Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

“Oh, you think so, do you?” Claudia resumed her pacing of the atrium, wafting her fan so hard that a couple of the feathers sprang loose from their clip. Dear Diana, it was hot. Small wonder that half of Rome had taken itself off to the cool of the country or else to the seaside for the month of August. She thought of the refreshing coastal breezes. A dip in the warm, translucent ocean. The sound of cooling waves crashing against rocks... “Well, let me tell you something, Leonides. That doesn’t sum up even half the current situation.”

According to the astrologers and soothsayers in the Forum — at least those diehards who hadn’t fled this vile, stinking heat — terrible storms were in the offing unless almighty Jupiter could be appeased. For everyone else in the Empire, storms would be a relief from this torpid, enervating swelter. Sweat soaked workmen’s tunics and plastered their hair to their foreheads. Meat turned within the day, and fish was best avoided unless it was flapping. Even Old Man Tiber couldn’t escape. His waters ran yellow and sluggish, stinking to high heaven from refuse, sewage, and the carcasses of rotting sheep. But for farmers with grapes still ripening out on the vine, storms on the scale that were being predicted provoked only fear. A single hailstorm could wipe out their entire vintage.

“Prayers and libations aren’t enough,” Claudia said, as two more feathers flew out of the fan, “and I can hardly buy grapes from the market and palm them off to Jupiter as my own.”

It was enough that that bitch Fortune happened to be unwavering when it came to divine retribution at the moment. Claudia didn’t want it spreading round Mount Olympus like a plague.

“And you’re forgetting, Leonides, that I can’t despatch a slave to Etruria to cut bunches until tomorrow at the earliest, because today, dammit, is the Festival of Diana — which just happens to be a holiday for slaves!”

“Oh, I hadn’t forgotten,” Leonides replied mournfully.

Claudia blew a feather off the end of her nose and thought at this rate, the wretched fan would be bald by nightfall, and why the devil can’t people make things to last anymore, surely that isn’t too much to ask. She stopped. Turned. Stared at her steward.

“Very well, Leonides, you may go.”

He was the only one left, anyway, apart from her Gaulish bodyguard, and it would take an earthquake, followed by a tidal wave, followed by every demon charging out of Hades before Junius relinquished his post. She glanced across to where he was standing, feet apart, arms folded across his iron chest, in the doorway to the vestibule, and couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he wasn’t out there lavishing his hard-earned sesterces on garlands, girls, and gaming tables like the rest of the men in her household.

The girls, of course, had better things to do. Dating back to some archaic ritual of washing hair, presumably in the days before fresh water had been piped into the city by a network of aqueducts, the Festival of Diana was now just a wonderful excuse for slave women to gather in the precinct of the goddess’s temple on the Aventine. There, continuing the theme of this ancient tradition, they would spend the day pinning one another’s hair in elaborate curls and experimenting with pins and coloured ribbons. Any other time and Claudia would have been down there, too, watching dexterous fingers knotting, twisting, coiling, plaiting, because at least half a dozen innovative styles came out of this feast day on the ides of August, and all too fast the shadows on the sundial on the temple wall would pass.

But not today. Today she had received the news that her bailiff was covered in spots and that rather than risk the harvest by having the workforce fall sick, he had put them in quarantine to the point where no one was even available to pick a dozen clusters of grapes. There was a grinding sound coming from somewhere. After a while, she realised it was her teeth.

“Junius?”

Before she’d even finished calling his name, he’d crossed the hall in three long strides. Was any bodyguard more dedicated, she wondered? Sometimes, catching sight of his piercing blue gaze trained upon her, she found his devotion to duty somewhat puzzling. Any other chap and you’d think he carried a torch for her, but hell, he was only twenty-one, while she was twenty-five, a widow at that, and tell me, what young stallion goes lusting after mares when he can have his pick of fillies?

Widow. Yes.