Man Eater

Orbilio watched as her hand swept a bowl of dried rose petals on to the floor. Mother of Tarquin, this woman’s amazing. Accused of premeditated murder, does she crumple? Does she hell! Claudia Seferius throbs with the very essence of life, spitting, cursing, hurling china as fast as insults.

It was, he decided, deftly ducking a potted fern, a highly powerful aphrodisiac.

‘You can take that smug look off your face, too.’ A scarlet cushion whizzed past his left ear and bobbed upon the water. ‘It’s not your damned cat that’s gone missing!’

‘Drusilla?’ His eyebrows rose by a fraction.

‘If it hadn’t been for her-’an oak-carved Pegasus clattered off an incense burner‘-none of this would have happened.’

‘But she’s here.’

A sandal remained poised in Claudia’s hand. ‘Say that again?’

‘That’s right, this is my second encounter with a-’ He let his voice trail off. Perhaps this wasn’t the time to mention words like spitting, snarling, hissing-or, indeed, cat. ‘Outside,’ he said instead. ‘About an hour ago.’

‘Are you sure it was Drusilla?’

He rolled up his sleeve and showed her the claw marks.

Men! Who needs ’em? One keeps you here under false pretences. One rates the shine on his breastplate higher than justice. One sells your secrets and one… One turns up when you least want to see him and then he doesn’t even have the decency to end your misery over images of small furry carcases ravaged by jackals. Claudia pushed hard against Orbilio’s chest.

‘Hey!’

It was, she decided, a thoroughly gratifying yelp that rang to the rafters. Before the splash drowned it out.

*

Say, twenty-four hours earlier, a friend or colleague had asked Marcus Cornelius Orbilio to define the word dignity, he would have had no problem. His answer would have mingled breeding with demeanour, propriety with self-possession, solemnity with honour. In short, he would have said, it is nobility of bearing-and said friend or colleague would have taken one look at Marcus Cornelius Orbilio and understood implicitly.

Then came the incident with Gisco the charioteer, calling at his house in the dead of night and (he imagined) flashing a short, sharp gelding knife into the bargain. As a result, half his ride along the Via Flaminia was preoccupied with the question of how dignified was it, a patrician of rank and seniority, legging it out of his own bedroom window like a common thief. He had reached Narni, where the Bridge of Augustus strides east across the valley and leaves the old road behind, before he felt close to redeeming himself. This, he told himself as his stallion’s hoofs crunched the weeds underfoot, is an emergency. It would not have helped Claudia’s cause, had he stayed to reason it out with Gisco. Thus it was, sporting a full set of dignities, that Orbilio had arrived at the Villa Pictor.

With great personal regret he observed the same thing could not be said at the moment.

And even now, when he thought decorum had reached its lowest ebb at the point where Sergius lent a sceptic arm to pull a waterlogged stranger out of his atrium pool, Orbilio discovered he had miscalculated.

His boot slipped on the sodden, sunken cushion and he crashed back into the water.

Taking his host in with him.

Oddly, it was not the loss of his dignity that concerned him, rather the emancipation of an almost illegal sense of jubilation. Orbilio had physically to force himself to stop grinning like a lunatic before Sergius mistook him for one and ejected him from the premises, while at the same time the flood of elation that swept through every artery was so great, he was in danger of paying tax on it.

So she hasn’t found someone else, then? She still feels the same.

Admittedly it would be difficult to explain to an outsider that being shoved backwards into a pool of cold water was Claudia’s way of showing affection, but Orbilio had no man to account to except himself.

And himself was more than satisfied with progress.

*

To the uninitiated, it might not be immediately obvious how a sleeping cat can bristle with indignation, but bristling Drusilla most certainly was.

The turned back, the stiff spiky coat, the refusal to open a single eyelid, those signs were plain enough, but the disdain with which she treated Claudia’s bolster, still bearing the impression of her head-now that was the clincher.

‘Think you can treat me like this, do you?’ the embattled form blazed. ‘Throw me down hillsides, pelt me with stones, disguise the trail with rhino and tiger dung, then expect me to hunt for my suppers? Well, fine. Fine. Just don’t expect portable pillows from me as well.’ Emphasizing her point, Drusilla butted even tighter against the foot of her bed, curling herself inwards like a dormouse and pointedly anchored her tail with her paw. The drawbridge was up.