Tilla took a long, slow breath. They were probably just teasing her, but in a strange land she had no way of guessing from their tone. Keeping her voice as steady as she could manage, she said, ‘Let me go. My friends will vouch for me. Their family is very important.’
‘Really?’
Was that a note of doubt in his voice? ‘Their father is Publius Petreius who built a big temple with an inscription. When everyone hear that you make one of their guests prisoner alone in this shop, how many rich ladies will want to come here and buy things?’
She hoped the fumbling at the back of her neck was undoing the fastener and not a prelude to something worse. Moments later she felt the stones slither across her throat as the necklace was removed. ‘There you go, miss,’ said the salesman, as cheerfully as if he had been trying to help her from the start. ‘Try and remember next time. If your friends come back we’ll tell them you were looking.’
Tilla stood on tiptoe at the crossroads. There was no green stole in sight. Neither of the women she stopped to ask had seen two girls answering the right description.
She turned right by the shrine on the corner, hurried on to the next crossroads and then right again. She thanked whatever gods might be listening that the Romans were so fond of squares and rectangles. If she kept choosing the same direction in this ants’ nest of narrow lanes, she would find herself at the other end of the jewellers’ street, and perhaps meet the girls coming back to find her.
She glanced into the few shops that were open as she passed: a weaver’s, a merchant selling perfumed oil, a meat stall, a scribe bent over his copying … no green stole in any of them. No green stole on any of the customers lolling at the shady counter of the bar, either. She passed a narrow alleyway where someone was playing a tune on a whistle. All she could see in the shadows were three curious dark-eyed children and a hen peering at her from behind a line of limp laundry.
The next open door had a picture of a smug-faced man painted on the wall beside it. The man was attached to an eager phallus which appeared to be beyond his control and, at the far end, beyond his reach as well. The Medicus’ sisters definitely wouldn’t be in there, and Tilla felt a momentary pity for the girls who were.
She could understand neither where the sisters had gone nor why. It was hard to believe that they would walk off in the middle of a conversation, or that they could vanish so completely and so quickly. She had heard tales of young women being stolen, of course: everyone had. Snatched up by gods, or ghosts, or more likely by humans with evil intent. But surely someone would have noticed two people disappearing at once? And surely Marcia would have had something to say about it?
It was hard not to conclude that the girls had deliberately run off and left her.
None of the figures chatting on the communal seats of the latrine was familiar. Back out in the glare of the street, she realized she was no longer wearing the straw hat that the Medicus had bought her. After a moment’s thought she remembered taking it off in the jeweller’s shop. She sighed. She was not going back there. The hat was lost.
The slave-girl sweeping the paving stones in the grand square of the Forum knew nothing. The knot of women standing on the fringe of a poet’s audience told her they had no money for beggars. Neither the silversmith’s slave nor the boy selling fancy sandals knew anything. If Marcia and Flora had passed this way by choice, Tilla was certain they would have paused at those stalls. According to the attendant, who refused to let her in to look around without payment, they were not in the bath-house, either.
Pausing at the next fountain, she borrowed a cup from a friendly young woman with a black eye and gave herself a long drink. Then she asked which local god might be inclined to help a foreigner who had lost something she was supposed to be looking after.
‘You could try Isis,’ suggested the woman, pointing across the street at a small shrine gifted with several bunches of lavender. ‘I pray to her for protection sometimes.’
Tilla glanced at the black eye. ‘And does she answer?’
The woman ran her forefinger lightly along her bruised cheekbone. ‘Well,’ she conceded, ‘he hasn’t killed me yet.’
With nothing else to give, Tilla unfastened the knife from her belt and laid a lock of blonde hair amongst the lavender before setting off again on her search.
The city slaves who had the unenviable task of dredging the sacred spring had no more idea about Marcia and Flora than the ducks preening their feathers under the balustrades. (Even the sacred spring, Tilla noticed, had been trapped into a rectangular stone pond. The god of the spring had taken his revenge by turning the water pea- green and cursing it with a bad smell.) ‘Try going up the hill, miss,’ suggested one of them. ‘You’ll get a better view.’
The view after she had slogged up the hill was indeed better, but no more useful. The guards at the nearby tower had no information to offer except that, for a special price for pretty girls, they could let her climb up to the top and enjoy a finer view still.
Tilla threw herself down in the shade of a pine tree, pausing to straighten out the creases from Arria’s cast- off tunic. She surveyed the vast sprawl of red roofs stretching out in front of her. The pale oval in the distance must be the amphitheatre, where men would soon be trying to murder each other for the entertainment of the townspeople. Down there, somewhere in that cruel city, were two girls whose mother had sent them out under her protection.
She stood up, brushed away the dead pine needles that had made patterns on the backs of her calves and decided there was no point in wandering about. If the girls had been taken, they would be hidden. If they had drifted off, they knew their way far better than she did. She would go back to the Augustus gate and hope they turned up in time for the cart the Medicus was sending to fetch them. If they did not, she would stay there to wait for them and send the driver hurrying home with the message that they were lost.
She could imagine what the stepmother would have to say about that.
18
Ruso turned the cart left off the main road about a mile short of his own house. The slaves working in the stony vineyards and olive groves that stretched out to either side of him would all be the property of My Cousin The Senator down in Rome. The man had a country estate this size, and yet his agent was prepared to seize the only home another family owned. No wonder the Gabinii were one of the richest families in town.
Ruso drove for several minutes before a graceful villa came into view. It was large enough to be grand without being ostentatious, and neatly positioned to catch the breeze and make the most of the view south across the plain. Between the house and the surrounding countryside was a long garden wall, and in that wall a pair of gates was opening to allow a carriage to exit.
Ruso narrowed his eyes and peered past the matched pair of bay horses. Someone was sitting in the seat behind the driver. Perhaps he was about to meet Severus earlier than he had expected. He wiped a trickle of sweat off his forehead and shifted his grip on the reins.
As the vehicles closed on each other he slowed the mules, then felt the tension in his shoulders ease as he realized the passenger under the sunshade in the other carriage was a woman. She was repaying his interest by staring back at him from beneath an arrangement of orange curls that seemed to be frozen to her head. He nodded an acknowledgement and returned his attention to the road just as he heard her cry, ‘Stop!’
The carriage rumbled to a halt, and he found himself sitting no more than six feet away from its passenger. A pair of perfectly made-up dark eyes gazed at him from an artificially pale face. The reddened lips parted to emit the word ‘Gaius!’
‘Claudia!’ Ruso was not sure how a man should address his former wife after three years of separation, but he was confident that ‘You’ve put on weight’, and ‘What have you done to your hair?’ were not appropriate.
Claudia seemed to be having the same difficulty, because she repeated, ‘Gaius!’
She was immaculately turned out as usual, from the clusters of pearls dangling beneath her ears, down past something pale pink and floaty to the soles of her delicate coral-pink sandals with matching pearls stitched at the join of the toe-straps. The whole effect looked effortlessly elegant, and to achieve it she would have had the servant-girl messing about with combs and tongs and pots of make-up for hours while she dealt with the strain by
