Virgin Territory (35 page)

‘It was the father what was supposed to hand the daughter over,’ Aristaeus explained, ‘but we was at war with Rome. Sextus agreed to Sabina’s ordination but he wouldn’t agree to Eugenius leaving, whereas Faustulus, being Sicilian born and bred, knew ways.’ He tapped the side of his nose knowingly.

‘Faustulus handed her over to the Vestals, then the next thing he knew, she’d run away. He found her at the wharf, hysterical and desperate to find a passage to Sicily, saying the Holy Sisters wanted to bury her alive.’ Claudia was fully aware of the tale of the recalcitrant Vestal who had forsaken her vow of chastity. Her lover had been whipped to death in the Forum, but she, poor cow, had been interred alive.

‘So the young novice had nightmares?’

Aristaeus toyed with his plate, tapping his knife against the wood. ‘You must understand,’ he said eventually, ‘that Sabina was only six, and what she told Faustulus he believed.’ He threw down the knife. ‘She said she couldn’t go back to the temple, because she
was…
unchaste.’

‘Surely he—’

Aristaeus cut in firmly. ‘Sabina told him her daddy had done to Sabina what her daddy had done to her mummy. Do you understand?’

Claudia gulped, and nodded.

‘Right. Faustulus believed that, six years old or no, they’d bury her alive because Vestals have to be pure. Not just free of bodily defects, pure right through.’

‘Rubbish! They simply wouldn’t have admitted her!’ The huntsman held up a restraining hand. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But Faustulus didn’t understand, he thought she’d been ordained and that if he took her back, that’s what would happen. So he told the Sisters she’d been killed in a traffic accident and that, for them, was the end of it.’

She knew Orbilio had tried tracing Sabina’s chaperone, but after three decades the leads were too cold. ‘What happened next?’ She was almost scared to ask.

‘Faustulus brought her back to Sicily and raised her as his own. What else could he do? Couldn’t hand her back to Aulus, not after that. So we pretended she was ordained. Who’s to know? Not that lot, they’re too busy looking after Number One.’

Claudia slowly shook her head. Aulus. Old Conky. Assaulting his own
daughter…

Not long after, Aristaeus said, Sextus began stripping the hills for his warships and Eugenius was having financial problems from not being able to offload his wheat stocks. When Collatinus moved west, Faustulus followed. Sabina could keep tabs on her family, and in any case the pickings were good above Sullium.

‘Faustulus was your father?’

‘Yep.’ He swung out his arm and lifted another jug of beer on to the table. ‘On his deathbed, he made me swear to look after Sabina for the rest of her life.’

Claudia made rapid calculations. ‘How old were you?’

‘Fifteen.’ The word was almost obscured by a gulp. ‘Both sisters long married and my mother two years in the ground.’

‘It doesn’t sound like Faustulus,’ she protested. ‘It was unfair. I mean, why for life?’

‘Oh, Sabina always had clouds in her mind,’ he said, as though half the population were batty. ‘From the outset we knew she was…
’

‘Mad?’

‘Special.’

‘Because of what Aulus had done?’

He didn’t reply, but set cheese and radishes on the table. Claudia watched him slice off a fist-sized piece of bread and chew on it.

‘You loved her?’ she ventured.

His eyes rose and bored into hers. ‘I
cared
for her,’ he replied, wiping the crumbs from his beard. ‘But I told her straight. We’ll keep up the pretence, but when your thirty years is up, you go home. When the Senior Vestal retired, I sent her back.’

Claudia thought back over the things Sabina had told her. About seeing mountains split asunder, spilling rivers of blood. Etna, erupting nineteen years ago. So obvious. Just like Varius. Why couldn’t she see the things that were under her nose?

‘Last year I built this hut. There’s no room for two, she knew I meant business.’

‘Did you sleep with her?’ After what had been aired today, the question didn’t seem impertinent.

Aristaeus took a deep breath. ‘A man has to relieve his frustrations, don’t he?’

Claudia hoped her expression was suitably ambivalent.

His fist thumped down on the table. ‘Croesus, she just lay there. I was eighteen years old, red blood coursing through my veins, and it’s not as though I didn’t ask
if…
I could…you know. But she just lay there, staring up at the roof. Then I saw it—the blood—and that’s when I
knew…I knew…’

‘She’d been lying.’ Claudia finished it for him.

The huntsman’s face was distorted with pain. ‘I asked her. I said, why didn’t you tell me you was a virgin? Why say them terrible things about your father—and you know what she said? She said, “But he did. Daddy kissed me.”’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘I sacrificed twenty years on account of a
kiss
.’

There followed the sort of silence that seems endless and yet, at the same time, seems no time at all. The sort of silence you feel sacrilegious about breaking.

Finally, Aristaeus picked up the ring. ‘This was my mother’s, it was all she had. I wanted to give it to Minerva, to atone for my shame.’

‘There is no shame, Aristaeus.’ Only irony. Bitter, bitter irony. But he needed, desperately, to assuage his guilt. ‘Why don’t you give it to Diana?’

He used his hunting knife to slice through the wooden hand to create a finger and solemnly slipped the ring on to it. Again, the sense of unreality was aroused. He patted the statue reverentially and stared deep into its carved eyes.

‘It wasn’t just that once, either.’

Claudia heard the wind whispering in the leaves, a distant woodpecker drumming. There was a faint mushroomy smell in the air, mingled with sawdust and wood smoke. She could sense the searing pain inside him, even though she struggled to catch the words.

‘I beseech you, Diana of the Forests, not to judge me harshly.’

She won’t. ‘Sabina was a selfish woman, Aristaeus. She came from a selfish family.’

‘Said she didn’t mind me doing it, because she was invisible.’

Sweet Jupiter, no man deserved this on his conscience. ‘If it’s any consolation, they’ve got the man who killed her.’

Pained eyes left Diana’s. ‘Who?’

‘Fabius.’

He shook his head in wonderment. ‘By Apollo, they’re an evil family.’

I’ll drink to that, Claudia thought.

‘How did you find out she lived here?’

Claudia explained about the blue glass flagon. How she was in Sullium on market day and noticed a barber mopping a cut with a spider’s web which he drew from the bottle. Preoccupied with other matters, it didn’t sink in at the time and only later, when the memory returned, Claudia realized that the chances of two such flagons appearing in one town were remote, to say the least. She sent Junius to track down the barber, who confirmed he bought his webs from Aristaeus, and the Syrian glassblower, who confirmed he had indeed supplied a stock for the huntsman.

She braced herself to ask the next question. ‘Do you know a woman named Hecamede?’

‘I know
of
a woman called Hecamede. Killed herself, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. Yes, she killed herself.’

Her knees were weak as she made her way across the clearing. She did not say goodbye. She did not look round.

She certainly did not tell him that Hecamede’s suicide was her fault. That, again, if only she’d seen what was in front of her nose, Hecamede would be alive today, coming to terms, albeit painfully, with what had befallen her little Kyana but at least having the satisfaction that justice was served at last to the man who’d abducted her.

Because that was the second thing she’d sent Junius to check out.

Stand in front of the harness maker’s, she told him, three paces from the corner, then turn and look over your left shoulder. What do you see? Take a wax tablet and a stylus and note down everything.
Everything.

He’d followed her instructions to the letter. Harnesses, hooks, customers, shopkeeper, coins, strips of leather, a painted sign, a spider in its web, the side street, kerbs, gutters, a poulterer on the other corner, the barber’s next door to the poulterer…

Exactly. The barber’s next door. Had Claudia’s eyes not been riveted on the spider, her own survey would have taken in the shop over the road. She’d have realized earlier that not every barber pays for pre-vinegared spiders’ webs. That now and again, they go and collect them themselves.

So simple. Hecamede was a local woman, she’d have been concerned only with local issues.

Claudia passed out of the cool, leafy canopy into a blast of dry, dusty air, surprised to find herself weeping. Not for poor, blighted Aristaeus, whom she had nearly killed in the belief he was a child molester. Not for Kyana and the other little girls who had been abducted, tragic though it was. Not even for Sabina or the long-suffering Acte, despite their obscene murders.

Claudia was weeping for Hecamede, whom she had failed. Hecamede who was slum poor, and whose accusations against a seemingly respectable barber fell on a bigoted magistrate’s deaf ears. Hecamede, one breast lolling out of her tunic, driven wild by grief until, finally, she was driven to suicide.

Hecamede. Who had cut her wrists the way Claudia’s own mother had cut her wrists.

Claudia had failed her, too.

XXXII

It was over. Finally, it was over.

Physically drained and emotionally exhausted, Claudia halted on the plateau. Below, a molten silver streak cleaved a path towards the shimmering ocean beyond and suddenly she was impelled to immerse her whole body in this river of forgetfulness. A cold plunge which was no luxury, but a necessity.

There was much to forget.

The raw injustice big ugly Utti had been given, and the dreadful truth confronting Aristaeus after he made love to Sabina. Alas, it said much about Aulus that Aristaeus, Faustulus, even Claudia herself, believed him capable of the charge laid against him, but the unpalatable fact was, a grim brutality simmered underneath the surface in that family which was as sickening as it was incomprehensible.

Linus, knocking his wife into next week. Aulus, chopping off thumbs left, right and centre. Even the viciousness of Senbi, Piso and Dexippus. It seemed Fabius had felt justified as long as the vacant creature calling herself Sabina wasn’t related…

Claudia slithered
down
the slope,
using rocks as footholds and tree roots as handholds. Far in the distance were the whitewashed walls and red shimmering tiles of the Villa Collatinus, surrounded by small, bleating puffs of white. A peaceful scene, and utterly uninviting.

She listened to the babble of water as it raced over the stones in its excitement to reach the sea.

Orbilio had believed Diomedes the killer, since who but a doctor would have the precise medical knowledge? There had been no ‘trouble’ before he arrived. And yet the same criteria applied to Fabius. Army life would teach a man how to kill, maim and immobilize. Did it, then, desensitize him to such a degree that he could plan the cold-blooded killing of two women? Cut their spinal cords, leave them paralysed—helpless and desperate for air—so he could rape them?

Like the beechwood earlier, precious metal turned to base as the silver became nothing more exotic than water, yet it was no less appealing. She sat on a rock and pulled off her sandals, thinking of the murder weapon embedded in the tree trunk. In time, no doubt, the bark would grow to envelop it, obliterating all traces of this hideous crime, but despite the warmth of the sun trapped in the valley, Claudia shuddered.

She waded into the middle of the river, her iris blue cotton darkening to blueberry, and sat facing downstream, hands outstretched on the river bed behind her, head tilted towards the sun. The icy water washed over her, floating her skirt and numbing the bruising on her neck. Stay here long enough and it’d wash away the guilt and the horror and maybe, just maybe, the fear of waking in the night and seeing the hollow eyes of Hecamede staring back at her.

It was over. Praise be to Juno, it was over. She was
stupid to have come to Sicily in the first place, but in a matter of hours that freighter would be whisking her back to Rome and life would continue as normal. Well, not Rome exactly, she thought, hauling herself upright, amazed at the weight of her wet stola. It’ll drop us on the mainland and we can cover the coastal route by road, picking up the Via Appia which will be a damn sight quicker than fighting headwinds. I can’t wait to get back to the—

‘Dammit, Aulus, you made me jump’

Pervert. Still, he wasn’t the only man in the world who got turned on by watching women bathe and by wet cotton clinging to feminine curves.

‘Ooh, you made me jump,’ he mimicked. ‘Oooh, Aulus, you made me jump.’

Claudia wrung out her skirt, wondering how much satisfaction she would feel when Old Conky heard his eldest son was a depraved monster. She picked her way towards her sandals, trying not to let him see how painful the jagged rocks were on bare feet, and she was gripped by an exhilarating surge of mischief.

‘Aulus,’ she said, heaping on the sympathy. ‘I know who killed Sabina and Acte, and I’m afraid
it…
wasn’t Utti.’

‘Oh?’

Claudia smiled to herself. String him along a little further and the blow would fall the harder. ‘But I know who, and I know how, and I know why.’

‘You do?’

The bolt shot home, you could see the emotions race across his face. Anger, hatred, resentment, possibly even respect. A strange light burned in his eyes and Claudia nonchalantly reached down for her sandals.