Caesar's Women (12 page)

“Would you be prepared to take that chance?” she asked.

He didn't hesitate. “No. My luck says it's a girl.”

“I don't know either. I didn't think of this happening, so I didn't concentrate on making a boy or a girl. It will indeed take its chances as to its sex.”

If his own demeanor was detached, so, he admitted with some admiration, was hers. A lady well in control.

“Then the best thing you can do, Servilia, is to hustle Silanus into your bed as soon as you possibly can. Yesterday, I hope?”

Her head moved slowly from side to side, an absolute negative. “I am afraid,” she said, “that is out of the question. Silanus is not a well man. We ceased to sleep together not through any fault of mine, I do assure you. Silanus is incapable of sustaining an erection, and the fact distresses him.”

To this news Caesar reacted: the breath hissed between his teeth. “So our secret will soon be no secret,” he said.

To give her credit, she felt no anger at Caesar's attitude, nor condemned him as selfish, uninterested in her plight. In many ways they were alike, which perhaps was why Caesar could not grow emotionally attached to her: two people whose heads would always rule their hearts—and their passions.

“Not necessarily,” she said, and produced a smile. “I shall see Silanus today when he comes home from the Forum. It may be that I will be able to prevail upon him to keep the secret.”

“Yes, that would be better, especially with the betrothal of our children. I don't mind taking the blame for my own actions, but I can't feel comfortable with the idea of hurting either Julia or Brutus by having the result of our affair common gossip.” He leaned forward to take her hand, kissed it, and smiled into her eyes. “It isn't a common affair, is it?”

“No,” said Servilia. “Anything but common.” She wet her lips again. “I'm not very far along, so we could continue until May or June. If you want to.”

“Oh yes,” said Caesar, “I want to, Servilia.”

“After that, I'm afraid, we won't be able to meet for seven or eight months.”

“I shall miss it. And you.”

This time it was she who reached for a hand, though she did not kiss his, just held it and smiled at him. “You could do me a favor during those seven or eight months, Caesar.”

“Such as?”

“Seduce Cato's wife, Atilia.”

He burst out laughing. “Keep me busy with a woman who stands no chance of supplanting you, eh? Very clever!”

“It's true, I am clever. Oblige me, please! Seduce Atilia!”

Frowning, Caesar turned the idea over in his mind. “Cato isn't a worthy target, Servilia. What is he, twenty-six years old? I agree that in the future he might prove a thorn in my side, but I'd rather wait until he is.”

“For me, Caesar, for me! Please! Please!”

“Do you hate him so much?”

“Enough to want to see him broken into tiny pieces,” she said through her teeth. “Cato doesn't deserve a political career.”

“Seducing Atilia won't prevent his having one, as you well know. However, if it means so much to you— all right.”

“Oh, wonderful! Thank you!” She huffed happily, then thought of something else. “Why have you never seduced Bibulus's wife, Domitia? Him you certainly owe the pleasure of wearing horns, he is already a dangerous enemy. Besides, his Domitia is my half sister Porcia's husband's cousin. It would hurt Cato too.”

“A bit of the bird of prey in me, I suppose. The anticipation of seducing Domitia is so great I keep postponing the actual deed.”

“Cato,” she said, “is far more important to me.”

Bird of prey, nothing, she thought to herself on the way back to the Palatine. Though he may see himself as an eagle, Servilia thought, his conduct over Bibulus's wife is plain feline.

Pregnancy and children were a part of life, and, with the exception of Brutus, just a something which had to be endured with a minimum of inconvenience. Brutus had been hers alone; she had fed him herself, changed his diapers herself, bathed him herself, played with him and amused him herself. But her attitude to her two daughters had been far different. Once she dropped them, she handed them to nursemaids and more or less forgot about them until they grew sufficiently to need a more sternly Roman supervision. This she applied without much interest, and no love. When each of them turned six, she sent them to Marcus Antonius Gnipho's school because Aurelia had recommended it as suitable for girls, and she had not had cause to regret this decision.

Now, seven years later, she was going to have a love child, the fruit of a passion which ruled her life. What she felt for Gaius Julius Caesar was not alien to her nature, that being an intense and powerful one well suited to a great love; no, its chief disadvantage stemmed from him and his nature, which she read correctly as unwilling to be dominated by emotions arising out of personal relationships of any kind. This early and instinctive divination had saved her making the mistakes women commonly made, from putting his feelings to the test, to expecting fidelity and overt demonstrations of interest in anything beyond what happened between them in that discreet Suburan apartment.

Thus she had not gone that afternoon to tell him her news in any anticipation that it would provoke joy or add a proprietary feeling of ownership in him, and she had been right to discipline herself out of hope. He was neither pleased nor displeased; as he had said, this was her business, had nothing to do with him. Had she anywhere, buried deep down, cherished a hope that he would want to claim this child? She didn't think so, didn't walk home conscious of disappointment or depression. As he had no wife of his own, only one union would have needed the legality of divorce—hers to Silanus. But look at how Rome had condemned Sulla for summarily divorcing Aelia. Not that Sulla had cared once the young wife of Scaurus was freed by widowhood. Not that Caesar would have cared. Except that Caesar had a sense of honor Sulla had not; oh, it wasn’t a particularly honorable sense of honor, it was too bound up in what he thought of himself and wanted from himself to be that. Caesar had set a standard of conduct for himself which embraced every aspect of his life. He didn't bribe his juries, he didn't extort in his province, he was not a hypocrite. All no more and no less than evidence that he would do everything the hard way; he would not resort to techniques designed to render political progress easier. His self-confidence was indestructible; he never doubted for one moment his ability to get where he intended to go. But claim this child as his own by asking her to divorce Silanus so he could marry her before the child was born? No, that he wouldn't even contemplate doing. She knew exactly why. For no other reason than that it would demonstrate to his Forum peers that he was under the thumb of an inferior—a woman.

She wanted desperately to marry him, of course, though not to acknowledge the paternity of this coming child. She wanted to marry him because she loved him with mind as much as body, because in him she recognized one of the great Romans, a fitting husband who would never disappoint her expectations of his political and military performance any more than his ancestry and dignitas could do aught than enhance her own. He was a Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a Gaius Servilius Ahala, a Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, a Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Of the true patrician aristocracy—a quintessential Roman—possessed of immense intellect, energy, decision and strength. An ideal husband for a Servilia Caepionis. An ideal stepfather for her beloved Brutus.

The dinner hour was not far away when she arrived home, and Decimus Junius Silanus, the steward informed her, was in his study. What was the matter with him? she wondered as she entered the room to find him writing a letter. At forty years of age he looked closer to fifty, lines of physical suffering engraved down either side of his nose, his prematurely grey hair toning into grey skin. Though he was striving to acquit himself well as urban praetor, the demands of that duty were sapping an already fragile vitality. His ailment was mysterious enough to have defeated the diagnostic skills of every physician Rome owned, though the consensus of medical opinion was that its progress was too slow to suggest an underlying malignancy; no one had found a palpable tumor, nor was his liver enlarged. The year after next he would be eligible to stand for the consulship, but Servilia for one now believed he had not the stamina to mount a successful campaign.

“How are you today?” she asked, sitting in the chair in front of his desk.

He had looked up and smiled at her when she entered, and now laid down his pen with some pleasure. His love for her had grown no less with the accumulation of almost ten years of marriage, but his inability to be a husband to her in all respects ate at him more corrosively than his disease. Aware of his innate defects of character, he had thought when the disease clamped down after the birth of Junilla that she would turn on him with reproaches and criticisms; but she never had, even after the pain and burning in his gut during the night hours forced him to move to a separate sleeping cubicle. When every attempt at love-making had ended in the ghastly embarrassment of impotence, it had seemed kinder and less mortifying to remove himself physically; though he would have been content to cuddle and kiss, Servilia in the act of love was not cozy and not prone to dalliance.

So he answered her question honestly by saying, “No better and no worse than usual.”

“Husband, I want to talk to you,” she said.

“Of course, Servilia.”

“I am pregnant, and you have good cause to know that the child is not yours.”

His color faded from grey to white, he swayed. Servilia leaped to her feet and went to the console table where two carafes and some silver goblets resided, poured un-watered wine into one and stood supporting him while he sipped at it, retching slightly.

“Oh, Servilia!” he exclaimed after the stimulant had done its work and she had returned to her chair.

“If it is any consolation,” she said, “this fact has nothing to do with your own illness and disabilities. Were you as virile as Priapus, I would still have gone to this man.”

The tears gathered in his eyes, poured faster and faster down his cheeks.

“Use your handkerchief, Silanus!” snapped Servilia.

Out it came, mopped away. “Who is he?” he managed to ask.

“In good time. First I need to know what you intend to do about my situation. The father will not marry me. To do so would diminish his dignitas, and that matters more to him than I ever could. I do not blame him, you understand.”

“How can you be so rational?” he asked in wonder.

“I can see little point in being anything else! Would you rather I had rushed in squalling and screaming, and made what is still our business everyone's business?”

“I suppose not,” he said tiredly, and sighed. The handkerchief was tucked away. “No, of course not. Except that it might have proved you are human. If anything about you worries me, Servilia, it is your lack of humanity, your inability to understand frailty. You bore on like an auger applied to the framework of your life with the skill and drive of a professional craftsman.”

“That is a very muddled metaphor,” said Servilia.

“Well, it was what I always sensed in you—and perhaps what I envied in you, for I do not have it myself. I admire it enormously. But it isn't comfortable, and it prevents pity.”

“Don't waste your pity on me, Silanus. You haven't answered my question yet. What do you intend to do about my situation?”

He got up, supporting himself by holding on to the back of his chair until he was sure his legs would hold him up. Then he paced up and down the room for a moment before looking at her. So calm, so composed, so unaffected by disaster!

“Since you don't intend to marry the man, I think the best thing I can do is move back into our bedroom for enough time to make the child's origin look like my doing,” he said, going back to his chair.

Oh, why couldn't she at least accord him the gratification of seeing her relax, or look relieved, or happy? No, not Servilia! She simply looked exactly the same, even within her eyes.

“That,” she said, “is sensible, Silanus. It is what I would have done in your situation, but one never knows how a man will see what touches his pride.”

“It touches my pride, Servilia, but I would rather my pride remained intact, at least in the eyes of our world. No one knows?”

“He knows, but he won't air the truth.”

“Are you very far along?''

“No. If you and I resume sleeping together, I doubt anyone will be able to guess from the date of the child's birth that it is anyone's but yours.”

“Well, you must have been discreet, for I've heard not one rumor, and there are always plenty of people to let slip rumors like that to the cuckolded husband.”

“There will be no rumors.”

“Who is he?” Silanus asked again.

“Gaius Julius Caesar, of course. I would not have surrendered my reputation to anyone less.”

“No, of course you wouldn't have. His birth is as great as rumor says his procreative equipment is,” said Silanus bitterly. “Are you in love with him?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I can understand why, for all that I dislike the man. Women do tend to make fools of themselves over him.”

“I,” said Servilia flatly, “have not made a fool of myself.”

“That's true. And do you intend to go on seeing him?”

“Yes. I will never not see him.”

“One day it will come out, Servilia.”

“Probably, but it suits neither of us to have our affair made public, so we will try to prevent that.”

“For which I should be grateful, I suppose. With any luck, I'll be dead before it does.”

“I do not wish you dead, husband.”

Silanus laughed, but its note was not amused. “For which I ought to be grateful! I wouldn't put it past you to speed my quittance if you thought it might serve your purposes.”

“It does not serve my purposes.”

“I understand that.” His breath caught. “Ye gods, Servilia, your children are formally contracted to be married! How can you hope to keep the affair secret?”

“I fail to see why Brutus and Julia endanger us, Silanus. We do not meet anywhere in their vicinity.”