Virgin Territory by Marilyn Todd Page B

absently. ‘Sometimes I think the years have dragged, being crippled and bedridden, then I think to myself, hold on. Last January you were bouncing your grandson on your knee and now here we are in October and he’s got four children of his own.’
    Claudia smiled to herself. They were all the same underneath, weren’t they? Soft men inside rock hard shells.
    Now, from her perch beside the old lighthouse, she noticed the last vestiges of daylight were almost extinct. High in the hills, lamps and lanterns shone from the houses in Sullium. Closer to hand, torches flickered at the Villa Collatinus and oblongs of yellow thrown from the windows gave a honey glow to the courtyard. But with dusk the chill had intensified and could no longer be ignored. Claudia threw her palla round her shoulders, but made no move to pick her way home.
    Sabina’s funeral this afternoon had made for a good turnout. For a small town, the wailing women weren’t bad, although Claudia would have preferred to see a bit more ash plastered about. Also the undertaker leading the cortege tended to give the impression he was more important than the dear departed, but on the whole it went well, the men with black togas drawn over their heads, the women with their hair dishevelled. Indeed, a stranger might have been fooled into thinking they cared.
    Fabius shone, quite literally, in his uniform so that whenever the sun caught it, anyone looking his way was positively blinded. Even Claudia had to admit he cut a dashing figure with his broad chest and gleaming bronze armour. The red crest on his helmet, running side to side to reflect his centurion status, ruffled in the breeze in the most stately and dignified fashion, drawing the attention of many a maiden along the route, yet even as she recalled the procession, she could think only of another man, a patrician, in the scarlet tunic and hammered breastplate of the tribune. Not that his would need to be beaten out to exaggerate the muscular development of the professional athlete…
    Dammit, that man gets on my whiskers!
    Claudia pushed thoughts of Orbilio’s torso to a dim and distant recess of her mind and concentrated on the funeral cortege as it filed slowly through the streets. As they were entering the Forum, the wailing women almost drowning out the trumpeters, she spotted Utti in the crowd, his ugly mug practically obliterated by the bodies of two small children, one perched on each shoulder for a better view. Before Claudia had had a chance to identify Tanaquil, another familiar form had sidled up.
    ‘You’ll help me find her, won’t you?’ The rings under Hecamede’s eyes were darker, the hollows in her cheeks deeper. ‘Only you promised.’
    ‘I did no such thing.’ Praise be to Juno, both breasts were tucked up safely!
    ‘You did, you give me your word.’
    Two of the Collatinus slaves pulled her roughly away and frogmarched the pitiful figure out of sight. Diomedes moved up beside Claudia.
    ‘What was that about?’
    ‘Oh, nothing, really. The woman’s touched. Thinks someone’s stolen her child and tried to point him out to me, but there was nothing there except some bloody great spider. She said he—whoever he might be—was collecting them at the time.’
    ‘Aristaeus, you mean?’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Aristaeus. The man who collects spiders’ webs.’ Claudia faltered, nearly tripping over her hem. ‘Say that again. You mean there really is a man who goes around collecting spiders’ webs?’
    ‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’
    Failing to see how anybody could possibly make a profession out of something like that, Claudia shook her head.
    ‘Strange man,’ Diomedes continued. ‘Lives up in the hills. A—what’s the Latin word?—recluse.’
    Child molesters would be, wouldn’t they?
    As she began to follow the white line of the path along the peninsula, Claudia’s mind pictured this seedy individual, this raptor of little girls. Middle-aged, potbellied, probably more