Caesar's Women (91 page)

He lifted his head. “You were there,” he said.

“I was. I have a very nice hiding place between the Curia Hostilia and the Basilica Porcia, so I don't emulate Fulvia.”

“What did you think was going on, then? Among the three of us, I mean.”

Her chin felt a trifle hairy; she must begin to pluck it. That resolution tucked away, she turned her attention to Caesar's question. “Perhaps when you produced Pompeius it wasn't anything more than a shrewd political move. But Crassus made me stand up straight, I assure you. It reminded me of when he and Pompeius were consuls together, except that they arranged themselves one on either side of you. Without glaring at each other, without a flicker of discomfort. The three of you looked like three pieces of the same mountain. Very impressive! The crowd promptly forgot Bibulus, and that was a good thing. I confess I wondered. Caesar, you haven't made a pact with Pompeius Magnus, have you?”

“Definitely not,” he said firmly. “My pact is with Crassus and a cohort of bankers. But Magnus isn't a fool, even you admit that. He needs me to get land for his veterans and ratify his settlement of the East. On the other hand, my chief concern is to sort out the financial shambles his conquest of the East has brought to pass. In many ways Magnus has hindered Rome, not helped her. Everyone is spending too much and granting too many concessions to the voters. My policy for this year, Servilia, is to get enough poor out of Rome and the grain dole line to ease the Treasury's grain burden, and put an end to the impasse over the tax-farming contracts. Both purely fiscal, I assure you. I also intend to go a lot further than Sulla in making it difficult for governors to run their provinces like private domains belonging to them rather than to Rome. All of which should make me a hero to the knights.”

She was somewhat mollified, for that answer made sense. Yet as Servilia walked home she was conscious still of unease. He was crafty, Caesar. And ruthless. If he thought it politic, he would lie to her. He was probably the most brilliant man Rome had ever produced; she had watched him over the months when he had drafted his lex agraria, and couldn't believe the clarity of his perception. He had installed a hundred scribes upstairs in the Domus Publica, kept them toiling to make copies of what he dictated without faltering to a room full of them scribbling onto wax tablets. A law weighing a talent, not half a pound. So organized, so decisive.

Well, she loved him. Even the hideous insult of his rejection had not kept her away. Was there anything could? It was therefore necessary that she think him more brilliant, more gifted, more capable than any other man Rome had produced; to think that was to salve her pride. She, a Servilia Caepionis, to come crawling back to a man who wasn't the best man Rome had ever produced? Impossible! No, a Caesar wouldn't ally himself with an upstart Pompeius from Picenum! Particularly when Caesar's daughter was betrothed to the son of a man Pompeius had murdered.

Brutus was waiting for her.

As she wasn't in a mood for dealing with her son, formerly she would have dismissed him curtly. These days she bore him with more patience, not because Caesar had told her she was too hard on him, but because Caesar's rejection of her had changed the situation in subtle ways. For once her reason (evil?) had not been able to dominate her emotions (good?), and when she had returned to her house from that awful interview she had let grief and rage and pain pour out of her. The household had been shaken to its bowels, servants fled, Brutus shut in his rooms. Listening. Then she had stormed into Brutus's study and told him what she thought of Gaius Julius Caesar, who wouldn't marry her because she had been an unfaithful wife.

“Unfaithful!” she screamed, hair torn out in clumps, face and chest above her gown scratched to ribbons from those terrible nails. “Unfaithful! With him, only with him! But that isn't good enough for a Julius Caesar, whose wife must be above suspicion! Do you believe that? I am not good enough!”

The outburst had been a mistake, it didn't take her long to discover that. For one thing, it put Brutus's betrothal to Julia on a firmer footing, no danger now that society would frown at the union of the betrothed couple's parents—a technical incest for all that no close blood links were involved. Rome's laws were vague about the degree of consanguinity permissible to a married pair, and were— as so often—more a matter of the mos maiorum than a specific law on the tablets. Therefore a sister might not marry a brother. But when it came to a child marrying an aunt or uncle, only custom and tradition and social disapproval prevented it. First cousins married all the time. Thus no one could have legally or religiously condemned the marriage of Caesar and Servilia on the one hand and of Brutus and Julia on the other. But no doubt whatsoever that it would have been frowned upon! And Brutus was his mother's son. He liked society to approve of what he did. An unofficial union of his mother and Julia's father did not carry nearly the same degree of odium; Romans were pragmatic about such things because they happened.

The outburst had also made Brutus look at his mother as an ordinary woman rather than a personification of power. And implanted a tiny nucleus of contempt for her. He wasn't shriven of his fear, but he could bear it with more equanimity.

So now she smiled at him, sat down and prepared to chat. Oh, if only his skin would clear up a little! The scars beneath that unsightly stubble must be frightful, and they at least would never go away even if the pustules eventually did.

“What is it, Brutus?” she asked nicely.

“Would you have any objection to my asking Caesar if Julia and I could marry next month?''

She blinked. “What's brought this on?”

“Nothing, except that we've been engaged for so many years, and Julia is seventeen now. Lots of girls marry at seventeen.”

“That's true. Cicero let Tullia marry at sixteen—not that he's any great example. However, seventeen is acceptable to true members of the nobility. Neither of you has wavered.” She smiled and blew him a kiss. “Why not?”

The old dominance asserted itself. “Would you prefer to ask, Mama, or ought it be me?''

“You, definitely,” she said. “How delightful! A wedding next month. Who knows? Caesar and I might be grandparents soon.”

Off went Brutus to see his Julia.

“I asked my mother if she would object to us marrying next month,” he said, having kissed Julia tenderly and ushered her to a couch where they could sit side by side. “She thinks it will be delightful. So I'm going to ask your father at the first chance.”

Julia swallowed. Oh, she had so much counted on another year of freedom! But it was not to be. And, thinking about it, wasn't it better the way he suggested? The more time went by, the more she would grow to hate the idea. Get it over and done with! So she said, voice soft, “That sounds wonderful, Brutus.”

“Do you think your father would see us now?” he asked eagerly.

“Well, it's grown dark, but he never sleeps anyway. The law distributing land is finished, but he's working on some other huge undertaking. The hundred scribes are still in residence. I wonder what Pompeia would say if she knew her old rooms have been turned into offices?”

“Isn't your father ever going to marry again?”

“It doesn't appear so. Mind you, I don't think he wanted to marry Pompeia. He loved my mother.”

Brutus's poor besmirched brow wrinkled. “It seems such a happy state to me, though I'm glad he didn't marry Mama. Was she so lovely, your mother?”

“I do remember her, but not vividly. She wasn't terribly pretty, and tata was away a lot. But I don't think tata truly thought of her the way most men think of their wives. Perhaps he never will esteem a wife because she's a wife. My mama was more his sister, I believe. They grew up together, it made a bond.” She rose to her feet. “Come, let's find avia. I always send her in first, she's not afraid to beard him.”

“Are you?”

“Oh, he'd never be rude to me, or even curt. But he's so desperately busy, and I love him so much, Brutus! My little concerns must seem a nuisance, I always feel.”

Well, that gentle, wise sensitivity to the feelings of others was one of the reasons why he loved her so enormously. He was beginning to deal with Mama, and after he was married to Julia he knew it would become easier and easier to deal with Mama.

But Aurelia had a cold and had gone to bed already; Julia knocked on her father's study door.

“Tata, can you see us?” she asked through it.

He opened it himself, smiling, kissing her cheek, hand out to shake Brutus's hand. They entered the lamplit room blinking, it was filled with so many little flames, though Caesar used the very best oil and proper linen wicks, which meant no smoke and no overwhelming odor of burning oakum.

“This is a surprise,” he said. “Some wine?”

Brutus shook his head; Julia laughed.

“Tata,” she said, “I know how busy you are, so we won't take up much of your time. We'd like to marry next month.”

How did he manage to do that? Absolutely no change came over his face, yet a change had happened. The eyes looking at them remained exactly the same.

“What's provoked this?” he asked Brutus.

Who found himself stammering. “Well, Caesar, we've been betrothed for almost nine years, and Julia is seventeen. We haven't changed our minds, and we love each other very much. A lot of girls marry at seventeen. Junia will, Mama says. And Junilla. Like Julia, they're betrothed to men, not boys.”

“Have you been indiscreet?” Caesar asked levelly.

Even in the ruddy lamplight Julia's blush was noticeable. “Oh, tata, no, of course not!” she cried.

“Are you saying then that unless you marry you will succumb to indiscretion?” the advocate pressed.

“No, tata, no!” Julia wrung her hands, tears gathering. “It isn't like that!”

“No, it isn't like that,” said Brutus, a little angrily. “I have come in all honor, Caesar. Why are you imputing dishonor?''

“I'm not,” Caesar said, voice detached. “A father has to ask these things, Brutus. I've been a man a very long time, which is why most men are both protective and defensive about their girl children. I'm sorry if I've ruffled your feathers, I intended no insult. But it's a foolish father who won't ask.”

“Yes, I see that,” muttered Brutus.

“Then can we marry?” Julia persisted, anxious to have it fully settled, her fate decided.

“No,” said Caesar.

A silence fell during which Julia began to look as if a huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders; Caesar had wasted no time in looking at Brutus, he watched his daughter closely.

“Why not?” from Brutus.

“I said eighteen, Brutus, and I meant eighteen. My poor little first wife was married at seven. It matters not that she and I were happy when we did become man and wife. I vowed that any daughter of mine would have the luxury of living out her years as a child as a child. Eighteen, Brutus. Eighteen, Julia.”

“We tried,” she said when they were outside and the door was shut on Caesar. “Don't mind too much, Brutus dear.”

“I do mind!” he said, broke down and wept.

And having let the devastated Brutus out to mourn all the way home, Julia went back upstairs to her rooms. There she went into her sleeping cubicle—too spacious really for that term—and picked up the bust of Pompey the Great from the shelf where it resided near her bed. She held it cheek to cheek, danced it out into her sitting room, almost unbearably happy. She was still his.

By the time he reached Decimus Silanus's house on the Palatine, Brutus had composed himself.

“Thinking about it, I prefer your marriage this year to next,” Servilia announced from her sitting room as he tried to tiptoe past it.

He turned in. “Why?” he asked.

“Well, your wedding next year would take some of the gloss off Junia and Vatia Isaurieus,” she said.

“Then prepare yourself for a disappointment, Mama. Caesar said no. Eighteen it must be.”

Servilia stared, arrested. “What?”

“Caesar said no.”

She frowned, pursed her lips. “How odd! Now why?”

“Something to do with his first wife. She was only seven, he said. Therefore Julia must be a full eighteen.”

“What absolute rubbish!”

“He's Julia's paterfamilias, Mama, he can do as he wills.”

“Ah yes, but this paterfamilias does nothing from caprice. What's he up to?”

“I believed what he said, Mama. Though at first he was quite unpleasant. He wanted to know if Julia and I had—had—”

“Did he?” The black eyes sparkled. “And have you?”

“No!”

“A yes would have knocked me off my chair, I admit it. You lack the gumption, Brutus. You ought to have said yes. Then he would have had no choice other than to let you marry now.”

“A marriage without honor is beneath us!” Brutus snapped.

Servilia turned her back. “Sometimes, my son, you remind me of Cato. Go away!”

In one way Bibulus's declaration that every comitial day for the rest of the year was a holiday (holidays, however, did not forbid normal business, from market days to courts) was useful. Two years earlier the then consul Pupius Piso Frugi had passed a law, a lex Pupia, forbidding the Senate to meet on a comitial day. It had been done to reduce the power of the senior consul, enhanced by the law of Aulus Gabinius forbidding normal senatorial business during February, the junior consul's month; most of January was made up of comitial days, which meant the Senate now couldn't meet on them, thanks to Piso Frugi's law.

Caesar needed the Assemblies. Neither he nor Vatinius could legislate from the Senate, which recommended laws, but could not pass them. How then to get around this frustrating edict of Bibulus's making all comitial days holidays?

He called the College of Pontifices into session, and directed the quindecimviri sacris faciundis to search the sacred prophetic Books for evidence that this year warranted its comitial days' being changed to holidays. At the same time the Chief Augur, Messala Rufus, called the College of Augurs into session. The result of all this was that Bibulus was deemed to have overstepped his authority as an augur; the comitial days could not be religiously abolished on one man's say-so.