‘I don’t know what got into my daughter,’ muttered Daphne. ‘As soon as we heard he was dead, I fixed her up with a merchant from Alexandria, and how did she repay me? Marcus, as much as I tried to beat common sense into that girl, she flat out refused to marry him and suddenly it was men, men, men. Couldn’t get enough of them, the dirty little slut. I said to your uncle at the time, she’s no child of mine… ’
Her indignation droned on, but Marcus failed to hear the diatribe and his heart cried back through time. He saw a vibrant young woman laid prostrate with grief, seeking love and affection wherever she could find it and whose frantic succession of lovers was her own way of mourning the loss of her soulmate, a means to forget. How hard was Daphne’s heart? Croesus, the girl was twenty, for gods’ sake! Had her parents no pity?
‘What has that to do with the girl in the Forum?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Her!’ Daphne snorted. ‘Crawls out of the woodwork this…this…Annia she calls herself. Tells me she’s Penelope’s daughter-’
‘ What?’
‘Expected me to take her in, you know. Eighteen years on, I ask you! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? I told her straight, you’re lucky to be alive, I said. If I’d had my way, you’d have been strangled at birth. Conniving little cow’s after money, that’s my guess.’
His thoughts were tumbling. He couldn’t take it in.
‘Is…is it true?’ Was that fair-haired sprite really his beloved Penelope’s child?
‘Probably,’ replied Daphne, without a shred of remorse. ‘She showed me the ring we’d tied round her neck when we handed her over. Not an heirloom, of course, just a cheap band.’
Annia. Her name was Annia. ‘She’s very pretty,’ he said carefully. Dammit, he wished he’d paid more attention to the girl. ‘Who’s her father?’
Daphne’s lips pursed. ‘Who indeed? Marcus, that baggage slept with half the men in this city, she could be anyone’s from a senator’s to a peddlar’s, and I can’t think why Penelope made such a fuss when we took the brat away.’
‘Wait!’ Wait a minute. ‘You’re saying she wanted to keep her?’
‘By the gods, Marcus, you should have heard the fuss she made. My baby, my baby,’ mimicked Daphne. ‘Anyone would think she’d planned the bloody thing right from the outset.’
Mother of Tarquin, it was worse than he thought! Distraught after the death of her husband, Penelope had sought to replace him with the love of a child. The same child who was snatched from its birth bed and handed to ‘Who fostered the child?’
‘Fostered?’ Daphne stared at her nephew as though he was covered in lime green spots. ‘Good grief, boy, you don’t foster creatures like that. I handed it over to some Babylonian slave dealer, forget his name now. He raises them like cattle, of course, but they have a decent placement at the end and you’ve only got to look at madam there to see we did the right thing.’
Did the right thing? Wrenching a longed-for baby from its pleading mother’s arms? Handing it over to be raised ‘like cattle’? Blind to the realization that life without husband or child was too much for a bereaved girl to bear…
Did the right thing-?
By the time the whirling eddy in his head had subsided, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was alone in the park. The goldfinch had gone, the blackbird had gone, but the scent of the myrtle had grown sickly and overpowering. He felt sick. Very sick. Putting his head between his knees until the nausea passed, he wondered whether he’d ever be able to speak civilly to Daphne again.
He could not say how many times he walked round the garden, past the swathes of blue Gaulish crocuses and the gurgling fountains. He did not hear the croak of the frogs in the water margins, or the piercing cry of the peacock in the aviary. He saw only a wood sprite, a fairhaired nymph with wide, blue eyes and slender white hands and felt a twist in his gut that he should have mistaken Penelope’s child for a con-artist. How closely Annia resembled her mother he had no idea. Eighteen repressed years had passed, precise features were no longer available to his memory, only vague images which involved sunshine and laughter. But Penelope, too, had had fine golden tresses, he would comb them while they sat on the river bank and she made flower chains and read aloud the poetry she composed for her husband fighting in the Balkans.
Was the shame of bearing a bastard worth the price of one life and the condemnation to slavery of another? The Egyptians had it right, Marcus thought, weighing a person’s heart against a feather for their place in the afterlife. Would Daphne bully her way through that trial as well?
‘Shit.’ Orbilio punched his fist into the palm of his hand.
It was his musing on foreign mythology that made the connection. From Egypt, his mind travelled to Babylon. From Babylon to its patron god, Marduk. And from Marduk to the dragon. The blue dragon tattoo! It could not be coincidence. Those girls who had died slashed to ribbons had been raised by the Babylonian, it was his brand that they bore.
