The Course of Honour (43 page)

Vespasian was remembering that astrologer at the Theatre of Balbus who said her face could never be upon the coinage. On the obverse the old man, grinning with embarrassment; flip over—only some suitable religious scene: Mars perhaps, or Fortune. He needed a great coin issue; soon have to decide its design.

Not Caenis; no. Thinking of all the prinked madams who did make it through the mint—Messalina with corrugated rolls of hair all across her great fat head, or starched Livia with her long nose and that wild squint, or worst, Agrippina—he was glad. Caenis would never belong in that mad company. Besides, no dye-cutter could catch her character. And he would not like to see her debased, reduced, diminished to some staring nag in an improbable coiffure: Caenis slipping through the filthy fingers of fishmongers and fornicators; Caenis dropped down drains at all the outposts of the Empire; Caenis cemented under the footings of every barracks and basilica.

Yet the man in the booth had known it; she was his life's true reverse.

‘So much to tell you!' His voice was soft. Spotting her stiff look, he added wryly, ‘And no doubt one or two points of order you intend putting to me.'

Certainly: Cremona; the Flavian generals; Domitian; Sabinus; whatever Vespasian could have imagined he was doing when he let himself be lured into faith-healing at Alexandria . . . Caenis said none of it. For one thing, he knew. For another, he probably agreed with her.

‘I'm a republican,' she told him.

‘Every Caesar should keep one,' he returned patiently.

‘I shall always say what I think.'

‘Wonderful—' He moved abruptly. ‘Look at me, Caenis! Just look, will you? Well?'

‘What?' She pretended she could not fathom him. She noticed there were laughter lines, seamed white by the desert sun, at the corners of his eyes. ‘What?' she demanded again gruffly, though she knew.

‘Look here! This man collapsed on your couch is Vespasian—older, balder, paunchier, a little more scratchy and a great deal more
slow. Tired out with grief and sick of Eastern food, yet your man . . . Why won't you come?' he asked, and his tone dropped.

‘You would be disgraced—'

‘You're worth it.'

‘Oh stop staring!'

‘Stop ranting! I'm just looking at you. Such a relief to be in the same room again. See you. Hear your voice . . . To wonder which of us will win.'

‘You're enjoying this.'

‘Of course. Been longing for a wrangle with you.' Caenis was blindingly tired. She knew he could see it. He was offering to let her bury her weariness in him. ‘Your house was always so wonderfully peaceful, lass . . . You look all in; have you had anything to eat today?'

‘No.'

He was reaching for the handbell but she stopped him with a violent shake of her head. He gave her a look that said she would dine decently tonight if he had to grip her jaws and post in the food like feeding medicine to a sick dog. Caenis stared down at the floor. When she looked up again Vespasian mouthed her a kiss like some liquid-eyed lad lounging on the steps of a temple annoying female passers-by. She could not help it; she blushed.

‘You had better go,' she told him. ‘The banquet.'

He shrugged. He stopped flirting and became more businesslike. ‘Entirely up to you. If you don't want to go, we'll just have a quiet night in. I don't mind. Might as well enjoy my position. Entire city reclines at table formally, only to be told: the Emperor is having a bite of supper at home instead. Don't suppose they'll mind either, so long as they all get a nice slice of goose in sesame sauce and a pomegranate to take home.'

He was being ridiculous. Caenis ignored him.

He waited a short time then tried again. ‘Caenis; don't renege. I never asked you, “Live with me just until something better crops up.” '

‘No. No; you were always generous to me. Don't worry; I won't grizzle or throw vases or make you watch me cry—'

‘No,' he answered bleakly. ‘I remember that. But don't you know, your stricken face haunted me for twenty years?'

Caenis thought she knew. ‘I forgot to say,' she murmured, soothing him because he was upset, ‘you may of course keep my set of silver knives.'

‘Oh thanks! Those were all I was worrying about.' She saw him sigh slightly, still in a low mood. She gazed at him with smiling eyes until she knew he had rallied because he exclaimed, with one of his surges of energy, ‘Caenis, stop clinging to your rock like a stubborn winkle! Lass, you have your fixed view of what you are allowed—not much. An emperor invites you to dinner with all Rome, and you have to prove that you're still down-to-earth by cleaning out the lavatory yourself!'

‘I keep a tidy house,' she muttered defiantly.

‘You'll keep a tidy palace.'

‘After four emperors in eighteen months I dread to think what's clogging up the drains.'

‘Don't bring it to show me, that's all I ask—' He leant towards her more urgently since she had hinted at the possibility she might be there. ‘I want you to come—you must come!'

‘The Emperor commands!'

‘Don't be ridiculous; I was always polite to you.'

Caenis was running out of strength.

She took a deep breath. She told him bluntly she did not want to lurk at his Palace in some dark nook across a cold corridor, the sorry embarrassment from his past that he was too kind-hearted to shed. This dramatic declaration which she had been practising in her head for a year now rang less nobly than she had always hoped.

Vespasian had been listening noncommittally but he became more agitated suddenly. ‘Oh I know all
that
! I've known you a long time.' He shifted like some restless lion before the opening of the amphitheatre cages. ‘How do you intend I shall manage?' he mocked curtly. ‘Take on some slovenly cow who lies in bed with a couple of charioteers all day, then spends her nights watching tragic actors guzzling off my best plate and vomiting in the fountains afterwards? A prudish stick whose interest in politics means murdering me? Some wondrous
little teenager with big breasts and melting eyes who'll present me rather unexpectedly with twins? Or maybe those pimps in charge of the Emperor's pins and pots that I seem to have inherited can fix me a new girl every day, every hour if the correspondence can spare me and my stamina holds out. What a glorious position for a man to be in. I can have any woman that I want in the world; I can have them all!'

With this final explosion of satire, he collapsed. He was himself. ‘It won't do. I'm a plain man; Rome must take me as I am.' His eyes softened; Caenis closed hers, set-faced. She heard him laughing. ‘I remember you looking just like that one night, standing in the street—we had nowhere else to go—raving that you
liked
me; all the time you were absolutely terrified I was going to jump on you and rape you against a house-wall—and to tell the truth, I wanted you so badly I was terrified I would!'

‘I was just a slave; why didn't you?' Caenis asked coldly.

‘Same reason you were saying no.' Their eyes met. ‘Forget the rules,' he said. ‘We share our lives; we are a partnership; that is our way.'

Caenis protested hoarsely, ‘Oh Vespasian, you
cannot
!'

The Emperor adopted the formal air of a man who was about to make a speech. ‘Lady, there are only two things that I cannot do. You are a freedwoman; I am not allowed to marry you. Nor, therefore, can I make you an empress. You may never be Caenis Augusta; when we're dead you will not be invited by the Senate to join me as a god: neither of us takes
that
seriously—nor, I suspect, do the gods! But you were born in that Palace a slave; you shall rule it. You who were once Caesar's possession shall live equal to a Caesar of your own. I can give you no titles but while I live, Antonia Caenis, Caenis my darling, you shall have the state, the place, the position, the respect . . . No dark nooks in corridors. Our terms were to go side by side.'

It was a good speech. Caenis replied from a gentle heart, ‘We never had terms. You and I never sank to that. You and I managed with trust, decency, fondness for each other's quaint ways—and in a real crisis the fact, O my Caesar, that you owed me ten thousand sesterces!'

Unintentionally she had reminded him. At once he rose and came
a little way towards her. He pegged something solemnly under a lamp, then whistled quietly. ‘Don't argue. That's my banker's draft for you. No more votes for you to buy. I need four hundred million sesterces to put the Empire back on its feet but that can be arranged without your nest-egg now!'

Caenis was curious to know how a man who never managed to make any money for himself planned to find four hundred million sesterces for the State. His eyes gleamed, longing to explain. Vespasian's father was a tax collector; Rome had forgotten that.

‘You and I are square, lass. I pay my debts and I don't forget. Caenis, you have such faith in the public man: trust the private man too.'

She did. They were one. They laughed at the same things, grew angry at the same time, scoffed at hypocrisy in the same tone of voice. They were comfortable together; they were close. Their daily lives ran at the same pace. After four years away, the world and their own lives in upheaval, he had walked through that door—and really, neither of them needed to say anything at all.

She sat riveted by the banker's draft. The fact that Flavius Vespasianus owed her money had always been her lifeline; it kept one notional tie between them whatever else occurred. They did not need it any longer.

A yard away, he was waiting. The room had become very quiet.

‘Caenis, you daft old woman, be gracious to a poor old man.'

‘Is it what you really want?'

‘Yes. Oh yes!'

‘Why?'

‘You know very well why.' He seemed to have been saying that to her for years. Her chin lifted, telling him so. When for once he decided to explain, it was without fuss or drama: ‘I love you. I always did. I always will.'

Caenis could not answer him.

It seemed to Vespasian there was something wrong with her face. Her mouth had set in an odd line; her eyes were squeezed too tightly closed. It was so strange he felt temporarily crippled by doubt. Caenis held out her hand to him, helpless to reassure him any other way. He had never seen her cry before.

In amazement he flung open his arms. ‘Oh my poor lass!' The first sob, restricted for so long, hurt her throat. She was on her feet. With one stride he clamped her in a great, comforting imperial embrace. ‘Come here; come here to me—' He was wresting his bangle from her hand to slide it back over her wrist into its proper place. That she had taken it off must have been bothering him ever since he came in.
‘Oh Caenis, my dear love!'

He meant it. He had meant it all along. She bruised her forehead on the padded bosses of his rich embroidery.

 

People had come. Outside the door there were the restless shuffles and chinks of the Emperor's retinue filling her hall, parking their spears against her furniture and crowding down her passageways . . . the floors hardly dry and big men in gigantic boots trampling all over them. Vespasian ignored it. They could hear Aglaus in ecstatic form, giving the Palace rankers a good ear-bashing. Twelve lictors leant on their axes and wilted before his scintillating sarcasm. Praetorian Guards braced themselves for backchat while their centurion of the day felt the perspiration running helplessly between the cheek-guard of his helmet and his rigid jaw. Litter-bearers were wetting themselves with worry out on the public road; secretaries flexed their note tablets; a chamberlain with high blood pressure prepared to expire against the old fern tub on the step. The Emperor's chief wardrobe master had brought—upon a tiny crimson cushion with four slithery silken tassels—the Emperor's missing wreath.

‘There,' chortled Vespasian, aware of it all and yet oblivious. ‘Oh love; if it's all too much for you, however do you imagine that I feel? Blow your nose on the purple; never mind if the dye runs. You cry. Cry on the most important shoulder in the world; snuffle all over the silly gold braid.'

‘The wretched stuff will go green—' She knew about imperial embroidery.

She raised her damp face. The man she had loved all her life sniffed slightly himself just before he grinned. He was just the same. ‘Look—we'll have to go now.'

Caenis was still crying.

‘That's settled then. So are you ever,' enquired Vespasian curiously, ‘going to condescend to kiss the Emperor of Rome?'

She stopped crying. She wished she had thought of it before. ‘Titus,' she said, as if she had just remembered to welcome him home. ‘Titus—oh Titus, I'm so glad to see you!'

She waited until he had finished drying her face on the rather prickly edge of the imperial gown. It took some time because Vespasian was a soldier, so he carried out practical tasks with textbook thoroughness. Of all the luxuries she would be able to command, none would equal the careful attentions of those big familiar hands.

Then Caenis kissed the Emperor. She kissed him as fiercely as she had kissed him once before, intending the man to realise
exactly
how she felt. Enjoying it immensely, he allowed her to finish then this time kissed her back, with a tenderness that balanced her defiance and a glint in his eye that promised more to come. For a moment they stood locked together, sharing their own deep companionship and peace.

‘There's no winner,' Caenis told him.

He laughed. ‘No contest! You always were a challenge; that was understood. Now come home to your palace, lass, and dine in state with me!'

From the day Caenis met him, she had known what he might be. ‘You will be Caesar. And I—'

He gave her a tolerant look. ‘You will be Caesar's lady,' said the Emperor Vespasian.