Man Eater

‘Bitch!’ Corbulo ran to the crate and the bars rattled in his hands. Janus, for a moment there she thought he was going to. ‘You conceited, insolent, know-it-all bitch! How dare you-you of all people-accuse me of making this up? It’s my ancestors who lie buried there, my blood which was spilled there, my sweat that manured the soil, so don’t you lecture me on ownership, you empty-headed golddigger, you!’

It was a dangerous line, but Claudia persisted.

‘Your sweat,’ she scoffed. ‘How far does it travel, this precious Etruscan perspiration? How is it so different from the rest of us that it can reach from Carrera on the coast to my vineyards in the east?’

It was working, sweet Jupiter, yes, it was working. The mind that had planned and honed each meticulous detail could yet be defeated by rage.

‘Carrera? Who ever lived in Carrera? We’re farmers, my people, and bloody good farmers at that.’ He snorted derisively. ‘Your husband. Called himself a farmer, did he? I was a lad when he bought that land, eight years old, and I still remember the outrage among my people when he turned prime agricultural soil into vineyards. Vineyards!’

Claudia’s mind made quick computations. Her husband set himself up, must be twenty-four, twenty-five years ago. That’s right, Corbulo’s in his early thirties. ‘We’ve had this conversation, I believe. And I told you then, wine pays handsomely.’ The Empire virtually runs on it.

The trainer wasn’t listening. ‘Ten years ago he added a parcel to the south. That land belonged to my father-’

‘Ten years ago, I was fourteen,’ she pointed out, quite reasonably.

‘But you know the story, don’t you?’

Of course I do. Her husband trotted it out at every dinner party. ‘What story?’

‘It was that bloody Compulsory Purchase Scheme. Our lands for just half-a-dozen gold pieces plus some stinking slum in Rome. I ask you, Claudia, who could survive in two filthy rooms hemmed in by foul-mouthed drunks, babies crying day and night and dogs pissing up your front door? Nothing but stale sweat and rancid fats in your nostrils, and all the time, wherever you walk, that godsawful dust from the stonemasons drying the air!’

‘A million of us manage quite successfully.’ Some of us even love it.

Corbulo kicked the cage and she felt it lurch closer towards the waterfall. Janus! With an iron grip, Claudia hugged her knees as though conversations like this were commonplace in her calendar.

‘Well, I couldn’t. And neither could my father, or my mother, or my two little sisters. The girls, they were only ten and thirteen, but they died of the flux within a month. It broke my parents, watching their babies die, knowing that had we had space and fresh air and clean, running water they’d be alive today, with babies of their own, and did your husband give a damn?’

Her husband had his faults, she thought, but a sense of injustice wasn’t one of them. This story did the rounds at dinner parties not out of venom, but as a warning to others. For a start, no peasant was forced off his own land, they went voluntarily and in the case of Corbulo’s father, very rapidly. Augustus was keen to stabilize the economy and men like him were not only exceptionally well paid, they were given good apartments and a weekly dole. But with Corbulo’s father, it went deeper. He’d neglected his acres, working the soil as little as possible and drinking his money away and (this was the point of her husband’s after-dinner speech) when he was remunerated for his lands, he lost the whole lot on one single cockfight. A chicken, godsdammit. Corbulo’s father sold his birthright for a chicken.

‘So did he, Claudia?’ The trainer’s roar was louder than the falls. ‘Did your husband give a fuck about us?’

Rumour also had it that his father sold his eldest daughter into prostitution. Small wonder the mother threw herself into the Tiber.

Claudia felt her anger boil at this appalling waste of human life, and if Corbulo truly cared about his family, he left it pretty damned late.

‘For gods’ sake, man, yours is not the only family who moved out under the scheme. I can name you a dozen who uprooted to Rome, and not only did they survive, they put their sons in the Senate. So spare me the hard-luck stories.’ She leaned forward and gripped the bars, her face barely inches from his. ‘You could have gone back any time you wanted, and if land’s so cheap’-it wasn’t-‘why didn’t you godsdamned buy some?’

Grey eyes blazed back at her. ‘You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said, have you? How many more times do I have to tell you? I only want to work that which is mine.’ He threw up his hands in a gesture of futility. ‘Croesus, Claudia, I begged you, I actually fucking begged you, to let me work with you. You could have done that for me.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ she said with a jauntiness that stuck in her throat. ‘Now you’ve explained everything, now I understand what’s behind all this, let’s put it behind us and start from scratch, shall we?’

‘How?’ There was a glimmer of reason in the angry, grey eyes.