“Remember I was only a kid myself, George … Take a guess. The simplest reason of all.”
“Money?”
“Damn right. Remember, I was about ten when you were born. It had been a long gap. Mum and Dad had taken a long time trying to decide if they could raise another kid. You know how cautious Dad was. Well, along you came, but they hadn’t banked on twins — you and Rosa.”
“We were twins?” Shit, I hadn’t known that. Another kick in the head.
“And then, just after you two were born, they ran into trouble; Dad lost his job, I think. The timing of it all was one of God’s little jokes. They didn’t tell me much, but it was going to be a struggle: I remember they talked about selling the house. They wrote to relatives, asking for help and advice. And then this offer came in, from the Order. They’d take in Rosa, school her, care for her. Suddenly, with just you, they were back to the position they’d bargained for when they decided to have a second kid.”
I felt a complex melange of emotions — relief, envy. “Why her, not me?”
“The Order only takes girls.”
“Why didn’t she come back?”
She said, “Maybe the Order has rules. I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to the discussions.”
I wondered briefly why, if my parents had always been as hard up as they claimed, my dad had continued to send money to the Order, long after Rosa must have completed her education.
“They never told me about Rosa,” I said. “Not a word.”
“What good would it have done? … I swore it would never happen to me,” Gina said suddenly.
“What?”
“Being so poor you have to send your kid away. Et cetera.” She was staring at the wall.
For once I thought I could read her. I’d only been seeing this from my point of view. But Gina had been old enough to understand what was happening, though of course she’d only been a helpless kid herself. When Rosa was sent away, she must have been afraid it would be her next.
Impulsively I put a hand on her arm. She flinched away.
She said, “Look, Mum and Dad believed they were doing the best for Rosa. I’m sure of that.”
I shook my head. “I’m no parent. But I don’t see how any mother could send her little kid away to a religious order full of strangers.”
She frowned. “But they didn’t. How much do you know about the Order?”
“The name. Rome.” Apart from a request that I keep up Dad’s payments, which I’d refused, the Order hadn’t responded to my emailed requests for information. “Oh, the genealogy business.”
“George, that’s not even the half of it. The Order are family. Our family. That’s how Uncle Lou made contact with them in the first place.”
“Lou?” He was actually our mother’s uncle, my great-uncle.
“He was in the forces — the American forces — during the war. He was in Italy at the end, and somehow found them. The Order. And he found out they saw us as a kind of long-lost branch of the family.”
“How so?”
“Because of Regina.”
“Who? … Not the Roman girl. That’s just a family legend.”
“Not a legend. History, George.”
“It can’t be. Nobody can trace their family tree that far back. Not even the queen, for God’s sake.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Anyhow Lou always kept the contact to the Order, and later when Mum and Dad got into trouble—”
I eyed her. “Dad sent money to this damn Order. Do you?”
“Hell, no,” she snapped back. “Look, George, don’t cross-examine me. I don’t even want to talk about this.”
“No, you never did, did you?” I asked coldly. “You left it all behind, when you came here—”
“Yes, away from that cramped little island with its stifling history. And away from our murky family bullshit. I wanted my kids to grow up here, in the light and the space. Can you blame me? But now it’s all chased me here …” She became aware she was raising her voice. Only a screen separated this part of the kitchen from the dining area.
“Gina, do you think all families are like ours?”
“One way or another,” she said. “Like huge bombs, and we all spend the rest of our lives picking our way through the rubble.”
“I’m going after her.” I was making the decision as I spoke. “I’m going to find Rosa.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s my sister. My twin.”
“If you think that will help you sort out your screwed-up head, be my guest. But whatever happens, whatever you find, don’t tell me about it. I mean it.” She actually shut her eyes and mouth, as if to exclude me.
“All right,” I said gently. I thought fast. “What about Uncle Lou? Is he still alive? Where does he live?”
He was alive, and lived, it turned out, not far from Gina. “Florida is heaven for the elderly,” she said dryly.
“You have his address? And you must have a contact for the Order. An address — maybe an intermediary … Dad gave you a damn grandfather clock. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have given you a contact for your sister. Come on, Gina.”
“All right,” she said dismissively. “Yes, there’s a contact. A Jesuit priest in Rome.”
“Have you checked it out?”
“What do you think?”
“But you’ll give me the addresses.”
“I’ll give you the fucking addresses. Now,” in flat, brutal Mancunian, “piss off out of my kitchen.”
The boys hadn’t heard what we said, but they had picked up the tone of our voices. We ate our summer puddings in awkward silence. Dan just looked at me, evaluating.
Chapter 11
“… The notion that man has been innately flawed since the Creation is nothing but an artifact of our own difficult times. Just as the wise farmer gathers his harvest and sets aside his store for the winter, so a just man will, through good works, love and the joy of Christ, earn his passage to God’s eternal kingdom …”
The voice of the Christian philosopher was thin and high, and only fragments of what he had to say carried to Regina on the soft breeze that swept over the hilltop. The crowd pressing around her did their best to listen to what was said, and to the replies of the rival thinkers who rejected this “heresy of Pelagius,” preferring the depressing notion that humans were born into the world with ugly, flawed souls.
She suppressed a sigh, her attention drifting. It had come to something, she thought, when the most exciting event in her life was a debate between two splinter sects of the followers of the Christ. She didn’t actually like the Christians; she found their intensity, and their habit of praying with arms spread, hands raised, and faces lifted, disturbing and off-putting. But at least they knew how to put on a show.
And at least the little Christian community, here on the hill, was flourishing. It was outside Verulamium itself, close to the gaudy shrine that had been constructed over the presumed grave of Alban, the town’s first martyr — indeed, it was said, the first Christian martyr in all of Britain. A group of wooden roundhouses, rectangular huts and even a little area set aside as a marketplace had gathered around the focal point of the shrine. You could see how marble from one of the old town’s arches had been cut up and reused to build the shrine itself, the only stone building here; inscriptions in Latin, a language that few spoke anymore, had been sliced through unceremoniously and then scratched over with the chi-rho, the symbol of the Christians.
This hilltop village was still small and, in its rough unplanned clutter, hardly a Roman community. But pilgrims came from afar to visit Alban’s martyrium, bringing their wealth with them. Even today, listening to this dry stuff about the nature of sin, there might have been forty people — a big gathering for Verulamium nowadays — and many of them were brightly dressed for the occasion, in jauntily dyed tunics and cloaks. People had brought their children, who played at their feet. There was even a seller of roast meat working the crowd, adding to the odd carnival atmosphe
re.
She looked back down the hill to the old town itself. From here she could easily trace the lines of its walls, the lozenge shape sketched on the plain by the river, and she could make out the neat gridwork of the street layout, connected up to the roads that marched away to north, south, and west. There was plenty of activity, carts and pedestrians passing along the main roads and through the gates, and a bustle of activity around the stalls in the Forum. But she could see how stretches of the wall had been broken down, and how, even in the six years she had been here, the green had risen like a tide, encroaching the center of the town and flooding the broken-down shells of abandoned buildings.
Carausias complained of how the community around the shrine was drawing the last blood out of the old town. But Regina cared nothing for that. Why should she bother about the upkeep of public buildings, or the problems of paying soldiers, or keeping bacaudae out of the town? She was seventeen years old. All she wanted was to have fun. And the fact was, such excitement as there was to be had was up here on the Christians’ hill.
“… Who would ever have thought that my little Regina would grow up to be a student of theology?”
It was Amator. At the sound of his voice Regina whirled.
He stood close, not a hand’s breadth away. He was dressed in a bright tunic of yellow and green, and he wore an elaborate scarf of what looked like silk, pinned at his throat by a small brooch. His thick black hair, brushed back from his tanned face, was heavy with powder and oil. At his side was a man she did not recognize: perhaps about the same age, he was a thickset fellow wearing a tunic in the barbarian style, made of leather and wool and studded with a big, crudely constructed silver brooch.
Regina had not seen Amator for three years, not since he had left for Gaul — to “make his fortune,” as he had said. And yet his gaze had the same searching intensity it had always had, and she couldn’t help but respond with a surge in her belly, a flush she could feel spreading to her cheeks. But at seventeen she wasn’t a child anymore. And by now he wasn’t the only man who had ever looked at her that way.
She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “You made me jump.”
“I bet I did. And have you missed me, little chicken?”
“Oh, have you been away?” Regina lifted her finger and drew it down Amator’s cheek. His eyes widened; he almost flinched at her touch. “The sun has changed you.”
“It shines more strongly on southern Gaul.”
“It has turned your face to old leather. Shame — you were so much better looking in the old days.”
Amator glowered.
The friend laughed. “She has the measure of you, Amator.” His accent was thick, almost indecipherable. “You have run your sword through him, madam; every morning he spends an enormous time plastering his cheeks with cream and powder to restore his pale color.” This other turned out to be called Athaulf; he bowed and kissed her hand, his gaudy barbarian jewelry glinting. “A pretty face and a sharp tongue,” he said.
Amator said, “But you, Regina — you have become still more beautiful — but perhaps I shouldn’t have left you alone so long, if this dry-as-dust theology is the highlight of your life.”
She sighed. “Life has been a little duller since you left, Amator,” she admitted. Duller, and lacking the edge, the sparkle, the frisson of danger that she had always associated with Amator.
“Well, now I’m back …”
“Back to work,” Athaulf reminded him. “Hard though it is to drag myself away from this young lady, aren’t we due to meet those landowners?”
“So we are, so we are. I’m a man of business now, Regina. Business, property, wealth, great concerns beyond the ocean. And so I must deal with old corpses like my father, when I would much rather be flirting with you.”
“But your business won’t take all day,” she said, as coolly as she could.
“Indeed it won’t.” He glanced at Athaulf. “Tell you what. Why don’t we have a party?”
She clapped her hands, though she was aware she must look childish. “Oh, wonderful! I will tell Carausias and Cartumandua and Marina — we will prepare the courtyard—”
“Oh, no, no,” he said gently. “We don’t want to be depressed by that gloomy lot. Let’s make a party of our own. Come to the bathhouse. Shall we say a little after sunset?”
“The bathhouse — but nobody goes there anymore. There’s no roof!”
“All the better, all the better; nothing like a little faded grandeur to make the blood flow. After sunset, then.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you need to catch up on your theology.”
“I’ll be there,” she said evenly. “Have a good day, Amator. And you, sir.” With that she turned and walked away, letting her hips sway, aware of their silence as they watched her.
But once out of their sight she ran down the hill, all the way home.
* * *
Even in the few years she had lived here it had gotten a lot harder to make her way through the streets of Verulamium.
Some of the abandoned houses, roofless and gutted by fire, had begun to crumble seriously. Serious looting for tiles and building stone had advanced that decay, although that had tapered off as most new buildings were wattle and daub, and nobody had much use for stone. There were plants sprouting on top of walls and ledges. What had once been gardens and orchards were choked with weeds: dandelions, daisies, rose bay willow herbs. On some, longer abandoned, the shrubs and saplings grew waist-high, or higher. As the population of the town had continued to fall, nobody even used these bits of wasteland for pasture. The few new buildings, just wattle and daub with crudely thatched roofs, had mostly been built on the surface of the old streets, where the risk of falling masonry was least. So you had to step off the road and dodge around the houses, clambering over piles of rubble, and passing by broken drains and clogged sewers that nobody ever got around to fixing, and trying to avoid the children and chickens and mice that ran everywhere.
In one place she walked past a grave, crudely dug into the raw earth and marked with a wooden slab. Strictly speaking burial inside the town walls was still against the law, just as under the rule of Rome. But the magistrates rarely met, or if they did nobody listened to their pronouncements.
Even the great Basilica was affected by the general decay. Its walls still stood, but after its final abandonment by the landowners and their councils, its roof had collapsed, and birds nested in the glass- free frames of its gaping windows. But the building still had its uses. Even without the roof, the great walls provided some shelter from the weather — and a miniature village had grown up in there, on the floor of the great hall itself, with roof posts and beams driven into the walls to support small wooden lean-to shacks. It was an extraordinary sight. If you wanted proof of the Emperor’s gross dereliction of his duty to sort things out, Regina thought, it was in this single image of lean-tos huddling timidly in the lee of the mighty walls. When things got back to normal there would be an awful lot of work to do to put all this back together again.
Still, the Forum, the beating heart of the town, was as crowded as ever. Regina plunged into its noisy, smelly melee with a will.
Regina was popular with the Forum vendors, if only because she was younger than most of them. There were few young people to be seen in town nowadays, and fewer still with money. The town had never been able to sustain its own population numbers; infant mortality had always been too high for that. But because there was no work for them to do anymore, the flow of immigrants from the countryside had long dried up. Anyhow Regina played on her youth and energy for all it was worth, ruthlessly haggling with middle-age men who should have known better.
The stalls nowadays sold mostly fruits, vegetables, and meat from the local farmsteads, gardens, and orchards. There were very few manufactured goods for sale. But sometimes there were treasures to be found. A shipment of brooches or scents or fabrics from the continent might find its way here, or the contents of a town house or villa wou
ld be sold off by its owners, who had decamped in search of a better life elsewhere.
Today, in her rummage through the stalls, she was lucky. She found a shawl made of bright yellow wool that its vendor swore had come all the way from Carthage, and even a set of rings — only bronze, but one of them was set with an intaglio, a cut stone once used by some grand lady to seal documents. She was able to pay for all this in coin, though she had to pass up a pretty iron brooch in the shape of a hare, for its vendor insisted on payment only in kind.
After that, bursting with energy, she raced back to the town house. Everybody knew Amator was home, and Carausias was beaming that his son, so long away, had returned. Regina yelled for Cartumandua. On a day like today it was only Carta, trained by Julia herself at the villa, who could help Regina prepare for her party.
Regina ran to the room she still shared with Marina, and threw her purchases onto her bed. She rummaged through her cosmetics and jewelry. She was running out of space on the little wooden shelves she used to store her things, so she shoved the three little matres out of the way and spread out her newest brooches, trying to decide which was the brightest. Beside the jewelry the matres looked like what they were, just dull lumps of crudely carved stone.
Once she had finished her chores in the kitchen, Carta came to help Regina with her toilet. She brought hot water, towels, and a scraper to cleanse Regina’s skin. She used tweezers, nail cleaners, and ear scoops to ensure that every part of her was perfect, and she patiently braided her hair. And she dripped perfume onto her skin, scooping it out of little bottles with a bronze spoon. Meanwhile Regina went through her growing collection of hairpins and enameled brooches, beads of glass and jet, and rings and earrings, trying to decide what to wear.
But as she prepared charcoal — she ground it up in one of her own most precious possessions, a tiny mortar and pestle small enough to be held between thumb and forefinger — Carta let Regina know how much she disapproved. “To spend good money on brooches and hairpins and shawls! You know what Carausias is saving for …”
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