The Grass Crown

by Colleen McCullough

  "Well?" he prompted when Livia Drusa did not go on.

  Frowning, she licked her lips, then raised her lovely eyes to look directly at him. "Marcus Livius, for a very long time I have been aware that my husband and I have outstayed our welcome."

  "You're wrong," he countered quickly, "but if in any way I have inadvertently given you that impression, then I apologize. Truly, sister, you have always been welcome— and you always will be welcome in my house."

  "I thank you. However, what I said is a fact. You and Servilia Caepionis have never had a chance to be alone, which may be one reason why she has failed to conceive."

  He winced. "I doubt it."

  "I do not." She leaned forward earnestly. "Times are tranquil at the moment, Marcus Livius. You have no office in the government and you have had little Drusus Nero long enough to make the possibility of a child of your own much greater. So the old women say—and I believe them."

  Finding all this painful, he said, "Get to the point, do!"

  "The point is that while Quintus Servilius is away, I would very much like to remove myself and my children to the country," said Livia Drusa. "You have a little villa near Tusculum, which isn't more than half a day's journey from Rome. No one has lived in the house for years. Please, Marcus Livius, give it to me for a while! Let me live on my own!"

  His eyes searched her face, looking for any evidence that she was planning some indiscretion. But he could find none.

  "Did you ask Quintus Servilius?"

  Keeping her eyes looking into his, Livia Drusa said steadily, "Of course I did."

  "He didn't mention it to me."

  "How extraordinary!" She smiled. "But how like him!"

  That provoked a laugh. "Well, sister, I can't see why not, since Quintus Servilius said yes. As you say, Tusculum isn't very far from Rome. I can keep an eye on you."

  Face transfigured, Livia Drusa thanked her brother profusely.

  "When do you want to go?"

  She rose to her feet. "At once. May I ask Cratippus to organize everything?"

  "Of course." He cleared his throat. "Actually, Livia Drusa, you'll be missed. So will your daughters."

  "After putting an extra tail on the horse and changing the bunch of grapes to rather lurid apples?"

  "It could as easily have been Drusus Nero in a couple of years' time," he said. "If you think about it, we were lucky. The paint was still wet, no harm was done. Father's works of art are quite safe in the cellar, and there they'll stay until the last child is fully grown."

  He rose too; they walked together down the colonnade to the mistress's sitting room, where Servilia Caepionis was busy on her loom, weaving blankets for little Drusus Nero's new bed.

  "Our sister wants to leave us," said Drusus, entering.

  There could be no mistaking his wife's dismay—nor her guilty pleasure. "Oh, Marcus Livius, that's too bad! Why?"

  But Drusus beat a quick retreat, leaving his sister to do her own explaining.

  "I'm taking the girls to the villa at Tusculum. We're going to live there until Quintus Servilius comes home again."

  "The villa at Tusculum?" asked Servilia Caepionis blankly. "But my dear Livia Drusa, it's a tumbledown wreck of a place! It belonged to the first Livius, I believe.

  There's no bath or latrine, no decent kitchen, and it won't be big enough."

  "I don't care," said Livia Drusa. She lifted her sister-in-law's hand and held it to her cheek. "Dear lady of this house, I would live in a hovel for the chance to be the lady of a house! I don't say that to hurt you, nor is it a reproach. From the day your brother and I moved in here, you have been graciousness itself. But you must understand my position. I want my own house. I want servants who don't call me dominilla and take no notice of anything I say because they've known me since I was a baby. I want a bit of land to walk on, a bit of freedom from the crush of this dreadful city. Oh, please, Servilia Caepionis, understand!"

  Two tears rolled down the cheeks of the lady of the house, and her lip quivered. "I do understand," she said.

  "Don't grieve, be happy for me!"

  They embraced, in full accord.

  "I shall find Marcus Livius and Cratippus at once," said Servilia Caepionis briskly, putting away her work and covering the loom against dust. "I insist that builders be hired to turn that antique villa into something comfortably livable for you."

  But Livia Drusa would not wait. Three days later she had packed up her daughters, her many buckets of books, Caepio's very few servants, and set out for the farm at Tusculum.

  Though she hadn't visited it since childhood, she found it quite unchanged—a small plastered house painted a bilious yellow, with no garden to speak of, no proper facilities, very little air or light inside, and no peristyle. However, her brother had not wasted time; the place already teemed with the employees of a local builder, who was there in person to greet her, and promised that within two months the house would be livable.

  Thus Livia Drusa installed herself amid a controlled chaos—plaster dust, the noise of hammers and mallets and saws, a constant volley of instructions and queries shouted in the broad Latin of Tusculans who might live only fifteen miles from Rome, but rarely if ever went there. Her daughters reacted typically; half-past-four-year-old Lilla was entranced, whereas that composed and secretive child Servilia all too obviously loathed the house, the building activity, and her mother, not necessarily in that order. However, Servilia's mood was unobtrusive; Lilla's boisterous participation in everything only added to the chaos.

  Having placed her daughters under the charge of their nurse and Servilia's dour old tutor, Livia Drusa set out the next morning to walk through the peace and beauty of the deep winter countryside, hardly able to believe that she had thrown off the shackles of a long imprisonment.

  Though the calendar said it was spring, deep winter it was. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus had not prodded the College of Pontifices he headed to do their duty and keep the shorter calendar year in time with the seasons. Not that Rome and her environs had endured a harsh winter that year; of snow there had been little, and the Tiber hadn't frozen over at all. Thus the temperature was well above freezing, the wind was no more than an occasional breath, and there was good grass underfoot.

  Happier than she had ever been in all her life, Livia Drusa wandered across the home field, clambered over a low stone wall, walked carefully around the perimeter of a field already under the plough, climbed another stone wall, and entered a place of grass and sheep. All bound up in their leather coats, the silly creatures galloped away from her when she tried to call them to her; shrugging and smiling, she walked on.

  Beyond that field she found a boundary stone painted white, and beside it a little towered shrine, the ground before it still marked with the blood of some sacrifice. In the lowest branches of an overhanging tree there bobbed little woolen dolls, little woolen balls, and heads of garlic, all looking weatherworn and drab. Beyond the shrine was a clay pot turned upside down; curiously Livia Drusa lifted it, then dropped it back in a hurry; under it lay the decomposing body of a big toad.

  Too citified to understand that if she went any further she would be trespassing—and that she was now on the land of someone scrupulous in his attentions to the gods of the soil and of boundaries—Livia Drusa strolled on. When she found the first crocus she knelt to look at its vivid yellow flower, rose again to gaze into the naked branches of the trees with an appreciation so new that trees might have been invented just for her.

  An orchard of apples and pears came next, some of the pears still unpicked, a temptation to which Livia Drusa happily succumbed, finding her pear so sweet and juicy her hands became a sticky mess. Somewhere she could hear water running, so she walked through the carefully tended trees in the direction of the sound until she came upon a little brook. Its water was icy, but she didn't care; she dabbled her hands and laughed softly to herself as she shook them dry in the sun, now high enough to have warmed the air. Off cam
e her palla wrap; still kneeling beside the stream, she spread the huge piece of cloth out and folded it into a rectangle she could carry, then rose to her feet. And saw him.

  He had been reading. The scroll was in his left hand, curled up again because he had quite forgotten it, so fixedly was he staring at this invader of his orchard. King Odysseus of Ithaca! Encountering his eyes, Livia Drusa caught her breath, for they were the very eyes of King Odysseus, large and grey and beautiful.

  "Hello," she called, smiling at him without shyness or any kind of discomfort. Having watched him for so many years from her balcony, he seemed indeed the wanderer returned at this moment, a man she knew at least as well as Queen Penelope had known her King Odysseus. So she threw the folded palla over her arm and began to walk toward him, still smiling, still talking.

  "I stole a pear," she said. "It was delicious! I didn't know pears hung so long on trees. Whenever I go out of Rome, I go to the seaside in summer, and it isn't the same."

  He said nothing, just followed her approach with those grey and luminous eyes.

  I still love you, she was saying within herself. I still love you! I don't care if you're the progeny of a slave and a peasant. I love you. Like Penelope, I had forgotten love. But here you are again after so many years, and I still love you.

  When she stopped, she was too close to him for this to be the chance encounter of two strangers; he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, and the big dark eyes looking now into his own were filled with recognition. With love. With welcome. It therefore seemed absolutely natural to step a very few inches closer to her, to put his arms around her. She put her face up and her arms about his neck, and both of them were smiling as they kissed. Old friends, old lovers, a husband and wife who had not seen each other for twenty years, torn apart by the machinations of others, divine and human. Triumphant in this reunion.

  The sure strong touch of his hands was a recognition, she had no need to tell him where to go, what was fitting; he was the king of her heart, and always had been. As gravely as a child placed in charge of some precious treasure, she bared and offered him her breasts, went about him taking his clothes while he spread out her wrap upon the ground, then lay down beside him. Trembling her pleasure, she kissed his neck and sucked the lobe of his ear, held his face between her hands and found his mouth once more, caressed his body blissfully, mumbled a thousand endearments against his tongue.

  Fruit, sweet and sticky—thin bare twigs tangled amid a bluest sky—the jerky pain of hair caught too tight—a tiny bird with stilled wings glued to the tendrils of a webby cloud—a huge lump of packed-down exultation struggling to be born, then suddenly soaring free, free—oh, in such an ecstasy!

  They lay together on their clothing for hours, keeping each other warm with skin on skin, smiling foolishly at each other, amazed at finding each other, innocent of transgression, enmeshed in the deliciousness of all kinds of discoveries.

  They talked too. He was married, she learned—to one Cuspia, daughter of a publicanus, and his sister was married to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the younger brother of the Pontifex Maximus; dowering his sister had been a staggering expense, one he had only managed to achieve by marrying his Cuspia, whose father was enormously wealthy. There were as yet no children, for he too could find nothing to admire or love in his spouse—she was, he said, already complaining to her father that he neglected her.

  When Livia Drusa told him who she was, Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus grew very still.

  "Are you angry?" she asked, lifting herself up to look down on him anxiously.

  He smiled, shook his head. "How can I be angry when the gods have answered me? They set you down here on the lands of my forefathers for me. The moment I saw you at the stream, I knew it. And if you are connected to so many powerful families, it must be yet another sign that I am indeed favored."

  "Did you truly not have any idea who I am?"

  "None at all," he said, not quite happily. "I've never seen you in my life."

  "Not even once? Did you never walk out onto Gnaeus Domitius's balcony and see me on my brother's balcony above?"

  "Never," he said.

  She sighed. "I saw you many times over many years."

  "I'm profoundly glad you liked what you saw."

  She cuddled into his shoulder. "I fell in love with you when I was sixteen years old," she said.

  "How perverse the gods are!" he said. "Had I looked up and seen you, I wouldn't have rested until I married you. And we would have many children, and neither of us would be in this awful situation now."

  To turn and cling together was instinctive, a mixture of pleasure and pain.

  "Oh, it will be terrible if they find out!" she cried.

  "Yes."

  "It isn't fair."

  "No."

  "Then they must never find out, Marcus Porcius."

  He writhed. "We should be together with honor, Livia Drusa, not guiltily."

  “There is honor,'' she said gravely. "It's only our present circumstances make it seem otherwise. I am not ashamed."

  He sat up, hugged his knees. "Nor I," he said, and took her back into his arms and held her until she protested, for she wanted to look at him, so beautifully put together, long-armed and long-legged, skin cream and hairless, his scant body hair the same fiery color as on his head. His body was well knit and muscular, his face bony. Truly King Odysseus. Or her King Odysseus, anyway.

  It was late afternoon when she left him, having arranged that they would meet at the same place and time on the morrow, and they took so long making their farewells that by the time she reached Drusus's house, the builders had done with their work for the day. Her steward, Mopsus, was on the point of marshaling everyone to start looking for her. So happy and uplifted was she that realities of this nature hadn't even occurred to her; standing in the fading light blinking stupidly at Mopsus, she had not the wits to think of reason or excuse.

  Her appearance was appalling. The hair hung down her back in a tangle liberally larded with bits of twig and grass, great smears of mud marred her clothes, the sensible closed shoes she had worn now dangled by their straps from her hand, her face and arms were dirty, her feet covered in mud.

  "Domina, domina, what happened?" cried the steward. "Have you had a fall?"

  Her wits returned. "Indeed I have, Mopsus," she answered cheerily. "In fact, I fell about as far as I could, and live."

  Surrounded by clucking servants, she was swept into the house. An old bronze tub was produced, put in her sitting room, filled with warm water. Lilla, who had been crying because Mama was missing, trotted off now in the wake of her nurse to eat a delayed dinner, but Servilia followed her mother unobtrusively and stood in the shadows while a girl unfastened the clasps of Livia Drusa's gown, clicking her tongue at the state of Livia Drusa's body, dirtier than her clothes.

  When the girl turned away to see that the water was the right temperature, Livia Drusa, naked and unashamed, stretched her arms above her head so slowly and voluptuously that the unnoticed little girl beside the door understood the meaning of the gesture on some utterly primitive, atavistic level only time would elucidate. Down came the arms, up went their hands to cup the full but lovely breasts; Livia Drusa's thumbs played with her nipples for a moment, while Livia Drusa's mouth smiled and smiled and smiled. Then she stepped into her bath, turned so her girl could trickle water down her back from a sponge, and so didn't see Servilia open the door and slip out.

  At dinner—which Servilia was allowed to share with her mother—Livia Drusa chattered away happily about the pear she had eaten, the first crocus, the dolls in the tree above the boundary shrine, the little brook she had found, even details of an imaginary fall many feet down a steep and muddy bank. Servilia sat, eating daintily, her expression neutral. An outsider looking at them would have judged the mother's face that of a happy child, and the child's face that of a troubled mother.

  "Does my happiness puzzle you, Servilia?" the mother asked.
r />   "It's very odd, yes," said the child composedly.

  Livia Drusa leaned forward across the small table at which both of them sat and tucked a strand of black hair out of her daughter's face, genuinely interested for the first time in this miniature reproduction of herself. Back rushed the past, her own desolate childhood.

  "When I was your age," Livia Drusa said, "my mother never took any notice of me. It was Rome responsible. And just recently I realized Rome was having the same effect on me. That's why I moved us to the country. That's why we're going to be living on our own until tata comes home. I'm happy because I'm free, Servilia! I can forget Rome."

  "I like Rome," said Servilia, sticking out her tongue at the various plates of food. "Uncle Marcus has a better cook."

  "We'll find a cook to please you, if that's your worst complaint. Is it your worst complaint?"

  "No. The builders are."

  "Well, they'll be gone in a month or two, then things will be more peaceful. Tomorrow"—she remembered, shook her head, smiled—“no, the next day—we'll go walking together."

  "Why not tomorrow?" asked Servilia.

  "Because I have to have one more day all to myself."

  Servilia slipped from her chair. "I'm tired, Mama. May I go to bed now, please?"

  And so began the happiest year of Livia Drusa's life, a time when nothing really mattered save love, and love was called Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, with a little bit left over for Servilia and Lilla.

  Very quickly they settled into a pattern, for of course Cato didn't spend much time on his Tusculan farm—or hadn't, until he met Livia Drusa. It was necessary that they find a more secure rendezvous, one where they wouldn't be seen by a farm worker or a wandering shepherd, and one where Livia Drusa could keep herself clean, tidy, presentable. This Cato solved by evicting a family who lived in a tiny secluded cottage on his estate, and announcing to his world that he would use it as a retreat, as he wanted to write a book. The book became his excuse for everything, especially for protracted absences from Rome and his wife; following in the footsteps of his grandfather, this opus was to be an extremely detailed compendium about Roman rural life, and would incorporate every kind of country spell, rite, prayer, superstition, and custom of a religious nature, then would go on to explain modern farming techniques and activities. No one in Rome found its genesis at all surprising, given Cato's family and background.