The Uncertain Hour (7 page)

“That’s the only reason you’re here, isn’t it? You people disgust me, you really do. Still, I think you’ll be pleased.”

Petronius and Cornelia glided toward the door, and the others followed, making a cheerful noise. But at the top of the stairs, they paused and gasped collectively. Even Petronius himself, who had given the orders, could not help but be impressed.

At the center of the terrace, the great pergola of Lebanese cedar had been hung with garlands of fragrant melilot entwined with roses, drooping between the crossbars and spiraling down the posts. Chains of silver bore crystal lamps like sparkling fruit, twinkling and winking among the viburnum, shrouded in the smoke rising from censors of myrrh and filtering through the leafy canopy, twisting off into braids that climbed and vanished on a steady, gentle breeze into the cloudless night. A sliver of yellow moon quivered over Pithecusa. The air was laced with thyme, incense, and burning fennel.

Beneath the pergola, the great semicircular dining couch had been prepared for nine, overlaid with mattresses, cushions, and a single vast counterpane of purple silk embroidered with gold and silver thread, which glowed and pulsed in the crystalline lamplight. The couch was sheltered from the wind on two sides by a great hinged scrim of Nile reeds, painted and lacquered in gleaming scarlet with Egyptian motifs, that Petronius’s greatgrandfather was said to have procured from the household of Cleopatra during his prefecture of Egypt. The surface of the water table, an ornamental pool at the axis of the couch, was afloat with small ceramic dishes and lamps in the form of pleasure craft and waterfowl; the dishes, nudged toward the diners’ side by a plashing fountain, held mounds of olives, nuts, and relish. Larger bronze platters rested on the basin’s edge, heaped with cold steamed fish, raw oysters and vinegar on beds of crushed ice, the roast eggs of songbirds, and figpeckers baked in peppered egg yolk. Nine slaves, one per diner, stood at the ready around the couch to help the guests with their sandals and provide them with napkins and goblets.

Melissa was at his side, resting gently against him. He put his arm around her waist and spoke to her in a whisper.

“Are we not to have any time to talk in private?” “Are you sure that’s what you want, Titus?” she replied. “You’ve had me to yourself all week and done nothing about it.”

“I need … I’ve needed to find the right words to say to you.”

“I’ll be here when you’ve found them.” And she moved on down to where Lucilius awaited her with outstretched arm. Petronius followed her with his eyes. Was it that she’d changed so much since that day, eight years earlier, when they’d met in the ruined merchant’s house, or that she’d changed not at all?

PETRONIUS SQUINTED INTO
the dark shadows of the peristyle, and was just able to discern the silhouette of a cloaked woman. She stepped into the courtyard, but the light was failing there, too, and he could make out no distinguishing features of her face.

“Who are you?” he demanded sharply.

“An art lover, like you,” she said somberly.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here, Governor?”

“You know me?”

“Everybody in Prusa knows everybody else. You’re the only man in Prusa I don’t know, so you must be the governor.”

She was an Italian, with a powerful Cisalpine accent, perhaps from Mutina or Verona. Petronius thought she might be a whore, especially given her impudent way of answering questions with questions. Perhaps he had interrupted an assignation—this dismal relic would certainly offer a discreet trysting spot in a town where privacy was at a premium—and her client was lying low somewhere nearby, waiting for an opportune moment to make his escape. And yet it seemed unlikely that an Italian whore should have found her way to this dreary provincial city. That she was of the lower classes, in any case, was perfectly clear. Petronius took her for a soldier’s wife.

“I ask you again: What are you doing here?”

“There are few enough places in this city where a woman can go to be alone with her thoughts. Now there’s one less.”

“Why should a respectable woman need to be alone with her thoughts?”

“Why should the ruler of a great Roman province spend his afternoons dreaming among the ruins?”

“I’ll escort you to the barracks.”

“Thank you, Governor.”

They walked through the darkened streets, instinctively choosing the smaller and less frequented ways, neither of them wishing to be recognized, either individually or in each other’s company, though it would have made little difference in any case, as the town was as vacant and silent as if it had been evacuated before an oncoming army. Every so often, they passed beneath a torch or lamp placed at important intersections, and as they did he would turn to get a better look at her. She kept her head down and held the hood of her cloak tightly beneath her chin, so he had to be content with fleeting glimpses. She was not young, perhaps in her late twenties, but her posture was upright and strong, her gait confident in the incongruous fur boots she wore—swag, no doubt, from one of her husband’s campaigns in the north. Her hair appeared to be the lightest brown, almost blond, and her full lips, though somewhat dry and cracked, betrayed a kind of erotic or sensual disdain. Her nose was small and sloped, a legacy of the Gallic invasions of centuries past.

Her name was Melissa Silia. Her husband was Aulus Junius, a centurion of the local cohort, attached to the Fourth Scythian. Petronius knew it by reputation, a legion despised by the high command for its laxity and want of fighting spirit. Aulus had seen some action in Illyria and Pannonia, and had risen through the ranks on the basis of plodding, brutal competence, but since then had been posted from one dismal backwater to the next. He and his wife had lived in Prusa for the past three years; it would probably be his last posting, as he was to retire within eighteen months. He had not yet decided whether to settle on his allotment on the River Savus in Illyria, there to raise beans and cabbage, or to sell the allotment and return to his family cooperage in Cremona. The couple had no children.

All this she told Petronius with detached candor, as if providing the biographical background of a stranger at a judicial inquiry. It came pouring out of her unbidden, and yet, for all her frankness, there was something hard about her, something that had been damaged long ago and poorly reset. She didn’t need to tell him how miserable her life was—that came through eloquently just in the cold facts—or that she held her husband in haughty disdain. It would have been improbable, Petronius imagined, to endure a life one hated for so long and not to develop calluses. He sensed that he was not the first stranger to whom she had related this story. It came out of her almost as if by rote, the way a refugee might tell the tale of her lost family to every passer-by, in the forlorn hope of hitting on that one in a million who had relevant information. It was also as if she didn’t fully grasp the significance of the accumulated facts—as if, were she to explain them patiently enough to all who would listen, someone out there would finally be able to tell her what they meant. That was it—she seemed to be in shock, unable to absorb the enormity of the disaster that had befallen her. Petronius had seen civilians behave that way in warfare, following the destruction of their community and family.

She told him that she was the daughter of a Cremona cooper who had married her off to the son of his rival in the hope of consolidating their businesses and monopolizing the local trade. Her new husband, ambitious but stupid, had instead joined the military shortly thereafter, with forlorn dreams of glory. In his absence, she had gone to live with her in-laws, who had treated her with bullying contempt, more like a slave than a daughter. She had been lively and flighty then, and had begged her own father to take her back, to no avail. Ultimately, and against all odds, her husband had been promoted again and again, having been consigned to the ninth cohort of his legion, the weakest and therefore the one from which the ablest soldiers were transferred elsewhere. When he was promoted to centurion, he sent for her, and she had lived in military barracks ever since. He had seen no action in many years, and thus had had no opportunity to enrich himself on booty, his dreams of glory faded to dull anticipation of a comfortable retirement.

All who are born poor believe they were born for something better, that some mistake has been made. She never once suggested that she was more sensitive, more artistic, or more receptive than her peers, but it seemed obvious that she must have been. What kind of soldier’s wife moons about in ruined courtyards over ancient statuary? Either she was incubating her dreams, or she was mourning them.

She did not say what had become of those dreams; she didn’t need to. She had no education to speak of, and was somewhat vulgar of speech, but a ferocious intellect blazed in every word she uttered. Having been raised with no great expectations above her sex and station had not prevented her from being bitterly disappointed in life. She was bright enough to recognize that her misery, having failed to devolve into resignation or blindered complacency, remained her saving grace. Miraculously, after all these years, she still seemed to cling to some desperate scrap of hope that something might yet be salvaged from the debacle, and as a result she was afraid of nothing. Why else would she be walking through the dark streets with a total stranger?

They walked in silence for some time, Petronius awed and enchanted by her body language and tone of voice, to which he paid the closest attention. She seemed to be telling him all this not in any attempt to elicit his sympathy, but rather simply because he was there, a convenient sounding board for private thoughts that had outgrown their confinement. It was unlikely that she had anyone in her personal life in whom to confide them, but then again, how unusual it would be to find someone, anyone, of her Stoic thoughtfulness in a provincial military outpost.

“You’ve given this a great deal of thought,” he said finally.

She shook her head and dropped her shoulders. “I have a great deal of time on my hands.”

“And how have you determined to resolve your dilemma?”

Again she shook her head. “I don’t understand your question, Governor.”

“What are you going to do about it, Melissa Silia?”

She laughed, and a spark of lamplight glanced off a white tooth. “I’m not stupid, Governor. I know what you asked me; I just don’t know how you could ask it. What would you expect me to do, a thousand miles from home, a woman with nothing but her good name to protect her? Should I seek a divorce, do you mean, and somehow find my way back to Cremona, where no one wants me?”

Petronius thought he knew what she might do, but her questions had been purely rhetorical.

She went on coolly, unruffled. “As it happens, I have already resolved my dilemma. I resolve it anew every day, by taking refuge in my own thoughts and milking the consolations of philosophy.”

“Is that why you are speaking so brazenly to me?”

She stopped in her tracks and looked up at him, but still he could make little of her face in the dark.

“Am I brazen? I suppose I am. You seem like a nice man.”

Now it was Petronius’s turn to laugh. “If that’s all it takes,” but he held back when he sensed that he had offended her. “Forgive me.”

“That’s all right. It doesn’t change anything.”

They went on again in silence, and by the time they began to slow their pace as they neared the barracks, Petronius was smitten. He would offer himself as her lover and give her a new life, a new future. Not now, but soon; she should not think him impetuous, or profligate in his gifts, or lightly enamored. Let her know that he was not the same as other men, that he was more than “nice,” that he had come to save her. How sweet would her gratitude be; how well he would reward it!

They stopped some few blocks from the camp gates; she would go the rest of the way by herself. There came the faintest glow from a kitchen hearth through the chink in a curtain; he positioned her so that it fell on her face. It was not much, but it was the best sense of her features he had yet had. She seemed to him to be very beautiful, her cheeks rosy from the cold, her eyes glistening. She lifted her face to his and he knew that she would let him kiss her if he wanted to, fuck her right there in the doorway, as she’d surely done before with other strangers generous enough to listen to her story. Instead, he bowed, wished her well, and walked away.