Marilyn Todd - Widow's Pique

'Alms! Alms for a poor blinded cripple!'

'Help an old leper, sir, won't you?'

The beggars' pleas carried like midwinter winds some high-pitched and keening, reminiscent of blizzards, others deeper and low, like the northerlies that keep the earth frozen and every last one echoed with the bleakness of their existence. Pushing through the huddle of begging bowls and gruel-stained rags, Claudia shielded herself from the April drizzle with her veil. At night, these lined, empty faces would huddle in doorways or seek shelter in the lee of the towering warehouses lining the wharves, but the minute day broke, they swarmed to the approach roads, seeking alms from the multitude who flocked into Rome every day. Merchants, poets, philosophers and sightseers; foreigners, furriers and farmers. The Ostia Gate on the Ides was no exception.

'Can you spare us a copper?'

'Ease an old soldier's war wound!'

Many of the injuries were fake. That amputated leg, for example, would be a lot more convincing if the beggar had put blood on the inside of the bandage and tied his ankle higher up the thigh so you didn't see his foot when he hopped. But ribs poking through flesh testified to the authenticity of most of the claims. As did the stench of festering ulcers. 'Clear off, you scabrous scum, you!'

The crack of a bull whip cleared a path for a rich man's litter to pass through.

'Out of the way, you old crone!'

A young blade on horseback was equally unimpressed with poverty and destitution.

Claudia stared down at the child sitting cross-legged in front of the gates. When darkness fell, these huge wooden doors would be cranked wide to admit the wheeled traffic that was prohibited during the daytime, the city streets being congested enough. But right now they remained barred and the girl sat in silence, with a resignation far beyond her eight years, her battered bronze bowl held out in front of her, her empty eye sockets fixed patiently upwards.

Claudia pushed on through the crush. Stopped. Then turned back. Girls, she thought. It was always the girls

Vaguely, she was aware of a patrol unit marching beneath the arch in military precision, their breastplates and greaves jangling, the plumes on their helmets bobbing as they splashed left-right-left through the puddles. Of a black stallion pulling up sharply, its booted rider dismounting. Of water-bearers, beasts of burden, a priest in his chariot, of mourners taking flowers to a grave out of town, a flock of geese being herded to market. But these things were a blur. Claudia saw only this little mite's parents deliberately blinding their daughter, that she might keep them for the rest of their lives You shouldn't have given the child so much silver, a voice chided. It only encourages other bastards to mutilate their babies.

I can't help it, Claudia told the voice inside her head. The kid shouldn't suffer for the brutality of her own parents, the load was heavy enough.

They'll only drink it away, the voice argued. Then beat her, because she's not bringing home enough money.

I know, I know. The bruises showing through the rips in her rain-sodden tunic were as angry as they were fresh. But 'You'd have been better off giving her a good meal.'

Claudia spun round. Since when did the voice of reason start interrupting?

'Here you go.' A warm pie was pressed into the child's tiny hand and was met with a smile as wide as the Tiber.

'Veal and ham, with a honey cake and a couple of figs for afters.'

Dammit, she should have recognized the boots, if not the black stallion.

'Now what, pray, brings the Security Police out on a morning like this?' she asked sweetly. 'Pneumonia?'

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio kept his expression solemn. 'No, I'm saving that for a special occasion.'

His dark, wavy mop nodded in the general direction of the coast.

'I've been sorting out a communications problem with one of our senators.'

The drizzle had eased off and, through a gap in the clouds, the watery sun glinted on the flecks in his hair and she caught a whiff of his sandalwood unguent even above the stench of poverty and destitution, and the acid sweat of his mount. No amount of expensive cologne could disguise the smell of the predator, though.

'It's the Emperor's fault,' he continued. 'He shouldn't have said how he championed large families, citizen numbers being in sharp decline and all that. Sooner or later someone was bound to misunderstand.'

Orbilio grinned wickedly as he held up four fingers.

'And take it to mean wives, instead of children.'

'That situation didn't require intervention on the part of the authorities,' Claudia retorted. 'With four mothers-in-law, your senator would quickly have realized his mistake.'

'Maybe so, but what worried us was that he's got To Whom It May Concern inscribed on his marriage contract.'

Good looks, charm, intelligence and wit. Standard issue among the aristocracy, and with Orbilio the only patrician in the Security Police, the combination was exceptionally deadly. But did he really think she was stupid? A serial bigamist stalking the Senate, indeed. Young, dedicated and bitterly ambitious, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had only one thought in his oh-so-handsome head. Promotion. And how better to grease the rungs of his professional ladder than by a clampdown on smuggling, forgery, tax evasion and what was that other thing she was involved in? Oh yes, fraud.

'Perhaps I could escort you to wherever you're going?' he asked with deceptive mildness.

'That's terribly sweet of you, but my litter's right behind. I just wanted to stretch my legs for a while.'

'Litter?' he murmured.

'Tch, have they got left behind in the crush? I shall have to sack that head bearer. The man's hopeless.'

'Stretch your legs?'

He wasn't giving up.

'Cramp, you know. Terrible thing. Unfortunately, it runs in the family.'

'Don't you mean limps?'

'I-'

'Ahhh.' A well-upholstered Arab with eyes as cold as marble appeared at her elbow. 'Meestress Seferius.'

Damn.

'Punctual, as usual, I notice.'

He performed a sequence of obsequious gestures with automatic correctness, but his hard gaze never left hers.

'You hef my money?'

She'd left it too late and now the long arm of the law was draped nonchalantly over its saddle, with a sly smile on its face.

'Me?' she flashed, twirling her cloak to conceal the stuffing of a fat purse into an even fatter outstretched hand.

With a muffled chink, both disappeared into the folds of his long, flowing robes faster than a bubble could pop.

'I think you have the wrong woman.'

Claudia had nothing against naked ambition. Provided it wasn't at her expense.

'Of course, of course, so sorry to hef troubled you.'

The Arab shot a sharp glance at her companion before backing away with practised unctuousness.

'Wasn't that Anpu the moneylender?' Orbilio murmured, stroking his stallion's muzzle.

'No idea. The fellow was a complete stranger to me.'

'I could have sworn that was the same Anpu who takes on gambling debts, but maybe I'm wrong. After all, everyone knows that gambling's illegal and, in any case, you told me you weren't doing that any more.'

Ah, but I didn't say I'd be doing it any less.

'Yes, well, you needn't worry your pretty head about me,' she told him. 'I'll be leaving Rome for a while.'

'Business or pleasure?' he asked, keeping a close watch on Anpu's oiled curls as they snaked their way through the crowd.

Claudia ignored the implication that Rome had suddenly become too hot to handle.

'Hardly pleasure,' she sniffed.

Instead of settling down to a long, hot, lazy summer stuffed with five lots of games, a dozen festivals and more feasts and processions than you could shake a stick at 'I'll be stuck in some dire little outpost at the edge of the Empire.'