‘Thanks!’ Lucilla sounded dry.
Gaius rasped a laugh: ‘The crazy thing is, anyone who tries to denounce me will come whispering to the very team of inquisitors I now collaborate with.’
He saw Lucilla frown. ‘Are you going to enjoy that work?’
‘No. But this is the Guards.’
‘You will need a clear head then. Stop overdoing the drink. Yes,’ Lucilla reproved him. ‘Members of your family are very concerned. Paulina had a word. For some reason people think you may listen to me.’
‘I do.’
‘Then stop being a barfly.’
‘I am dealing with it.’ Gaius poured them more mulsum; they both smiled.
‘All drunks say they are in control, but I agree you are strong-willed.’ Lucilla was presumably thinking, I ought to know. ‘Besides, wine is just your temporary refuge; it’s understandable. You never got over Dacia. Are you still sleeping badly?’
‘Bad memories.’ Gaius scowled. ‘I came home, assuming I had left it all behind, yet Dacia won’t loosen its grip on me. While I was there, the recurrent memory was something very different.’ Time to tell her. Time to open up. ‘We have never talked about what happened at Alba.’
Lucilla said nothing.
He stared out over the courtyard. ‘That was a special occasion and we both know it. Flavia Lucilla, you could sleep with the man of your heart a thousand times and only achieve such an experience once… Mind you,’ said Gaius, speaking ruefully for his own reasons, ‘you could have nine hundred and ninety-nine other attempts afterwards, with at least some hope…’ She did not smile. ‘I thought about you every day,’ he announced baldly.
‘I was worth it then?’ Lucilla’s voice was a whisper.
He turned back. She was sitting on his left, so it meant bringing his head right around to look at her. Graceful in a light flowered gown, with rows of fine neckchains hung from two enamelled shoulder brooches, she made his blowsy wife seem common and his respectable wife seem stiff.
His smile was sad, his voice intense: ‘Oh yes, you were worth it!’
Lucilla flushed. He reddened a little. Gaius prompted, ‘You could say the same about me?…’ Lucilla released a scathing puff of laughter, which he hoped meant her appreciation of him as a lover went without saying. ‘Still, not anymore,’ he confessed hoarsely, bursting out with it. ‘Dacia seems to have done for me.’
While Lucilla slowly grasped what he meant, Gaius writhed unhappily. He was innocently unaware that she was thinking he had two wives, a sympathetic commanding officer and a large family; it was unfair to burden her. Still he insisted: according to his fourth wife, when he came round after that first night in her squalid lair, he had significantly failed to function. ‘Apparently, I just cannot do it.’
Lucilla exhibited very little shock. Gaius would have been amazed how often impotence was a subject of conversation with hairdressers. ‘That must be enormously distressing for you.’
Gaius swallowed, unable to say more. Broken by the relief of sharing his trouble, he dropped his face into his hands, elbows on his knees, welling up in shame and misery.
He heard Lucilla’s chair scrape as she rose and came to him. Leaning down, she put her arms around him. He smelled her own perfume, plus echoes of other lotions she had been using in her work. As if held by his mother, he was enveloped in warmth and sympathy. Clearly there was no sensual element to this close embrace; even though Lucilla stroked his hair, her touch was professional. ‘This grey over your ears… I could darken it for you; still, it looks distinguished… You are a man who has lived. Gaius, living means suffering.’
When crouching became awkward, she loosed him and resumed her seat. Gaius had recovered his composure. ‘Time, Gaius. You will have to heal. Have you talked to a doctor?’
He flared up. ‘There is nothing wrong with me!’
Lucilla forbore comment on the contradiction. ‘Were you wounded?’
Gaius was still tetchy. ‘Why is that the first question women must ask?’ Onofria had done so. ‘No. Not in the groin. I was hit on the head.’
‘But might a head wound affect you?’
He exploded again: ‘I don’t use my brain — ’
Lucilla toughened up with him. ‘When fit, you used everything, including the wits you have thrown away today. Experience, observation, curiosity, ideas, responses…’ Alba again.
‘Hands, lips, breath, muscles, heart — but mostly the all-important dingle-dangle,’ groaned Gaius bitterly.
There was silence.
Lucilla braced up to the easier question. ‘Well you have to decide which you want. You can’t have two wives, one of them must go.’
‘Both.’
‘The loud Onofria and the quiet Caecilia?’
‘Both. Absolutely; both.’
‘Well Gaius, make this the last time you let your brothers boss you. Stop them pushing you around. Grow up. Take responsibility for your own life.’
Now it was the turn of Gaius Vinius to make a massive, unthinking mistake.
‘I know what I want — who I want. Get free of both these bloody nightmares and make a vacancy.’ He meant so well — for both of them. He said it so wrongly.
Lucilla was hearing unpleasant contempt in the way he spoke of Onofria and Caecilia, even though he just told her he had voluntarily made drunken promises to one and exchanged formal vows with the other. He sounded hard, coarse, a little crazy. For herself, she would never fear any harm from Vinius, yet she was glimpsing a changed man here; she understood it might be temporary but he was a man out of control, a man she did not like.
At Lucilla’s silence, he made matters even worse: ‘All right, I know I’m a mess. But you can excuse the battle flashbacks, the drunken nights, the dried-up sap… Here I am, darling. Battered, but now all yours.’
Oh no. Calling her ‘darling’ was terrible. She had always hated the mocking insincerity of the way he used that word. But that was just the tip of her wrath, and Gaius could see how his lack of refinement was destroying their relationship.
Flavia Lucilla jumped to her feet. Deep in her eyes burned a fierce message that a man with five wives recognised: a diatribe was about to fell him like a tree struck by lightning. ‘How convenient — I can be sixth in the parade?’
The dog slid down off his lap and quailed against his chair. ‘That came out wrong,’ Gaius admitted hurriedly.
‘Really? You forget — I have seen how you treat wives. Who wants to be pushed out of the way while you grease your way off to some new refuge, your next secret “investment”, to confide in some new safe co-tenant, who may let you seduce her when she’s desperate but who will have no claim on you?’
‘I have had my faults-’
‘Yes.’
‘But you would be different.’
‘The promise you made to all those neglected wives!’
‘No!’
‘Two believe they still own you, even while you are pouring your heart out to me.’
‘ Because you are different-’
‘Because you take me for an idiot. You imagine I am just waiting to be a substitute, the next chained captive in your pathetic triumph.’ Lucilla shuddered. ‘This is my home. Don’t come to my home and behave like a dumb soldier. I have been a wife — to a good man, who for all his faults offered affection and respect.’ She knew how to make Vinius jealous.
‘I respect you.’
‘Don’t insult me. You are a disgrace, Vinius.’
‘So my wives tell me.’
She stormed off. The dog, who knew how to make choices, slunk after her. Vinius sat on the balcony with the wreckage of his hopes, until there was no point sitting alone any longer. He left the apartment without speaking again to Lucilla.
That was that then.
He had ruined it.
Everything was over.
The Praetorian knew it would be self-destructive to spurn Lucilla’s good advice. She would have been surprised how much of it he followed. Step by step he reclaimed his life.
He said goodbye to Onofria. He took her a generous amount of money and was surprised when she good-heartedly waved him and his cash away. He left the pay-off even so.