Man Eater

Hidden behind the pillar, Claudia waited until the atrium emptied. She watched Macer clap his arm round his nephew’s shoulder as the two of them disappeared into the courtyard. She watched the legionaries file out of the main entrance and head towards the slaves’ barracks. She watched Timoleon wring the water out of his yellow hair as he chuckled his way to his room.

And she watched Taranis throw a murderous glance at what she first thought was the gladiator’s retreating back, and then was not so sure that Timoleon was the intended target.

Unfortunately the marble column prevented her seeing who was.

XVI

The last place you’d expect to find an oasis of peace and tranquillity in this madhouse was at its centre, but that’s life for you. One surprise after the other. In consequence, while the Prefect and his entourage jangled off to inspect mutilated corpses and snack-happy crocodiles, and while an army of slaves waged war on cobwebs and dirt with an arsenal of sponges on poles and ostrich-feather dusters, Claudia twiddled the rings on her fingers and examined the marble statuary dotted between the topiaries.

The impending trial aside, to say she was at a crossroads in her life was to elevate understatement to an art form. Augustus’ sweeping reforms were not confined to the army or the land, public buildings or public works, far from it. Since poor health had effectively grounded him twelve years previously, he sought greater and nobler causes to advance, with morals topping his agenda. Other people’s morals, that is. He meant well, she’d give him that. On the whole he was a decent, honest and well-meaning chap whose infidelities were no more than light relief at a time when the weight of the Empire was enormous, and for so elevated a position he lived humbly and he lived frugally, the days when he prostituted himself to a consul for financial advancement or became Julius Caesar’s catamite as the price for adoption almost forgotten.

But only almost. It was his past that shaped her present-that and the fact that the number of actual citizens, as opposed to prisoners-of-war who had become slaves, was dwindling fast. In an effort to stabilize marriage and encourage larger families, Augustus’ moral reforms discouraged birth control, made divorce difficult and adultery a criminal offence (at least as far as women were concerned). More pertinently, widows had two years in which either to mourn or to rejoice before remarriage became mandatory.

Already one-quarter of Claudia’s freedom had slipped past

She paused between the laurels and looked up. Jupiter’s storm clouds were gathering again, there would be another tempest tonight. Beside her, the winged dragon that had carried Medea to Corinth bared its sharp bronze teeth.

When she first heard that her husband had bequeathed her the lot-his house, his vineyards, his investment properties-her immediate thought had been ‘sell them’. All of them. Turn them into cash and be done with. It was why she’d married him, wasn’t it? And let’s face it, Claudia Seferius’ knowledge of wine was strictly limited…to the level of the contents of her glass. Later, though, when a reliable source suggested the business should net ten percent comfortably, it seemed sensible to hang on and live off the earnings.

So what went wrong? And why, after a winter spent poring over accounts that showed profits closer to seven percent and maybe as low as six percent, had she felt a physical revulsion about selling? Quintilian wasn’t the only patronizing son-of-a-bitch to put in an offer, whether for outright purchase or marriage in which, ha-ha, the Widow Seferius came as a bonus on top of their, ha-ha, shrewd investment.

She’d give them ha-bloody-ha.

Fortunately, she was, so far, the only person who knew that sales were…not as good as forecast (that was it, not as good as forecast), but word would get out soon enough. With a shiver, Claudia left the dragon and studied a marble satyr. Clearly drunk, his outstretched goblet begged for a refill. She patted him on his goatish knee. It’s true, isn’t it? All roads lead to wine. One way or another.

In her own case, and with little else to occupy her during the long winter evenings, she had set out to improve her knowledge of commerce. Since, by a strange quirk of fate which had nothing whatsoever to do with her, her gambling debts had spiralled up the wall and over the ceiling, it was a gushing flow of liquid cash she needed, not a few dribbling investments. Strangely enough, the raising of hard crunchy currency had not proved too arduous a task. For a senator, Quintilian showed a distinct lack of munificence in chucking out the poor and installing the educated classes and she had rapped his knuckles for that by retaliating in the Campanian deal, but that was only part of the pleasure.