by Stant Litore
But she pushed from her mind the memory of those moans of hunger and those terrible, grasping hands. Better to consider that unreal, a nightmare. Focus on what was at hand; there were closer, more intimate terrors clutching at her heart. Worry for Marcus. Worry for the others in the insula—had the guardsmen found their hiding place, had they kicked or broken their way into it before giving up the search? And fear for herself as she stared at the locked door and remembered the guardsman’s hand on her body. Shame, heavy and hot in her breast; the guard had touched her as though she were a whore, a slave he might own and throw to the floor when he pleased. Men had touched her that way before; they had touched Dora that way. Regina trembled. She’d been dragged from the insula into the street; she’d been bound. However much she’d screamed or kicked, it had made no difference. Her freedom and her refuge and her new name—had any of it really been true, when it could be taken from her so easily?
The thought shook her.
Yet.
There was Polycarp.
Polycarp had loved her, called her daughter.
In his eyes, she had never been a slave.
When he’d touched her hair or brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers, there had never been in that touch any demand for her to please him. Confronted with a man who didn’t demand her, for the first time she’d found herself giving. At first, she’d given to him by doing little tasks about the insula or making tea for him, or carrying messages to his tenants. Later, she had done far more, keeping the accounts and listening to the tenants’ troubles. She had learned to give to all of them, all who looked to her as a deaconess who might serve and love and shelter them, and not as a slave who must please and obey.
To Polycarp, she’d given everything that he’d accept from her. Now her breath caught, remembering; she had kissed him the night before. Before the dead, before the guardsmen. She’d pressed her lips to his, knowing that he might die when he stepped through that door into the alley. She had wanted to give even that, of herself. She’d never had the choice to give a kiss before, had never wanted to before.
“Daughter,” he’d said, as though she’d embarrassed him.
She shut her eyes against a sting of tears, feeling the ache in her heart. Here in the dark of this shed, she heard more of her heart than she ever had before. She knew now that she yearned to make a free gift of herself, but this gift wouldn’t be received, for it seemed clear to her now that Polycarp didn’t need or desire a lover. He was a man accustomed to thinking of others as children to care for, and he had so many of these children, so many who needed his love. “Daughter,” he’d said to her.
And now it was too late, in any case. Everything—everything—was shattered and lost. She blinked at the shreds of light let in by chinks in the wall of the shed, her heart bleak. She was crated here like an animal.
She groaned, her grief at Polycarp’s absence sharp as glass within her. She needed him to hold her or to speak to her in that firm, calming voice of his. His voice always conveyed that he knew who he was and what he was doing. Just hearing him, she felt she knew who she was too. She needed that now. She needed him. She needed him to be alive.
Her throat tightened. She didn’t know whether he had been simply knifed in the dark or was being held somewhere for a trial. He might even be in one of the other sheds she’d seen. She thought of calling out for him—but what would that serve, except to bring some reprisal for them both from the guardsmen outside? Yet the uncertainty tormented her. Where was he now? How had they treated him? She closed her eyes against the thin light. Even if Polycarp still lived, he was going to die—she was certain of that. She drew a few shuddering breaths, refused to cry. Marcus needed her. The youth was breathing raggedly on her lap.
Bitterly, she thought of Julia, wondered where the woman and her husband were now. Not in a shed, she was sure.
With a few words to the officers of the city, the baker’s wife had shattered all their lives.
Regina had last seen Julia the morning of her disappearance. The baker had sent some bread with Regina to the Catacombs the night before, though neither he nor his wife had come to the gathering. They never did. The morning after, Regina had climbed the narrow, foot-worn steps to Julia’s small, fourth-story apartment to thank her. She climbed slowly and with some tightness in her breast; she was never comfortable or at ease talking with Julia. The woman seemed stiff, unfriendly, and not very willing to partake either of conversation or companionship.
But then, Regina had reminded herself sternly, she knew a thing or two herself about what it was like to feel alone. She straightened her shoulders as she approached the door.
No answer came to her knock, but the door was ajar. After hesitating, she nudged it open, her heart beating with a sudden fear that something bad may have happened. Perhaps Julia had fainted or was ill.
“Julia?” she called softly.
The baker’s wife sat at her windowsill, gazing out at the garden. Her head turned at the call, and Regina caught a glimpse of deep sorrow in the woman’s eyes before she masked it. In her lap Julia held a bit of lace. Regina found her gaze held by it.
“It’s very beautiful,” Regina said.
Julia’s eyes stayed cold. The silence stretched into something uncomfortable; Regina had the feeling that she’d burst in during some private moment too intimate to be shared—as though she’d interrupted Julia in the midst of a prayer or a confession.
“I came to thank you.” Regina bit her lip, trying to think of the words she needed. “And your husband. For the bread.”
“Well.” Julia glanced down at the lace, her voice detached, distant. “We have enough to spare.”
Regina heard a low murmur of voices from the garden below—a few people talking outside a door. She moved slowly toward Julia, giving the woman a smile and seating herself beside her on the wide sill, her back to the other side of the window, their knees almost touching. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
When Julia didn’t answer, Regina folded her hands gracefully in her lap and looked at the lace she held. “I never had that skill,” she said softly. “My hands can’t make anything beautiful. Though I was taught to dance, and—other things.” Her eyes darkened, and she slammed a door shut in her mind against the shrieks of furious memories. She searched instead for older, less painful memories, ones rarely recollected, in order to fill the silence with small words. “But first, when I was young, very young, my grandfather taught me numbers. My parents didn’t have any sons, and I was supposed to help my father at his shop. In Damascus.” She smiled.
Julia let out her breath slowly. “This would have been for my child.” Her fingers tightened about the lace. Those fingers were thick, but they must have moved with particular grace to make that small bit of beauty, that gift for someone who did not exist but was only a hope.
Regina’s heart softened. She gazed at the other woman, as though seeing her for the first time. The baker’s wife had been hurt, many times; it was in her eyes, a deep and weary conviction that life was a sequence of losses, and amid that weariness a still-flickering flame of yearning and need.
Regina recognized the yearning, and the weariness that came of having never had a child. Regina didn’t think she herself could have one; her body carried scars inside, not just on her back. She had faced that. And in helping Polycarp she’d learned that she had many children, many people in this insula, and in others, who relied on her—for an occasional gift of bread from the larder, or for words of comfort, or for an ear and a listening heart, to bring their cares and needs to the father. She had a community and a home; what more could she need?
“Julia,” she asked softly, “are you so unhappy?”
“What have I to be unhappy about?” Bitterness in her voice, sharp and lethal—though Regina sensed beneath it a woman so brittle she might break at a touch. “I have a man, and bread to eat.”
“But it’s not enough,” Regina murmured. The bite in Julia’s tone had sta
rtled her; she searched the other woman’s face, her concern growing.
Julia’s eyes lifted, found hers. They were dull with an old and harbored anger. “I was domina of my own house, girl. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that means.”
“No,” Regina said after a moment. “I don’t.”
She waited.
Julia’s shoulders trembled. She folded the lace, carefully, precisely. Her face struggled to hold in her emotion. “I want it back. I want it all back. I’d do anything for that. Give up anything. This—this place. I don’t live here, I only breathe. I can’t bear a child here, it’s so filthy. Someone two stories down takes a shit, and I can smell it.” Her voice was low and intense. She closed her eyes, tightly, and lowered her head, holding her breath against whatever was inside her wanting to shake her apart.
“I didn’t know you felt like this.” Regina reached out and took the other woman’s hand, but Julia pulled her hand away quickly.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you touch me.”
“Julia—” Regina fought to find something she could say. “Julia.” Her heart beat with alarm. How long had she felt like this? What poison was in her heart?
“No. I’m done. I thought I could bear it, but I’m done.” Julia straightened, her face becoming stone. “Please go.”
Regina hesitated. The pain in Julia’s voice was clear as a shout. Yet her anger was sharpening now to a knife’s edge; Regina didn’t think sitting here with her was helping her. “I’ll speak to the father,” she offered.
Julia’s eyes flashed. “I don’t want his pity, or yours.”
Regina flushed. “It’s not pity I’m offering—I worry for you.”
“You.” Julia’s eyes burned now. “You worry for me. What are you?”
The coldness of her voice struck Regina hard.
“A slave,” Julia hissed. “That’s what. A slut who thinks herself the mistress of the insula. An uppity thing Polycarp puts up with because she’s good with numbers.”
Regina went white.
It was a moment before she could speak. “A slave?” Regina couldn’t keep the distress from her voice. “I am a freed woman.”
“You, girl, are a travesty.” Julia set the lace beside her on the sill, her fingers trembling, then smoothed her dress. “This entire place is a travesty,” she muttered.
Regina felt a surge of panic, fought it down. Her vulnerability terrified her. Julia’s voice had taken on a cant and an intonation that she recognized. The consonants were sharper, the vowels shorter—it was not the way a woman of the Subura spoke. It was the way an equestrian spoke, a daughter of Rome’s merchant classes, who strolled the Forum and claimed homes on the lower slopes of Rome’s seven hills. Possibly Julia wasn’t even aware of the change in her voice. Regina glanced at her cold face. Wondered if years ago, Julia had spoken in such a sharp, precise voice to her slaves.
She seemed suddenly a stranger in their insula.
Regina took a breath, tried to steady herself. Equestrians came to the gathering in the Catacombs. They were no different from the rest of the people, no different from the bakers or the tanners or the fresco painters. No different even from manumitted slaves. And this insula, her insula, Polycarp’s insula, was not the house of miserable years where Regina had been beaten, and Julia was not the domina of that house. She had nothing to fear.
“I would befriend you,” Regina cried suddenly. “We all would, Julia. If you’d only come sit with us in the garden—or walk with us—or—why must you clutch your grief so tightly to your breast? Does it feel so good doing that?” Her face was flushed, her veins hot with adrenaline. “Come to dinner with us—tonight—please. Whatever you may think of us, you live here with us. Why stay locked away in this room?”
Julia’s fingers trembled again, and she clutched the folds of her dress, stilling them. Watching her, Regina felt a chill of insight. Julia’s grief was perhaps the one thing she owned, the one thing that told her who she was. The woman was so hurt and so alone that she’d forgotten how to love. Horror flickered in Regina’s belly. She herself might have been like that. If Polycarp hadn’t found her—she might have been like that.
“Please, come to dinner, Julia,” she whispered. “Tonight. Phineas and Marcus and I are breaking bread together, and we’ll invite the father, and I’ll invite Cecilia and Portia. Just come. Don’t stay up here.”
“I have no intention of staying here.” Julia’s voice was very quiet. Something in her tone— some finality, some terrible certainty—brought Regina’s head around. Her eyes widened. With a shock of clarity, she saw the window and the way Julia sat with her hips on the sill. How she would only need to lean back to topple from the sill and plummet to the garden earth four stories below. Regina thought quickly, her heart racing. Surely she was only imagining it. Julia couldn’t mean to do that—she couldn’t.
“You may go, girl,” Julia said.
The blood rushed back into Regina’s face. She was being dismissed, as one might dismiss a house slave. Her throat tightened; all the warmth left her body.
“Go,” Julia hissed.
Regina wanted to say something, to protest, to plead with her, but so many feelings and fears were rushing through her body so quickly, leaving her racked and shaken. At last, she turned and fled, unable to find words, knowing only that she needed privacy now to recollect and regather herself. Leaving, she shut Julia’s door with a quiet snick, blocking out the sight of the woman’s cold, furious eyes. Old memories were rattling the doors in Regina’s mind; she felt as though it took her whole being to hold those doors shut.
She walked as fast as she could down the steps and into the atrium and across the narrow garden toward her own first-story room. Glancing back over her shoulder as she moved around the lilacs, she caught sight of Julia still seated at the sill of her fourth-story window. Her cold hauteur had faded with Regina’s departure; now the other woman sat with her head lowered. Framed in that window, she had the look of an animal in a cage. Not a beautiful woman but an elegant one, Julia had always seemed graceful in the way she moved and in her posture. She appeared slumped now, like one of the gazelles they keep in narrow pens beneath the Colosseum, to whet the appetite of lions who would later be loosed on the gladiators.
Perhaps this same insula that for Regina was a place of safety, with high walls to keep at bay the threat of memory, felt for Julia like a confinement. Beneath the current of her fear, Regina felt a sharp prick of fresh worry, as though she’d stepped on a thorn. Then she looked away.
She was the deaconess; she should’ve brought her worries at once to the father.
If only she’d told him.
But she’d been too shaken. Too shaken even for anger, or for anything other than hurrying to her own room, to its refuge and safety. Shutting the door, she’d leaned against it and hugged herself tightly. The words Julia had used fell on her like robbers then in the dim light of her room—slave, slave, slut, slut—and she whimpered through closed lips, then flushed in shame at the sound. She was not a slave. Not anymore. She mustn’t act like one. After a few moments, she stepped to the shelf along the back wall and plucked down a small flask of wine, one she kept there for mixing with water to drink. She opened the flask, nearly spilled it, her hands shaking. She allowed herself only a sip, then placed it back on the shelf.
Slave, slave.
After a while, her blood still loud in her ears, she knelt on her bedding on the floor and prayed aloud, though softly, sharing the secrets of her heart with Polycarp’s God, that God he promised was always near and whose comforting presence Regina felt at rare times. The love Polycarp said his God had for the gathering, for his adopted children bought out of the slavery of their pasts, of their evils and their regrets—Regina knew about that love chiefly because of the love she saw Polycarp give to those in the gathering. But lacking the courage yet to speak her heart to Father Polycarp, she spoke instead to his God.
She prayed for most of the mo
rning, concealed within her room. She prayed for the courage to believe in her freedom and for the courage not to flee when threatened. Blinking back tears, she prayed her gratitude that she was no longer in the master’s house, no longer lashed or beaten or kicked from her bedding in the early hours, no longer answering to a name she did not want or laboring fiercely to delight and appease a man she hated. Even if she at times felt as though she were still in that insula, she wasn’t. She was here. “Help me not to be scared,” she whispered. “I want to help Polycarp, I want to make his work easier. It is a good work. He is such a good man. I hadn’t known there were such men, before I met him, before he saved me. But I am frightened, so frightened. I don’t even know why. Please. I just—I need—I want to be free of my past.”
Her heart roared awake inside her, like a lion lashed to the earth with hard cords, roaring in both fear and desperate hope. Without words, she laid out, vulnerably, the tangle of her feelings for Polycarp. Her face was wet with tears; this part of her prayer took a long time. It brought no answers, but a little comfort, for in thinking on Polycarp, the doors in her mind that had been rattling hard since Julia’s cruel words touched her ears closed tightly and stilled at last.
Finally, Regina prayed for Julia.
Then she rose, her knees screaming in protest, and moved stiffly to her door and opened it. At the outer door of the insula, several of the tenants were talking in low, urgent voices. Marcus was there, and Vergilius. She walked to them, pale but composed, determined to be again the deaconess and not a frightened slave girl. Those were both roles she might play, and if her heart did not always know which role was truest of her, she did know which she preferred. So she walked to the men at the outer door with her shoulders straight and her steps graceful and certain.
