The Course of Honour (10 page)

‘Nudged into it, eh?' The custodian pretended not to understand him. ‘What's that racket over there?'

‘Overhauling the main catalogue, sir; quite a task. A lady who is helping reminded us about the two hundred thousand volumes Mark Antony lifted from the Library at Pergamum. Some poor dog must have recorded those! She said, did we realise that Cleopatra was just a girl who liked to curl up with a good read . . .' He subsided into giggles.

After a worrying pause the senator abruptly grinned too, transfiguring his face. ‘Sounds like Caenis!' He could hear her voice in his head, deceptive and crisp, as she made the daft comment. ‘Is she here?'

‘Not now.'

‘Ah.'

Another pause.

Eighteen months abroad was nothing to a man who had already lived away from home, doing his military service at a much younger, more impressionable age. Who could say what eighteen months might bring to an ambitious female slave?

He had expected Caenis to make her way. Yet there seemed an odd discrepancy today. He had marked her as a worker. Now she seemed to rely on others, while she merely went flitting from place to place never needing to lift her pen; for a slave she was taking horribly public risks.

‘Speaking of Caenis—I have something of hers I borrowed.'

‘You could drop in on her at Antonia's house, sir. You might be offered lunch!'

A much longer pause: Antonia's house? Drop in?
Lunch?

On rare occasions elderly citizens grew so incapable of managing their own affairs that unscrupulous slaves took over their property and ruled like monarchs in their homes, while the senile patrons were locked away in little rooms and starved . . . Still Antonia had family to protect her interests. Her son Claudius, though kept from public life, was an author and antiquarian—perfectly fit to supervise if ever his mother's capacities failed. And not Caenis, surely? Caenis could not be capable of abusing an old woman.

‘Thanks!' the senator contented himself with saying sternly in reply.

He went home. He had lunch by himself.

 

There were two hundred public bathhouses in Rome. Fortunately Phania and Melpomene had mentioned which one Caenis used.

He was struggling down the Clivus Tuscus from the main Roman Forum, dragging his tired train of attendants like a magpie's unwieldy tail, when Cornelius Capito came out of the bookshop on the corner, hailed him and tagged along. By then the baths were in sight, so he stopped to converse as a man was supposed to do. A detachment of
Guards came tramping straight up the centre of the road, grinding down anyone who meandered in their path; as the grumbling crowds pressed back into the gutters, Vespasian and Capito moved under the awning of a wineshop. Vespasian propped himself on the counter with its inset jars of red and white beverages; he paid for warmed measures for his acquaintance and himself, then spun a coin to the captain of his slaves so they too organised a round, glancing at him sideways, unable to believe their luck.

Vespasian's slaves knew now that there was a woman on his mind. They were still not sure if it was any particular one.

Capito gossiped happily of libel actions, charioteers, trade, the elections, his mother-in-law, his gambling debts, his barber's new Gallic pomades. A companion rarely had to answer him; he just liked a body there to spare him the ignominy of talking to himself . . .

There were two young women standing on the bathhouse steps.

‘What's up?' Capito demanded, when his companion's cursory attention dried up altogether. He bore no malice; he was only surprised that Vespasian had troubled himself to loiter so long. The man was affable, but not renowned for chat.

‘Wonder if I know that girl?'

Capito came to his shoulder.

One was a blonde, flimsily wrapped in a riveting crimson robe, with parcels spilling around her feet. She was exquisite, and no doubt exquisitely expensive. Cataracts of silver tumbled from her ears, flashing like cymbals in an amphitheatre parade; filigree ropes wound over her dramatic chest. She remained bare-faced and bare-headed, ignoring passersby while the bead-sellers, the augurs' bowl boys, the plasterers, pastry chefs and pensioned-off centurions all longingly stared at her.

‘It's Veronica,' announced Capito. At once a number of necks craned dangerously amongst their slaves. ‘Much sought after, and amenable to being sought! Want an introduction?'

The other debated the offer as long as was polite. His slaves watched him curiously, keen for him to try his luck. They knew that when he chose he never went short. They also knew that he reckoned never to pay.

‘Not my type.' He stroked his chin. Capito laughed.

Even from halfway down the street, Veronica's companion looked wondrously dignified.

The second girl—hardly a girl now—was wound several times in modest layers of cloth, wrapped around her body and over her head until her shape was completely disguised and her face invisible. Even so, that fine way she stood was all her own. Capito had said nothing about her. Nor did Vespasian. ‘Thanks, Capito.'

With a nod to his escort, he shed everyone and began to work nearer up the street.

He was waiting for the women to separate but despite the poor weather they were dawdling on the steps. He stopped, side-stepping under the portico of a butcher's shop, pretending to eye up a rack of Spanish hams.

At last: Veronica was being collected by a double sedan chair; behind its opaque talc windows lurked a shadowy figure, no doubt some well-gilded crab. She scrambled aboard. The other woman patiently helped hand in the parcels, then leant forwards to allow herself to be kissed goodbye. As she straightened, her mantle fell back from her head. It was definitely Caenis.

She looked different.

This Caenis had parted her hair in the middle, twisted back interesting loops above her ears with glinting combs, then pinned up all the rest in fantastic plaits. With a man's eccentricity he wondered first of all
why?
—before he realised from the smart, poised, elegant set of her head exactly why: that was how Caenis had been born to look. The real question was:
who paid for her hairdresser?

There was something wrong with her face. The defiant, demon-haunted look had been sharpened up with cosmetics—he could soon get used to that—and there was something else. Caenis had a strong face with a clear expression. He remembered the expression perfectly: the painful mixture of striving and mistrust. It had gone. Something had happened to her. Somebody had changed her. This Caenis looked strangely serene.

She had kept her knack of standing perfectly straight and still. She was trying to lift her mantle again, but blusters of wind constantly
snatched the edge from her hand. Vespasian arrived near enough to glimpse coral beads in her ears.
What bastard gave her those?

Then something astounding happened.

Caenis turned suddenly, calling to a wizened scrap who skipped out from a pillar with the thong of an oil flask wrapped around her wrist. It almost looked as if she had her own slave, though that should be impossible. A discreet litter drew up; Caenis and her companion hurried in and at once the steps were folded away, the half-door shut for them and curtains impenetrably pulled.

As Vespasian sprang forward to roar out her name, an unusually solid footman swung smack into his path.

‘Now, sir!'

Rome had turned upside down.

‘I want a word with that woman—' The chair was already moving off.

‘Not
that
one, sir! Try the racetrack,' advised the footman frankly, ‘or the Temple of Isis. Plenty of nice girls about.'

‘Thanks!' Vespasian observed civilly, though the girls at the racetrack were definitely not nice and the delicate creatures at the Temple of Isis were quite often not even girls. He let his cloak fall open so it was obvious he was wearing full senatorial fig. ‘Don't I recognise your passenger?'

‘I doubt it!' scoffed the footman, perfectly indifferent to anything less than a consular commander strung around with medals from at least three triumphal campaigns. But he condescended to let a junior senator grease his palm with half a denarius. ‘That's Caenis,' he admitted discreetly.

‘Antonia's slave?'

‘No, sir,' protested the footman, with a smirk that very clearly said,
Back off, laddio; she's out of your class!
‘Antonia's freedwoman!'

There was only one solution now: laddio backed off; scowled bleakly; and strode home to write Antonia's freedwoman a grovelling note.

 

 

 

 

V
espasian was brief:

O Lady! A rogue from Crete would very much like to see you!

T. F. V.

He had written to her before.

The letters Vespasian wrote to her from abroad had not been embarrassing effusions. Caenis knew a great deal about love letters, from scribing them for other people. She had been deeply relieved when her own correspondent did not eulogise her as the soul of his heart and the heart of his soul, nor describe her divine eyes as entirely the wrong colour, nor spend half a page announcing in gynaecological detail the intimacies she could expect upon his return. Juno be praised, he never exclaimed that she was just like his mother. Instead he possessed the gift of apt quotation and a fine eye for the absurd. He told her interesting facts about his province and rude anecdotes about the people with whom he dealt. Years later, when he had earned a wide reputation as a joker, Caenis still thought that none of Vespasian's reported wit was so wickedly funny as the letters that he had written to her as a young man from Crete.

She had expected him to practise his shorthand. In fact since she had given him her ciphering notes too, he used code. At the back of
her reference sheets he had found a system the teenaged Caenis once invented herself: ‘My Code: By Caenis' was excellent; without the key, it took Caenis herself three weeks to unravel Vespasian's first letter even though she had once been the star of her cipher class.

She took a long time to reply. Caenis had never written a letter for herself. Vespasian's second arrived before she had answered his first. Yet by the middle of his tour she too had found her style and her length; she settled into speaking directly with the candour that he obviously liked, and learned to enjoy herself. Enjoying herself was almost certainly a mistake, but she no longer cared.

 

For reasons she could not explain, Caenis had never mentioned to him that she had gained her freedom.

That year a sense of fatality had afflicted her mistress, Antonia. She was bound to feel the loneliness of a woman whose contemporaries had all gone, many in grim circumstances, which as an elderly lady she remembered more distinctly than her breakfast that morning. She was smitten by an urge to set things in order.

Discussing with Caenis the library which bore Octavia's name, for the first time she had reminisced about her mother. Abandoned by Mark Antony, Octavia had brought up single-handedly not only their own children, but first Antony's by his stormy marriage to Fulvia and, eventually, even his children with Cleopatra. ‘Not an easy woman, my mother,' Antonia had admitted. ‘Impossible not to admire her—I am sure even my father always did that—but she often seemed reproachful and difficult to like.'

This was an intriguing glimpse of the legendary, much-loved sister of Augustus, so famous for her goodness. Caenis ventured curiously, ‘Do you think if your mother had been less formidable, Mark Antony might have come back from Egypt?'

‘Oh no!' Antonia was definite. ‘Losing a man to a woman is one thing—giving him up to politics is final.'

On her birthday Antonia had freed several of her slaves who deserved retirement. Pallas was among them, rewarded by freedom and a large estate in Egypt for his good service with the letter about Sejanus.
Diadumenus, the Chief Secretary, took his deserved retirement; Caenis was to be promoted. Antonia had asked her to prepare the manumission documents, which at last gave her the opportunity to speak on her own behalf: ‘Madam, you know I have been saving since before I came to you. I want to ask to buy my freedom.'

Immediately there was a sense of strain.

She had known Antonia would not like it. Her patroness expected to plan her slaves' lives for them; in the Palace there had been much less scope for advancement but at least matters of business could be broached without irritating anybody else. She watched the old lady trying to be tolerant.

‘That will be unnecessary.' Reluctantly Antonia explained that Caenis was to be freed one day under her will.

‘Madam, I am grateful, but I should hardly enjoy looking forwards to your death.'

‘Oh, I don't enjoy it myself! Now be serious; I cannot let you waste your money.'

Caenis sat still. She would pay for her freedom if she had to, but it would take all her resources. She would have nothing at all to live on afterwards. She had a bitter grasp of financial needs. Yet she wanted to be free. She had saved what she knew to be a good secretary's price; she was desperate to realise her ambition now. So many disasters might intervene otherwise. A will could be altered; Antonia's heirs might not honour it; the Senate might change the law. Now that citizenship stood within her grasp through her own enterprise, Caenis could not bear to wait.

Antonia understood the situation. A secretary might not command the outrageous price of a handsome driver or a sloe-eyed dancing-girl but Caenis, trained in the imperial school and with such good Greek, was still a prize. The fact that she had managed to save her worth indicated strong willpower. Even with the offer of acquiring her freedom for nothing eventually, she would still be prepared for hardship in order to gain it now.

‘You have to be thirty years old.' Caenis felt younger, but since she did not know her age she bluffed it out. Antonia pursed her mouth yet let that issue drop. ‘You are forcing my hand, Caenis!'