The decurion gave a surly nod.
“Take me to him.”
The decurion leaned back against a decaying fence rail and crossed his hands behind his head. “It’s late. Wait until morning.”
She spared the moon a frustrated glance. “You made me ride a whole day’s journey with two bairns.”
“I’ve taken pleasanter journeys with criminals destined for crucifixion.”
“The least you can do is take me to the tribune.” Ness fingered the tip of her belt. She needed to harden her heart before this upcoming confrontation.
“You made me stop twenty-five times.”
With one hand, she brushed the dust off her skirt. “You miscounted. It was only twenty-one.”
The decurion stretched his greasy cheeks downward. “It felt like five hundred.”
She dug her boot into the fence post as she searched the array of buildings. “I’d like to see the tribune now, and quickly.”
The decurion raised bushy eyebrows. “As quick as our journey here was?”
“Take me to him!” And stop wasting her anger on the wrong recipient. If she could get this done tonight, she could leave tomorrow.
The decurion crossed his hairy arms and gazed insolently through a jutting forehead. “Spent too many nights apart already, is that how it is?”
“I’ll leave the door open so you can find out. Move.”
“I hope you’re better at that than journeying.” With a groan, the decurion pointed to a storage shed a stone’s throw away.
She strode up to it. The door boasted a lock, but it hung unfastened. Placing one hand on the splintered surface, Ness pushed.
As the door opened, it squeaked. Aquilus looked up from a table piled with a mound of tablets. One glance at her, and he turned back to the tablets.
Striding up to his writing table, she slapped her hands on the surface. “Thanks to your minions terrifying my entire village, I’m here. Now, what do you want?” Perhaps he meant to tell her he’d reconsidered taking that post in Camulodunum. No, she shouldn’t even hope that.
Slowly, he laid aside his stylus and turned his gaze to her. “Distraught to miss your wedding?” His tone could have shriveled an oak tree.
“What do you want?”
“I’m a tribune. I don’t want. I obtain.” He didn’t bother to raise his voice.
After dragging her a day’s journey with babes, he intended to take that tone with her? She glared at him.
“Where are our sons?”
“With the housekeeper. What do you think I am, an irresponsible mother?”
“Glad to hear you’re a better mother than a wife.”
Her cheeks flamed. She clenched her fist as his words stabbed through her. “That’s because I’m not your wife.”
He looked back at his tablets. She could not imagine a ruder expression than the one he wore. She already knew he found her lacking as a wife without him forcing her here to yell at her about it.
“You can leave now.” He shifted another tablet in front of him.
“Good.” She turned and gripped the door. “I’ll be back at my village before morning light.” With an even more piercing headache because he’d forced her here. Had Father started harvesting her wheat field yet, or would she make it back in time to enjoy the fruit of her labor?
“Not go back, leave. Get out of my room and take care of my sons, leave.” He glared at his tablets, refusing to look at her.
Ah, so he would tirade more before releasing her. She intended to get this over with tonight so she could leave tomorrow. In the shadows, she leaned back against the wall. She tapped the wood boards. As she’d expected, Aquilus soon moved his gaze to her.
He looked disgusted and angry. “What’s a promise mean to you, nothing?”
“I keep promises.” She dug her nails into her palms to shove down the sick feeling in her stomach. Did he think he needed to drag her all the way to Camulodunum to communicate how much he despised her? She knew full well.
“Is that what you call leaving me, your lawful husband, and prostituting yourself in some barbarian’s arms?”
“Prostituting!” She lunged forward.
Aquilus didn’t even flinch. “The whole garrison is going to hear you.”
Standing by the table now, she glared at his tablets. He had sloppy handwriting.
Collecting herself, she raised her gaze with haughty calm. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying the jealous husband act, which is rather visceral for a Stoic. The problem is, to play the jealous husband, you have to actually be a husband.” Her voice turned to a shriek. “You’re not so just let me go and stop beleaguering me.”
Aquilus spat on the dusty floor.
She stepped back. That was an uncouth, provincial habit.
“Even under confarreatio law, you deserve to be divorced.”
“Divorce me then.” A hot wave rolled over her sleep-deprived body as her aching head pounded. Let him go to Rome and loathe her there where she didn’t have to hear it.
“No!” He glared into her eyes. “I set sail tomorrow morning with the tide, and you, my lawful wife, and my sons will be on that boat.”
Her knees went weak. She stared at him. “I’m a freeborn woman, Aquilus.”
He folded his arms and tilted his stool back against the wall. “And I’m your husband. Remind me again why I shouldn’t lay too much coin on my wager that you will play by my rules?”
Her pulse raced. A lightheaded feeling overtook her. “You can’t seriously intend to do this.” Couldn’t. She had a field to harvest tomorrow.
Aquilus raised a confident eyebrow. “Try me.”
In the lone candle’s light, she faced down his stare. “You had your chance and you threw it away. Kidnapping me and the twins doesn’t change that.”
“Kidnapping!” He looked unjustifiably outraged. “You act as if I forced you to marry me. You chose to marry me. In fact, now I think of it, you jumped at my offer.”
Blood surged across her face. “You think that justifies you constantly leaving for Germania and acting like a tyrannical Roman?”
His shoulders, innocent of armor now, came up in a shrug. “I told you I was a tribune. You chose.”
“I unchoose now!”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”
She didn’t even know what she wanted to yell at him. As she considered, he went back to a parchment, his face emotionless.
She slapped her hand down on the sheet, tearing it. “This conversation isn’t over and I’m not leaving until it is.”
Teeth clenching, he dug his fingernails into the tabletop. “I must be the only man in the world who would put up with this.”
Again, he had to voice how he despised her. Ness kicked the table. Cedric admired her.
An hour later, the candle had burnt to a stump and her head ached from fighting Aquilus.
“If you think you can break my will by denying me sleep, you’re wrong,” Aquilus said. “I did this for a week once fighting the Germanic tribes.”
A week? She did this for six months after she gave birth to his sons. “We are not married and you can’t force me to leave with you,” she yelled at him for the twenty-second time. The other thirty-four times, she’d made a conscious effort to say it calmly.
“We are, and I can,” Aquilus said for the fifty-fourth time. He’d only shouted it at her once, but that time made up for the rest.
Speaking of missing six months of sleep, she refused to miss another night standing in this wood hut. She turned on her heel.
“Admitting we’re married?”
“No, but I’m done talking to an arrogant stulte like yourself.” Every one of her muscles was sore and her head throbbed.
“Do you want me to procure a nurse for you—them?” He said it civilly.
She whipped back. “Nurse? Why would you even do that?”
With a sigh, he stood and walked around the table to where she stood. “You’re tir
ed already. You’d be exhausted on a ship voyage chasing twins by yourself.” Something lingered in his eyes. Reaching out, he brushed his fingers against hers.
She jerked back. “Why would you care?”
“Because that’s what men do for their families—provide for them.” He looked annoyingly self-righteous as he said it.
“And what, that sentiment is supposed to impress me?”
Aquilus stood tall. “I have no desire to impress you. I’m doing it because it is right.”
“Right? When do Romans ever do right? Now Vocula is pressing villagers into forced labor.” Her mouth trembled. Father had looked so worried.
Aquilus rolled his eyes. “You exaggerate.”
She crossed her arms. “It’s true. Ask your friend the legate.”
“I will.”
She swept toward the door. On the threshold, she paused. “And if you were truly decent, you’d offer to care for the twins yourself. They’re your sons.”
As the midmorning sun reflected off the calm water, Ness kicked the splintered wood of the deck rail. Could life truly change in a day?
The Roman ship rocked gently as it pulled away from the Britain shore. Maybe she should have cried, but she felt too frustrated and Eric and Wryn cried enough for three people. Scooting back to the rope coils they’d scrambled in, she disentangled Eric’s hand from Wryn’s hair. More screams.
“You sailed oceans before you were born.” She leaned her aching head against the ship rail.
Roman might. In the last few centuries, it had conquered the entire known world and just this morning it had gotten her on a ship heading the last place in the world she wished to reach.
Leaping forward, she grabbed a nail out of Eric’s grasp, then turned to pry a splinter out of the finger Wryn held up. A big drop of blood dripped from his finger as his eyes filled up with tears.
She rocked him in the crook of her arm and Eric, quite unexpectedly, quieted against her leg. Both boys snuggled into her while sailors bustled around the ship, adjusting ropes and sails. She looked back toward the white cliffs of Britain, but the breeze grew stronger, blowing the ship ahead, and the cliffs disappeared in the mist. Wryn sighed and dug his head further into her shoulder. She clutched him close.
She would bring him and Eric back. They would grow up on Britain soil.
How? Surreptitiously part company with Aquilus? Even if she could miraculously turn this ship around, she’d never live free as long as he persisted in insisting they were married.
She dug her heel into the ship’s deck. Mother was ill. Now, even if Mother died, she’d not hear of it. Poor Cedric waited for her as well as her crops; her lovely crops.
Shifting Eric’s sleeping form, she leaned back on the rope coils. If all the world feared Rome, then she needed a Roman divorce.
So, she’d admit Aquilus’ point, say they were still married, and then get her divorce.
He might be a Stoic, supposedly invulnerable to emotion, but she knew how to anger him. He might be a Roman tribune with a garrison of soldiers at his beck and call, but when one invites a woman into one’s house as wife, one provides her with more effective means to secure a divorce than any a garrison of soldiers could halt.
She glimpsed Gaul’s coastline ahead. She’d seen this scenery last time she made this trip, but she had more to look forward to then.
No, that wasn’t true. She’d been sick and miserable with her life in an unraveled tangle. Then she’d reached home, had two beautiful boys, and Cedric proposed. She wouldn’t lose all that. Within two weeks, maximum four, she’d gall Aquilus into giving her a divorce and then reclaim her life.
No one could stop her.
Chapter 14
If she stood on this barge talking to Aquilus another moment, she’d throw herself into the Rhine, but to irritate him enough to divorce her, she had to keep harassing him. The harassment definitely worked. Aquilus had exceeded annoyance and almost reached the temper-breaking point. Problem was, so had she.
The early morning sun shone on sailors milling the deck in a purposeful fashion. A small cabin blocked the sun behind them.
Aquilus brought his eyebrows down hard as the muscles of his face struggled for control over rising red. He kicked the door to the cabin open. “We’ll discuss this in private.”
As if in the last five weeks the sailors hadn’t figured out that the Paterculi marriage held on to as little goodwill as a bungling gambler did coin? Ness followed him inside.
Jars and barrels filled the space, and the smell of foreign spices wafted up from one stack of crates. She squinted in the dusky space. Now Aquilus called her a lying Celt for the perfectly legitimate Britain divorce.
Her chin came down. Romans only told the truth because they preferred brute force to pretense.
“Adulteress,” Aquilus called her.
Even the veins on her neck tightened. “Remarriage is not adultery!”
Aquilus launched a Stoic stare. “You left me for another man.”
“Because you were never there.” Fury tinged the words. Good thing Eric and Wryn lay peacefully asleep in a separate cabin.
Aquilus shrugged. “I was faithful.”
“There’s more to marriage than faithfulness.”
Aquilus narrowed his eyes. “Not to you. To you, there’s a whole lot less.”
She hated how he could execute icy insults. Would reading more philosophers teach her the skill? It might almost be worth suffering through Horace. Instead, she let the volume of her voice increase. “How about giving me a divorce instead of insulting my honor?”
“No.”
She pursed her lips. “I am going back to Britannia.” She should have been gone three weeks ago, only Aquilus was wretched stubborn.
“Adulteress,” he called her again. Now she truly had succeeded in making Aquilus lose his temper. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it should have been.
“Don’t you ever call me that!”
“And why not?”
“I didn’t do anything. More’s the pity.” She held her chin high. The cabin’s dust wafted into her nostrils, and she fell to coughing, quite ruining her determined pose.
“Would-be-adulteress then.”
“I was getting a divorce first!” She scowled. Her losing her temper did not fit the battle plan.
Aquilus folded his arms. “I don’t believe in divorce.”
She cast him a Medusa-worthy glare. She’d change that.
“Cease with the words about adultery.” She shifted position. Her elbow knocked a shelf of tied down pottery. The wood jiggled but held fast.
Ignoring the exceedingly bad workmanship of the storage room’s excuse for a shelf, Aquilus paused and looked at his wife. His, as in the possessive, personal pronoun. He had heard that the frontier tribes held looser ideas on marriage, but this passed belief. Zeno said divorce was wrong. Cinncinatus said divorce was wrong. The Paterculi lineage hadn’t been marred by a divorce for ten generations.
Ness leaving without notice had been bad enough, but trying to marry this Cedric? The same Cedric whose name he’d heard dozens of time that first year of their marriage with stulte stories about horses or planting. He clenched his hand. Cedric, that’s who Ness had gazed at that day two years ago when she’d wed him. Cedric, who wasn’t Ness’ brother.
Aquilus kicked the wine vat that some incompetent fool had roped down just as insecurely as he’d nailed that shelf. The mountains to the west cast a shadow over the barge, dimming the window’s light.
But Ness had done what she had done. Anger flared inside him. No, he was a Stoic. He would not be such a fool as to love or trust this woman again, but as Horace said, angry words proved nothing.
“All right, I won’t remind you again.” He turned on his heel. He had a three-day journey to make to the frontier.
At the doorway, he paused. “The Rhine marks the edge of civilization. Don’t go into town without guards.”
“I live to obey your commands,�
� his wife shot back at him very sarcastically.
He scowled. That would be the day.
The steady thud of legionary boots behind Aquilus slowed as they approached the garrison walls. Thirty more miles of Rhine traders to canvass, then his two-year project of collecting trade information in Germania would be complete and he could write up a plan to fix the sorry mess.
Like an eagle nest, the tiny garrison clung to the top of the mountain above. Underneath it, a town spread with thatched roofs, Celtic-shaped dwellings, and vibrant townsfolk. The problem with the Senate these days was no one came to these tiny outposts to discover the real issues facing the provinces.
Aquilus turned to his men, who longingly eyed the hot bread racks, off-key street musicians, and rickety tavern. “Tomorrow morning, early.”
They replied with a chorus of eager,“yes, sir.”
“And I mean early,” Aquilus said.
More too-ready responses of, “yes, sir.”
“And sober.” He dismissed them with a salute rather than listen to the chorus of groans. Now to find this trader.
Aquilus kept up a steady pace, moving past the faded wood of weather-worn huts and the occasional yapping mutt or racing child.
Trade was at least as important as the choice of governors and location of legions. Trade not only prospered Rome but also kept province natives flourishing instead of killing his soldiers. He looked ahead to the garrison walls where a dozen heads rose high, mounted on pikes.
He grimaced. What kind of criminal governor would ignore the natives’ well-being and cause these insurrections?
The Senate’s shortsightedness meant they never inquired about the natives either. Consequentially, dishonesty abounded. Aquilus frowned, but not too severely. Thinking about anything besides Ness spelled relief. Five weeks had passed since they’d boarded that ship out of Camulodunum and she hadn’t let a single day of those five weeks go by without screaming at him.
The packed-down streets turned to mud at the edge of the village. Up ahead, where the clearing turned to the vast reaches of the Germanian forest, drying pelts hung from a circular Celtic dwelling.
For Life or Until (Love and Warfare Series Book 1) Page 19
