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turban.
    ‘No tense dramas?’
    Again, the turban shook sadly from side to side. ‘Even tragedy is out of the question,’ he said. ‘When things go wrong, as they are prone to do in a small touring company whose thespian turnover is faster than the blink of an eye, a laugh on a child’s deathbed scene makes the difference between being showered with silver and being showered with distressed vegetable waste.’
    ‘Which only leaves comedy.’
    ‘I do not pretend to understand modern audiences when I tell you that the best laughs come from storylines involving pimps and prostitutes,’ Caspar said. ‘But sadly they’ve been done to death this season. What I’m left with are plots revolving round swaggering soldiers who think they’re the gods’ gift to women, grasping misers who get their comeuppance and beautiful girls without brains in love with penniless poets. Of course, I need the obligatory mix-up surrounding identical twins, and if the poor playwright can throw in a couple of cuckolds, so much the better.’
    Caspar rubbed the statuette with affection.
    ‘A sad miss, my dear wife, a sad miss.’
    ‘So why don’t you write a play round a grasping miser with an airhead of a wife who conspires to relieve him of his gold so she can elope with her handsome, but penniless, poet lover?’ Claudia asked.
    ‘Ho!’ Caspar was jumping up and down, and not from the cold. ‘Magnificent, madam, absolutely magnificent. Dear me, you possess more creative talent than the dear departed! Now if I could only devise a happy ending, whereby the lovers run off with the money and make the husband look small…’
    ‘How about the poet has a secret identical twin who agrees to recite his poetry before a group of drunken, swaggering soldiers to provide his brother with an alibi for the time of the robbery…?’
    ‘Sublime!’ For a moment she thought he’d wet himself. ‘Utterly, brilliantitiously subl i me!’
    ‘Not utterly, brilliantitiously implausible, you don’t think? To the point of, say, ludicrous and far-fetched?’
    Caspar calmed down enough to roll his eyes at the very suggestion. ‘We are looking at comedy here, madam. At pantomime. Farce. Escapist entertainment. Nudity.’
    ‘ Nudity ?’
    The entrepreneur gave an exaggerated wink. ‘Nudity pays the rent, dear lady. Especially volumptuous beauties like mine.’ He laced his little fat fingers. ‘And since musical farce is the one area in which women are allowed on the stage, it would be a shame to waste their plumptious talents. Nudity.’
    Claudia smiled as the oxen were finally coerced into moving. Never let it be said that this had not been one eventful afternoon.
    Caspar took advantage of the space to envelop her in his arms and shower her face with kisses that smelled of rosewater. ‘You have bestowed upon me a veritable triumph, madam. This play will be the talk of all Rome.’ More kisses rained down on her cheek. ‘How can I ever thank you?’
    The oxen had plodded off and were out of sight round the corner. Claudia drew her beaver fur around her. The litter stand was just across the street.
    ‘Well, Caspar. It’s funny you should ask.’
    *
    Forget the five to six pounds of silver. This latest Spectacular, with its ‘volumptuous’ beauties and musical farce, couldn’t fail to impress potential clients. And with four days of public holiday, that was a lot of clients Claudia could squeeze in to be impressed.
    As Caspar said, bawdiness was the order of the day as far as Roman comedy was concerned, and Claudia could see her clients’ eyes popping out on stalks when the girls were on stage and a mischievous wind, manufactured in the wings, accidentally blew aside the thin scarves that draped round their bodies or forced their clothes to cling tight to their spectacular curves.
    Best of all, though, by staging the revue at her house, no financial outlay was required. She looked around the rainbow group, shivering in the cold as they staggered