Man Eater

She poked her tongue into the corner of her mouth. How did Sergius make his money? Bruised and bleeding as she was yesterday, and long before she saw the pens of exotic animals, Claudia was aware that there were neither vines nor olives to suggest traditional rural income. One thing, though. Sergius sure was a man to maximize his potential. None of the outbuildings (and there were scores of them) encroached on this narrow, precious fertile finger, but where herds of cattle might walk, gazelle grazed. Where sweeps of wheat might grow, row upon sprouting row of lupin and vetch, clover, bracken and spelt flourished as animal fodder. What, she wondered, waggling her finger through the bars of the parrot’s cage, is going on here?

Her gaze fell beyond the archway to the wild, untamed hills beyond. Thanks to the fog, this was her first real view of them, and what a contrast to the broad skies and rolling terraces of her Etruscan vines. Well aware that Umbria oozed streams galore and was positively bursting with natural springs, woodland floors carpeted with hellebores and spurges, anemones and violets were not for Claudia. She felt her shoulders slump. How long, Drusilla, before I can leave this godforsaken wilderness? Come to think of it, what on earth possessed her to leave Rome? Bloody Rollo. He was her bailiff, for gods’ sake, he was paid to sort things out!

‘I ask you!’ She addressed the parrot. ‘What’s the point of employing a chap if he can’t handle the odd spot of arson?’

‘Erk?’ The feathers on the bird’s crest perked up.

‘You heard. Arson.’

When news of the attacks first filtered through, Claudia had blithely dismissed the whole sordid business You’d be surprised at the number of people who get a thrill from sending flaming arrows into a fully stocked barn or tipping a pot of blazing naphtha over a neighbour’s thatched roof. Hence some pea-brained moron torching olive groves was by no means noteworthy. Until he started in on vineyards. Not any old vineyards, either. These, if you please, stood adjacent to her own.

Now arson isn’t difficult. Not with barns, not with roofs and especially not with olives. That lovely oily bark flares up in next to no time, and if you synchronize your blaze with a nice strong wind, you’ve got a fireball whipping through the groves like breath from a dragon. But vines?

‘That, my little lovebird, is where our friend came a cropper.’

The bird stretched out a shiny black wing and tipped its head on one side.

‘Arson in a vineyard is a labour-intensive exercise. It takes time to hack through the thick thorn hedge, time to smear oil on the newly pruned vines and even more time to stop and fire each one individually.’

In consequence, although he hadn’t been caught, a good description of the arsonist was circulating. So what was Rollo’s problem? What was behind that scribbled, secretive note, ‘Urgent, come at once’?

With April fast approaching, a month almost entirely devoted to games and festivals, Claudia had been loath to leave, but Rollo was not a man to cry wolf. However, if this was purely a request for personal approval to prune a few vines-in other words, if I’ve been run off the road by a gang of rowdies, had my bones battered, my flesh pulverized, my cat scared to death and a corpse thrown at me, all in the name of administration-then you can kiss your giblets goodbye, Rollo, and that’s just for starters.

‘Ouch!’

She snatched her finger back and sucked at the point where the beak had nipped, but the parrot merely winked in a particularly coarse manner then bobbed up and down on its perch.

‘I’ll have you know, you red-beaked budgie, it’s not easy being a widow.’

Good life in Illyria, she hadn’t married her husband for his looks! He was old, he was a ball of blubber and the state of his dental work left a lot to be desired, but the wine merchant had one massive thing in his favour. He was rich. Filthy, stinking, rolling-in-it rich and when he’d done the decent thing and shuffled off his mortal coil rather earlier than expected, Gaius had then done something to exceed even Claudia’s happy expectations. He’d bypassed his whinging relatives and willed the entire estate to his twenty-four-year-old widow.

Really, she thought, she had been very fond of the old chap.

Bless him, he’d left her enough money to last her a lifetime, provided, at the rate she was spending it, she did not expect to see thirty. Unfortunately, even that inheritance would come to naught unless she extricated herself from this trial fiasco. Dear Diana, so many problems had piled up in the seven months since her husband popped off, they were multiplying faster than rabbits in warm weather and she was hanging on by her fingernails as it was. She certainly had no intention of watching the business go under simply because some turnip got himself knifed on her doorstep.