Virgin Territory (2 page)

‘Heave!’ the captain cried.

Every man threw his weight against the tiller.

‘Heave, men, heave!’

The little freighter plunged helplessly on, tossed by the wind and the force of the waves. Up she went. Teeter. And crash. Up and teeter and crash. Claudia’s nails
gouged deep into the woodwork. They stood no chance! They were going to hit it! They were really going to hit it!

Then, with a sudden merciful lurch, Neptune relented and the ship, spinning in the current, missed that rock by the smallest whisker on earth. Claudia didn’t hear the cheers. She was too busy promising white bulls. To Jupiter the Storm Maker. To Neptune, lord of the sea. To the Tempestates, whose shrine stood just outside the Capena Gate. Anything they wanted was theirs. She was rich now. She could afford to be generous.

In fact the very first thing she’d determined was that Gaius had left in his moneybox a float of 23 gold pieces, 1 silver denarius, 835 sesterces, 6 asses and 12 quadrans. Hardly a fortune, but ample funds to finance the odd flutter. Her mouth twisted down at the corners. She ought to stop. Hadn’t she been taught a lesson once already?

Except the old excitement had taken hold, more and more with each wager—which in turn became heavier and heavier, wilder and wilder. The addiction was back. With a vengeance.

‘Boredom,’ she told herself.

And so rather than face up to the fact that the weight of her inheritance was too great and she simply couldn’t cope, Claudia immersed herself in the thrill of the chariot race, the combat of the gladiators. Here it was easy to ignore pressing commercial problems and decisions up at the farm. Here you could escape in-laws clamouring for a decent settlement. With breathtaking alacrity that liquid float turned itself into a paper deficit of over 700 sesterces, the equivalent of a labourer’s annual wage. Claudia sighed. It was true, the old saying. The best way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one… Therefore that letter from Sicily, coming out of the blue, had been nothing short of a godsend.

One Eugenius Collatinus, an old friend of her husband, sends condolences to the grieving widow and invites her to stay with him and his family for as long as she needs. If, however, she does decide to visit, would she mind chaperoning his granddaughter, Sabina, returning home after thirty years’ service as a Vestal Virgin?

He lived just outside Sullium, he said, not far from Agrigentum. Claudia, who barely knew where Sicily was, much less Sullium, rooted out an ageing map etched on ox hide, blew the dust off and unrolled it. Triangular in shape and large enough to be a continent in itself, Sicily was plonked right in the middle of the Mediterranean and it wasn’t so much a bridge between warring nations as a breakwater. It was easy, now, to see how the province had become Rome’s first conquest. Where are we? Ah yes, there’s Agrigentum, on the south coast. So where’s, what’s it called, Sullium? Claudia’s finger trailed along the cracked surface of the hide until she found it. West of Agrigentum. Oh good. Right by the sea.

After that, the hard work had begun in earnest, but a thorough—and she meant thorough—search of Gaius’s business papers for transactions involving this Collatinus chappie came up empty-handed. There was nothing in his personal correspondence either.

But she did find something else.

Something very, very important.

Something which put her whole future in jeopardy…

Claudia lost no time winging off a reply along the lines of how she desperately needed to get away from Rome. Each street, each sound, each sight reminded her of poor, dear Gaius, taken before his time, she could not bear to stay here any longer.

As to chaperoning Sabina, she’d be delighted—and that, at least, was partly the truth. It was a damned prestigious role, Vesta’s priestess. Conspicuous in bridal dress, celibate and serene, these six women took prominent roles in many festivals and, like everyone else, Claudia was aware of the system. Every five years, after a thirty-year stint, the senior Vestal retires and the next oldest steps up to take her place. At the same time, a little novice, a specially invited initiate aged between six and ten, slips in at the bottom and the rota continues. Representing the daughters of an ancient king, they tend the hearth of Rome itself—and legend says should the sacred fire ever go out, the city will be destroyed for ever. Was it surprising they were held in such reverence?

Or, to put it bluntly, Eugenius Collatinus needed considerable clout to have got a granddaughter ordained and Claudia, for one, had no intention of letting a chance like that pass by.

She did everything that was necessary. She’d avoided her in-laws, evaded her debt collectors and commissioned a special cage for Drusilla, until finally the whole kit and caboodle had arrived at Ostia’s wharf last Tuesday
by which time the captain’s ulcer was twitching badly. Another hour and the wind wouldn’t have been strong enough, he’d have had to set sail without her. After a smile that did more to neutralize his ulcer than half the limeflower infusions he guzzled down, she was ushered towards Sabina’s cabin with the respect and veneration associated everywhere with the Vestals.

‘How do you do?’ Sabina, smiling coyly, rose to meet her chaperone as the ship weighed anchor and began to bob gently on the waves.

Claudia stared hard. Tall, willowy and dressed in an elegant dove-grey tunic, the woman was a picture to behold. Her eyes seemed a little distant, as though she was staring
through
Claudia rather than at her, and she was clutching what appeared to be an empty blue flagon to her bosom. A apart from those two anomalies, this was one of the most handsome specimens Claudia had ever seen.

Pity the woman was a total stranger. Because whatever else this creature might have done with her thirty-six years, she hadn’t spent the last three decades serving Vesta.

In fact, two weeks hadn’t passed since she came face to face with the Holy Sister at the Feast of Jupiter—and unless that girl had taken extensively to drink in the meantime, this was not the same woman.

As the ship cleaved its way through the seething white water, rain bouncing off the heavy goat’s-hair cloak, Claudia groaned.

What am I doing here?

In debt. In a storm. With an imposter. In a little wooden bucket. Bound for a place I’ve never heard of. To stay with someone I don’t know. While my whole future hangs in the balance and the crew want to chuck my cat overboard…

Hell, on top of that—look, I’ve broken my bloody nail.

II

Ask yourself this. If you’d just spent the past three days being tossed around boiling seas with salt water chapping your cheeks and bilge water slapping your ankles, would your first thought on stepping ashore be for a fortune teller?

Claudia barged past.

‘I see the image of a ram,’ a Sicilian voice called after her, ‘and arrangements for a wedding.’

Claudia rolled her eyes. Every man, woman and child in Syracuse could see the image of a ram, that was the shape of the
Furrina’s
red, carved sternpost.

‘I see a funeral—’

‘You’ll see your own bloody funeral if you don’t get out of my way, now clear off!’

Where was her bodyguard, for gods’ sake? Surely Junius had got his sea-legs back by now?

‘—and I see love blossoming for you. A tall—’

Don’t tell me. A tall, dark, handsome stranger. Claudia pulled up short and heard a satisfying thump as the fortune teller tripped over a rope. What was it about these people, hustling you all the time? Respected astrologers she could understand, theirs was a science, an art—but these frauds? Weddings, funerals, tall, dark, handsome strangers. Originality was hardly her strong point.

To her credit, the fortune teller, with her mass of red hair and generous bosom (neither of which was her own), might have many things to learn, but tenacity wasn’t one of them. She’d already picked herself up and was limping up the wharf after her quarry.

‘For just two sesterces, I can whisper the name of your future husband in your ear.’

‘For just two sesterces, I can have any one of these big, burly porters throw you in the harbour.’

‘You wouldn’t…?’

But the look on Claudia’s face told the fortune teller that she just might, and the subsequent arrival of a muscular, Gaulish-looking slave at her elbow tended to confirm the issue. The redhead vanished.

To Claudia’s surprise, Sabina had not been at all perturbed by the storm, though neither had she been eager to stretch her legs. She’d wait till the last minute before disembarking, she said. Well, that was her loss, because Syracuse was fun. It was big and bustly, noisy and colourful. Fortune tellers apart, it thrust its wine shops and whores, food stalls and physicians upon you the instant you set foot on solid land and after a long sea voyage, Claudia decided, as she marched back to supervise her luggage, the men would probably need them all. It was merely a question of priorities.

On every step, round every pillar, under every towering statue along the harbourside, clerks and merchants, watermen and wharfies went about their business through the constantly changing tide of humanity, waving, gesticulating, holding up fingers—
five, I said five
—as bales and crates and sacks changed hands to the clank of the tally pieces. Donkeys brayed under the noonday sun, bright pennants and banners flapped in the breeze.

Despite an abundance of temples, theatres and other public buildings to testify that, regardless of two hundred years of Roman occupation, this was still the gem in a once-Greek crown, the city had a curiously cosmopolitan feel, with its assortment of brightly coloured tunics and dark coloured slaves. Great tusks of ivory lay piled on the quay alongside Lebanese cedars and Carthaginian camels honking in protest. A tigress, bound for the arena, snarled inside her cage. A Syrian aristocrat in floppy hat and pantaloons gathered together his brood of little Syrian aristocratlets. Yet for all that, Syracuse had contrived to remain Greek.

Yes, there were togas in evidence, but it seemed the good men of Sicily weren’t perhaps so status-conscious as their counterparts in Rome, for here far more of them took advantage of the Greek pallium. It was lighter and smaller and draped in such a way as to leave the right arm and shoulder bare, making it a much more attractive garment for the climate, as well as considerably less restrictive than the conventional toga. However, one man who had not adopted this cool and casual form of dress stood out in the crowd. Not necessarily because of his height, which was above average, or because of his looks, which were compelling rather than handsome, but because at this very moment Claudia was being pointed out to him by one of the men off the ship. His bearing proclaimed a military background, which was confirmed when he marched straight up, stopped abruptly and all but saluted.

‘Mistress Seferius, my name is Fabius Collatinus. Follow me, please.’ He strode off down the wharf.

So much for the army. It teaches a man how to build roads, bridges, aqueducts and fortresses. It teaches a man how to fight, build siege engines and guard frontiers. It does not, unfortunately, seem to teach a man manners. Claudia resumed supervision of her baggage.

It was a rather less confident Fabius who returned. ‘Excuse me, you
are
Claudia Seferius?’

‘I am.’

This time she didn’t even bother to look up. Amongst legionaries he might be a giant among men. Among the Claudias of this world he was a mere babe in arms. She turned to the porters, who appeared to be handling Drusilla’s cage with some trepidation.

‘That crate’s to travel with me.’

‘It’s my duty to escort you onwards to Sullium. There’s a passage booked on board the
Isis,
she sails within the hour.’

‘Then she’ll have to sail without us.’ She turned towards him and smiled prettily. ‘I can’t leave Syracuse until their eyes open.’

He cocked his head to one side. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Claudia indicated the crate at her feet. ‘The kittens. I’ve promised Drusilla we won’t embark on the next leg of the journey until their eyes open.’

‘Drusilla?’

‘My cat,’ she explained cheerfully, beckoning over a food-seller and selecting a venison pie. ‘Now, Fabius, I don’t suppose you know of a decent tavern, do you?’

He shook his head, and it was difficult to tell whether Fabius meant no, he didn’t know of a tavern or whether he shook it out of pure bewilderment.

‘Where do
you
recommend?’ she asked the pie-seller. ‘The island here or the mainland?’

For a moment the poor man was speechless. Not once in his life had the nobility canvassed his opinion on any subject under the sun, let alone asked him to recommend accommodation. But he had a shrewd eye for business (how many pie-sellers bothered to meet incoming ships?) and therefore suggested an establishment he knew to be frequented by visiting dignitaries.

‘Oh, the island, m’lady. Without a doubt!’ The fact that the place belonged to his brother was, he felt, neither here nor there. ‘I’ll lead the way.’

That was worth three asses, he reckoned. Add on a cut from his brother and with any luck he’d be pissed before twilight. To his dismay, the man in the toga sought directions then dismissed him with the princely sum of two copper quadrans, which just happened to be the price of the pie.