As usual, I left my luck with the Guard on the door. Vespasian was out of Rome.
The Flavians were famous as a family team. Having two grown sons to offer long-term stability had been Vespasian's chief qualification. He and his elder son Titus were virtually partners now; even the younger, Domitian, took a full part in public duties. The night I came to beg for advancement both imperial sons were working; the chamberlain, who knew me, told me to choose which Caesar I wanted to see. Even before I had made up my mind I knew the best choice was to walk away. But I was geared up for action, and could not back down.
Not even I could ask Titus, who had once cast interested eyes on Helena, to give me promotion so I could snatch the girl myself. There had been nothing between them (as far as I could ascertain), but without my presence there might have been. He had a pleasant mentality, but I hate to push a man beyond reasonable limits. Tact necessarily intervened.
'I'll take Domitian.'
'Best thing. He's doing the public appointments nowadays!' The Palace staff laughed. Domitian's fervour in handing out postings left and right had caused even his mild father to criticise.
Despite jumping the queue, I had to wait about. I ended up wishing I had brought one of the judge's encyclopaedias to read or my will to write. But finally it was my turn, and in I went.
Domitian Caesar was twenty-two. Handsome; solid as a bullock; curly-topped, though hammer-toed. Brought up among women while his father and Titus were away on public duties, instead of his elder brother's sweet disposition he now had the introverted, obstinate air that is more often found in an only child. In his first acts in the Senate he had made mistakes; as a result he had been demoted to organising poetry competitions and festivals. Now he conducted himself well in public, yet I distrusted him.
There were reasons for that. I knew things about Domitian that he would not want repeated. His reputation as a plotter had foundation: I was in a position to indict him for a serious crime. I had promised his father and brother they could rely on my discretion-but my knowledge was what had prompted me to choose him of the two young Caesars, and I walked into his presence tonight full of confidence.
'Didius Falco!' I had been announced by officials. It was impossible to tell from his greeting whether the young prince remembered me.
He wore purple; that was his privilege. His wreath was fairly plain and reposing on a cushion. There were no mounds of grapes or jewel-encrusted goblets, very few garlands and certainly no sinuous dancers writhing around the floor. He was attending to public business with the same seriousness as Vespasian and Titus. This was no debauched, paranoid Julio-Claudian. Yet I knew he was dangerous. He was dangerous-and I could prove it. But after so many years in the business, I should have known that did not make my own position safe.
The room was of course full of attendants. Slaves who looked as though they had work to do were, as always in the Flavian audience chamber, quietly proceeding with their business, apparently unsupervised. There was someone else there too. Domitian gestured to a figure on the sidelines.
'I have asked Anacrites to join us.' My request for an audience would have been relayed long before I was actually summoned; during the tedium of my long wait, this disaster had been arranged. Domitian thought I was there as an agent. He had sent for support. Anacrites was the Palace's official Chief Spy.
He was tight-lipped and tense; pale-eyed; obsessively neat; a man who had brought the undercover arts of suspicion and jealousy to new depths.
Of all the petty tyrants in the Palace secretariat he was the meanest, and of all the enemies I could have picked in Rome I hated him the most.
'Thanks, Caesar. We need not detain him. My business is personal.' Nobody reacted. Anacrites stayed.
'And your business is?'
I took a deep breath. My palms were sweating unaccountably. I kept my voice low and even. 'Some time ago your father made me a wager that if I could produce the financial qualifications, he would make me a member of the middle class. I have recently returned from Germany where I completed various actions on the state's behalf. I now wish to marry and settle to a quieter life. My elderly father agrees with this decision. He has deposited four hundred thousand sesterces with a land agent, for investment in my name. I have come to beg the honour which your father promised me.'
Very neat. So restrained. Domitian was even more restrained. He merely asked me, 'You are an informer, I believe?'
So much for polite rhetoric. I should have said, 'You're a rat and I can prove it. Sign this scroll, Caesar, or I'll spew the dirt from the Rostrum and finish you!'
His Caesarship did not look at Anacrites. Anacrites did not need to speak to him. Apart from the fact that everything must have been settled between them before I had even crossed the threshold for my fatal audience, the rules were quite clear. Domitian Caesar stated them: 'In reforming the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders, my father is concerned to provide reputable, meritworthy groups from whom he can draw future candidates for public posts. Are you,' he asked, in that measured tone with which I could not quarrel, 'proposing that informers should be regarded as reputable and meritworthy men?'
I opted for the worst kind of salvage: telling the truth. 'No, Caesar. It's a seedy, disgusting occupation, picking over secrets at the worst end of society. Informers trade in betrayal and misery. Informers live off other people's death and loss.'
Domitian stared. He had a tendency to be morose. 'Nevertheless, you have been useful to the state?'
'I hope so, Caesar.'
But the upshot was inevitable. He said, 'That may be. But I do not feel able to grant this request.'
I said, 'You have been most courteous. Thank you for your time.'
He added, with the diffidence that characterised the Flavians, 'If you feel an injustice has been done, you may wish to ask my brother or the Emperor to re-examine your case.'
I smiled bitterly. 'Caesar, you have given me a reasoned adjudication which conforms with the highest social principles.' Once Domitian had stacked the odds against me there was no point in exclaiming. Titus would probably refuse to interest himself. I knew without exposing myself to more sorrow that Vespasian would support his boy. As my own would say, what are fathers for?
I scoffed, 'Injustice I cannot accuse you of, Caesar-merely ingratitude. No doubt you will inform your father of my views, the next time he wants me for some stinking mission that exceeds the capabilities of your normal diplomats?'
We inclined heads politely, and I left the audience.
Anacrites followed me out. He seemed shocked. He even seemed to be calling upon some brotherhood of our trade. Well, he was a spy; he lied well. 'Falco, this had nothing to do with me!'
'That's good.'
'Domitian Caesar called for me because he thought you wanted to talk about your work in Germany-'
'Oh I do like that,' I snarled. 'Since you had nothing at all to do with my achievements in Germany!'
The spy was still protesting. 'Even freed slaves can buy their way into the middle rank! Are you accepting this?' Spies are simple people.
'How can I quibble? He followed the rules. In his place, Anacrites, I would have done the same.' Then, knowing that Anacrites was probably a freedman, I added, 'Besides, who wants to rank with slaves?'
I walked from the Palace like a prisoner with a life sentence who had just heard he was to benefit from a national amnesty. I kept telling myself the decision was a relief.
Only as I plodded to collect Helena from Mother's did I gradually allow my spirits to sink under the knowledge that my losses today, which already included dignity and pride, now had to include ambition, trust and hope.
LXXIII
Not knowing how to face Helena Justina, I went to get drunk. At Flora's Caupona there were lamps along both counters. The new waiter was presiding with a care and attention which must already have lost several of the old lackadaisical customers. Not a crumb marred the mock-marble counters, which he flicked every few seconds
with a cloth, while waiting eagerly for requests to serve the few nervous inebriates. What the caupona had gained in cleanliness it now lacked in atmosphere.
Still, that would change. The old dismal standards were too ingrained to stay under for long. After ten years, mediocrity would reassert itself.
I was pleased to see this new waiter was a man I recognised.
'Apollonius! Just filling in until you get the call back to education?'
'On the house!' he said proudly, placing a cup two inches from my elbow and following it with a neat little dish of exactly twenty nuts.
There was no way I could get drunk in such a pristine environment. Good manners forbade forcing this enraptured soul to hear my pathetic ramblings, let alone mop up after me. I managed a minute of small talk, then drained my cup. I was just leaving when a woman came in from the back room with her sleeves rolled up, drying her hands on a towel.
For a moment I thought it was Mother. She was small, tidy, and unexpectedly grey-haired. Her face was sharp, her eyes tired and suspicious of men.
I could have left even though she had seen me. Instead, I took a deep breath. 'You must be Flora.' She made no reply. 'I'm Falco.'
'Favonius's younger son.' I had to smile at the irony of my preposterous father running away to a 'new life' when even the woman he took with him insisted on using his old name.
She must be wondering whether I posed some sort of threat. Probably Festus when he was around had worried her; possibly she understood that I was different.
'May I ask you to give a message to my father? It's bad news, I'm afraid. Tell him I went to the Palace, but was turned down. I'm grateful, but his loan won't be required.'
'He will be very disappointed,' the redhead, who was no longer a redhead, commented. I fought off my anger at the thought of the two of them discussing me.
'We'll all survive,' I told her. Speaking as if we were one glorious united family.
'Perhaps you will have another opportunity,' Flora offered me quietly, like any distant female relation consoling a young man who had come to announce a failure on the worst day of his life.
I thanked Apollonius for the drink, and went home to my mother's house.
Too many voices greeted me; I could not go in.
Helena must have been waiting. As I reached the foot of the stairs again, heading off by myself, her voice called out, 'Marcus, I'm coming-wait for me!'
I waited while she seized a cloak, then she ran down: a tall, strong-willed girl in a blue dress and an amber necklace, who knew what I had come to tell her well before I spoke. I did tell her, as we walked through Rome. Then I gave her the other dreary news: that whatever I had said to Anacrites, I did not intend to stay in a city which broke its promises.
'Wherever you go, I'll come with you!' She was wonderful.
We went up on the Embankment-the great ancient rampart built by the republicans to enclose the original city. Rome had long outgrown these battlements, which remained now as a memorial to our forefathers and a place to climb to view the modern city. Helena and I came here in times of trouble, to feel the night air blowing around us while we walked above the world.
From the Gardens of Mycaenas on the slopes of the Esquiline arose a soft springtime odour of damp soil stirring with new life. Dark, powerful clouds were thrusting across the skies. In one direction we could see the stark crag of the Capitol, still lacking the Temple of Jupiter, lost to fire in the civil wars. Curving round it, outlined by small lights on the wharves, the river took its meandering course. Behind us we heard a trumpet from the Praetorian barracks, causing a raucous surge of drunken noise from a drinking-house near the Tiburtina Gate. Below, monkeys chattered among the disreputable booths where fortune-tellers and puppeteers entertained the cheap end of society who even in winter took their fun out of doors. The streets were full of waggons and donkeys, the air rent with shouting and harness-bells. Exotic cymbals and chanting announced the begging priests and acolytes of some unsavoury cult.
'Where shall we go?' demanded Helena as we walked. Respectable girls are excited so easily. Brought up to be chaste, staid and sensible, naturally Helena Justina now kicked up her heels at the first promise of a jape. Knowing me spelt ruin for her parents' dreams of curbing her, just as knowing her spelt disaster for my own occasional plans to reform into a sober citizen.
'Give me a chance! I have just reached a wild decision in a moment of despondency; I don't expect to be taken up on it.'
'We have the whole Empire to choose from-'
'Or we can stay at home!'
Suddenly she stopped in her tracks, laughing. 'Whatever you want, Marcus. I don't mind.'
I threw back my head, breathing slowly and deeply. Soon the damp winter odours of the soot from a million oil-lamps would be giving way to summer's scents of flower festivals and spicy food taken in the open air. Soon Rome would be warm again, and life would seem easy, and taking a stand would become just too much agony.
'I want you,' I said. 'And whatever life we can make for ourselves.'
Helena leaned against my side, her heavy mantle wrapping itself around my legs. 'Can you be happy as we are?'
'I suppose so.' We had paused, somewhere above the Golden House, near the Caelimontana Gate. 'What about you, sweetheart?'
'You know what I think,' said Helena quietly. 'We reached the decision that mattered when I first came to live with you. What is marriage but the voluntary union of two souls? Ceremony is irrelevant. When I married Pertinax…' She very rarely referred to this. 'We had the veils, nuts and the slaughtered pig. After the ceremony,' said Helena baldly, 'we had nothing else.'
'So if you marry again,' I replied gently, 'you want to be like Cato Uticensis when he married Marcia?'
'How was that?'
'Without witnesses or guests. Without contracts or speeches. Brutus was present to take the auguries-though maybe you and I should dispense even with that. Who wants their failures to be prophesied in advance?' With me, she could be certain there would be failures. 'They simply joined hands, communing in silence, while they gave their pledge-'
Romantic moments with a girl who is well read can be difficult. 'Cato and Marcia? Oh that's a touching story. He divorced her!' Helena remembered angrily. 'He gave her away to his very rich best friend-while she was pregnant, mark you-then when the lucrative second spouse dropped dead, Cato took her back, acquiring the fortune. Very convenient! I see why you admire Cato.'
Gamely I tried to laugh it off. 'Forget it. He was full of weird ideas. He banned husbands from kissing their wives in public-'
'That was his grandfather. Anyway, I don't suppose anyone noticed,' Helena snapped. 'Husbands ignore their wives in public; everyone knows that.'
I was still living with a mass of prejudice derived from Helena Justina's ex-husband. Maybe one day I would dispel her bad memories. At least I was willing to try. 'I won't ignore you, love.'
'Is that a promise?'
'You'll see to it!' I said, holding off a moment of panic.
Helena chuckled. 'Well I'm not the incomparable Marcia-and you're certainly not Cato!' Her voice dropped more tenderly. 'But I gave you my heart a long time ago, so I may as well add my pledge…'
She turned towards me, grasping my right hand in hers. Her left hand lay upon my shoulder, as always with that plain band of British silver which she wore on her third finger to mark her love for me. Helena made a good stab at the pose of adoring submissiveness, though I am not sure whether I quite pulled off the frozen look of caution which is often seen in married men on tombstones. But there we were, on that April night on the Embankment, with nobody to see us, yet the whole city assembled around us had we wanted the presence of witnesses. We were standing in the formal Roman matrimonial pose. And whatever communing in silence entails, we were doing it.
Personally I have always thought that Cato Uticensis has a lot to answer for.
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