"What does nudging entail?" Vespasian cracked, looking back over his hefty shoulder with a contempt that startled her.
"Oh—the usual!" When caught off guard Caenis could be a belligerent tease. She glanced down, then up again through her eyelashes. Veronica imbued this gesture with resonant sexuality; Caenis got an eyelash in one eye. "I just took an interest in his work."
Vespasian stared.
To soothe him, while she fiddled with the eyelash she commented that Antonia was unlikely to keep this office once Tiberius either died or came home to Rome. It was years since he decamped to Capri. There he now owned a dozen villas, plus a series of grottoes and bowers that provided a pretty playground for acting out orgiastic fantasies—or so it was said. Some of the terrible stories were probably true.
Sometimes the Emperor did make journeys to mainland Italy and circled Rome like a wary crab, informing the Senate that he intended to visit and yet then fleeing back to his hideaway with the headlong panic of a haunted man. Astrologers had decided that the hour of his leaving Rome had been so inauspicious that returning might be fatal. Caenis scoffed at the idea, but Vespasian folded his arms over his glossy new toga and said, "Not if he really believes the prophecy."
"That I accept," Caenis agreed. "He'd be quite likely to collapse if he heard a rat in the hypocaust, or a spider ran over his foot. You know, Antonia believes that is what happened to her son in Syria."
"Germanicus? I thought he was poisoned."
"He was; but he might have withstood it better if witches had not filled his house with fossils, and feathery monsters, and dead babies under the floorboards, until they frightened him to death." She was philosophical about Tiberius. "So long as the creatures who parade for the Emperor's perversions volunteer, let him stay on his island."
"Is it all true?" Eyes bright, Vespasian had a respectable man's shameless curiosity about the Emperor's fusty sexual habits.
"Worse."
Disturbed, he saw the dismal memories clouding Caenis' face.
She braced herself to cope. She had never expressed her views on Tiberius; it had never been safe. Yet in Vespasian she placed absolute trust. To him she could speak. "I was a child when he last lived here, but those years were very dark. His household existed in dread. He was most intrigued by persuading the aristocracy to commit obscenities, but no slave carried him a cup of wine or was sent to fasten his shoe without the risk of being stripped and subjected to indecency—either by him or the men and women who surrounded him. No one could save you if you attracted attention. Childhood was no protection. Ordinary rape was a kindness compared with the alternatives."
In the schoolroom she herself had been relatively safe. Even so, as a teenager she had always carried her stylus knife so if she ever met trouble she could stab herself and perhaps take one of the Emperor's catamites with her. One of her friends had died of suffocation and shock during an ugly ordeal in the Emperor's underground entertainment room. Caenis would not repeat the details.
Vespasian walked slowly back to where she sat. Leering curiosity had given way to middle-class distaste. His face remained neutral, though Caenis sensed the concealed throb of anger. "Not you, I hope?"
"No," she reassured him somberly, with all the color bleached from her own voice. Simply talking to him had healed her bad memories. "Not me."
She noticed a small nerve jerk in his cheek.
He sat down again. They changed the subject.
They spoke of Crete. They discussed the problems of running a province that was divided between a Mediterranean island and a tract of North Africa; the main advantage for the quaestor was that he could always send his governor to bumble around the other half of the territory while he enjoyed himself.
They spoke of Vespasian's mother. "Is she fabulously pleased with you now?"
"Afraid so!"
They had become confederates. They were talking like two outsiders from society. They talked for the months they had already missed and the period of Vespasian's coming tour; openly and easily, sharing rudeness and laughter, discovery and surprise; until lunchtime, through lunchtime, and into the afternoon. They talked until they were tired.
Then they sat, two friendly companions just leaning their chins on their hands.
There were no sounds of habitation. It was so quiet, they could hear the creak of walls contracting in the winter chill and birdsong—a thrush, perhaps—from a far-off deserted park.
"Oh gods, Caenis; this is no good." He flung out his arm across her table, stretching his hand toward her. "Come here!"
"No!" Caenis exclaimed. She shrank back from him instinctively.
Their eyes locked. His hand dropped. He sighed; so did she.
"All right. I'm sorry."
"You're going away!" she cried.
They sat in silence again, but their encounter had brought them so close, Caenis suddenly confessed with desperate clarity, "I am afraid of what I feel."
She should never have done it. She saw his face set. Men hated any admission of emotion. Men were terrified of the truth.
Not this one.
"So am I," he acknowledged. "But there seems nothing to gain by ignoring it." Fiddling with her sticks of sealing wax, he kept his tone deliberately level. "Are you still asking me to leave you alone?"
"I should," Caenis returned carefully, as she too found herself staring at the edge of the table. "You know I am not."
Though he wanted to disguise it, his gratitude was unmistakable. They both looked up again. Nothing had happened, yet everything had changed. They both smiled a little at their shared sense of helplessness.
Flavius Vespasianus was not a man anyone would expect to hold this kind of conversation. To Caenis he seemed too mature, too good-humored, too cynical to be touched by internal conflict or uncertainty. Yet he was stubbornly himself.
"Hmm! I'm going away," he agreed with a murmur of regret. "What a shame!"
After another pause he threw back his heavy head, his eyes on her all the time. "Oh, lass; I ought to leave you!"
"You must. I need to do my work."
"I don't want to." Yet he was already standing. They persuaded one another into sense; they always would.
Caenis had to finish correcting the copyists' work. She clambered to her feet and came around politely to take her visitor to the door. It was the first time she felt easy standing so near to him. Before he lifted the latch he turned back to her, smiling as he warned, "I'm going away—but I shall be coming back!"
Expecting him to make some more determined move, she was startled when he carefully clasped both her hands in his while he stood, looking at her; making her look at him; keeping her close. Any other man gazing at her so intently would have made some declaration. Not Vespasian. It was illegal and impossible; Caenis accepted that he never would.
Instead, just before he released her he leaned forward and kissed her, very lightly, on the cheek. It was not a lover's kiss. Nor was this formal social statement something a slavegirl would ever expect to receive from a young man of senatorial rank. This was how he must salute his mother and grandmother; how a man of his class would greet a daughter, a sister, or a wife: It was the gesture, between equals, of genuine affection and respect.
PART TWO
ANTONIA CAENIS
When the Caesars were Tiberius and Caligula
NINE
A windswept day in July. A senator, not yet thirty, bronzed from provincial service but today swaddled against the unseasonable gusts in a long brown hooded cloak with a heavy nap, walked into the Imperial Palace. He left his meager escort of slaves at the entrance, then proceeded alone. His pace slowed, more with reminiscence than uncertainty.