“Now, is that any way to treat a friend?” Tacitus bellowed from the other end of the garden.
XIII
“Stay right here,” I told Aurora, placing her hand on one of the columns that line the garden. “You’re just a few steps from the exhedra on your left. I’ll be right back.”
I rushed to Tacitus and threw my arms around him, barely able to hold back tears. “Thank the gods!” I cried. “But I thought you were going to Gaul. Your brother—”
“No, my brother is fine. I’ll explain. But what about you? You don’t look or sound so good.” He put an arm around my shoulder and I winced from the pain in my side.
I told him as succinctly as I could about what had happened since the last time I saw him.
“Aurora’s blind?” He shook his head when I finished and looked across the garden at her. “That’s tragic. You should have gutted the bastard who did it. I would have, without a moment’s hesitation.”
“How could I, with Aurora begging me not to?”
“Hmm. I see your point. Don’t you wonder sometimes what women are thinking? What are you going to do with her now? I mean, a blind slave—”
“How can you even ask that? I’ll take care of her as long as she needs me. She may recover her sight. The doctor holds out some hope. But that doesn’t make any difference.” I looked at Aurora, still standing by the column where I’d left her. Her head was high, but the expression on her face told me that she was afraid, uncertain where she was. “I need to go to her.”
Tacitus held me back. “You’ve coupled with her, haven’t you?”
I turned on him, aghast. If he knew, who didn’t know? “How did you—”
“It was obvious the last time I saw the two of you together. At least it was obvious to Julia. I wasn’t sure, but from the mournful expression on your face now, even I can tell there’s something between you two. What does your mother think? Or your bride-to-be?”
“They don’t know, I hope.” I straightened my shoulders, trying to go back on the offensive. I would have to explain to him later that the phrase “bride-to-be” didn’t mean exactly what it had meant when he left. “We can talk about this some other time. Right now, you owe me an explanation.”
“And I will very shortly pay that debt—in full, with enough interest to satisfy even the greediest money lender. Do you think we can get enough privacy in the exhedra? The morning is quite fine.”
“All right. Let me get Aurora.”
“And I have to get someone as well.” He turned toward the front of the house and gestured. A man and a woman I hadn’t noticed stepped out of the shadows. “This is Lucius Nonnius and his wife, Marcella.”
The couple he introduced had the air of rural gentry. Their clothing suggested that they were reasonably well off by the standards of their village or small town, but the way they gawked at everything in my garden made it obvious that they were seeing things like this for the first time, things they would like to copy when they returned home.
“Welcome to my house,” I said.
“We’re very pleased to be here, sir,” Nonnius said with a deferential nod.
I glanced at Tacitus for an explanation for their presence.
“They’re neighbors of Crispina and Popilius,” he said, “and Nonnius is a cousin of Popilius.”
“I see. But how—”
“Let’s get settled and then we can talk.”
We crossed the garden and I took Aurora’s hand. She squeezed mine in relief. “Tacitus has brought some visitors,” I told her.
“I wish I could say it’s nice to see you, my lord Tacitus,” she said, picking up on my hint about the presence of strangers. “But it is nice to have you here again.”
I decided I would just let Nonnius and Marcella wonder who Aurora was. From the way she addressed Tacitus and from my lack of an introduction, they should be able to figure it out for themselves. “Let’s go into the exhedra.”
“Oh, this is exquisite,” Marcella cooed as we took our places on the couches, sitting instead of reclining. I expected Aurora to sit beside me on the high couch, but she stood behind me, with one hand on my shoulder—a more appropriate position for a servant. Nonnius and Marcella, as guests, took the middle couch.
“I’ve never seen such beautiful mosaics,” Marcella went on. “And your garden is a work of art as well. I’ve never seen anything like the statue of that faun.”
“You’re very kind,” I said. “My late uncle is responsible for most of what you see. I haven’t made any major changes here since I inherited the house from him a few years ago. The faun, I’m told, was brought back from Corinth by Sulla.”
I looked out over the garden, trying to imagine seeing it for the first time. The sun was high enough now that light fell directly on the garden. Melanchthon had recently trimmed the shrubs and the rain of a few days ago had left everything green and fresh. Marcella couldn’t stop looking around. Nonnius’ frank admiration was focused on Aurora, although he appeared to be looking at me. I couldn’t fault the man’s taste, even if his manners left something to be desired. I took a quick glimpse at her myself and was shocked. Standing where she was, with the sun behind her, the outline of her body could be seen through her tunic. I shifted my position on the couch and brought her to stand behind my other shoulder. Nonnius then shifted his gaze to me.
“Now, Cornelius Tacitus,” I said, “please tell me what’s going on. Where have you been?”
“Well, I decided to do what Aurora suggested and try to find Popilius’ farm to see if any of his neighbors could tell me anything about him and Crispina.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that was what you were going to do, instead of concocting that story about Gaul?” And making me feel like you were deserting me.
“Because you would have wanted to go with me, and I wanted to go alone to see if I could apply what I’ve learned from watching you. And, if it turned out to be a waste of time, I would not have taken you away from your inquiries.”
“Did you uncover anything that will help us unravel this mess?”
“I’m afraid I may have just made it even messier.”
“What do you mean? You found these neighbors, even a relative. Can’t they clarify some things for us?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘clarify.’ They say that everything Crispina told us was a lie.”
*
“A…a lie?” I sputtered. “What do you mean, it was all a lie?” Aurora tightened her grip on my shoulder.
“Just what I said,” Tacitus replied calmly. “A lie, a deliberate distortion of the truth. I’m sure you know the meaning of the word. I told them what Crispina told us and they said the only truth in it was that Popilius was her second husband. The rest is a fabrication worthy of a Milesian tale.”
Aurora leaned in toward me. “My lord, I’m sorry if I’ve led you astray.” Her voice shook. “She seemed truthful to me. And you heard her story, from her own lips.”
“Yes, and I believed it. But, like you said, she may have been just trying to throw us off the scent.” I patted her hand to reassure her, then turned to Nonnius and Marcella. “Tell me everything.”
Nonnius began, but, from the way his wife’s jaw was working, I had the feeling she wouldn’t be silent for long. Her face resembled a thundercloud just before a downpour. “Well, sir, as Cornelius Tacitus said, she did speak one bit of truth. Her first husband was Fabius, and Popilius was her second husband. But Fabia wasn’t her daughter. She was the daughter of Fabius by his first wife. That wife died giving birth to the girl, and Fabius remarried quickly, to give his child a mother.”
“So Fabia was her stepdaughter.” That explained Clodius’ comment that Fabia wasn’t his sister and perhaps his comment that she was mean to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the boy?” Aurora asked. “Was he Crispina’s son?”
“I’ll come to that,” Nonnius said, looking at Aurora in surprise. “In due time.”<
br />
“All right, then,” I said. “Fabia was Crispina’s stepdaughter.”
“Yes, sir. She continued to raise the girl after Fabius died.”
“But they never got on well,” Marcella interjected, having held her tongue as long as she could, I suppose. “That little Fabia was more than a mother could handle by herself. She was beautiful and everybody told her so. Made her think mighty highly of herself. She needed a man’s firm hand to keep her in line. That’s why Crispina married Popilius.”
“I thought she was trying to keep herself from starving,” I said.
“Pssht,” Marcella said, waving her hand. “She wasn’t wanting for anything. She had plenty of her own and Fabius left her even more. Popilius moved into her house after they married because it was nicer than his. They combined their properties, just like Crispina planned all along.”
“It’s true,” Tacitus said. “I’ve seen her farm. It’s large enough to provide a comfortable living, and she has a good-sized familia to run it.”
“So Popilius wasn’t a former rejected suitor?”
“No, sir,” Marcella said. “He owns the land next to Crispina’s. She wanted to grab that and get some help raising Fabia in the bargain.”
“But Popilius—and he is my cousin, sir—wasn’t without his own plan,” Nonnius said. “Pardon my frankness, but, before he married her, he boasted to me that he would plow Crispina until that field dried up. By then, he said, Fabia should be ready.”
The plowing image again. “He wanted the girl? Couldn’t he have just waited until she was nubile and then asked to marry her instead?”
“He wasn’t sure Crispina would have him as a son-in-law. He didn’t realize that she wanted his land, too.”
“Oh, tell him the truth,” Marcella said, jabbing her husband with an elbow. “That’s what we’re here to do. How long are you going to keep protecting him?”
Nonnius glared at her and lowered his head. When he looked up and caught my eye, I could see that he had decided to confront something unpleasant. “Well—how shall I put this?—my cousin has always been attracted to…well, to very young girls.”
I felt a knot forming in my stomach. Although we Romans expect girls to marry young, we do not approve of men taking advantage of them when they’re still children. As is true with so many of our less admirable social customs, there’s no law against it, but it carries the same opprobrium as attraction to a member of one’s own sex—one of those things that just “shouldn’t be done.” I noticed that Tacitus’ head was down. Whatever his proclivities, at least I know he has never consorted with a child.
“Didn’t Crispina know that about him?” I asked.
“No, sir. Popilius kept his secret well. He always went somewhere else to…indulge himself.”
“Mostly to Ostia,” Marcella said. “You can find anything in that place. It’s like the very bottom of a sewer.”
“I doubt you’ll find many as pretty as little Fabia anywhere,” Nonnius said. “Popilius felt he’d arrived in the Elysian Fields. Because Crispina got along so poorly with the child, she was quite happy to leave her in Popilius’ care. For her part, I think little Fabia was happy to have a parent who cared about her, no matter how.”
“How old was she when Popilius married Crispina?”
“She was seven,” Marcella said, “but as flirty as a girl twice that age. She would sit in Popilius’ lap and kiss him.” She shuddered.
“She was an affectionate child,” Nonnius said. “She couldn’t have known how Popilius felt about her.”
“She was a little tease,” his wife snapped, shifting away from him on the couch. “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
I needed to intervene before they came to blows, something I suspected they did regularly. “Crispina claimed that Popilius refused to let Fabia get married.”
“That much is true, sir,” Nonnius said. “He wasn’t going to let another man have her. He told me he’d fallen in love with her, even after she became nubile. That’s when he usually started looking somewhere else. But Fabia stayed small. Never did look her age. No breasts or hips to speak of.”
That description certainly fit the body we had found tied to Tabellius’ wheel.
“Popilius said he would never want anyone else,” Nonnius continued. “They hid what they were doing from Crispina, but, when Fabia realized she was pregnant, she boasted to Crispina about it, since Crispina hadn’t been able to bear a child.”
“Wait!” Aurora said. “What about the boy? She told me he was her son.”
“Well, only in a manner of speaking,” Marcella said. “Crispina had suspected for some time that she couldn’t have a child. She’d never gotten pregnant, even though she’d been married twice, and one of the men, at least, had fathered a child.”
Nonnius snorted. “As if you can ever be certain who the father is.”
Marcella glared at him, and I suspected she had produced a jug-eared heir who resembled the town butcher more than her husband. She resumed her story. “Crispina begged us to help her, being neighbors and friends, even Popilius’ family. Eight years ago, when one of our servant girls found out she was pregnant, Crispina pretended she was, too. When our girl gave birth one night, we told her the child had died. The next morning I went to Crispina’s house, bringing a load of supplies—including the baby—to help in her ‘delivery.’ I sent her servant women out of the room to get things. By the time they returned, Crispina had had an easy delivery. She presented Popilius with a handsome son, and nobody was any the wiser.”
“You stole your servant’s child?” I didn’t know if I was more appalled at what they’d done or at the nonchalance with which she told us about it.
“The father was a free man, sir,” Nonnius said, “with a wife and family of his own. He didn’t want the child. There were going to be all sorts of legal problems, as I’m sure you understand.” He looked at me as though I were in the habit of coupling with female slaves—mine or anyone else’s—and producing bastards by them. “This way, everybody was relieved and Crispina had her baby.”
I never cease to be amazed at how people can justify any action they decide to take. But what if Aurora were to have a child? Roman law would make him a slave because of his mother.
“It was even best for the boy,” Marcella said. “He’ll grow up a free man, not the child of a slave, if he gets to grow up. Do you know what Crispina has done with him?”
“She left him here. I thought it uncaring of her to abandon him, but if he’s not really her son—”
“She cared enough to leave him in a safe place,” Marcella said. “May we see him, sir?”
“I’ll get him as soon as we’re finished with this conversation. I don’t think Clodius needs to hear it.”
“No, sir. Certainly not. Would it be possible for us to take him home with us? We’ve no children of our own, and Clodius has always thought of us as his Aunt Marcella and Uncle Nonnius.”
“Wouldn’t it be uncomfortable to have him in the same house with the servant woman who is his actual mother? What if people see a resemblance?” My mother often comments on how much I look like her.
“No one has noticed so far,” Nonnius said. “We worried about that for a while, but the boy seems to resemble his father more than his mother.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” Tacitus said. “Crispina made her husband think she was pregnant until you could slip a newborn child into the house?”
“She almost got away with it,” Nonnius said. “But Fabia figured it out. She told Crispina she had seen her padding herself and she was going to tell Popilius.”
Tacitus shook his head. “Was Popilius so obtuse that he couldn’t see Crispina was fooling him? I’ve read comic plays in which women deceived their husbands like this, but I never found them believable. How could a man be so unaware of what his wife was doing?”
“He wasn’t much interested in Crispina, sir. He coupled with her now and then, he said, to ke
ep her from getting suspicious about…what he was doing with Fabia. She made sure she seduced him just as soon as we knew our servant girl was with child. I doubt they ever coupled after that. She might have…you know, with her mouth. He liked that, he told me, because the young girls did it well and it didn’t hurt them.”
“So little Fabia was blackmailing Crispina?” Tacitus asked, obviously as uncomfortable as I was with this turn in the conversation. “How old was she when this happened?”
“She would have been nine,” Marcella said. “She was a conniving little wench. Crispina never could control her after that.”
“All the more reason, I suppose, for Crispina to be outraged when she found out about Popilius and Fabia.”
“ ‘Outraged’ doesn’t begin to describe it, sir. Popilius and Fabia had to run for their lives. They came to our place and begged for a horse. They had only one. Popilius said Crispina had come after them with an axe. He was able to knock her out long enough for them to escape. That was less than a month ago. We haven’t heard from them since.”
“Do you have any idea where Popilius might have gone now?”
“No, sir. I’m sure he’s trying to get as far away from Crispina as possible,” Nonnius said. “You’ll never find him.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t know it,” I said. “I have no idea what he looks like.”
“It wouldn’t help much if you did,” Marcella said. “There’s nothing remarkable about his looks, aside from him being a bit stoop-shouldered. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd, unless you heard him speak. His voice is odd. I’m not sure how else to describe it, except to say…it’s odd. There’s something about the pitch of it. Once you’ve heard it, you don’t forget it.”
Aurora gasped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the man, my lord, the man who dropped the pot and the bucket when Marinthus’ shed was on fire. He was standing next to me in the line.”
“Sounds like a clumsy oaf.”
“I thought so at the time, my lord. Now I think he was trying to keep us from putting out the fire.”
The Eyes of Aurora Page 19
