The Course of Honour Read online

  There was nothing unusual in his expression itself. He always frowned in that grim way; people laughed at him but there was nothing he could do to change it. She recognised the horror only because every plane of that face had set rigid in misery.

  Her voice sounded remarkably ordinary. ‘Whatever’s the matter? Tell me.’

  He came right up to her. Apparently it felt inappropriate to kiss her. She did not want to be kissed – then she wanted it desperately. For a moment he placed both hands on her shoulders; meeting her stare, he let his arms drop.

  ‘You guess. A suitable woman has agreed to be my wife.’

  Caenis wanted to fight. She could never win. There was no enemy. She heard herself saying in a low respectable voice, ‘Quite right. Dear me; what took so long? Yes. You must. Well! . . . Rich, I hope?’

  Vespasian was drawing her to a couch where he made her sit, taking a place beside her, holding her hand – not so much to console her, for he would realise from her resistance that she could hardly bear to be touched, but as if he himself needed to grip some part of her in order to go on. ‘The rich ones,’ he confided greyly, ‘seemed curiously slow to take me up. She is not. Do you really want to hear?’

  Caenis closed her eyes. For some quaint reason she seemed to nod her head. ‘Other people are bound to tell me. I would rather have it from you.’

  ‘Well. Someone from Ferentium. Father in the financial service; not quite a provincial but she should understand my difficulties. Her father had to appear before a Board of Arbitration to establish her right to the full citizenship but I think it went through on the nod –’ He was using the tone which on other subjects had been his vehicle for asking her advice. He fell silent.

  ‘Good character?’ Caenis encouraged drily.

  He answered like a man under examination in the Senate on some imperial informer’s wild charge of impropriety: ‘Oh; all right!’ He relented. He sighed. He forced himself to be less offhand. ‘No; let’s be fair – a decent woman.’

  ‘You’ve seen her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Slept with her?’ Caenis demanded.

  ‘No,’ Vespasian answered patiently. Really it could not matter any more, yet Caenis was glad of that. ‘I had better tell you; she has been someone’s mistress – Statilius Capella, a senator from Africa –’

  Gods, she was nothing! Caenis snapped, ‘Excellent! A senator? Decent of you both to leave one free for the rest of us . . .’ She took back her hand and stood up, pacing the room.

  ‘Caenis, don’t.’

  He followed her, as she ought to have known that he would. She wanted to crouch in some dark place like a hurt beast. There was this dreadful need to be civilised. There was this appalling obligation: not to hurt him. She had no escape.

  ‘Caenis, I’m desperately sorry. Don’t be brave and bitter. Scream at me if you like, rant, rave, beat my chest with your fists, cry; cry all you want and I’ll probably join in –’ It was hideous; he was frantic.

  Caenis let him take her into his arms.

  ‘Titus, hush. It was brave of you to come. I appreciate your honesty. You don’t have to dread a scene.’

  She stood there, not responding, but leaning patiently up against him until, helpless, he let her go. ‘Shall I leave you now?’

  It was over. Everything was over.

  ‘Wait a moment; please.’ Her numb brain reminded her to make everything absolutely clear. ‘You know I shall not see you again.’

  ‘No.’

  He would not create difficulties. Nor would she, come to that. There was only one kind of discipline for either of them now.

  ‘Not even acknowledge you; it’s best . . . What are your plans?’ she asked more gently.

  ‘Oh – aedile, praetor, then start angling for an army post.’ His tone was more harsh than she had ever heard it. ‘The cursus honorum stretches idyllically away!’

  ‘Titus? Oh love, what is it?’ Caenis had to ask.

  It was Vespasian’s turn to move away. He stood rigid, that face still as drained of colour as it was of permitted emotion. He was quite obviously deeply upset.

  For the first and only time he said curtly, ‘You were right all along. We should never have done this.’

  There was nothing she could safely reply.

  She held him; what else could she do?

  ‘Stupidity.’

  ‘Never say that. Don’t devalue it.’ She folded her arms around him, rocking slightly, with her face against his, though safely turned away.

  She was surprised to hear anyone else so bitter: ‘Was it worth this?’

  And, ‘Yes!’ Caenis bellowed gloriously: Vespasian winced.

  By then they were laughing together, painfully verging on tears.

  ‘Oh Titus, Titus; don’t. I am supposed to make the fuss, not you. Ah you great soft-hearted wretch, how dare you be upset? Be a monster, damn you – be a man – be typical!’

  Ruefully he laid his forehead against hers. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Not good enough. Are you short of cash?’

  He was thunderstruck. ‘Oh Jupiter! What a ludicrous question –’ He had drawn back; she had steadied him; he had lost his temper; it would be all right. ‘In the first place, I’m always running short and in the second, lass, spare yourself that. You are not obliged to worry any more about me and my filthy bank account.’

  Caenis decided she would worry about just whomsoever in Hades she chose. ‘Never mind that. Listen. I have ten thousand sesterces; Antonia’s legacy. I can’t spend it, it’s my insurance, and I don’t want to trust it to a strong box in the Forum to be fiddled away by some obnoxious Eastern banker who smarms around his abacus trying for a kiss when all I want is a decent rate of interest –’ She was running out of breath.

  ‘No, Caenis. Caenis; not your savings –’

  ‘Yes! Borrow it; use it for your good. Enhance your state; buy some support. It won’t achieve much but it’s a gesture: somebody believes in you.’

  ‘It’s a wicked gamble,’ he scoffed.

  ‘A shrewd investment,’ Caenis quipped back. ‘I want you to have it; no one else in Rome is worth it. If I can’t have you, then by the Good Goddess I’ll help to make you – you owe me that!’

  He buried his face in his hands. His voice was very quiet. ‘I will send you the interest – and I will pay you back.’

  ‘Perhaps!’ Caenis barked, more like herself.

  ‘If you need it just ask me.’

  Since she was never intending to speak to him that would be difficult. ‘Titus – I must return this to you.’

  The bangle he had given her to celebrate her freedom was on her arm now; he had bought her occasional trinkets since – pins, a shell necklace, an ivory comb – but her only other good pieces were gifts from Antonia. Antonia’s presents had been of impressive antique workmanship, set with garnets, opals, tourmalines. Caenis’ gold bangle was to her still the most beautiful thing she had ever owned.

  Vespasian was furious at her offer. ‘No dammit!’

  ‘Is it paid for?’ she insisted. He never answered that.

  ‘Caenis, that’s yours; yours from me; yours to keep. If you don’t want it, all right get rid of it, but don’t tell me and don’t try to antagonise me by handing it back!’

  She assumed he had forgotten how both their names were engraved inside. Doggedly she pulled off the bangle and gestured to the lettering: ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You may do one day.’

  He folded his arms grimly. ‘Shall I really?’

  Caenis slowly replaced her gift, with a feeling of relief. He laid his hand there briefly where the gold burnt on the fine skin of her arm. Their eyes met. She whispered, ‘I’d like you to go now.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Are you all right?’

  Another question he refused to answer. So he was not all right: she was learning this language. She had after all been the star of her
cipher class.

  People were supposed to quarrel. Quarrelling made it bearable. Here they were, nursing one another through; something would have to be done: she, of course, would have to be the one who did it. ‘Just go – go now!’

  Men so liked to drag things out. ‘I’ll never forget you.’

  ‘Men always say that.’ How touching, thought Caenis, forced beyond the bounds of charity again, to be the romantic blossom a man chooses to remember from his youth.

  Vespasian argued anxiously, ‘Women say they’ll never forgive.’

  She was brisk. ‘Not me.’

  ‘No. Thanks, Caenis.’

  ‘Titus.’

  She stood quietly, with the humility a woman was expected to show, while Vespasian gently kissed her cheek to say goodbye.

  But at that, in her one gesture of absolute defiance, Antonia Caenis blazed with the love she was never permitted to acknowledge, as she seized him and kissed him back: fiercely and furiously, full on the mouth, intending that the man should know exactly how she felt.

  All things considered, he took it very well. She thought the bastard smiled at her in fact. So, with a regretful little smile from him, Caenis was left.

  And even then, she did not cry.

  The woman was called Flavia Domitilla. Veronica told her.

  ‘Capella’s mistress,’ she announced angrily. Caenis had been right; people did so want her to have to know. ‘Capella’s nothing; I don’t know why she bothered. Come to that, she’s nobody herself. Her father actually had to appear before a tribunal to disprove some claim that she was born a slave –’

  ‘She won’t be a slave,’ Caenis commented quietly.

  ‘I thought your high and mighty Flavians like to parade themselves as a respectable family?’

  Veronica fell silent. She finally realised that even where a mistress had always known disaster would be unavoidable, she might prefer to be abandoned for a person who was somebody.

  Once or twice in Rome Caenis saw Vespasian’s wife. She was neither beautiful nor fashionable; rather too dark, and bony-looking (thought Caenis, who was in that respect quite well made). Flavia Domitilla seemed neither happy nor unhappy. Still, she became the mother of a daughter and two sons; the elder boy was a charmer, people said. As far as Caenis knew, the woman’s husband treated her with good humour and respect. Perhaps he loved her; possibly she loved him. These were things that in Roman society remained private between a man and his wife.

  Marriage certainly helped his career. Flavius Vespasianus stood again for aedile; though he only scraped into sixth place on the list that did not matter since there were six vacancies. Two years later at the age of thirty he became eligible for the rank of praetor. At those elections Caenis almost missed finding his name in the Gazette: he had romped home, the first time he stood, right at the head of the list.

  PART THREE:

  THE HERO OF BRITAIN

  When the Caesars were Caligula and Claudius

  XVII

  Almost three-quarters of a century afterwards in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, the historian Suetonius had to mention Antonia Caenis in one of his essays on the Caesars. The Emperor Domitian had once been rude to her, which illustrated perfectly Domitian’s defective character for it was accepted that being rude to Caenis was the act of a charmless boor. In another way too, the freedwoman and secretary of Antonia the Younger was impossible for a historian to overlook.

  Caenis would have liked to know, during the next fifteen or twenty years, that she was working her way into the end of a paragraph in the work of a chronicler whose titles included not just The Lives of the Caesars but Famous Prostitutes, and as a particular highlight the slim volume Greek Terms of Abuse. She would have liked to own a dictionary of Terms of Abuse herself – in order, for one thing, to express more fluently her views upon historians.

  What were twenty years to a literary biographer? The period from one mad emperor, through another who was merely inconsistent and undignified, and on to yet another madman: undisciplined men with monstrous wives, a handful of territorial adventures, a lively set of poisonings and stabbings on stairways, a financial scandal here and a legal outrage there, ambition, greed, corruption, lust – just technical ingredients. Useless to rise up booming like a cow over its lost calf because a historian, who needs to move on his narrative slickly to the next cogent point (or the next racy scandal), has slid over in the second half of a sentence the whole dismal, humdrum, suffering course of the best years of some woman’s life.

  Caenis knew better than to hope her story would become the triumph of the obscure. She did not suppose it would even be told.

  So, once Vespasian had left her, she sat and listened to the silence of Antonia’s slowly dying house. No one here even knew of her devastating blow.

  This silence seemed to stretch ahead for the rest of her life. She might die young. Plenty did. Or she might last another forty years. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing expected of her; nothing for her to expect. All her duties to Antonia were done. There was nothing else.

  She considered the alternatives. She could set herself up in a pretty salon for the gentry – music and good conversation, raffish elegance and fairly clean sheets. She could live chastely in single state, being sour and strict with her own slaves. She could pool resources to buy a lock-up shop with some skinny freedman: marry him, and snap at him, and struggle. She could in fact marry anyone in the Empire she liked, except the six hundred men who were members of the Senate. Augustus had debarred those from marrying freedwomen; he decently allowed the senators anybody else, though he obviously preferred them to stick at one another’s sisters, daughters and aunts. (Caenis had always reckoned that otherwise there was not much chance for some of the senatorial sisters, daughters and aunts.) Vespasian had not even managed that: his new wife’s father was only a knight.

  She could jump off a bridge. Useless; she swam too well.

  She could simply go on, as she had always known she must.

  So she went on. Her patroness would have expected it. More importantly she expected it of herself.

  Afterwards she was proud of her tenacity, and glad. Glad because having lived her own life she could value all the more the rewards she eventually did win; glad too because it made her braver when she realised that she had to give them back.

  Her first action now was to find somewhere new to live. Born in a palace, she went to live in a slum. Caenis, who had spent her happiest years in the most select private house in Rome, exchanged it for two rooms and a scullery on the squalling fifth floor of an unspeakable tenement. She remained perfectly calm about it. This was her own choice: she was short of ready cash; she avoided obligations; it was her own. She could have done better; she had endured worse. She remained calm even though for the privilege of living here on her own she was paying an unbelievable rent. As a ploy to forget a lost lover, the irritation this flagrant rent caused her was ideal.

  She lived among the gruelling goat-paths that bordered the Via Appia in the Twelfth District. It was a dense plebeian settlement, added to the ancient city environs by Augustus. Her own block had been destroyed by fire then rebuilt by landlords with an eye to future compensation when it all collapsed again. They had invested little in the fabric, and there was even less chance they would pay for improvement or simple maintenance.

  To find her apartment she turned off the narrow hubbub of the Via Appia, down a pitted sideroad just wide enough for two wheeled vehicles to sidle past one another in the night, and into a lane where a single handcart might squeeze; there she lived high above a yard bordered by flaking tenements. All the blocks looked the same and all the apartments inside them were arranged identically. The first week she forgot her way home three times; no point asking directions: in this rabbit warren street names were unknown. Panic-stricken, she chose markers: the fountain with three conch shells where in due course she recognised the women washing one end or another of their recalcitrant children, the cor
ner where the sharp smell from the tannery caught the back of her throat, the midden, the tired walnut tree, the local market.

  Life held its compensations; in Rome there would always be mullet and oysters. There were cold meats and hot pies. She could bathe every day. She could escape to the theatre. She could sink her teeth into the sweet golden flesh of a luxurious nectarine . . .

  The ground floor of her tenement was leased to a wineshop and a furrier, and used also by a morning nursery school. Whenever she came in or went out the vintner winked at her, the furrier whistled, but the schoolmaster only stared. For some time Caenis foolishly supposed the schoolmaster’s nature was more refined than the others’.

  Everybody hated the landlord. Not simply because of his outrageous rents. He was a seedy, leery capitalist who preyed on the lower levels of society while pretending to render favours in providing desperate folk with a roof over their heads; all his roofs leaked. He lived on the first floor. Although in subletting her apartment he had made great play to Caenis of the fact that her rent would include the provision of stair-sweepers, porters and water-carriers, these functions were in fact all delegated to one African slave called Musa, who had a bad leg. The landlord’s name was Eumolpus. In Roman tradition he was almost certainly not the owner of the ground lease for the building, nor even the principal mortgagee.

  On the second floor lived a retired ex-centurion, whom nobody ever saw, and his middle-aged mistress, who fluffed about her balcony like a peachy powder-sponge. Caenis won her confidence and found her a lonely woman who lived in terror that the centurion would die and leave her penniless. In the end she worried herself to death first; the centurion was heart-broken and Caenis had to help him with the funeral.