“Indeed. Everything was splendid, Davia.”
Eco added his praise but his applause was interrupted by a profound yawn. Too much good food and fresh air, he explained, gesturing to the table and to the breath before his lips. Eco’s tongue was useless, due to a fever that had nearly claimed his life, but he was a skillful mime. He excused himself and went straight to bed.
Lucius and I took chairs down to the stream and sipped his finest vintage while we listened to the gurgling of the water and the chirring of the crickets and watched thin clouds pass like shredded veils across the face of the moon.
“Ten days of this, and I think I might forget the way back to Rome.”
“Ah, but not the way back to Bethesda, I’ll wager. I was hoping to see her. She’s a city flower, yes, but put her in the country and she might put out some fresh blossoms that would surprise you. Ah well, it shall be just us three fellows, then.”
“No other guests?”
“No, no, no! I specifically waited until I had no pending social obligations, so that we should have the place all to ourselves.” He smiled at me under the moonlight, then turned down his lips in a mock-frown. “It’s not what you’re thinking, Gordianus.”
“And what am I thinking?”
“That for all his homely virtues, your friend Lucius Claudius is still a patrician and subject to the snobbery of his class; that I chose a time to invite you here when there’d be no one else around so as to avoid having you seen by my more elevated friends. But that’s not the point at all. I wanted you to have the place to yourself so that you wouldn’t have to put up with them! Oh, if you only knew the sort of people I’m talking about.”
I smiled at his discomfort. “My work does occasionally bring me into contact with the highborn and wealthy, you know.”
“Ah, but it’s a different matter, socializing with them. I won’t even mention my own family, though they’re the worst. Oh, there are the fortune-hunters, the ones on the fringes of society who think they can scrape and claw their way to respectability like a ferret. And the grandpas, the boring, self-important old farts who never let anyone forget that some ancestor of theirs served two terms as consul or sacked a Greek temple or slaughtered a shipload of Carthaginians back in the golden age. And the crackpots who claim they’re descended from Hercules or Venus — more likely Medusa, judging from their table manners. And the too-rich, spoiled young men who can’t think of anything but gambling and horse racing, and the too-pretty girls who can’t think of anything but new gowns and jewels, and the parents who can’t think of anything but matching up the boys and girls so that they can breed more of the same.
“You see, Gordianus, you meet these people at their worst, when there’s been a dreadful murder or some other crime, and they’re all anxious and confused and need your help, but I see them at their best, when they’re preening themselves like African birds and oozing charm all over each other like honey, and believe me, at their best they’re a thousand times worse! Oh, you can’t imagine some of the dreadful gatherings I’ve had to put up with here at the villa. No, no, nothing like that for the next ten days. This shall be a respite for you and me alike — for you from the city, and for me from my so-called circle of friends.”
But it was not to be.
The next three days were like a foretaste of Elysium. Eco explored every corner of the farm, as fascinated by butterflies and ant beds as he was by the arcane mechanics of the olive-oil press and the wine press. He had always been a city boy — he was an abandoned child of the streets when I adopted him — but it was clear he could develop a taste for the country.
As for me, I treated myself to Davia’s cooking at least three times a day, toured the farm with Lucius and his foreman, and spent restful hours lying in the shade of the willows along the stream, scrolling through trashy Greek novels from Lucius’s small library. The plots all seemed to be the same — humble boy meets noble girl, girl is abducted by pirates/giants/soldiers, boy rescues girl and turns out to be of noble birth himself — but such nonsense seemed to fit my mood perfectly. I allowed myself to become pampered and relaxed and thoroughly lazy in body, mind, and spirit, and I enjoyed every moment.
Then came the fourth day, and the visitors.
They arrived just as the light was beginning to fail, in an open traveling coach drawn by four white horses and followed by a small retinue of slaves. She was dressed in green and wore her auburn curls pinned in the peculiar upright fan-shape that happened to be stylish in the city that spring; it made a suitable frame for the striking beauty of her face. He wore a dark-blue tunic that was sleeveless and cut above the knees to show off his athletic arms and legs, and an oddly trimmed little beard that seemed designed to flout convention. They looked to be about my age, midway between thirty and forty.
I happened to be walking back to the villa from the stream. Lucius stepped out of the house to greet me, looked past me, and saw the new arrivals.
“Numa’s balls!” he exclaimed under his breath, borrowing my own favorite epithet.
“Friends of yours?” I said.
“Yes!” He could not have sounded more dismayed if he was being paid a visit by Hannibal’s ghost riding a ghostly elephant.
He, it turned out, was a fellow named Titus Didius. She was Antonia, his second wife. (They had both divorced their first spouses in order to marry each other, generating enormous scandal and no small amount of envy among their unhappily married peers.) According to Lucius, who took me aside while the couple settled into the room next to mine, they drank like fishes, fought like jackals, and stole like magpies. (I noticed that the slaves discreetly put away the costliest wines, the best silver, and the most fragile Arretine vases shortly after they arrived.)
“It seems they were planning to spend a few days up at my cousin Manius’s place, but when they arrived, no one was there. Well, I know what happened — Manius went down to Rome just to avoid them. I wonder that they didn’t pass him on the way!”
“Surely not.”
“Surely yes. So now they’ve come here, asking to stay awhile. ‘Just a day or two, before we head back to the city. We were so looking forward to some time in the country. You will be a dear, won’t you, Lucius, and let us stay, just for a bit?’ More likely ten days than two!”
I shrugged. “They don’t look so awful to me.”
“Oh, wait. Just wait.”
“Well, if they’re really as terrible as that, why don’t you let them stay the night and then turn them away?”
“Turn them away?” He repeated the phrase as if I’d stopped speaking Latin. “Turn them away? You mean, send away Titus Didius, old Marcus Didius’s boy? Refuse my hospitality to Antonia? But Gordianus, I’ve known these people since I was a child. I mean, to avoid them, like cousin Manius has done, well, that’s one thing. But to say to them, to their faces—”
“Never mind. I understand,” I said, though I didn’t, really.
Whatever their faults, the couple had one overriding virtue: They were charming. So charming, indeed, that on that first night, dining in their company, I began to think that Lucius was wildly exaggerating. Certainly they showed none of the characteristic snobbishness of their class toward Eco and me. Titus wanted to hear all about my travels and my work for advocates like Marcus Cicero. (“Is it true,” he asked, leaning toward me earnestly, “that he’s a eunuch?”) Eco was obviously fascinated by Antonia, who was even more remarkably beautiful by lamplight. She made a game of flirting with him, but she did so with a natural grace that was neither condescending nor mean. They were both witty, vibrant, and urbane, and their sense of humor was only slightly, charmingly, vulgar.