Death of an Empire (47 page)

In his tasteful villa, Petronius’s beautiful wife, the chaste Gallica Lydia, reclined on her perfumed bed and wept as if her heart was breaking. Her pride in her patrician ancestry and her determination to be the perfect wife in the style of Galla Placidia had come crashing down from the moment Emperor Valentinian had made his first advances. Like Caesar’s wife, she had deflected his overtures as gracefully as she could, but Valentinian refused to listen to her polite rejections.

The shame burned within her, more potent than her fear of the emperor. When Gallica Lydia had returned from Valentinian’s palace, her husband was missing. Lydia was almost glad. Almost. She had been lured to the palace by her husband’s ring, trusting the messenger who had explained that she was ordered to attend upon the empress, Licinia Eudoxia, but the whole ruse became obvious when she found herself in a distant bedroom in the palace. Valentinian had offered her a sumptuous meal, as if the gross immorality of his actions was normal and gallant. She couldn’t bring herself to eat, lest she should vomit and further shame her noble ancestors.

The rape had not been the worst part of the whole business. Valentinian had taken her roughly as if she was a servant girl, but afterwards he had ordered her out of his room as if she was a woman of the streets. He had stated bluntly that he was tired and
wished to sleep, so a woman would be in the way. The dismissal, uttered so casually, cut her pride to its roots and tore it loose from her soul.

Even worse, she felt betrayed by her husband, who must have known the uses to which the family ring could be employed. The man who should have protected her was her ultimate betrayer. When Petronius returned and divined the situation, he swore his love and devotion and begged her to believe he hadn’t been aware of Valentinian’s plans for her seduction. But the eunuch had lowered his guilty eyes as she fled from Valentinian’s sanctum, and she had seen the servant’s lips curl with mirth. Then, three days later, a courier had delivered a message from Placidia, daughter of Valentinian and daughter-by-law of Flavius Aetius. The message was short, cloying and unkind, although only someone who was aware of Valentinian’s perfidy would recognise the evil intent behind the message.

To Gallica Lydia,

Honoured wife of Flavius Petronius Maximus.

Hail. I have heard you are indisposed, so my husband wishes me to relay to you his earnest hope that you will soon be well once more.

Unkind words and innuendo have been spread through the court, but I beg you to believe that no one in our house will listen, knowing the whole truth. Flavius Aetius reminds you that names cannot hurt, but he is well aware, from experience, that reputations are lost through unwise indiscretions. On the occasion of your visit to my mother’s house, he saw your disarray, but will not speak further on the subject in the hope that any scandal will wither on the vine.

I will close my ears to any unkind words that I should hear in the hope that you will remain a model of the Roman wife and a loyal subject of the Empire.

There is no need to respond to this message. I refuse to believe that you would choose to compromise my noble father but, perhaps, to silence the rumourmongers, it would be advisable if we did not meet in future.

If you refrain from dwelling on cruel gossip, perhaps this whole affair will soon be forgotten. As the Christos tells us, it is only the sinless who have the right to throw stones.

I shall pray for you.

Written by Flavius Aetius, Magister Militum,

For Livia Placidia,

Daughter, wife and friend.

Poor Lydia! Every word chopped away her confidence. She was obliged to ask Petronius to read the scroll to her, for like many women of her class she did not know her letters very well. Having demanded an accurate reading, she had been further humiliated when he had stumbled over the words. His face was red and swollen as he tried to comfort her clumsily when she had begun to cry, but a part of her brain was angry that he didn’t attempt to soften the ugly message through the device of harmless lies. Lydia knew she was being perverse, for she truly preferred to know the worst, but Petronius hadn’t even remonstrated with her when she demanded that every word on that hateful scroll should be spoken aloud.

The gulf between Petronius and Lydia widened into sullen silences as she found herself effectively ostracised by the patricians of Ravenna. Fortunately, she was unaware that Gaudentius was informing anyone who chose to listen that his noble wife had publicly prayed for Lydia’s compromised reputation, for such
knowledge would have caused her to rage and weep uncontrollably. As it happened, even as Petronius tried to protect her from the worst of the gossip, Lydia was insulted when she became aware of the whispering and giggling of some of her servants. Her old nurse, after much persuasion, eventually told Lydia the brutal truth that further lies were being bandied about the fair city of Ravenna – tales implying that the wife of Petronius Maximus was a harlot at worst, and at best a credulous fool who had tried to cement her husband’s standing with the emperor by trading her body for preferment.

Unkind whispers were not the worst of it, for Lydia could laugh off the suggestion that she hid a lascivious nature under a skin of feigned piety. When the gossip implied that she had been seduced because her husband had traded her body for a gambling debt, Lydia felt her heart begin to break. She had borne four living sons for Petronius. All were married advantageously and settled outside Italia, but her waist was still tiny, her feet and hands were delicate and her face was still unlined. The clean lines of her features and the perfection of her thick, white skin had defied time, and many men still watched Gallica Lydia with hot, lascivious intentions.

But Lydia had loved her older husband, although he was often foolish and hasty in his decisions, and responded with his emotions rather than with his reason. Even if he had been ignorant of the use to which Valentinian put his family ring, Petronius had not left the court when his wife became the subject of vulgar gossip. He had said nothing in answer to her critics, and continued to bow low to the emperor to maintain his position at court.

Her husband’s apparent indifference to the destruction of her good name was the most painful cross she had to bear. Petronius must not love her, so she had based her pride on the shifting quicksand of an unrequited devotion.

The misunderstandings that exist between husband and wife are commonplace in any marriage, but the tragedy for Gallica
Lydia lay with her inability to broach her feelings with Petronius Maximus. Dumb as she was with misery, her husband knew that something was seriously amiss with his wife, but his natural reserve with women made any confessions of guilty feelings quite impossible to repeat to her. Just as he brought no hint of his many frustrations at the emperor’s court home to Lydia, he did not expect to be confronted with her hurt feelings and shame. And so the silence festered between them.

Eventually, Lydia could cry no more and she rarely left her rooms, preferring solitude to the looks of pity or amusement in the eyes of her staff. She became pale and silent, a shadow of her previous self without the animation that had kept old age at bay. Hopelessness was her constant companion and silence became her lover.

For two months, Gallica Lydia withered. Desperate to avoid her dark, wounded and accusing eyes, Petronius began his campaign to poison the emperor’s mind against Flavius Aetius. With a fixed and implacable determination, Petronius used subtlety rather than warnings, by innuendo and apology rather than by character assassination. In short, he praised Aetius constantly and spoke with respect and reverence of the general’s strategic gifts, his capacity to survive all his commanders and his intelligence in marrying his children to useful allies. In particular, Petronius expressed admiration for Aetius’s cleverness in binding the Romanised Hun nobility to his person through the marriage of his youngest daughter, Flavia.

‘It would be easy, my darling,’ he explained to Lydia as he shared a simple evening meal with her in her rooms, ‘and it would be foolish to make disparaging remarks about the marriage of Valentinian’s daughter to Aetius’s son. The emperor would see any such warnings as spite. He knows how close Aetius stands to the throne, so I don’t need to belabour the point. But, puss, when I
remind the emperor that Aetius also has a son-in-law who is wealthy, and a Hun, then Valentinian will start to wonder.’

‘Good!’ Lydia murmured tiredly, and Petronius scanned her pallid face with real concern.

He was increasingly worried over the health of his frail but still lovely wife, which perhaps was the reason for quitting a game of chance early to return to his villa with its red-tiled roof and crisp white walls. As the afternoon shadows barred the forecourt with deep blue stripes, the bare poplars rattled their skeletal branches in the winter breeze coming in from the sea. A tang of salty air caught in the back of his nose and reminded him again of the sea journey to Ostia in company with Aetius’s daughter and her chaperon, and once again he relived the feelings of impatience that he had experienced at the realisation that he was being used as an escort for a spoiled girl who lacked even the distinction of patrician birth. Petronius should have been fighting the Hun, but he had been reduced to performing the insulting duties of a tame watchdog, not to mention fulfilling the role of a spy. At the time, Aetius had been distracted by Attila’s advance southward, but in spite of the urgency of the situation the general had also been obsessed with the whereabouts of a Celtic healer and his followers. The man, named in his heathen way after their sun god, Myrddion, had been interesting for any man of action, for the healer had confined himself to treating any sailors who were ill and watching the shorelines along the route of the voyage. Petronius had scorned to mention the Celt to Aetius, forswearing the role of eavesdropper.

Aetius had used him whenever they had met and, unpardonably, the general had used Petronius’s sweet and gentle wife nearly as terribly as had Valentinian, the man who raped her. Aetius was a pestilence, an evil that must be eradicated if Petronius was ever to sleep easily.

So Petronius was quietly angry when he tossed off his toga with
its narrow bands that indicated his pedigree. His steward rescued the fine wool from the tiled floor of the colonnade as Petronius strode towards the mistress’s rooms to assure her that he would be home to dine with her. When he knocked at her door, he heard no answer. Even with his ear against the heavy timber, Petronius could hear nothing in the stultifying silence.

He opened the door carefully in case Lydia should be sleeping, and wasn’t surprised to discover her curled like a weary child under the fine bleached-wool coverlet. Frightened in case he should disturb her, he almost tiptoed away, but something about her stillness and the quiet of the dim room made the hair rise on his arms.

‘Lydia?’ he called softly. The silence was eerie and he realised that her small dog lay curled around her feet. The little creature looked up at him with piteous eyes.

‘Lydia? Wake up, Lydia,’ he exclaimed, his voice rising as her stillness chilled his skin. When he gripped her thin shoulders to shake her to wakefulness, her flesh was icy.

Petronius let her corpse fall back upon the cushions on her bed. Her open hand, with the blue veins pathetically exposed at her wrist, filled his heart with pity, loss and a growing wave of hot, scarfing loneliness. Against his volition, a sob escaped from his tight throat so that the delicate, liver-spotted dog howled thinly in his own poignant misery. The small glass bottle that had held something very poisonous rolled off the sleeping couch and smashed to splinters on the tiled floor, releasing and giving voice to his misery. As man and dog howled in unendurable pain, the running servants could not tell which cry was human, so that they held their hands over their ears lest the gods forsake them.

In the heavy darkness, the senator wailed inconsolably behind the door he had locked to ensure that his wife could not be taken from him. The entreaties of his desperate steward were ignored by
the suffering Petronius, whose cries swirled through the villa and set the teeth of all the servants who dwelled within it on edge.

As Flavius Petronius Maximus gave voice to his pain, far away in the City of the Seven Hills Myrddion Emrys started and dropped the bowl of hot stew that he had been holding, so that the searing liquid splashed his feet and burned his flesh. Six pairs of eyes swivelled to watch him, shocked and staring.

Both Finn and Cadoc had seen those open, sightless eyes before, but Willa screamed shrilly and Bridie moaned once in shock and fear.

Myrddion stood up like a man in a trance and walked towards the windows, opening the rickety wooden shutters to their full extent. With eyes that saw a different world from the shadows of the dark city, Myrddion moaned . . . then began to speak.

‘Woe is come to you, City of the Romans, and you will burn before five years have passed. For fourteen days and fifteen agonising nights, the wild men will rip your fine old flesh apart before you crumble into ash.

‘Woe to your children, dead in their beds, for there is nowhere else for your people to flee.

‘Woe to your women who will be raped and enslaved, whether they be patrician, plebeian or slave. The barbarians will not care whether you suffer or die.

‘Your roads will lead to scattered hills of corpses and your aqueducts will shatter and run dry. Cursed are these hills when the last vulture has fled, for no Roman will ever wear the crown of Empire again. As slaves you will know the travails of defeat, people of Rome, and suffer the pain that you have inflicted on so many other enslaved peoples for more than twelve hundred years.