batten down the hatches and repel boarders?’

‘No need, they scarpered once the- Youch!’

‘You were saying?’ she asked sweetly.

Orbilio made a grab for the salt and applied it himself, a tad more gingerly she noticed. Wimp.

‘Those bastards meant to kill me. Goddammit, they were using me as a human battering ram. When Weasel’s door sprang open, I’m not sure who was the more surprised. Nerva’s men, me, or Senator Plautius with some curly-headed rent boy on his arm.’

Irony indeed. Had it not been for a senator who preached the high moral ground by day and stalked catamites by night, Orbilio would be floating half-way to Ostia by now.

The painkilling properties of her opobalsam salve were beginning to work. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, as he struggled to his feet.

‘I’ll live.’

‘I was afraid of that. Now tell me what you’re doing here.’

‘Me? Oh. Just passing.’

‘On your hands and knees?’

A muscle twitched at the side of his swollen lip, but before he could respond, a small child had come barrelling into the room.

‘Hello, I’m Jovi, who are you? I got lost. Claudia found me on the Argiletum. I asked another lady to help, but she was asleep, so Claudia brought me to her house for the night and she gave me a hot pie and a bath. Have you had a hot pie?’

‘Um. No. But I wouldn’t mind one.’ Orbilio glanced hopefully at Claudia, who made a great show of finding a clean place to dry her hands on the bloodied linen towel.

‘I’ll fetch you some from the kitchens,’ said Jovi. ‘They’re very good pies, I ate two. And some honeyed apricots. There was a cake on the hall floor, I ate that as well, actually there was two, so you can have the other one if you like.’

He pulled Claudia’s second honey cake out from his shirt and handed it across. The transformation was astonishing, she thought. Clean, his hair was at least two shades lighter, and his face was quite cute, once the dirt’d been scrubbed off. The lice had probably clogged up the drains.

Marcus studied the hot, misshapen offering and politely declined.

‘Why do you wear a long tunic?’ Jovi pointed to Orbilio’s trademark patrician attire. ‘I’ve never seen a man in a frock before, are you a priest?’

‘He has knobbly knees, soldier. People laugh at them, so he keeps them covered up. Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘Pff! I’m far too excited to sleep!’ Jovi stuffed the honey cake into his mouth. ‘I’ll go fetch you them pies,’ he said, crumbs spraying everywhere. ‘There’s lots to choose from, I had quail and then I had duck, but there’s all sorts of others, which do you want? Cypassis says beef for brawn, fish for brains-’

‘He already has fish for brains, Jovi. You bring back anything that looks nice.’

As his little feet pitter-pattered up the atrium, Marcus sluiced water over his matted hair. ‘Why, Claudia Seferius, I do declare you’ve been unfaithful in my absence.’

Claudia froze in her tracks. That was the trouble with Supersnoop. He disturbed her. He disturbed her and she resented him for it, and when she turned there was ice in her eyes. ‘Don’t get ideas above your station, Orbilio. Didn’t you know this is National Stray Day? I’m merely doing my bit for the Empire.’

He studied her lazily for several seconds. ‘How much are you in for?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The loan sharks. How much are you in for?’

Claudia brushed an imaginary speck off her pale-lemon tunic. ‘Nasty crack on the head you sustained. Makes you ramble.’

‘My steward informs me’-Orbilio winced as he combed out his tangles-‘that a moneylender called at my house recently. Apparently he required to speak with a lady by the name of-well, I forget what she called herself, it really doesn’t matter.’

‘If it doesn’t matter, why are you telling me?’

‘Now my steward is a cautious type of chap. He’s Libyan, you know, and they’re instinctively suspicious. He wondered whether this might be a ruse, to find out who lived there with a view to burglary, or perhaps casing the goldbeater’s opposite. You do know there’s a goldbeater’s opposite?’

‘Opposite where?’

‘The point is,’ he continued amiably, ‘my steward, being Libyan and extremely quick off the mark, realized at once that the description of this mystery woman fitted you down to the ground.’

‘Rubbish. He’s only seen me once.’

‘Once, Claudia, is enough,’ said Orbilio. ‘So I’ll ask you a third time. How much are you in for?’

Claudia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Mind your own business,’ she replied, sweeping out of the bath room.

‘That much, eh?’

She pulled up sharp by the family shrine and drew out a handkerchief. ‘With my dear, sweet husband,’ she sniffed, ‘still warm in his grave-’

‘Claudia. You married Gaius because he was old and filthy rich, and unless he’s interred over a volcano, it’s unlikely his ashes have stayed warm for seven whole months.’

There was, she decided, an unseemly twinkle in his eye for a man addressing the recently bereaved.

Claudia let the handkerchief fall. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. ‘Orbilio, I do not go into debt lightly.’ (Hell no, I sail in fully laden.) ‘At the moment I admit, I have a short-term cash-flow problem.’ (When I die, it’s finished with.) ‘So while we’re in the business of repeating things, I’ll say it again. Mind your own damned business.’ The lanterns flickering from their bronze and silver stands brought the painted songbirds to life. Greenfinches. Goldfinches. Goldcrests. An oval fountain splashed and danced, a marble athlete considered his next throw of the discus and in a vase on a podium, two dozen Syrian tulips found their slender stems could not support the weight of their rose-red heads.

‘I was offering to help,’ he said, scanning the crocodiles and papyrus plants on the great Nile fresco which covered the east wall of the atrium.

Any second now, Leonides, Cypassis or one of a dozen lesser servants could come wandering out of the slave quarters and Claudia did not want eyebrows raised at the lies she would be required to tell. As Orbilio turned his attention to a yawning hippopotamus, she swept the vase of flowers on to the floor.

‘I don’t need your bloody patronage.’

His shoulders stiffened. ‘That’s entirely your prerogative,’ he said, and though the tone remained mild there was no laughter left in his eyes.

‘Damn right,’ she snapped. ‘Just because I gave some bloodsucking usurer the wrong house number doesn’t give you the right to come tramping in and out of my home whenever you’ve the odd hour to kill.’

‘You know, Claudia,’ Orbilio sighed and leaned down to collect a single rose-red tulip, ‘for once,’ he sniffed in vain for a scent, ‘you may be right.’

With a farewell salute, he tucked the flower into his bloodstained tunic and stepped over the debris to disappear into the night.

The atrium seemed bigger, suddenly. The ceiling higher, the columns colder, the galleries darker, and the finches and the warblers were no longer three-dimensional. Claudia hurled the libation jug at the Nile fresco and an ibis turned red with the wine. Bugger Egypt. Bugger Rome, come to that. And-she threw a votive cake at a po-faced sphinx-bugger you, too, Marcus Casual Liaisons. I hope you’ve got concussion.

‘Has he gone, then, the man in the frock?’

Jovi’s arrival made her jump. Well, so what if he’s gone? Who gives a shit?

‘Was there a fight in this room, was it the man in the frock?’

A miracle, thought Claudia, no one else heard the crash and came running.

‘Did he chase off some burglars, were they trying to kill you?’ Jovi held up the pies in his fists. ‘What’ll I do with these, can I eat them?’

‘Maybe one,’ she said absently.

‘I don’t think they’ll give me the burps, not like those honey cakes, so can I have both? Ple-ease?’

Claudia peered down at his scrubbed and eager face. ‘What are you? A gannet?’

Jovi fell on to his knees. ‘No, I’m a bear.’ He stuffed the last corner of the pie into his mouth and scampered round the floor. ‘A big, brown mountain bear-watch me. Grrr!’

But Claudia wasn’t watching. Her eyes remained fixed on the vestibule door, where the image of a man with still-damp tendrils round his forehead remained imprinted on her retina and whose sandalwood ungent lingered persistently. She heard again the gentle drop of the latch as he left, and the street sounds he’d momentarily admitted-the plod of an ox, the rumble of a barrel being unloaded echoed repeatedly inside her head.

Oh, sod it.

‘Call that a bear?’ she said, turning to Jovi. ‘I’ll show you bears.’ Looping up her arms, she made claws of her fingers and chased him round the fountain. ‘Arrrrr!’

I have a wine business, I have a house, I have a villa and vineyard in Etruria. What more, Claudia asked herself, diving round the pedestals and podiums, could I possibly want?

*

In a dingy garret boasting ill-fitting shutters and a damp patch on two walls, a stinking tallow burned low. There was no incense to sweeten the air here, no joyful frescoes, and the only window faced a blank wall. Because you had to really crane your neck to see the street below, it was easier to lift your eyes to the roofs all around you. You could see whose tiles were missing, who had sparrows under their eaves, who was superstitious enough to grow houseleeks to ward off Jupiter’s thunderbolts.

The man in the garret rarely looked out. The sounds rising upwards didn’t touch him-not the rattle of chariot wheels, nor the crank of the building cranes. Hunched in his creaky chair, he dipped the nib of his reed pen into the inkwell and wrote carefully.

He did not wish to blot.

Satisfied with his efforts, he paused and looked round his walls. In pride of place over his bed-where else-he had nailed the original. Every day he dusted it, lightly, with an ostrich feather stolen from the market, and every day he examined it for signs of deterioration. If the paper curled, he would push a small tack in, but already the edges were ragged; brown marks were creeping relentlessly. Not that there was anything wrong with the ink. Top quality, imported from India, it withstood the test of the elements. The words, and he knew them by heart, still stood out clear. But he could not take chances.

He had only received the one letter from Claudia Seferius. He had no intention of losing it to mishap.

Pursing his lips in concentration, he returned to his work and the only sound he heard was the scratching of the nib. He did not smell apples baking in the apartment below, he did not hear the giggles of the newly-weds next door, he did not feel the damp from the Tiber meet the damp from the low clouds and creep its way into his bedding.

Satisfied the copy was perfect, right down to the angle of the serifs, he sat back and admired it for several minutes then picked up his hammer and four nails. Where should he put it, this precious document? Here? Over here? What about-yes, what about over there, just above the door and to the left?

Next door the newly-weds laughed at their neighbour’s ritual. They had been married but a month, yet every night at precisely the same hour came the hammering of four solitary nails. Sometimes they listened out for it, a signal to blow out their own lantern and dive under the covers.

Once, she had met her neighbour on the stairs and asked him what it was he stuck on the walls every night, but the look he gave her shrivelled her to the spot and she averted her eyes whenever she saw him after that.

She would have moved house altogether, had she known that his walls were plastered with more than two hundred such reproductions of Claudia’s letter.