Read Online Virgin Territory by Marilyn Todd - Free Book Online Page A

her.’ She jerked her head to a point over Claudia’s left shoulder and against her will yet mesmerized by the woman’s desperation, Claudia turned. Harnesses jangled from their hooks, the smell of leather was overpowering. Her gaze turned upwards. A hand’s span away, under the eaves of the shop, the most enormous black spider sat in the middle of its web.
    ‘Euch!’ Claudia recoiled in horror. She’d seen mice smaller.
    ‘That’s right, you be afraid of spiders. He was collecting ’em when he stole my little Kyana.’ Her face took on a wistful appearance and tears welled in her eyes. ‘You’ve got to watch ’em so carefully.’
    Leaving the local woman sobbing on her knees in the gutter, the sesterces lying forgotten beside her, Claudia turned the corner just as Matidia was emerging, empty-handed, from the mercer’s.
    ‘I do hope that awful Hecamede hasn’t been bothering you, dear, she’s quite deranged you know.’
    Claudia bit back the retort about black kettles and pots as Matidia elaborated.
    ‘Went that way after her daughter disappeared.’
    ‘Disappeared? She didn’t die, then?’
    ‘Kyana? Oh no. Well, that’s to say her body’s never been discovered, but the child was five and you know what they’re like at that age, forever getting into mischief.’ Somehow Claudia could not imagine Sabina, for instance, getting into mischief, but bit that back as well, concluding that today she had set something of a record for holding her tongue. It didn’t come easy. Probably because it was such a teensy-weensy thing, you didn’t notice it had run away until it was too late.
    ‘The worst part is,’ Matidia was saying, ‘three other women have now latched on to the notion of someone stealing their babies. Hysterical nonsense, which one does well to ignore, lest it spread right out of hand. Now tell me honestly, do you think I should have bought the red cushions?’
    Claudia glanced at the mercer, wiping his brow with his handkerchief and shaking his head, and felt little pity for him as she heard herself saying:
    ‘Matidia, dear, why don’t you go and have a look at the coloured ones again, just to be on the safe side?’
    Watching the shopkeeper’s face turn ashen as Matidia disappeared into the back of his shop, she telegraphed him a silent message. It’s you or me, chum, and I’ve had four days of the old windbag.
    The one good thing about a small town like this was that you could dispense with the bodyguards and the litter and the conventions, and just be yourself. Claudia paused to pass a critical eye over the work of the bronzesmith (really quite good, she might come back and buy that lantern, it would set off the front entrance). Lingering to watch a Syrian glassblower, her senses were aroused by the commerce around her. The acid tang of rope-making fought for first prize with the sharp smell from the paint seller’s before both were knocked out of the ring by the skills of the herbalist. The air was filled with the cries of the fishmonger, his live catch splashing in the tank, together with the agonized squeals of axles begging for grease, the grinding of the millstone and the braying of the donkey that worked it. A doorway draped with greenery signified a tavern, a cracked and smoke-blackened wall stood testimony to the presence of a cookshop. Claudia was passing the stall of the root-cutter, the man who supplied roots and rhizomes to apothecaries and the like, when she spotted the Collatinus family physician.
    Blond, athletic and classically handsome, Diomedes could be nothing but Greek. Not a Greek from the north like her own lanky steward, this man hailed from Achaea in the south, and it was tempting to ask whether his income came solely from serving the needs of the sick. A good many matrons in Rome would pay lavishly for his services, women in the rudest of health. With emphasis on the word rude. He wore the pallium, too, revealing a muscular shoulder and tanned chest which