The Course of Honour Read online

  Caenis, who even now did not smile easily, smiled at Vespasian. ‘Convinced!’

  Then he astonished her again; he suddenly held her, not in the great wrestler’s hug she expected but as tenderly as some ceramic almost too delicate to touch, while he muttered against the complicated pleating of her hair, ‘Oh Antonia Caenis . . . Welcome to freedom – and welcome to me!’ Then she knew this was a truly sentimental man. She put it from her mind. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ He could have taken her then and there, in the dark, amongst the stored furniture and tubs of desiccated flowers; he was ready and her need was as urgent as his.

  But Caenis possessed a modest comfortable room where, as a freedwoman, she was entitled to entertain her friends. She was proud of her achievements; she took him there.

  It was as she had always expected. This man was her other half. The bungled conjunctions in her previous experience were swept from her memory. The unwelcome clutches which had once seemed to be her only future could be angrily rebuffed. She would never again fall prey to incongruous hangers-on. She need never be coerced by her own insecurity. Now she knew everything. She had found the joy she had tried so hard to believe in.

  They were perfectly at ease. They had already established a companionship which ran deep and true. Each took, each gave with overwhelming honesty, openness and delight.

  When at the end Vespasian rolled over and lay on his back, he covered with one great hand deep brown eyes that were no longer so steady. ‘Oh lass!’

  Caenis was laughing as she rested her head upon his hammering heart, one arm outflung across his body to the edge of the bed. ‘Oh yes!’

  She felt his breathing start to settle but he was not asleep, for after a time he drew the coverlet around her and gathered her close. When he spoke his voice sounded subdued, as if he had somehow been caught off guard. ‘A fine pair, you and I.’

  Caenis found and kissed his hand. After a moment she confessed, ‘I wish you had not given me your present.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I did not want a bribe.’

  By then he was shaking with laughter. ‘You deserve a present. And you’re well worth a bribe! . . . I was certain it would make you say no.’ His arm tightened around her; his voice steadied. ‘I won’t be shaken off now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t try to send me away.’

  He knew her at least as well as she knew herself, for that was of course what Caenis had intended to do.

  ‘No,’ she told him gently, and settled against his shoulder as if for sleep, so he probably assumed his challenge had persuaded her. ‘While you want me, I shall never do that.’

  Her intention had been overturned. Quite simply there was no longer any choice. She would not send Vespasian away because she could not.

  Nor could she sleep. She lay with a throbbing brain as she buckled together her resources to cope with the commitment she had made. Impossible to tell whether Vespasian realised how she had withdrawn into herself; she hoped not, for she did not want him to wonder why. There was nothing to be done about it; nothing she even wanted to do. But Caenis recognised now, now when it was far too late, the mistake she had made: she had entered into a contract whose conditions were the exchange of friendship and pleasure on terms that should be utterly businesslike.

  And she had given this terrible contract to a man with whom she was inescapably in love.

  XII

  There was a way around the difficulty. It was perfectly simple: Caenis would make sure Vespasian never knew.

  She was his mistress for two years. To be attached to a young senator was useful to her and helpful to him. He took her where a woman without family could not otherwise go, while she introduced him to people a man so obscure might not otherwise meet. The situation never deteriorated into the one-sided disaster it could so easily become. Caenis made up her mind that she could either suffer – and suffer very deeply – or accept for however short a time what could be the most joyful experience of her life. So she tried to stay sweet-tempered, as no doubt he did too, and they were the firmest of friends.

  They settled into a tranquil routine. Each was considerate of the other’s private life; each gladly set aside time for them to be together. Neither was selfish or quarrelsome. Quiet conversation walking in a garden or sitting in some congenial room meant as much to them as the times they spent in bed. So far as possible they were open about their relationship, though discreet. Neither thought it clever to shock. Whenever they could they went to the theatre or listened to speeches; occasionally they dined with sympathetic friends. People liked them; they were an undemanding, easy-going pair. A world of casual couplings and cynical self-interest was perhaps intrigued by the warmth of their steady affection. It never became scandalous.

  Caenis tried to explain to Veronica but with little success. Veronica dismissed Vespasian as a disastrous unknown. Although Caenis had tried to live by a strict code (men she liked were few enough; best not sleep with men she liked), Veronica’s code was even stricter: best not to like men at all.

  Quite soon after Vespasian came home from Crete Caenis met her girlfriend, buying garlands on the Sacred Way. Veronica, who was still a slave, did have official duties though she somehow arranged they should be as light as possible. Some people manage to establish that their contribution at work is merely to move around being pleasant; it is understood that no more is to be expected of them and it would be pointless to chastise them for being as they are.

  Veronica was not foolish. She never forgot she might one day be challenged. She was the slave who ordered the wreaths for the banquets the absent Emperor never gave. So she made sure she was seen from time to time with abundant armfuls of flowers.

  It was early morning, the light already bright today as the florists set out their trolleys and trays, and refreshed their blooms in the public fountains. Men of all ranks were hurrying through the streets to visit their patrons and claim their daily dole – a basket of bread or a small gift of cash – in return for obsequiously paying their respects. There was a scent of new-baked loaves. Tired women draped bedclothes over balconies to air or swilled water across the lava pavements to wash away the rubbish and trickled stains that were the gifts of the previous lawless night.

  ‘Caenis! Caenis, wait!’

  Veronica’s voice had rung effortlessly above the raucous cries of ‘Garlands; garlands! Best on the Sacred Way!’, ‘Fine crowns of roses!’, ‘Myrtle wreaths; spikenard from India; garlands for your guests!’ as the sellers plied their wares. Little boys in sweatshop basements, where the atmosphere swooned with the sickly reek of violets and rose petals, worked through the last hours of darkness, with damp tingling fingers bending stiff stalks into long strings which tonight would adorn fat necks and sagging bosoms. Veronica came early, while the blooms were fresh; she would keep them all day somewhere in deep shade, sprinkling the wreaths with water and standing the glorious bouquets in tubs. ‘Help me carry these festoons.’

  Caenis obediently let herself be weighed down under ropes of white and gold, with seven crowns of laurel plonked for convenience on her head; once your arms were full it was the best way to carry crowns. ‘Come with me out of this racket. I want to step into the Temple of Cybele –’

  They struggled to the temple on the Palatine. Caenis had no real objection, because it lay almost adjacent to Livia’s House, so she could be close to home when it was time to attend on Antonia. Veronica laid out her flowers in the portico where they would not be crushed, curling the garlands on a grey stone floor like wriggling caterpillars frilled with crisp yellow stripes. Here the background was quiet, with languorous oriental music and intoning priests; occasional triangles and cymbals made them jump. Incense, subversive as a drug, prickled the nerves. It was a place of impersonal mystery; Caenis had always found it faintly seedy, not least because the steps of the Temple of Cybele were a famous pick-up point. The annual rites, led by male priests notorious for their frantic dancing, were an occas
ion for women’s unbridled release; it was not to her taste.

  Veronica urged with hushed excitement, ‘Sit by this pillar. You did it then? The bangle!’ Caenis wore Vespasian’s bangle every day. Veronica twisted it about on her arm, testing the weight. Caenis resisted taking it off; she did not want Veronica’s comments on the two names engraved together inside. ‘You’ve done well there. It’s a good one –’

  Caenis said bluntly, ‘I didn’t want this. I wish he knew I took him for the joy of it.’

  ‘You know better than to ever tell them that!’ Veronica retorted. ‘Watch yourself.’

  ‘I know.’

  Caenis really did know. She had always been eccentric. She understood what she had done.

  Veronica despaired of the girl. She could not bear to witness that look of being quietly reconciled. To Veronica this deliberate facing-up to unpalatable facts, this stoic acceptance of pain even before it occurred, seemed unnecessary. She offered consolations Caenis did not want; she offered self-delusion; she offered dreams: ‘Don’t underestimate yourself, Caenis. You can hold on to that one if you want. Even if he marries –’

  ‘No! When he marries, he goes.’

  ‘Oh dear. I see. My poor girl . . . Oh help! We’d better salute the goddess. That priest with the watery eyes has spotted us.’

  Veronica always knew what men were doing; he had. At once they saluted the lofty statue through the portals of the temple, making it plain to any slyly watching Corybantes that they required neither mystic intercession with the goddess nor whispered proposals for commerce of a more sensual kind.

  Cybele, the oriental matriarch sacred to chastity, who had lured her lover Attis into self-inflicted castration, was not the obvious choice for Veronica’s devotion. Perhaps the attraction was that she lacked the patrician smoothness of the Graeco-Roman gods. Cybele was blood, and earth, and the knife in the grove – a goddess of the ecstatically anguished scream. Her statue was within the sanctum, enthroned, guarded by lions, and bearing an oriental drum representing the world.

  The two women made no attempt to breach protocol by entering the temple, but approached the outdoor altar. Veronica offered to this dark lady a small cluster of violets then prayed aloud with her own inimitable good cheer: ‘O Cybele, Mother of the Gods, Lady of Salvation, accept these blossoms. Make me handsome at thirty, rich at forty, and please, lady, dead by fifty! Make me careful, make me cheerful and (if you must, O Cybele!) make me good.’

  Caenis produced no offering. But she looked back, glimpsing through the portal the hard face of the goddess from the east who was supposedly friendly to women, and she prayed in her heart. O Cybele, great Idaean Mother, let me not love him more than I can bear! Adding, because she did love him and she recognised in him a man who would be genuinely concerned at her yearning pain, And, O Cybele, don’t let him love me!

  Two years was a long time to keep a secret from somebody so close. But she never said.

  Well; once.

  Once, at the end of a dinner party, when she was tired and at her low time of the month, when she had perhaps in consequence drunk far too much, he muttered something under his breath to her, with his head against her head, something spectacularly rude about one of the other guests, which made her suddenly giggle so much that her tension slithered away like a runnel of sand until, weak with laughter, she let herself exclaim with the force of desperate truth, ‘Oh, I love you!’

  Then she did not know how to cope.

  People had probably heard. It was not what she had said that mattered, but what saying it aloud had done to her. The look on Vespasian’s own face was so odd she was forced to apologise, sliding atilt to her feet: ‘I’ve had too much wine; I’m embarrassing us. I’ll go home – you don’t need to come . . .’

  But he came. He came, ambling after her like some great loyal mastiff, nuzzling the back of her neck while she tried to put on her outdoor shoes, towing along when she went for her chair, clambering in with her to the despair of the slaves who had to carry them both and then fondling her on the way home almost to the point of highway rape. He came into the house, nibbling her left ear, bribing the porter who did not normally expect to let him indoors so late; he came with her all through the elegant corridors, wrapping her around pillars with tipsy abandon then growling rumbustiously when she escaped. He came, mad as a clown in some rude Atellan farce, into her room.

  Where in darkness and complete silence he seized her, every line of his body melting into hers, and kissed her, absolutely sober, absolutely serious, absolutely still. Terrified, she tried to close her brain to the fact that he understood. She was ashamed to speak; he would not let her. Elated by a passion that seemed to devastate them both, he undressed himself; he undressed her; he brought her to the bed, still without speaking a word as if what he wanted to say was inexplicable. Then he made love to her as even he never had, befuddled as she was, befuddled as she thought he was, drawing them to ecstasy over and over again. When Caenis slept, perhaps the deepest slumber of her life, for once he was there throughout the night, not even lying at her side, but encircling her with every limb, every inch of him flooding her with abundant companionship.

  Vespasian awoke just before dawn; his lifelong habit. Caenis awoke with the change in his breathing which was, whenever she had the chance, a habit of hers. He kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  ‘I enjoyed that!’

  ‘So did I.’

  His mouth tightened into the line that she recognised as his most personal smile. ‘I thought you did!’

  He left the house quietly. They never mentioned the incident afterwards. Sometimes she caught Vespasian’s eye carefully upon her when she knew he thought her preoccupied and then, although Caenis was not normally given to frantic gaiety, she would turn on him and pelt him with mimosa blossoms, or snatch the cushions from under his elbow, or tickle his feet.

  After they settled down, she always knew when he was watching her again.

  XIII

  The Emperor Tiberius died in his seventy-eighth year at Cape Misenum. He had been riding to Rome but turned back when his pet snake was discovered dead and half-devoured by ants. Caenis thought any pet doomed to be hand-fed daily by Tiberius would fling itself cheerily to the ants.

  Soothsayers decided that if the Emperor entered the city he would be torn apart by the mob. For once their interpretation seemed adept. Tiberius’ last years had witnessed a reign of terror during which the appalling cruelties inflicted upon his own family and on members of the Senate were only equalled by the vile debaucheries to which the Emperor subjected himself. Show trials for alleged treason had become commonplace. His absence encouraged wild rumours about his personal habits. Rome viewed him with horror and his death was greeted with joy.

  It was typical of Tiberius’ malevolence that since he knew people wanted him to die he had struggled violently to disappoint them. He had tried to disguise his failing strength and clung so stubbornly to life and power that he even climbed out of bed calling for his dinner after being once pronounced dead. In the end his impatient young heir, Caligula, was widely believed to have assisted his adoptive grandfather into the underworld by applying a pillow to his face.

  Caligula was a tall, pale, prematurely balding youth. Caenis had known him slightly when he lived with Antonia before being summoned by Tiberius to Capri, perhaps to be trained as a successor – or simply to let Tiberius gloat over the viper he would be bequeathing to Rome. The young man appeared to have a quicker intelligence than his coheir, Gemellus, was reputedly eager to learn, and had distinguished himself at an early age making formal public speeches, including the funeral oration for his great-grandmother Livia. Yet Tiberius had held reservations about him and uneasy stories circulated. He was certainly under the influence of Macro, Sejanus’ even more brutal successor as chief of the Praetorians, the man who permitted his wife to have an affair with Caligula, and who probably helped him speed Tiberius’ death.

  Caesars who overstayed their
welcome must expect to be hurried along. Even Augustus was supposed to have been poisoned at the end by his famously devoted wife. Of the nine Caesars who ruled Rome during Caenis’ lifetime, only one would die of natural causes, quietly succeeded by his own elder son; only one sardonic soul would leave the world joking even at death: ‘Dear me! I feel I must be turning into a god!’

  If Caligula had a sense of humour it was to prove macabre, and he wanted his divinity in his lifetime. Yet he began discreetly. The Senate were too frightened of the army to protest when he asked to be awarded sole rights as Emperor; the army loved him because since a baby he had been their mascot, and while armies may change their minds or their loyalties they do not so readily change their mascots. No doubt encouraged by their commander, Macro, he had awarded each of the Praetorian Guards a thousand sesterces which ensured their loyalty. Two days after Tiberius died, Caligula supplanted his coheir, Gemellus, and assumed in a single decree of the Senate all the powers which Augustus and Tiberius had collected gradually and with modesty.

  Rome first hailed his succession as a new golden age. He was the people’s pet, their shining star. He was the son of their hero Germanicus and after twenty years of Tiberius, who terrified and appalled everyone, Rome badly wanted to find good in Germanicus’ son. Gemellus was quickly sidelined. At twenty-five Caligula had become lord of the civilised world.

  Caenis was to observe that the worst Emperors all began with sanctimoniously proper acts. Caligula, Nero, and also Domitian – though she never saw him rule in his own right – started public life with a show of youthful good behaviour. It was as if those whose balance of mind was most vulnerable to excess made a last effort to win real admiration before absolute power sent them off their heads.

  People called Caligula deceitful. It was certainly said that when Tiberius had summoned him to Capri he willingly joined in the foul practices, and he turned Jiimself into Tiberius’ agent and spy; this hardly fitted the personable image he first tried to cultivate as Emperor. He had previously acquiesced in silence to the exile and death of his mother, Agrippina, and his two elder brothers. Yet perhaps if he had not done so he might have ended like his brother Nero Caesar, who was forced to commit suicide on a remote island, or his brother Drusus, who was starved in a cellar under the Palace until he choked to death on pieces of flock from his mattress. Perhaps an adolescence spent in such danger and an apprenticeship under Tiberius explained, if they did not excuse, Caligula’s unhinged mind.