Sour Grapes Read online

  Once they realized the widow was digging her heels in, it became a war of attrition in which dirtier and dirtier tactics were employed to get their hands on Gaius’s business. Credit where it was due, they proved every bit as creative in their campaign as they were unscrupulous, with the result that, when you take into account the costs of retaliating with maintaining an estate in Tuscany, a big house in Rome, not to mention the aforesaid jewellers, dressmakers, book-makers and the like, assets soon became debts. It was true, she thought, fighting her way through the crush of fire-eaters, acrobats and poets. The best way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one. Orson was on to a loser.

  Away from the Forum, the streets quickly narrowed. Basilicas and temples gave way to six-storey tenements, and in no time the seductive tones of orators were drowned by the ringing of hammers as metalworkers beat out everything from swords to ploughshares to pastry cutters by torchlight. From the upper storeys, babies bawled and dogs bayed, while in the workshops below, chisels, planes and saws rasped out sideboards, ladders, writing tablets and hay rakes, as cobblers sat astride their iron lasts. Looms clacked, and the smoke from tavern ovens mingled with the dust from the stone cutter’s and picked up flakes of hemp from the rope makers’ premises. Lifting her skirts to avoid the refuse piling up in the gutters, Claudia understood his ambition to escape.

  When you’re born in the gutter, the desire to better yourself never wavers—though for men, at least, the route is more open. Indeed, Gaius had been a shining example. The son of a common road builder, he’d slogged night and day for what he believed in, until eventually he’d worked his way up to become one of the most respected wine merchants in Rome. Indeed, by the time he died, the name Seferius had become a byword for quality, and Gaius had been promoted to the prestigious rank of Equestrian by none other than the Emperor himself. In fact, the only thing Gaius Seferius had been lacking in his hard-won prosperity was the inevitable trophy wife to flaunt before his competitors, a gap the eighteen-year-old Claudia had been more than happy to fill. Admittedly, Gaius wouldn’t have married her had he known that, having been orphaned and penniless at the age of fourteen, her only means of survival had been through dancing (for want of a better word) in a northern tavern for sailors, but a deal was a deal. They’d both stuck by their side of the bargain and it was simply fortunate for her, if not for him, that the Ferryman had come to Gaius before his allotted time. Which made her even more determined, as she turned into the dark twisting alley where Flavia’s admirer had his carpentry workshop, that there would be no sneaking in the back door as far as Claudia’s stepdaughter was concerned. If this Orson fellow wanted to better himself and live high on the hog, that was fine. Just find another damned pig.

  ‘Hello?’ She had to shout over the whirr of the apprentice’s hand drill. ‘Is the owner around?’

  The apprentice, a thick lump of a boy with thighs like a bolster, laid his drill down. ‘He be out.’ He wiped the sawdust off his hands on his tunic. ‘Can Oi help?’

  ‘Only if you’re a gravedigger, because I have three burly bodyguards outside this door, each of them armed with a shovel, and when I find the bastard who messed with my stepdaughter I intend to put them all together.’

  ‘Oi see.’ The boy frowned. ‘And for this you be looking for Master Paulus?’

  ‘Paulus? Hell no, it’s Orson’s hide I’m looking to nail to my wall.’

  ‘Oi’m Orson.’

  There was a crashing sound, as prejudices shattered into tiny pieces.

  ‘You?’

  Fortune-hunters she could handle. No matter how slippery, no matter how smooth, they were no match for Claudia Seferius. But this boy! How old was he? Seventeen at the most, with hair straight and thick, just like him, and eyes pale and dim, ditto.

  ‘Why on earth did you own up?’ She could see the back door and it was open.

  ‘Oi’m not ashamed of me feelings for Flavia, miss… Oi mean, marm. She be a sweet girl and Oi’m right fond of her, and without wishing to brag, Oi believe she’s right fond of me, too.’

  ‘Too fond. The girl’s pregnant.’

  ‘She never is!’ Orson drew himself up to his full, lumpy height. ‘Oi’d not dishonour my Flavia out of wedlock and that’s the truth of it, marm. Now Oi ain’t saying we haven’t kissed and cuddled a bit, coz we have, but Oi haven’t overstepped no line seedwise, pardon my being so frank, so Oi don’t know where she got that idea from. Well. Not unless…’ He coloured to his sandy roots. ‘A couple of times Oi, um…’ He wrung his big, lumpy hands. ‘But a girl can’t get pregnant from that.’

  Claudia sighed. That was the trouble living with an aunt who never allowed her own husband into the bedroom, she supposed. The facts of life become totally muddled, but praise be to Hymen, Flavia was still a virgin. There was a gleam of light in the darkness yet.

  ‘Very well, Orson, this is what we do next. You write Flavia a note—’

  ‘Sorry, marm. For one thing, Oi’m not lettered, and for another, Oi ain’t going to give my Flavia up, not when Oi cares for her and Oi know she cares for me.’

  Dammit, she’d spent the last hour bribing, beguiling and bullying Flavia into ending this ridiculous affair without success. Now we have an apprentice with scruples! Claudia perched on the edge of his workbench.

  ‘You enjoy working with wood, don’t you, Orson?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, suppose someone were to set you up with your own business?’

  Several seconds passed in which she wondered whether he’d actually heard her. Then he swallowed.

  ‘Oi might not serve up no banquets at my table, but so long as my larder has enough in it to fatten a mouse, then Oi’m happy, and it’s not that Oi ain’t grateful for your offer, marm, but Oi don’t have the experience to be running a shop of me own, and before you say you’d get people in to run it for me, that ain’t the point, is it?’

  Damn. She twisted round, smiled prettily and began swinging her leg.

  ‘Experience, you say?’ She picked up the abacus he had been making. Ran her finger round along the exquisite grooving. ‘Maybe I’m wrong here, Orson, but it strikes me that you’re doing a professional’s job for an apprentice’s wages.’

  ‘Reckon Oi probably am, aye.’

  ‘You don’t resent that?’

  ‘As Oi see it, there’s no going to Hades in a gilt litter chair.’

  ‘Tell that to Flavia. Do you really think she’ll be happy, living in a garret?’

  Orson ran his tongue round his thick lips. ‘No, marm, that Oi don’t. But that’s for her to decide, don’t you think? Not the likes of you and me.’

  Integrity as well as scruples. Claudia jumped down from the bench.

  ‘Very well, Orson, this is what we do next.’ She brushed the sawdust from her skirts. ‘While I write Paulus a note, explaining how I’ve bought out your apprenticeship—’ She tried not to think how much it would cost, but set against Flavia’s virginity, it was worth every gold piece ‘—you pack your bags.’

  For the first time, Orson looked worried. ‘What for?’

  ‘Because you’re coming to Tuscany with me.’

  ‘Oi am?’ If anything, the boy looked even more anxious. ‘You ain’t just luring me outside to three men armed with shovels?’

  ‘No, Orson, as much as it pains me, I’m not.’

  There was a saying, she recalled, that when poverty walks in the door, love flies out the window. There was never any question of Flavia experiencing such a heartache, but equally there was no point in marrying her off against her will while she still had this ugly lug in her blood. Elopement and adultery were no grounds for a wedding.

  On the other hand, thrust these young lovers together, then it’s just a question of who backs off first. And how fast.

  *

  When Porsenna the Etruscan founded Mercurium during the height of his kingdom’s military power, he would have stood on the hilltop and scanned pretty much the same panorama the to
wnspeople had overlooked five long centuries later. The Roman villas, glistening white with local stone, would not have been there, of course, nor the straight metalled roads bustling with legionaries, merchants, strolling players and despatch runners, but otherwise Porsenna would have surveyed the same rolling hillsides verdant with olives and vines, the same pasturelands dotted with sheep, and the same waving fields of wheat that fused with forests rich in timber and game in the distance. What’s more, every last vista would have been suffused with the same golden glow that was such a feature of this glorious landscape.

  Nine tenths of Porsenna’s kingdom consisted of hills rising to mountains, from which a thousand streams sprung that merged and compounded until they formed a huge patchwork of rivers that kept his land fertile and green. In some places, water even spouted from the rock hotter than a first-rate bath and bursting with health-giving minerals. But from thermal spa to gently bubbling spring, rushing streams to slow-flowing river, all the waters were holy. To the King, as indeed with every Etruscan, the gods manifested themselves in every aspect of nature, so from the humblest vole to the most magnificent cypress, from fragrant wild sage to the swiftest of hawks, people knew that the gods moved among mortals and employed augurs to interpret their holy will.

  Reeds were especially sacred. The reeds whispered the words of the gods and carried them off on the wind, and although the augurs came to decipher the whisperings, the reeds steadfastly clung to their secrets.

  But now, as the sun climbed high in the sky and warmed the waters in which their roots had taken hold, one particular patch prepared to divulge at least one of its mysteries.

  High in the poplars, a flycatcher trilled, and a cuckoo called over the hedgerows. Fish darted in and out of the shallows, unaware of the heron’s shadow that stalked them, while spring lambs gambolled across flower-filled meadows.

  Deep in the reed beds, the water shimmered and rippled.

  After three days’ submersion, the gases inside gently raised the body to the surface.

  And a seventeen-year-old youth set out on his final journey downstream.

  Four

  As the cart clip-clopped through the arched stone gateway, Claudia was aware of something different that she just couldn’t put her finger on about the villa. At first, she assumed it was the mid-May sunshine bouncing off the walls, making them somehow lighter, brighter, full of radiance. But that was nonsense. The sun was in the wrong direction. Any enhancement to the redness of the roof tiles would come later in the day. So what, then?

  Dismounting amid a flurry of slaves rushing out with everything from goblets of elderflower tea to slake her thirst to ox-hair brushes to sweep the dust off her robe, she wondered if it was a trick of the memory. After all, she wasn’t the most regular of visitors…but no. The north wing still comprised the slave and estate workers’ quarters, the forge still belched out coils of smoke, and the windows of the little bath house still diffused light through their panes of green glass. Claudia picked up the cage containing a growling, howling, hackle-backed demon and marched off round the peristyle to the only room she’d ever shared with her husband.

  ‘Hrrrowwwww.’

  ‘Yes, I know, poppet.’ She flipped the latch on the cage and Drusilla, her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat, shot out as though someone had set fire to her tail. ‘I don’t want to be here, either.’ Nothing but hills, trees and vines; Hades offered better prospects for light entertainment. ‘But with this Candace creature charging the most exorbitant prices to convince my mother-in-law that it’s perfectly normal to commune with her dead son, what option do we have?’

  ‘Rrrrrrowwl.’

  Unconvinced, Drusilla took consolation in the plate of ham and cold chicken laid out for her mistress. Claudia waited until the cat had finished, then plumped down on the only couch she’d ever shared with Gaius—and how well she remembered clinging to her own side of the mattress.

  ‘Yes, that’s another thing. This mattress.’ She gave it a good hard prod and lost her finger. ‘It’s not only new, but unless I miss my guess it’s swansdown.’

  ‘Brrrp?’

  Drusilla’s ears pricked forward. Swansdown? The indignity of travel instantly forgotten, she jumped on to the bed, nestled into the centre by the pillows and began washing her whiskers.

  ‘Good grief!’ Claudia jumped up. ‘That’s it!’

  No wonder the place gleamed and looked so different! Everything had been renovated top to bottom, inside as well as out.

  ‘You’re not allowed in here, you know.’ A small face peered round the door to the peristyle. It was pale and freckled, and framed by a cap of gold hair. ‘I’m Amanda, and this room’s out of bounds, and if you don’t leave at once, Indigo and me will tell.’

  ‘Very well, Amanda.’ She watched a small gleam of triumph light up tiny blue eyes. ‘You and…um, Indigo go tell.’

  The freckles merged into one humungous brown blob when she frowned. ‘But we don’t like telling tales, do we, Indigo?’ She cupped her hands and whispered into thin air. ‘Anyway, Indigo says you’re supposed to go when you’re told. Can we come in?’ She didn’t wait to be asked, but ushered her imaginary companion in first. ‘Ooh, is this your cat?’

  ‘Reeeow!’

  ‘Not very friendly, is she?’

  ‘Not very,’ but the child hadn’t backed off and Claudia decided Amanda was probably used to being snarled at.

  ‘I say, is this your luggage?’ The girl knelt down and unhooked the clip on one of the chests. ‘I suppose you’re a guest, then, so you won’t have to leave, only you must be a pretty important one, if they’ve given you this room.’ Tiny fingers prodded about in the clothes. ‘But you want to be careful,’ she warned in a wide-eyed whisper. ‘Mummy says this is the old witch’s room.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy said that, did she? Well, I would really like to meet your Mummy, Amanda.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ The girl dragged a scarlet tunic shot with gold out of the chest and held it under her chin. ‘Nobody likes Mummy, that’s why me and Indigo have to keep moving on. What do you think? Too bright?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Indigo says it’s too bright.’ She tossed it on to a chair. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘Peacock blue matches your eyes.’

  ‘That’s exactly what Indigo says.’ Amanda pulled the robe over her head and belted it with a silver hair ribbon she picked out of the trunk. ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Ravishing.’

  ‘Really?’ Tiny eyes turned into dinner plates.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, look!’ Claudia held up a mirror, in which the child twirled excitedly.

  Bored with this girlie stuff, Drusilla wandered off in search of mice to torment, because time might have passed, but she hadn’t forgotten where they’d made their holes.

  ‘Indigo wants to know how long you’re staying,’ Amanda said, rummaging for a pair of emerald-green sandals.

  ‘Tell Indigo she’s very nosey.’

  ‘Oh, she knows that, and she’s rude and has terrible manners as well. Last night, she ate a whole plate of almond cakes all by herself and then she burped, but guess what? It was me that got a spank. Is this too much rouge?’

  ‘You mean I still have some left in the pot?’

  ‘I’m going to be a hairdresser when I grow up. What about you?’

  ‘I am grown up.’

  ‘No, silly, I meant what do you do? Or are you too important to do anything? Mummy said the witch—that’s whose room you’ll be sleeping in—Mummy says she’s a gold-digging cow, but I don’t see how, do you? Cows have horns, but you never see them digging with them.’ She smeared a wonky red line over her lips. ‘I suppose that’s why she’s a witch, though. When you’re a witch, you can do anything you like, even dig for gold with your horns, although I’d have thought a spade would be better.’

  ‘Where is your Mummy, Amanda?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed, ‘but you can bet that next
time I’m in trouble, she’ll be right behind me. Come along, Indigo.’

  Amanda beckoned her invisible friend to join her, scooped the long robe over her arms then slopped off into the peristyle, tossing her little fair head like the princess she was.

  Waving goodbye to Her Highness, her friend and her peacock-blue tunic, Claudia set off to make an inspection of the renovations. Was there no end to the work? Newly whitewashed walls. New tiles on the roof. The wall from the dining hall had been knocked out and replaced with folding doors that opened on to—you’ve guessed—a newly paved terrace that overlooked the whole estate. Nor was that the end of the list. The old well in the courtyard had been turned into an open pool complete with fountain. Brightly coloured friezes lined the walls of the portico in place of hazy geometrics. The gardens were unrecognizable beneath a new planting of plane trees, cypress, peach and cherry, oleander, box and myrtle.

  ‘Your mother-in-law has made many improvements,’ murmured a voice in Claudia’s ear.

  The voice was deep, rich and warm. Like melted honey drizzled on fig cakes. The sort of voice, no doubt, the dead enjoy communing with.

  ‘I am Candace. But then—’ she smiled an equally deep, rich, warm smile which somehow never quite made the journey to her eyes ‘—I suspect you guessed that.’

  So this was what sorceresses looked like? Taller than the average male, with dark, watchful eyes and legs that came up to her armpits, this woman had ‘feline’ written all over her. Her skin was as smooth and shiny as the ebony that covered her homelands and every bit as black (not Mummy, then), and to highlight her beauty, she’d chosen a gown of fuchsia pink edged with silver and purple. But it wasn’t her height, nor her skin, nor even the bold colours of her robe that made Claudia’s eyes pop. Black and springy, her hair was cropped short like a soldier’s, its scandalous style emphasized by Candace’s swan neck, yet there was nothing masculine about this woman. Nothing mannish at all.