Dark Horse (2 page)

'Yours, I believe,' he said smugly.

Two days later, and Claudia Seferius was in no mood for visitors.

'My cousin said
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb . .

How
could Hylas the Greek have found out where she lived?

'. . . blah blah
divorced and marrying again
blah blah blah . . .'

It was that bloody bookie, wasn't it? She'd kill him. By thunder, she'd bloody kill him. Rip his heart out, feed it to the cat, chop his children into pieces and make meatballs out of them.

'. . . rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
this magnificent embossed betrothal medallion . . .'

Once she was free of Hylas's clutches, of course. Dammit, couldn't the man see she was perfectly prepared to apologize? Explain that she hadn't realized the grain she'd fed his horse was doped/a rival breeder put her up to it/pure coincidence Calypso won the race. Oh, all right, twelve pure coincidences if he wants to be pedantic, but the point is, don't these Greeks negotiate? Like a stoat negotiates with a rabbit, according to the scribe who tried to collect her winnings. Adding that in his opinion Hylas was in a less conciliatory, more a break-both-her-legs kind of mood. Shit, there were only so many ways a girl can sneak out of the house when his bullies come calling . . .

'. . . blah blah
these are very difficult times for . . .'

Then there was the Security Police. Was it coincidence that Marcus Cornelius Orbilio just happened to be hanging around on the off-chance that someone would drug the top runners? The hell it was. Someone tipped him off and suddenly it's

Saturnalia and his birthday all rolled into one, because some stupid bitch actually hands him the bag of doped grain! What a mess.

. . rhubarb rhubarb
I quite understand if you—'

'Wait!' Hold it right there, chum. Claudia suddenly began to pay closer attention to her visitor. Mid-thirties, tall, dark haired, well-built with a slight cleft in his chin, Leo was a patrician to boot. 'Say that again.'

'I said I was so, so sorry to hear about your husband's demise. I met him several times over the course of the—'

'No, the bit after that.'

'Uh . . . You mean, when I said how courageous I thought it was of you to take on his business, because it can't be easy, you being so young and a woman as well?'

'Not that bit either.'

That was the reason she was in this shit - taking on the bloody business. Dammit, if those bastard fellow wine merchants hadn't banded together to try and drive her to the brink of ruin, she wouldn't be doping horses to raise capital, which meant Hylas the Greek would have no axe to grind and she wouldn't be facing several years in penniless exile because the Security Police had been handed the incriminating evidence in a little blue cotton bag. Which Orbilio had returned, true. But only after conscientiously removing the contents.

'Didn't you mention something about inviting me to visit your estate in the Liburnian archipelago?' she prompted Leo.

Orbilio can build up as compelling a dossier as he likes, but if the chief suspect is nowhere to be found, such was Rome's magnetism for criminal activity that it only needed a couple of juicy murders or a really good conspiracy and race fixing would drop right off the end of his scale of priorities.

Oh come on, it was only a gentle narcotic! A few seeds from a species of chervil given to her by an Armenian for whom she had once done a favour. Not enough to give the horse colic, merely sufficient to render White Star a little unsteady on her hooves and induce a pleasant feeling of equine apathy. (Provided the damn drug had time to work, which is touch and go if the second race ends up being abandoned!)

'I thought it might take your mind off your grief,' Leo

said, 'if you saw my revolutionary method of training the vines.'

For all she cared, Leo could use whips and a three-legged stool to train his damn vines. Claudia was packed almost before she'd said yes. Unfortunately, there just didn't seem to be the right moment to confess that the grieving widow wasn't exactly grieving. Not unless it was on account of the inheritance coming in vineyards, bricks and mortar instead of the luscious gold pieces she'd envisaged. I ask you. Who can buy a new gown with half a coppersmith's on the Via Latina? Or take home that delightful little brooch shaped like an owl with a stubby old vine bush or two? But even before her husband's pyre was cold, the sharks had moved in.

First they'd tried to buy her out, at a price far below the market value.

Then they'd tried to squeeze her out.

That did it.

Her husband, may he rest in peace (and she really must visit his grave along the Via Whatever sometime), had worked hard to build up the outlets for his prestigious Etruscan wines. Goddammit, these sons of bitches couldn't just barge in and take what they wanted for nothing. By hell or high water, or Hylas the Greek, Claudia would not let it go. Not, of course, that she knew the first thing about viticulture. That was what she employed experts for: to save her the bother of having to learn which of those twiddly bits needed pruning, whether it was better to line the vats with pitch or with resin. All she cared about was how it tasted. Because that made the difference between 7 and 10 per cent profit.

'I promise you,' Leo said, as the sails of the little merchantman bellied in the warm summer breeze, 'you won't regret coming to Cressia.'

Four hundred miles from Rome, Claudia had no doubts whatsoever on that score. She'd have taken up his offer had it meant spending the summer in the middle of the Libyan desert, providing that certain Greek nationals and the Security Police didn't get to hear about it. But the instant she set eyes on the island rising vertically out of the water, its wooded cliffs

plunging hundreds of feet into the sparkling Adriatic, Claudia knew Leo was right.

Through adversity comes opportunity - and it didn't need to knock twice at Claudia's front door. Talk about landing on her feet! The Island of the Dawn, according to one legend. Paradise for Claudia Seferius. Set amid hills redolent with a thousand aromatic herbs, Leo's estate was an idyll of orchid-strewn pastures, oakwoods, pines, olive groves and vineyards, peppered with caves and freshwater ponds.

All of it eclipsed by the Villa Arcadia.

Shaded by figs and pomegranates and ancient gnarled olives, and affording breathtaking views over the Liburnian Gulf, luxury oozed from every pore. Over the past few months (as Leo had explained at numbing length during the journey), a veritable army of builders, sculptors, painters and mosaic-makers had been brought in, no expense spared, to turn the house into a palace. Extensions had been added, gardens landscaped, every surface covered with marble or gold, and the work was not finished yet. A squad of Rome's finest artists were still beavering away, covering the walls with frescoes and such like, in preparation for Leo's forthcoming marriage.

'I know you're eager to see my vines,' he said, as the ship docked in the only deep harbour on the island.

Claudia flashed him her eager-to-see-vines smile as she checked out the beaches.

'And I know you'll be equally keen to get back to supervise your own estate.'

Claudia flashed him her keen-to-supervise-estates smile as she checked out the delightful rocky coves.

'But I'm rather hoping I can persuade you to stay on until after my marriage festivities.'

'We-ell. I suppose I
could
stretch a week or two more.' Even then you'd need a chisel to winkle me out. 'After all,' she added happily. 'Rome
is
rather hot at the moment.'

So there you have it. While Rome sweltered under a vile and viscous heat, and Greeks chased shadows and the Security Police chased their own tails, Claudia Seferius would be sunning herself amid a harmonious unity of rocks, sea and

fragrant pinewoods enrobed by sapphire seas in a sumptuous villa at the courtesy of a tall, dark, handsome aristocrat for the summer.

A dirty job, but hey - someone has to do it.

And besides. What's the point of having double standards, if you don't live up to both?

The demon stirred. Its sleep had been long, but in its sleep it had grown restless. The pull of the island was strong. The island of Cressia was part of Illyria, a great land stretching from the Alps in the north across the mountains to the east, as far as the border with Thrace. A thousand years ago, the Greeks believed Istria, the heart-shaped peninsula which separated Italy from the arid shores of Dalmatia, to be the edge of the world. It was there, they thought, that the Daughters of the Evening Star dwelt in the walled Gardens of the Hesperides, protected by the hundred-headed serpent who guarded a tree of golden apples.

A gentle legend, for a gentle country teeming with lush valleys and forests bursting with game. But the living on Istria was easy. On Cressia, as with the twelve hundred other islands in the Adriatic, life was a constant struggle for survival and there was no room for myth. Only fact.

Cressia's history ran heavy with blood. Every inch of her soil was steeped in treachery and drenched in betrayal, chronicling stories of murder, trickery and revenge . . .

The demon stirred and licked its lips. The pull of the island was strong. Too strong to resist any longer. It had smelled the blood of her past in its dreams. Now it wanted to taste it.

Paradise is all very well, with its forests of laurel, cypress and beech, its wild ginger, sandy beaches and bottomless freshwater lakes, but paradise is also prone to serpents.

'Touch me up once more, you odious little pusboil,' Claudia said, 'and I don't care how old you are, you'll be chewing your own chitterlings for supper.'

Beside her on the dining couch, Volcar's rheumy eyes shone like twin beacons. 'Now, now, gel. Surely you wouldn't begrudge an old man one final walk down mammary lane?' 'Remind me again how you spell "yes".'

'Trouble with you, young lady,' he chortled, 'is that you have no sense of indecency.'

'Trouble with you, old man, is that now you've discovered where the grass is greener, you're too old to climb the bloody fence. This lawn's private property.'

Volcar had heard about the notion of a man's four score years and ten - and had promptly spat in its eye. Shrivelled, bent and with a face like a pickled walnut, his appetite for life was undiminished. Rumour had it, the furthest he had ever been from a drink in his life was twenty paces.

'Can't blame a fellow for trying,' he said, smacking gums as hard as mussel shells as liveried slaves filed in with the first course of baked eggs, cheeses, asparagus and truffles. 'They say a man's only as old as the woman he feels, and at my age so long as I can feel something, I know I'm still alive.'

'You'd feel something, if you try to scale my fence again.' 'Y'know, I like you,' Volcar said. 'You've fire in your belly, gel, and I've always had a hankering for women with spunk. Not like that frosty faced fossil over there.'

He used an asparagus spear to point to Leo's sister-in-law,

the exquisite, immaculate, glacial Silvia, whose age was the same as Claudia's - twenty-five - whose plucked eyebrows arched in perfect symmetry. And whose honey-coloured ringlets wouldn't dare to droop, no matter what the circumstances.

'Wouldn't think, would you, seeing them tiny tits, that Silvia was a mother of three? Here's another thing I'll bet you didn't know.' Volcar lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'For all her airs and graces, madam there daren't show her pretty face in Rome.'

Didn't show it much round here, either. In the week that Claudia had been on the island, she'd barely exchanged a dozen words with the only other female in the villa. 'Because ... ?' she asked.

'Don't know, and to tell the honest truth, gel, don't care to know more about the prissy bitch. To listen to her, though, you'd think she owned the bloody place. Huh. Gets right up my nozzholes, does Silvia.' He chewed on a succulent white truffle. 'Mind, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say, wouldn't you, that abandoning her children might have a bearing on the scandal.'

'You, Volcar, are a wicked old man.'

'One who's too old for flattery, gel. Why don't you just let me feel your bum instead?'

The small man sitting next to Silvia leaned over to his host's couch, tapped him lightly on his forearm and mumbled something Claudia couldn't hear.

'Oh, not again!' Leo muttered. He turned to Volcar. 'Llagos tells me you're up to your old tricks again, Uncle.'

'Me, lad? Never laid a finger on the lassie.'

Scepticism expressed itself in a twist of the lips. 'Sorry I've left you to the randy old sod's mercy,' Leo told Claudia, as the dishes for the first course were cleared away. 'Only as the wedding draws ever closer, conversation tends to be more progress report than witty repartee.'

Looking round the couches, Claudia tried to imagine any of the assembled party being remotely amusing. Silvia? Too selfabsorbed to waste her energies on exploring the philosophies of the meaning of life. Saunio? The fat, pretentious but brilliant artist reserved his animation for his work, while Nikias, the

famous Corinthian portrait painter, would never use one word when none would do. Llagos the priest
might
be capable of levity, but his accent was invariably too heavy to follow and in any case, when he laughed, his protruding front teeth had a tendency to spit. Which just left Shamshi, Leo's personal astrologer-cum-augur. And the less that man said the better!