The Course of Honour Read online

  The recent troubles were the product of a rising mood of nationalism, aggravated by a series of Roman officials whose attitude had been unhelpful. Cestius Gallus, then Governor of Syria, had taken in troops to put down the unrest and been dramatically routed at considerable expense of equipment, the capture of an eagle and unacceptable loss of life. War was now inevitable. Nero feared that war in Judaea boded ill for the rest of the Empire; that was why he had humbled his musical pride. Having already executed the greatest soldier of their age, Domitius Corbulo, for being too successful, Nero realised that Vespasian was the only man he had left who would be capable of taking on the troubles in Judaea.

  Caenis and Vespasian considered Nero’s offer quietly. After a decade of sharing daily routines their patterns of thought were so similar, their sensitivity so acute, that it took few words to plunge into – and out of – what others might have made an endless debate.

  Vespasian, his eyes never leaving her, offered fairly, ‘If you want me to decline this, will you please say?’

  ‘Do you want an excuse not to go?’

  A ridiculous question, drily posed. At fifty-seven some men abandon enterprise; others are open to a new lease of life. Vespasian was eager. He wanted to show the establishment exactly what a plain man of good sense and real administrative calibre could do. He would rise to this opportunity perhaps even more strongly than he might have done in earlier days, for he was calmer and more confident.

  ‘I can say I’m an old man.’

  ‘You’ll be lying then.’

  ‘Caenis, I want to know what you think.’ He paused. ‘I can’t take you, not into a battle zone.’

  She had realised that. She had been thinking about it all the way home. ‘No. It would be dangerous and pointless.’

  ‘Quite. I wouldn’t see you anyway. I’d have to lock you in some fortress miles from the fighting. You’d be bored and I’d be anxious. We could hardly ever meet.’

  That he had even considered it was a graceful compliment. Caenis responded swiftly, ‘I know. I’m not afraid to come with you –’ He breathed with affectionate laughter, so she felt herself smile. ‘But I’ll stay in Rome. You need someone to look after things at home. You must go. Apart from the fact that you want it, I have,’ she told him stiffly, ‘given too much to your career to stop supporting you now.’

  He did not immediately speak, then asked gruffly, ‘Mind it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So do I. You know that, lass.’

  Their eyes met, and held fast for a long time, though he made no move to approach her. She wanted to go to him, but was afraid her control would break. Tonight, for the first time, she no longer thought of herself as a girl. She felt the effect of every past year in her tired eyes, her lightening bones, her panic-stricken brain. Vespasian sat with her showing a grave concern that racked her more than indifference.

  After a time they both slowly drank their wine. Caenis went to bed. He did not come to her. He recognised she would welcome time alone to adjust to her need to be brave. And already he had too much to think about. He could not spare himself to help her.

  She saw little of Vespasian or Titus in the following days. They were working incessantly, commissioning their officers, studying maps, scouring the briefs and dispatches that poured in the moment their appointment was officially announced. Titus was to sail to Egypt to collect the Fifteenth Legion from Alexandria. Vespasian would travel overland after crossing the Hellespont, to make his first contact with the Governor of Syria.

  Caenis was interested in the problem, and they made no attempt to shut her out. Yet Vespasian and Titus were forming a close association for an enterprise she would only be able to watch from the sidelines. Once they left Greece, theirs would be a life of action, immediacy and change. Caenis faced three years of suspense, hearing news selectively and long after the event. Once they did leave her she had decided to travel in Greece alone before returning to Italy; she had never been afraid of being by herself. That did not mean she was not lonely now. Even Vespasian’s birthday passed with less than usual ceremony.

  On the last night she sat with Vespasian and Titus until it grew dark, while they still worked. Then despairing of acknowledgement she went quietly to bed. She heard Titus go to his room, striding perhaps more noisily than usual. He called good night in a low voice as he passed her door.

  The house that she hated grew silent.

  Caenis was in bed. She had been trying to read, for she was unable to sleep, but the scroll now lay still half unrolled on a side table; Narcissus would have had something to say about that. The knock on her door was so gentle she was still wondering whether she had heard it when Vespasian came in.

  ‘May I? Saw your light. I’m glad you’re still awake.’

  He came and sat on her bed. Shadows from the disturbed lamp raced for a time up the wall. He was weary, subdued, but obviously wanting to talk to her. ‘All the work is done. I was determined to finish it so my mind was clear – did you think I had forgotten you?’

  ‘No,’ Caenis lied. Catching the dregs of her resentment, his eyes flickered momentarily. Her self-pity melted away at once.

  Smiling, Vespasian told her,. ‘I’ve just had a novel experience – I’ve been given some fatherly advice by my son!’

  Caenis was as fond of Titus as he of her; sensing they had quarrelled, she frowned. ‘What was that?’

  ‘He said I should put aside the planning and send for you to my room.’ She stared down at her folded hands. ‘Boy’s a fool,’ Vespasian commented. Besides an attractive temperament, Titus had an enquiring mind, a phenomenal memory, less wit but probably more culture than his critical papa. He was loyal, generous, tactful and spirited – a delightful young man. And no fool.

  Nor was his father.

  ‘Antonia Caenis, I don’t send for you; I never did and never will – you come of your own accord. You’re not some girl to be called for in the afternoon, then used – and paid – and sent away again until the next gracious summons from the old man. Besides –’ his voice dropped – ‘he either has no imagination, or lacks the experience to know.’ She looked up, her heart pattering. Vespasian seduced her with his eyes. ‘It’s so much more fun trying to persuade you to invite me to stay here with you!’

  With a cry of relief, Caenis had already opened her arms.

  They were both older, and so much slower, but some things were the better for that.

  Afterwards they both lay awake the greater part of the night. The lights were out. They lay close, and still, neither wishing to disturb the other yet each aware from the steadiness of the other’s embrace and occasional quiet movements that they were both awake. After many hours, when Caenis was easing the pressure on her arm, Vespasian finally spoke.

  ‘Well, my lady!’

  ‘Well, my general!’

  His lips brushed her forehead as she gave him his new title. ‘I’m coming back. Same as ever. Promise.’

  She buried her face in the angle of his neck, her hand moving lightly over the familiar lines of his chest, his shoulder, his strong upper arm. It was then he said, ‘I never thanked you for the sausage; the one at the British parade.’

  Caenis had forgotten all about that. ‘Oh Titus! I was so glad I saw you that day.’

  He remained silent for so long her heart raced with anxiety. ‘That day was very odd, lass. I didn’t seem to be myself.’ He wrapped both arms around her, gripping her tight, then abruptly confessed, ‘I wanted rather badly to come to you that night.’

  Caenis felt she had intruded unintentionally on some private anguish.

  He was determined to tell her: ‘I actually walked out from the banquet on the Capitol and stood for a long time in a colonnade, willing myself to go back in. It would have been right,’ he declared. ‘Being with you; after the Triumph.’

  Caenis made a low distressed sound, horrified to remember how at the time she had misinterpreted what he felt – and grateful that she had. To know this then w
ould have been unbearable; it was difficult to tolerate even now. He released her a little, because he knew her so well that he realised even before she started to move that she wanted to kiss him.

  So she did, trying to forget that he had made her want to weep.

  When she was kissing him, she heard that soft groan of pleasure, no different now than when they were young. She supposed it might be flattery, but even if it were, the fact that he thought her worth flattering warmed her heart.

  There was something about kissing Vespasian in the dark, when all the rest of the household thought them sensibly asleep. One thing led rather conveniently to another, one caress demanded more until, both laughing, they acknowledged what they both had been hoping from the start, as with every tenderness but yet the distinctly urgent passion of two people who were parting for a desperately long time, they moved closer than ever together and once again made love.

  ‘This is perhaps not the moment to ask –’

  ‘Lass, I am always free –’ said Vespasian politely (though she was quite right; it was not an easy moment) – ‘for a chat with you . . .’

  ‘Whatever did you do with the sausage?’

  ‘Ate it,’ he responded, after a short pause. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘In the street, lord?’ Caenis demanded, as she had done once before.

  And Vespasian answered, as he had done the first time, ‘In the street!’

  A four-baton general with full triumphal honours and the dignity of nearly sixty years: it seemed impossible that he would ever change.

  PART SIX:

  THE YEAR OF THE FOUR EMPERORS

  When the Caesars were Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius and their successor

  XXXVI

  Having wintered in Greece, Caenis spent the following spring by herself, travelling north through Dalmatia to Istria. When there seemed nothing to stay for, she returned to Rome.

  During this time Vespasian reached Antioch, the chief city of the eastern Empire, where he made his first rendezvous with the new Governor of Syria, Licinius Mucianus (whom he described to Caenis as a bed-hopping wart posted here as an exile rather than a reward) and their ally, King Agrippa of Judaea (whom Vespasian crudely called a shifty bunch of ringlets on the make). He then marched his Fifth and Tenth Legions south to Ptolomaïs, which lay a short way north of Mount Carmel on the coast. There Titus joined him from Egypt with the Fifteenth. Campaigning began in Galilee, which had been heavily fortified by the rebels; after an easy assault on Gabara, Vespasian tackled Jotapata, a natural stronghold on a precipice where heavy numbers of enemy troops were dug in. He captured Jotapata in July.

  He was a born soldier. More from what Titus told her than any indication Vespasian gave himself, Caenis knew that he possessed all the powers of analysis and organisation to bring off whatever was required. His talents flourished in the army, where no one cared who a man’s ancestors had been provided he measured up to the current task. Set in charge of the brilliant Roman military machine, he was an ideal leader. Action fired him; he threw his energy and intelligence into the campaign, always accessible to the men, always aware of their mood. His down-to-earth character made him one of them; his competence made him a general they were proud of. It was already obvious how things in Palestine would go.

  Caenis sailed to Italy. She travelled across country, pausing at Vespasian’s Reate estate. It was on her return to his house in Rome that the notorious incident with Domitian occurred. He was eighteen now. Caenis sympathised with his grudge that his brother had been singled out for special advantage in Judaea; the natural close partnership between Vespasian and Titus had become impossible to conceal. Caenis and Domitian had never liked each other but she greeted him with more than usual kindness, turning her cheek as usual for his kiss. Domitian curtly offered his hand instead.

  Caenis shook hands without a word. She never presumed to demand from other people the compliment Vespasian had chosen to give. She never complained. Yet it was noticed. Domitian would be condemned by the historians on her behalf.

  By the end of his first year Vespasian had subdued most of Galilee. It was at Gamala, while the Romans were pressing a hard siege, that his enthusiasm carried him so far forward that he found himself trapped with only a handful of men at the centre of the citadel; they had to fight their way out backwards, inching step by step down to safety behind a wall of locked shields. Of course, by the time Caenis heard this it was old news, she realised that. ‘Don’t panic!’ he wrote cheerfully. ‘Eat a decent breakfast and calm down!’ Caenis ate breakfast and half her lunch, then panicked and was sick. By now she had found out too about the arrow he had caught in his foot at Jotapata; this did not reassure her. He captured Gamala in October.

  Vespasian retired for the winter with two legions, later travelling with Titus inland to Caesarea Philippi for three weeks of state banquets and thanksgiving sacrifice. Caenis was by then missing him dreadfully, for the dark days and bitter weather seemed to emphasise the quietness of their house in Rome and the coldness of her bed. Letters became infrequent due to the closed sea-crossing, though at least when they came there were sometimes more than one. Alone in Rome she received fewer social invitations, and lost interest in the theatre without his being there too. She wished she had known he would winter at Caesarea where the climate was pleasant at that time of year and King Agrippa – who had such close family ties to Antonia – was apparently being most hospitable. Despite the sensible discussion she had had with Vespasian in Greece, she would after all have gladly endured a summer on her own in Syria in return for spending time with him now. She wanted more than ever to be there.

  It was only gradually that she realised Vespasian and Titus did not quite so badly need her. They were being entertained by King Agrippa in some style. Part of the entertainment comprised his radiant sister, Berenice.

  Queen Berenice of Judaea was high-born, courageous, wealthy, and acknowledged throughout the Empire as the most beautiful woman of the age. She was forty, but at the height of her looks. Caenis must be nearly sixty, and had never been a beauty.

  ‘Damn,’ she accused her mirror mildly.

  She trusted him; of course.

  There seemed no alteration in the tone of Vespasian’s letters. They had always been more anecdotal than sentimental. (He omitted anecdotes about Queen Berenice.) At the end he always mentioned that he missed Caenis; the statement became as regular as his official military stamp.

  He used their correspondence like a man marshalling his thoughts. He summarised for her the strong Roman position in Galilee, and his proposals for taking Judaea, Idumaea, and Peraea next spring before the great effort that would be needed for the siege of Jerusalem; the capture of Jerusalem must be the crown of his campaign. When the Judaeans were not fighting Rome they were fighting one another; Vespasian wondered why the most inhospitable tracts of territory were so endlessly disputed. Perhaps while they were struggling against sun and wind, locusts and famine, it made small difference for the inhabitants to struggle against each other too. Dwellers in richer pastures found peace more convenient . . .

  Suddenly once, as if it were by accident, he began a letter ‘Oh Caenis, my dear love –’ He had never done that before. In the rest of the letter he sounded wearier than usual, but that was no excuse. She knew then: nobody could ever be trusted.

  ‘Damn!’ exclaimed Caenis, not so mildly. She remembered Antonia saying that losing them to women never mattered; it was giving them up to politics that was final. Mark Antony’s daughter should have known better, her freedwoman thought, envisioning another exceptional Roman general making a fool of himself with another ravishing foreign queen.

  Caenis had intended to return a dignified answer, merely answering what he had asked her about events in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain. It was a complete mistake that she added at the end how keenly she was missing him, a plea which she in turn had always spared Vespasian. It was a mistake, but when she noticed she did not erase it. She felt he owed it to
her to accept the truth for once, even though she understood – since she had always been a shrewd woman – that the moment was wrong and the declaration most likely to drive him away.

  All his subsequent letters addressed her simply as Antonia Caenis, with the old-fashioned formality he normally used when he wrote. She noticed he was putting in more jokes. She could not decide whether that was good or not. She guessed it was guilt.

  For anyone with an interest in political events whose attention was not dominated by the situation in Palestine, what happened that spring in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain, was fascinating. Nero’s fourteen years had clearly reached their convulsive decline. After more than a century of Empire, and of executing their own kin, the Julio-Claudian family had thinned its own ranks to nothing. Nero’s only child, a daughter, had died in infancy. There was no alternative heir. Rome hung on the brink of a climactic upheaval, into which this time the whole Empire would be drawn.

  It was generally accepted that the lethargy and debauchery of the Senate, the private self-interest of the second-rank knights, the truculence of the mob, and a general decline in traditional values made a return to the Republic impossible. Perhaps the Empire was now too big. It needed an established administration, not subject to constant electoral change, while something in the current Roman character positively sought one guiding figurehead. It took little imagination to see that the next contest for the throne would involve more than murdering an ill-placed relative or suppressing an unwelcome will.

  Vespasian suggested to Caenis that they should correspond in her old code. She found he had left the key for her, with one of his secretaries. That he had kept his copy for so many years was oddly reassuring. That he had left it ready merely seemed peculiar.