“Those are exactly my own thoughts,” Tavius said.
So we would wait.
The next day, Tavius, Octavia, and I had another of our three-sided talks. Speaking as gently as I had ever heard him, Tavius apologized to his sister for ever asking her to marry Antony, and acknowledged that she had done it for his sake. “I never should have tied you to that man. I made a foolish mistake, at great cost to you. It’s time to undo my error. You must divorce him.” As he had before, he said she should come and stay with us, that he and I would do everything we could to ensure her comfort and happiness.
“I will not initiate a divorce. I will not leave Antony’s house,” Octavia said.
Tavius’s entire manner changed. “Antony has married another woman,” he said angrily. “What do you plan to do, live in a polygamous arrangement as if you were some barbarian slut?”
“Whatever he has done, he has not married her. He could not do that, not lawfully. He is married to me.”
Tavius fell into a paroxysm of coughing. He coughed more, lately; I took it as a sign of his unquiet mind. I felt his anguish and wanted to help him but was at a loss. I feared what would happen if Octavia divorced Antony. I imagined a war that Tavius might lose, a war that might take him from me forever.
When Tavius could speak again, he addressed his sister in a low voice. “Do you realize that the man you call your husband announced that Julius Caesar had one heir, and it wasn’t me? It’s as if he drew a dagger and aimed it at my heart. He spat on both of us. Don’t you have any pride?”
“I don’t want anyone to die for my pride.” She reached out and stroked his hand. “Least of all you.”
He suffered her touch for a moment, then jerked his hand away and got to his feet. We were in the garden of Antony’s house. Tavius looked around him as if even the flowers and the trees were his enemies. “Stay here then,” he said to Octavia. “If I loved and honored you less, I would have you carried out of here. But go ahead, stay. I see that you’ve gone insane. I can only hope you will recover.” His gaze shifted to me. “If I did to you what Antony has done to her, you would want to dine on my kidneys, and you know it. But you sit there and say not a word. I think you want my sister to tolerate this disgraceful treatment. Why?”
I felt his anger like a blow. Once we were so united we were like twin souls. Now it was as if walls had sprung up between us. “I only want peace,” I said in a shaking voice.
“Peace,” he repeated, as if the word disgusted him. He swung around and strode out of the house.
Octavia and I sat silently for a while. I struggled to keep from weeping. “I heard something about this so-called marriage of Antony’s,” she said finally. “Oh yes, I have my own sources. It was a strange half-Greek, half-Egyptian ritual. He dressed as Dionysus and she as some Egyptian goddess or other. They played at being god and goddess, as they and their guests feasted and drank. It was nothing like a Roman wedding.”
“It was a public event,” I said.
“It was foolishness. Antony is like a boy in some ways. Children can be cruel, but it’s unthinking cruelty. So we have to forgive them.”
Do we? I almost said. Antony had gone beyond all possibility of forgiveness, as far as Tavius was concerned. And to my mind he deserved whatever disaster came of this. But we did not. Rome did not. I imagined mothers mourning their sons because of Antony’s folly. Romans killing Romans again as we were all dragged into a civil war. A war that might destroy Tavius.
There was coolness now between Tavius and me. He had wanted me to help persuade Octavia to leave Antony’s house, and I had not done it. I daily felt his silent displeasure. And then, to further darken the skies, a fever swept through Rome. It had happened before; it would happen again. Physicians could do little. At night, one heard wagons rolling through the streets, collecting bodies. Tavius conducted a great sacrifice on behalf of Rome at the Temple of Jupiter to mitigate heavenly wrath, but this had no effect. Tiberius Nero went away to the country with our two boys, for there were few deaths in the countryside. Octavia left the city as well, taking her children and Antony’s sons, and little Julia too. Tavius and I were too busy with affairs to leave Rome.
I worried about Tavius’s precarious health. But he did not come down with the fever. Meanwhile, several senators I knew died, and so did two of my slaves. Then word came that Marcus Ortho had fallen ill. “I should go to Rubria,” I told Tavius.
“Send her husband the best physician we know,” Tavius said. “But I won’t have you going there to expose yourself to contagion.”
“There is contagion here in our own house, among the slaves,” I said.
“No,” he said. “The ones who were sick have either died or gotten well. You’re not to go to Rubria’s house.”
So I stayed away and only sent physicians. Then I heard that Ortho had died and Rubria herself had fallen sick.
“I might have been burned alive if not for her,” I told Tavius. “I have to be with her now.”
We were in his study. Tablets and papyrus scrolls covered his writing table. I always kept them in order, but it was still daunting to look at the piles of documents and think of all the matters that demanded his attention. Gaul, North Africa, Sicily—a thousand voices clamored for Caesar’s notice. He had taken on this burden gladly, but that did not mean it did not wear on him. Beyond that, there was this sickness in Rome, and always, casting a cloud over everything, the threat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. His face tight with strain, Tavius said, “Is it impossible for you to obey me for once, instead of adding to my worries? Can’t you just obey me as a wife is supposed to obey her husband?”
“Forgive me, I can’t. Not in this.”
I summoned my litter and started out for Rubria’s house. I could not do otherwise. The fear of losing Rubria clawed at me, and somehow I felt that if only I were with her, I would be able to save her from death as she had once saved me.
Her house, so festive mere months before, now seemed like an ornately decorated tomb. Entering, I immediately heard weeping. Slaves weeping for their master or for fellow servants who had also died? Or for their mistress who might soon set out on the same journey? Fustinius, the physician I had dispatched here, came into the atrium to greet me, grim-faced. He said, “She is dying. It can’t be helped. There’s no good you can do here. I advise you to leave.”
“Is she awake?”
“At times.”
“Then I will see her,” I said.
She lay looking pale as a wax image, covered with a blanket of clean white wool. I would not have known that she still lived except I could see the blanket move slightly with the rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes were closed. She did not stir when I entered and took a chair near her bed. I thought: She will not awake. I should leave now, for safety’s sake. But then I noticed her burn-scarred hands, resting above the blanket, and whispered, “Rubria, I am here.” She surprised me by opening her eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “You will get better.”
She stared blankly at me, as if I were a stranger.
“Do you know who I am?”
She nodded her head.
“Then you know I can’t do without you. You must not leave me.”
“The gods say differently.” She barely breathed the words.
“You deserve a long and good life, and to watch your son grow up. I say you will get well. Do you understand me?”
She whispered, “Do you think you can control life and death?”
I felt myself rebuked and pressed my lips together.
“I was happy…for a little while.” She spoke with effort, to console me.
“Were you?”
She did not answer. She seemed to sleep. Then she opened her eyes and said, “My son. Who…?” A look of terror came over her face. “He has no one.”
“I will care for him,” I said.
The fear did not leave her face. I wondered if she had even heard me.
I said in a louder voice, “Rubria, may Diana witness my oath, I will raise him as if he were my own child.”
She looked doubtfully at me.
“He will be my son,” I said. “I swear it.”
Gradually her face became peaceful. I waited, to see if she would speak again. But she never did. I could not tell the moment of her passing, it was so gentle.
After I closed her eyes and put coins on her eyes to pay the ferryman, I ordered Rubria’s servants to bring little Marcus to me. I carried him out to my litter and held him cradled against my breast all the way home.
“I just hope he doesn’t infect us all,” Tavius said when I told him Rubria had died and I had brought her child with me.
“Oh, thank you for those kind words,” I said, tears of grief in my eyes.
“Let me see him.”
We walked into a side room, where the baby lay in a cradle. Tavius looked down at the child.
“You see? He is healthy,” I said.
Tavius’s expression was bleak. Perhaps at that instant he imagined, as I did, how it would have been for the two of us to stand like this over the cradle of our own son.
“I gave my word to his mother I would raise him as my own,” I said.
“As your own?” He stared at me. “Without asking me, you swore that?”
At that moment terror filled me—terror of the chasm opening between us. I felt such a deep dread that we could lose each other that I think I must have pleaded with him with my eyes. “Beloved, how could I not go to Rubria? And how can I not care for her child now? You and I—we pay our debts. You would do the same thing in my place.”
“You’re that sure of what I would do?”
“Oh, yes. I know you.”
Tavius stood frowning, and I felt a chill around my heart. But finally he said, “Well, his mother was a loyal woman, and his father always kept faith. I suppose we can make something of him.”
I kissed his cheek.
He did not offer to legally adopt little Marcus; making the child one of his heirs would have been a great matter. But he tolerated the child’s presence in our home, and soon began to take the same kindly, if rather distant, interest in him he did in my other two children. There were fewer silences between us. And so my deepest fear passed, and I did my best to forget about it.
There were no more deaths from fever among people I knew, and few new deaths in the city. Rubria’s passing was a great blow to my sons, and to Tiberius in particular. He wept long and hard when he heard the news. Then he never spoke her name again.
The months passed, and Antony and Tavius continued their angry correspondence. Tavius urged Antony to return to his lawful marriage and start acting like a Roman official, not a Greco-Egyptian potentate. Antony said his personal affairs were his own business. Tavius strengthened his army, as was only prudent. In Rome, he continued his feverish building. The common people looked at all the scaffolds, all the busy workmen, all the glittering marble, and they applauded him. They applauded me too. But no one had a stronger claim on their affection than Octavia did. She was seen as tolerating a painful marriage for the sake of Rome.
“The people love her,” I told Tavius one day. “And they love you too, for keeping the peace.”
He grimaced. “The simple hearts of the Roman people.”
“Everyone speaks about Octavia’s greatness of soul.”
He sat on the couch in his study, looking over some petitions from the provinces. He threw the document in his hands on the side table. “Why do you keep praising her?”
“Because I feel for her. She said to me the other day that you hardly speak to her lately. That you don’t even like to look at her.”
His face flushed. “Gods above!” he shouted. “Are you too obtuse to understand? For her to let Antony treat her as he does turns my stomach. She’s my sister. This situation is a dishonor to me. Don’t you even see that?”
I did not bite my tongue or try to soothe his wounded spirit, for the tension we lived under had frayed my nerves just as it had his. I shouted back at him, “Can’t you think of her? Or think of the men who will die if there’s war between you or Antony? Can’t you ever think of someone besides yourself?”
Then we both fell silent and stared at each other.
He said in an icy voice, “It’s good to know my honor means nothing to you.”
I was shaken. “Your honor lies in preserving the peace. In serving Rome.”
“Yes, in serving Rome,” he said.
We said no more. Afterward I walked on tiptoe with him. I feared that if he flung harsh words at me, I would fling them back, and then where would we be? I could not for the life of me find the right phrases, the loving touch that would have served me. Then a most remarkable thing occurred.
At first, I thought I had miscounted the days. I recalculated. No, I had made no error. Well, perhaps I had some small bodily indisposition. When a half-month had gone by and I still had seen no stain on my undergarments, I began to believe my greatest hope would be realized. Still, I said nothing to Tavius, for fear of disappointing him. I noticed an aching in my breasts and remembered that as an early sign when my sons were conceived. Even so, I feared that I could be wrong.
I made a decision to wait ten more days, just to be sure, before I told Tavius the news. But he knew me too well. On the second day, as we prepared for bed, he took my face in both his hands and studied me. “I see that little secret smile of yours. What are you keeping from me?”
“What do you think it is?”
“You invested in more vineries, didn’t you? Without telling me? Didn’t I say it’s a time to be especially cautious with our money?”
I smiled up at him. “I haven’t bought any vineries.”
“Then what?”
“I’m carrying your child.”
As time had gone by, Tavius had tried to act as if our childlessness did not matter. I had never believed this pretense. Now, seeing how his face lit up, I sensed how desperately he had wanted us to have a child.
He kissed me until I was breathless. “Our son will rule the whole empire,” he said. “All of it. I swear to you.”
I felt a cold prickle on the back of my neck and almost said, What about Antony? But he had spoken in wild exuberance. It seemed foolish to make an issue of his words.
“Can we still—?” Tavius murmured.
“Of course,” I said.
I had to keep whispering words of reassurance: “Beloved, the baby won’t mind.” We came together so gently that night. Out of our happiness grew a fresh flowering of love. The soft, unhurried caresses, the murmured endearments, the all-encompassing tenderness reminded me of how it had been when we first married.
Perhaps it was the greatest joy I ever experienced in my life. To lie in my husband’s arms and know his child nestled within me, to picture a little boy with his blue eyes. To know I had not failed him after all. It had taken so long. We both felt as if we had been blessed with a miracle.
I made thank-offerings at all the temples. In particular, I thanked Diana. I asked only one thing more of her—that I bear a male child.
Yet, even at this time, which ought to have been so happy, there was still the tension with Antony, which sooner or later might destroy all our peace. And grief, very close to home. Tiberius Nero was dying.
I tried not to admit it at first, though he grew paler, thinner, and more spectral each time I saw him. He had an ulcer on his leg that would not heal. The doctors lanced it three times, and drained pus from it, but the ulcer worsened. I brought him medicinal drinks, but his sickness was far beyond the reach of any healing skill of mine.
“I’m for it,” he said to me one day, as I sat by his bedside.
“No,” I said. “It
’s just a matter of time until you get better.”
“We know each other too well for lies.”
I bit my lip.
“About my will—”
“Don’t talk about that,” I said. “Talk about getting well.”
“Livia, dear, I’m in very little pain right now. But the pain will come back, and then I’ll take a draught for it, and I won’t be able to talk. So listen to me now.”
I sat in the same bedchamber I had first entered as a girl of fourteen, where I used to gaze at the ceiling, wishing that he would take his hands off me. I thought of never seeing him or hearing his voice again, and my eyes burned with tears. “I am listening,” I said.
“Well, I’m freeing a few of my slaves and leaving bequests for them. You’ll see that my wishes are honored, I’m sure.”
I nodded. His red-haired slave girl now spent her time hovering over his sickbed. I guessed he would provide for her.
“With the exception of those small bequests, everything goes to the boys. I’m happy to be able to leave them fairly well off.” For a moment, he did look happy, even self-satisfied. “And I named just the right guardian for them and their property, until they come of age.”
I had pushed the thought of this away, because I had not been able to accept that Tiberius Nero was dying. But there had to be a male guardian. The idea of a stranger with authority over my sons disturbed me. What if Tiberius Nero had made the wrong choice?
He read my expression. “Don’t you trust me? Of course I chose Caesar. Who else? That’s what you’d advise, isn’t it?”
I fought to control a sob. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. It’s what I would advise. Yes. Thank you.”
I Am Livia Page 29
