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landscaped, every surface covered with marble or gold, and the work was not finished yet. A squad of Rome's finest artists were still beavering away, covering the walls with frescoes and such like, in preparation for Leo's forthcoming marriage.
    'I know you're eager to see my vines,' he said, as the ship docked in the only deep harbour on the island.
    Claudia flashed him her eager-to-see-vines smile as she checked out the beaches.
    'And I know you'll be equally keen to get back to supervise your own estate.'
    Claudia flashed him her keen-to-supervise-estates smile as she checked out the delightful rocky coves.
    'But I'm rather hoping I can persuade you to stay on until after my marriage festivities.'
    'We-ell. I suppose I could stretch a week or two more.' Even then you'd need a chisel to winkle me out. 'After all,' she added happily. 'Rome is rather hot at the moment.'
    So there you have it. While Rome sweltered under a vile and viscous heat, and Greeks chased shadows and the Security Police chased their own tails, Claudia Seferius would be sunning herself amid a harmonious unity of rocks, sea and
    fragrant pinewoods enrobed by sapphire seas in a sumptuous villa at the courtesy of a tall, dark, handsome aristocrat for the summer.
    A dirty job, but hey - someone has to do it.
    And besides. What's the point of having double standards, if you don't live up to both?

Three

    The demon stirred. Its sleep had been long, but in its sleep it had grown restless. The pull of the island was strong. The island of Cressia was part of Illyria, a great land stretching from the Alps in the north across the mountains to the east, as far as the border with Thrace. A thousand years ago, the Greeks believed Istria, the heart-shaped peninsula which separated Italy from the arid shores of Dalmatia, to be the edge of the world. It was there, they thought, that the Daughters of the Evening Star dwelt in the walled Gardens of the Hesperides, protected by the hundred-headed serpent who guarded a tree of golden apples.
    A gentle legend, for a gentle country teeming with lush valleys and forests bursting with game. But the living on Istria was easy. On Cressia, as with the twelve hundred other islands in the Adriatic, life was a constant struggle for survival and there was no room for myth. Only fact.
    Cressia's history ran heavy with blood. Every inch of her soil was steeped in treachery and drenched in betrayal, chronicling stories of murder, trickery and revenge . . .
    The demon stirred and licked its lips. The pull of the island was strong. Too strong to resist any longer. It had smelled the blood of her past in its dreams. Now it wanted to taste it.

Four

    Paradise is all very well, with its forests of laurel, cypress and beech, its wild ginger, sandy beaches and bottomless freshwater lakes, but paradise is also prone to serpents.
    'Touch me up once more, you odious little pusboil,' Claudia said, 'and I don't care how old you are, you'll be chewing your own chitterlings for supper.'
    Beside her on the dining couch, Volcar's rheumy eyes shone like twin beacons. 'Now, now, gel. Surely you wouldn't begrudge an old man one final walk down mammary lane?' 'Remind me again how you spell "yes".'
    'Trouble with you, young lady,' he chortled, 'is that you have no sense of indecency.'
    'Trouble with you, old man, is that now you've discovered where the grass is greener, you're too old to climb the bloody fence. This lawn's private property.'
    Volcar had heard about the notion of a man's four score years and ten - and had promptly spat in its eye. Shrivelled, bent and with a face like a pickled walnut, his appetite for life was undiminished. Rumour had it, the furthest he had ever been from a drink in his life was twenty paces.
    'Can't blame a fellow for trying,' he said, smacking gums as hard as mussel shells as liveried slaves filed in with the first course of baked eggs, cheeses, asparagus and truffles. 'They say a man's