The Grass Crown (23 page)

“Did you truly not have any idea who I am?”

“None at all,” he said, not quite happily. “I’ve never seen you in my life.”

“Not even once? Did you never walk out onto Gnaeus Domitius’s balcony and see me on my brother’s balcony above?”

“Never,” he said.

She sighed. “I saw you many times over many years.”

“I’m profoundly glad you liked what you saw.”

She cuddled into his shoulder. “I fell in love with you when I was sixteen years old,” she said.

“How perverse the gods are!” he said. “Had I looked up and seen you, I wouldn’t have rested until I married you. And we would have many children, and neither of us would be in this awful situation now.”

To turn and cling together was instinctive, a mixture of pleasure and pain.

“Oh, it will be terrible if they find out!” she cried.

“Yes.”

“It isn’t fair.”

“No.”

“Then they must never find out, Marcus Porcius.”

He writhed. “We should be together with honor, Livia Drusa, not guiltily.”

“There is honor,” she said gravely. “It’s only our present circumstances make it seem otherwise. I am not ashamed.”

He sat up, hugged his knees. “Nor I,” he said, and took her back into his arms and held her until she protested, for she wanted to look at him, so beautifully put together, long-armed and long-legged, skin cream and hairless, his scant body hair the same fiery color as on his head. His body was well knit and muscular, his face bony. Truly King Odysseus. Or her King Odysseus, anyway.

It was late afternoon when she left him, having arranged that they would meet at the same place and time on the morrow, and they took so long making their farewells that by the time she reached Drusus’s house, the builders had done with their work for the day. Her steward, Mopsus, was on the point of marshaling everyone to start looking for her. So happy and uplifted was she that realities of this nature hadn’t even occurred to her; standing in the fading light blinking stupidly at Mopsus, she had not the wits to think of reason or excuse.

Her appearance was appalling. The hair hung down her back in a tangle liberally larded with bits of twig and grass, great smears of mud marred her clothes, the sensible closed shoes she had worn now dangled by their straps from her hand, her face and arms were dirty, her feet covered in mud.

“Domina, domina, what happened?” cried the steward. “Have you had a fall?”

Her wits returned. “Indeed I have, Mopsus,” she answered cheerily. “In fact, I fell about as far as I could, and live.”

Surrounded by clucking servants, she was swept into the house. An old bronze tub was produced, put in her sitting room, filled with warm water. Lilla, who had been crying because Mama was missing, trotted off now in the wake of her nurse to eat a delayed dinner, but Servilia followed her mother unobtrusively and stood in the shadows while a girl unfastened the clasps of Livia Drusa’s gown, clicking her tongue at the state of Livia Drusa’s body, dirtier than her clothes.

When the girl turned away to see that the water was the right temperature, Livia Drusa, naked and unashamed, stretched her arms above her head so slowly and voluptuously that the unnoticed little girl beside the door understood the meaning of the gesture on some utterly primitive, atavistic level only time would elucidate. Down came the arms, up went their hands to cup the full but lovely breasts; Livia Drusa’s thumbs played with her nipples for a moment, while Livia Drusa’s mouth smiled and smiled and smiled. Then she stepped into her bath, turned so her girl could trickle water down her back from a sponge, and so didn’t see Servilia open the door and slip out.

At dinner—which Servilia was allowed to share with her mother—Livia Drusa chattered away happily about the pear she had eaten, the first crocus, the dolls in the tree above the boundary shrine, the little brook she had found, even details of an imaginary fall many feet down a steep and muddy bank. Servilia sat, eating daintily, her expression neutral. An outsider looking at them would have judged the mother’s face that of a happy child, and the child’s face that of a troubled mother.

“Does my happiness puzzle you, Servilia?” the mother asked.

“It’s very odd, yes,” said the child composedly.

Livia Drusa leaned forward across the small table at which both of them sat and tucked a strand of black hair out of her daughter’s face, genuinely interested for the first time in this miniature reproduction of herself. Back rushed the past, her own desolate childhood.

“When I was your age,” Livia Drusa said, “my mother never took any notice of me. It was Rome responsible. And just recently I realized Rome was having the same effect on me. that’s why I moved us to the country. that’s why we’re going to be living on our own until tata comes home. I’m happy because I’m free, Servilia! I can forget Rome.”

“I like Rome,” said Servilia, sticking out her tongue at the various plates of food. “Uncle Marcus has a better cook.”

“We’ll find a cook to please you, if that’s your worst complaint. Is it your worst complaint?”

“No. The builders are.”

“Well, they’ll be gone in a month or two, then things will be more peaceful. Tomorrow”—she remembered, shook her head, smiled—“no, the next day—we’ll go walking together.”

“Why not tomorrow?” asked Servilia.

“Because I have to have one more day all to myself.”

Servilia slipped from her chair. “I’m tired, Mama. May I go to bed now, please?”

And so began the happiest year of Livia Drusa’s life, a time when nothing really mattered save love, and love was called Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, with a little bit left over for Servilia and Lilla.

Very quickly they settled into a pattern, for of course Cato didn’t spend much time on his Tusculan farm—or hadn’t, until he met Livia Drusa. It was necessary that they find a more secure rendezvous, one where they wouldn’t be seen by a farm worker or a wandering shepherd, and one where Livia Drusa could keep herself clean, tidy, presentable. This Cato solved by evicting a family who lived in a tiny secluded cottage on his estate, and announcing to his world that he would use it as a retreat, as he wanted to write a book. The book became his excuse for everything, especially for protracted absences from Rome and his wife; following in the footsteps of his grandfather, this opus was to be an extremely detailed compendium about Roman rural life, and would incorporate every kind of country spell, rite, prayer, superstition, and custom of a religious nature, then would go on to explain modern farming techniques and activities. No one in Rome found its genesis at all surprising, given Cato’s family and background.

Whenever he could be in Tusculum they met at the same hour each morning, for Livia Drusa had established this as her own private and personal time because the children were doing their lessons, and they parted—an emotional business—at noon. Even when Marcus Livius Drusus came down to see how his sister was faring and how the renovations to the farmhouse were proceeding, Livia Drusa continued her “walks.” Of course she was so obviously happy in such a simple and artless way that Drusus could only applaud his sister for her good sense in relocating; had she displayed signs of nervousness or guilt, he might have wondered. But she never did, because she thought of her relationship with Cato as just, right, proper—deserved and deserving.

Naturally there were awkwardnesses, especially in the beginning. To Livia Drusa, the chief one was her beloved’s dubious ancestry. This no longer worried her to the extent it had when Servilia Caepionis had first explained who he was, but it did niggle at her still. Luckily she was too intelligent to tax him with it openly. Instead, she sought ways to bring the subject up that would not give him reason to think she looked down on him—though of course she did look down on him. Oh, not with patronization or malice! Only with a regret founded in the security of her own impeccable ancestry; a wish that he too could participate in this most Roman of all securities.

His grandfather was the illustrious Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius—Cato the Censor. Of wealthy Latin stock, the Porcii Prisci had been sufficiently prominent to have held the Public Horse of Roman knighthood for several generations when Cato the Censor was born; however, though they enjoyed the full citizenship and knight’s status, they lived in Tusculum rather than in Rome, and had harbored no aspirations of a public nature.

Her beloved, she quickly discovered, did not consider his ancestry dubious at all, for, as he said to her,

“The whole myth originated in my grandfather’s character—he masqueraded as a peasant after some rarefied patrician sneered at him when he was a seventeen-year-old cadet, early in Hannibal’s war. The peasant pose delighted him so much he never changed it—and we think he was quite right to do so, if for no other reason than that New Men come and go and are forgotten, but who could ever forget Cato the Censor?”

“The same might be said of Gaius Marius,” Livia Drusa ventured diffidently.

Her beloved reared back as if she had bitten him. “That man? Now he’s a genuine New Man—an outright peasant! My grandfather had ancestors! He was only a New Man in that he was the first of his family to sit in the Senate.1”

“How can you know your grandfather only posed as a peasant?”

“From his private letters. We still have them.”

“Doesn’t the other branch of your family have his papers? After all, it’s the senior branch.”

“The Liciniani? Don’t even mention them!” said Cato in tones of disgust. “It is our branch, the Saloniani, who will shine the brighter when the historians of tomorrow write about the Rome of our time. We are the true heirs of Cato the Censor! We put on no airs and graces, we honor the kind of man Cato the Censor was—a great man, Livia Drusa!”

“Yet masqueraded as a peasant.”

“Indeed! Rough, bluff, outspoken, full of the old ways, a real Roman,” said Cato, eyes shining. “Do you know, he drank the same wine his slaves drank? He never plastered his farmsteads or his country villas, he wouldn’t have a piece of tapestry or purple cloth in his Roman house, and he never paid more than six thousand sesterces for a slave. We of the Saloniani have continued in his tradition, we live the same way.”

“Oh, dear!” said Livia Drusa.

But he didn’t notice this evidence of dismay, he was too involved in explaining to his little Livian love how wonderful a man Cato the Censor had been. “How could he really have been a peasant when he became the best friend of a Valerius Flaccus—and upon moving to Rome, was the best orator and advocate of his or any other time? To this day, even overrated experts like Crassus Orator and old Mucius Scaevola the Augur admit that his rhetoric was peerless, that no one has ever used aphorism and hyperbole better! And look at his written words! Superb! My grandfather was educated in the grand manner, and spoke and wrote a Latin so well thought out that he never needed to draft.”

“I can see I must read him,” said Livia Drusa, ever so slightly dryly; her tutor had deemed Cato the Censor beneath her attention.

“Do!” said Cato eagerly, putting his arms around her, drawing her body between his legs. “Start with his Carmen de Moribus, it will give you an idea of how moral a man he was, how properly Roman. Of course, he was the first Porcius to bear the cognomen Cato—until then, the Porcii had been cognominated Priscus—and doesn’t that tell you how ancient our stock is, that it was called Ancient? Why, my grandfather’s grandfather was paid the price of five Public Horses killed under him while fighting for Rome!”

“It’s the Salonianus concerns me, not the Priscus or the Cato. Salonius was a Celtiberian slave, was he not? Whereas the senior branch can claim descent from a noble Licinia, and from the third daughter of the great Aemilius Paullus and Scipio’s eldest Cornelia.”

He was frowning now; this statement definitely smacked of Livian snobbishness. But she was gazing up at him wide-eyed and adoring, and he was so very much in love with her; it wasn’t her poor little fault that she had not been properly informed about the Porcii Catones. It was up to him to convert her.

“Surely you know the story of Cato the Censor and Salonia,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“No, I don’t, meum mel. Tell me, please.”

“Well, my grandfather didn’t marry for the first time until he was forty-two. By then he had been consul, won a great victory in Further Spain, and celebrated a triumph—he wasn’t greedy! He never took a share of the spoils or sold the captured prisoners for his own pocket! He gave everything to his soldiers, and their descendants still love him for it,” said Cato, so enamored of his grandfather that he had forgotten the point of his story.

She proceeded to remind him. “So it was at the age of forty-two that he married the noble Licinia.”

“That’s right. He had one child by her, his son Marcus Licinianus, though it seems he was very attached to Licinia. I don’t know why there weren’t more children. Anyway, Licinia died when my grandfather was seventy-seven years old. After her death he took one of the household slave girls into his bed and kept her there. His son Licinianus and his son’s wife, the high-born lady you’ve already referred to, were living in his house, naturally. And they were outraged by his action. It appears he made no secret of it, and permitted the slave to strut around as if she owned the place. Soon all of Rome knew what was going on, because Marcus Licinianus and Aemilia Tertia told everybody. Everybody, that is, except Cato the Censor. But of course he found out what they were saying all over the city, and instead of asking them why they had said nothing to him of their outrage, my grandfather quietly dismissed the slave girl very early one morning, and set off for the Forum without telling them the girl was gone.”

“How very odd!” said Livia Drusa.

Cato chose not to comment upon her comment, but went on. “Now Cato the Censor had a freedman client named Salonius, a Celtiberian from Salo who had been one of his slave scribes.

“'Ho there, Salonius!' said my grandfather when he reached the Forum. 'Have you found a husband for that pretty daughter of yours yet?'”