The Course of Honour Read online

  There was something wrong with her face. The defiant, demon-haunted look had been sharpened up with cosmetics – he could soon get used to that – and there was something else. Caenis had a strong face with a clear expression. He remembered the expression perfectly: the painful mixture of striving and mistrust. It had gone. Something had happened to her. Somebody had changed her. This Caenis looked strangely serene.

  She had kept her knack of standing perfectly straight and still. She was trying to lift her mantle again, but blusters of wind constantly snatched the edge from her hand. Vespasian arrived near enough to glimpse coral beads in her ears. What bastard gave her those?

  Then something astounding happened.

  Caenis turned suddenly, calling to a wizened scrap who skipped out from a pillar with the thong of an oil flask wrapped around her wrist. It almost looked as if she had her own slave, though that should be impossible. A discreet litter drew up; Caenis and her companion hurried in and at once the steps were folded away, the half-door shut for them and curtains impenetrably pulled.

  As Vespasian sprang forward to roar out her name, an unusually solid footman swung smack into his path.

  ‘Now, sir!’

  Rome had turned upside down.

  ‘I want a word with that woman –’ The chair was already moving off.

  ‘Not that one, sir! Try the racetrack,’ advised the footman frankly, ‘or the Temple of Isis. Plenty of nice girls about.’

  ‘Thanks!’ Vespasian observed civilly, though the girls at the racetrack were definitely not nice and the delicate creatures at the Temple of Isis were quite often not even girls. He let his cloak fall open so it was obvious he was wearing full senatorial fig. ‘Don’t I recognise your passenger?’

  ‘I doubt it!’ scoffed the footman, perfectly indifferent to anything less than a consular commander strung around with medals from at least three triumphal campaigns. But he condescended to let a junior senator grease his palm with half a denarius. ‘That’s Caenis,’ he admitted discreetly.

  ‘Antonia’s slave?’

  ‘No, sir,’ protested the footman, with a smirk that very clearly said, Back off, laddio; she’s out of your class! ‘Antonia’s freedwoman!’

  There was only one solution now: laddio backed off; scowled bleakly; and strode home to write Antonia’s freedwoman a grovelling note.

  X

  Vespasian was brief:

  O Lady! A rogue from Crete would very much like to see you!

  T. F. V.

  He had written to her before.

  The letters Vespasian wrote to her from abroad had not been embarrassing effusions. Caenis knew a great deal about love letters, from scribing them for other people. She had been deeply relieved when her own correspondent did not eulogise her as the soul of his heart and the heart of his soul, nor describe her divine eyes as entirely the wrong colour, nor spend half a page announcing in gynaecological detail the intimacies she could expect upon his return. Juno be praised, he never exclaimed that she was just like his mother. Instead he possessed the gift of apt quotation and a fine eye for the absurd. He told her interesting facts about his province and rude anecdotes about the people with whom he dealt. Years later, when he had earned a wide reputation as a joker, Caenis still thought that none of Vespasian’s reported wit was so wickedly funny as the letters that he had written to her as a young man from Crete.

  She had expected him to practise his shorthand. In fact since she had given him her ciphering notes too, he used code. At the back of her reference sheets he had found a system the teenaged Caenis once invented herself: ‘My Code: By Caenis’ was excellent; without the key, it took Caenis herself three weeks to unravel Vespasian’s first letter even though she had once been the star of her cipher class.

  She took a long time to reply. Caenis had never written a letter for herself. Vespasian’s second arrived before she had answered his first. Yet by the middle of his tour she too had found her style and her length; she settled into speaking directly with the candour that he obviously liked, and learned to enjoy herself. Enjoying herself was almost certainly a mistake, but she no longer cared.

  For reasons she could not explain, Caenis had never mentioned to him that she had gained her freedom.

  That year a sense of fatality had afflicted her mistress, Antonia. She was bound to feel the loneliness of a woman whose contemporaries had all gone, many in grim circumstances, which as an elderly lady she remembered more distinctly than her breakfast that morning. She was smitten by an urge to set things in order.

  Discussing with Caenis the library which bore Octavia’s name, for the first time she had reminisced about her mother. Abandoned by Mark Antony, Octavia had brought up single-handedly not only their own children, but first Antony’s by his stormy marriage to Fulvia and, eventually, even his children with Cleopatra. ‘Not an easy woman, my mother,’ Antonia had admitted. ‘Impossible not to admire her – I am sure even my father always did that – but she often seemed reproachful and difficult to like.’

  This was an intriguing glimpse of the legendary, much-loved sister of Augustus, so famous for her goodness. Caenis ventured curiously, ‘Do you think if your mother had been less formidable, Mark Antony might have come back from Egypt?’

  ‘Oh no!’ Antonia was definite. ‘Losing a man to a woman is one thing – giving him up to politics is final.’

  On her birthday Antonia had freed several of her slaves who deserved retirement. Pallas was among them, rewarded by freedom and a large estate in Egypt for his good service with the letter about Sejanus. Diadumenus, the Chief Secretary, took his deserved retirement; Caenis was to be promoted. Antonia had asked her to prepare the manumission documents, which at last gave her the opportunity to speak on her own behalf: ‘Madam, you know I have been saving since before I came to you. I want to ask to buy my freedom.’

  Immediately there was a sense of strain.

  She had known Antonia would not like it. Her patroness expected to plan her slaves’ lives for them; in the Palace there had been much less scope for advancement but at least matters of business could be broached without irritating anybody else. She watched the old lady trying to be tolerant.

  ‘That will be unnecessary.’ Reluctantly Antonia explained that Caenis was to be freed one day under her will.

  ‘Madam, I am grateful, but I should hardly enjoy looking forwards to your death.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t enjoy it myself! Now be serious; I cannot let you waste your money.’

  Caenis sat still. She would pay for her freedom if she had to, but it would take all her resources. She would have nothing at all to live on afterwards. She had a bitter grasp of financial needs. Yet she wanted to be free. She had saved what she knew to be a good secretary’s price; she was desperate to realise her ambition now. So many disasters might intervene otherwise. A will could be altered; Antonia’s heirs might not honour it; the Senate might change the law. Now that citizenship stood within her grasp through her own enterprise, Caenis could not bear to wait.

  Antonia understood the situation. A secretary might not command the outrageous price of a handsome driver or a sloe-eyed dancing-girl but Caenis, trained in the imperial school and with such good Greek, was still a prize. The fact that she managed to save her worth indicated strong willpower. Even with the offer of acquiring her freedom for nothing eventually, she would still be prepared for hardship in order to gain it now.

  ‘You have to be thirty years old.’ Caenis felt younger, but since she did not know her age she bluffed it out. Antonia pursed her mouth yet let that issue drop. ‘You are forcing my hand, Caenis!’

  Caenis made no reply. There was a long, not entirely amicable silence.

  Antonia asked stiffly, ‘Do you want to get married?’ Caenis shuddered. ‘Do you wish to set up in some business? Run a salon? Open a shop?’ Caenis laughed. Antonia breathed; the rings on her gnarled fingers flashed restlessly. ‘Would you leave me?’

  ‘Not if you would let me stay.’
>
  Antonia knew she was beaten.

  She sighed. ‘Don’t expect too much,’ she warned. ‘A slave is sheltered; a free woman faces more responsibilities than you may realise.’

  Although Caenis was too sensitive to argue, she lifted her head; she saw Antonia close her eyes momentarily, with a faint smile. They both knew Caenis would glide into responsibility fearlessly. She was ready to be her own woman. To hold her back would condemn her. Anyone who cared for her must sympathise.

  ‘Perhaps you will be good enough,’ the lady Antonia instructed her, with petulant formality, ‘to prepare for me another of these documents.’ Caenis knew her well enough to wait. ‘You will not be asked to buy your citizenship. Caenis, you are stubborn and independent – but, my dear, this was to be my gift to you and I refuse to forgo that pleasure!’

  So it was now to a distinguished imperial freedwoman that Vespasian had to dispatch his least ruffianly slave. Not only was Antonia’s house the highest ranking private home in Rome, by virtue of their position close to the imperial family, her freedwoman possessed more clout than any tax collector’s son. Vespasian would not consider visiting the House of Livia without his own patron, Lucius Vitellius, and he felt wary of making a personal approach to Caenis before he knew how she would react. He was not entirely certain his scab-kneed lad would be admitted.

  He was right that here they had no ‘Welcome’ sign set into their scrubbed mosaic floor. However, letters addressed to Caenis were always promptly delivered and Vespasian’s slave was permitted to wait for her reply. At ease in her long chair in one of the tasteful reception rooms, with her own slavegirl in attendance for decency’s sake, Caenis smiled a little as she dictated it to a thin Greek scribe.

  So pleasant to hear from you; so kind of you to remember me. You may visit me here at any time, tomorrow perhaps if you wish. I should very much like to see you!

  A. C.

  Vespasian decided not to wait until tomorrow.

  XI

  The House of Livia, Antonia’s house, like any substantial residence in Rome turned inwards on courtyards full of quiet sunlight and the soothing splash of fountains. Blank walls faced outwards, even though this dwelling possessed the added seclusion of a position on the Palatine. Everything was designed to eliminate the bustle of exterior crowds and to provide, even within the capital, a family haven of strict privacy and peace. The architects had not reckoned with the havoc that the mad Julio-Claudian family could cause in any haven, but for once the defect was not the architects’ fault.

  There was one courtyard garden, shaded in summer by a fig tree and overhead roses, surrounded by a colonnade. Nobody went there much nowadays. The wicker chairs and folding tables were stored on one side, together with terracotta urns of tender bulbs which had been brought under the roof for shelter. Entranced by a neglected sprawl of jasmine, Caenis had made this her private domain. It was a faintly dusty, comfortable place, kept private from formal visitors. She liked to lounge there even late in the day when the palest sunshine lancing down low over the main pantiles soon made it surprisingly warm. Sometimes after dinner when Antonia retired early to bed, Caenis sat there in silence in the dark.

  Her little slave, a child who lacked any susceptibility to the romance of private thought, usually brought her a bowl of pistachios and a proper table lamp.

  ‘Hello, Caenis.’

  There was a lamp being brought but no nuts, and it was not her little slave.

  ‘Who is it?’ she gurgled foolishly. Pointless: no one else spoke her name with the solemnity of a religious address. Vespasian’s substantial shadow unravelled and shrank down and up the folding doors that led out from the house. ‘Oh! I had better call my girl.’

  ‘You had better not,’ he retorted calmly. ‘I’ve just given her a copper to keep out of the way.’

  Reaching her, he held aloft his pottery lamp: the same sunny disposition, the same frowning face. Gazing back, where she reclined amongst cushions wrapped in a deep blue robe, Caenis felt herself breaking into a slow, tranquil grin to welcome him.

  ‘Antonia Caenis; Caenis Antonia!’ He pronounced it in full as a deliberate compliment, acknowledging her new right to be named after her patroness: that bad-tempered slavey he had first met with the pan of hot sausage, for ever now allied to the noble families of Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony.

  ‘Just Caenis,’ she shrugged. He barked with mirth; she would never change.

  He set his lamp on a plinth. ‘An imperial freedwoman,’ he marvelled. ‘Smiling in a verandah under the stars.’ He sat on the edge of a pillar base, holding his head ruefully between his hands. ‘O elegant and influential young lady! Far, far above a poor provincial bumpkin’s reach.’

  ‘Never,’ Caenis told him softly. The dim lamplight wavered on that wonderfully jovial face so the shadow of his nose hooked in a mad slant over one cheek while the outline of his chin lapped wildly down into the hollow of his throat.

  ‘Never? Oh I think in many ways you always were . . .’ She felt like a flattered queen. He said, shining, with joy for her, ‘You look as if your heart could burst with pride. You should have told me you had been made up – I suppose you know I’ve followed you about all day. I won’t tell you the things I was starting to imagine when I saw how you were queening it. Fortunately the Saepta Julia shuts up shop quite late.’

  The Saepta Julia was the market for jewellery and antiques; Caenis reckoned it was not one of Vespasian’s customary haunts. ‘I thought the Saepta was where a gentleman goes when he wants to waste a great deal of money?’

  ‘Spend a lot anyway,’ remarked Vespasian lightly. ‘There you are. With my congratulations. Don’t get excited; you can’t eat it.’ Withdrawing his right hand from the fold of his toga, he dropped a small but heavy package into her lap. It was tied with the kind of sleek ribbon which stated that the contents had been purchased at hideous cost.

  Deeply troubled, Caenis shook her head. ‘My word, this does look like a bribe, senator!’

  ‘Sadly for me, I know you can’t be bought. Go on.’

  ‘What is it?’ She was as stubborn as ever.

  ‘New shackles.’ He waited for her to look. It was a good gold bangle, in strikingly elegant taste, and of first-quality gold. ‘Since you like to sit in the dark,’ he said, ‘I shall have to tell you I had your name engraved inside – so you can’t pawn it and neither can you take it back. Your name, and also,’ he added bravely, ‘mine.’

  There was a very slight pause.

  ‘It’s lovely . . . You can’t afford it,’ she protested. ‘You know you can’t.’

  ‘No. A polite girl,’ Vespasian observed, ‘would try it on.’ Caenis obediently did so.

  That pillar base was striking up cold through his clothes; he stood up. For a bad moment she thought he was already taking his leave.

  ‘Titus, thank you!’

  He was visibly surprised. ‘You accept my gift?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  They both knew that with her obstinate streak she might not intend accepting anything else; she wondered if his spirits sank. Without exactly flirting, she found herself enjoying her sense of command.

  As she admired the bangle, Caenis lifted her feet from the floor. She was sitting in a silly summer chair that hung like a cradle from a frame. Now she automatically stretched her toes and swung; when she slowed, Vespasian lent a helping hand.

  ‘Welcome home!’ she exclaimed belatedly, looking up. ‘Thank you for writing to me; I enjoyed your letters.’

  ‘Thank you too.’

  ‘My last to you has probably gone astray.’

  Nothing ruffled him. ‘Probably lie in the Cretan quaestors’ work box for the next forty years, filed under “Too Difficult” . . . Glad to see me back?’

  ‘Mmm!’ The chair spun slightly, so her robe brushed against him before he steadied the basketwork then pushed the contraption straight again. Lulled by the methodical rhythm of the swing,. Caenis murmured, ‘I have heard that the g
irls in Crete are famously attractive.’

  ‘The girls in Crete,’ returned Vespasian gravely, ‘are ravishing. But their fathers are famously fierce.’

  ‘I expect people manage.’

  ‘I believe people do.’ He pushed her chair slightly harder than before. ‘Of course you always get the odd romantic who prefers to save up his initiative for some clever brown eyes he left behind at home . . . Antonia Caenis,’ he mused, perhaps changing the subject. ‘Caenis, in the dark with her shoes off – lovely feet! – Caenis, in a hanging chair. Very rash, young lady, some bad man may tip you out!’

  And Vespasian tipped her out himself.

  Her heart stopped.

  He caught her, as he meant to do, with one strong arm around her while the other held back the chair and saved it from banging into her. He brought her close against him, as she immediately realised he would. He turned her into the tiny pool of lamplight so he could search her face while she could see the determination lighting his. As she came into his arms it felt as natural and secure as she had always known it would.

  She squealed once, then grew still. ‘Titus –’

  ‘Caenis –’

  They both knew what was going to happen next. They knew Caenis wanted it as much as he.

  In the second when she passed from the cold atmosphere of the terrace into the warmth of his embrace she shivered, because she was startled, yet there was never any doubt. She had long ago made her choice. Against his chest she was conscious of his struggle to control his breath; her back arched slightly under the pressure of his arm; she caught his face between both hands and they moved together into an unfaltering kiss. At her eager response she heard his groan of relief, then afterwards as her cheek pressed his, he felt her own shuddering sigh.

  ‘Come to bed with me, Caenis. Oh –’ Unable even to wait for her reply he kissed her again, at demanding length. ‘Convinced?’