"Antonia Caenis, let me introduce you to my patron—"
"I know your patron," she interrupted quickly. Despite everything, Claudius might possibly not remember her; he drank heavily, and his recollection for faces was notoriously bad. "I am his mother's freedwoman; he is my patron too."
The Emperor nodded to her with that helpless quirk of the head.
They all sat, as Narcissus had suggested, quietly in the twilight. It was then for the first time that Caenis realized she was part of something new. Some strain that she had always known was lifting from Rome. By chance she belonged to the private household that was so unexpectedly governing the world. Narcissus, who approved of her, would bring her into this Emperor's tight-knit circle to watch, and if she wanted, to help.
Narcissus was saying openly to the Emperor, as if Caenis were already acknowledged as a colleague, "I left you the list to consider for army legates. You might give thought to Vespasianus. He could suit the Second Augusta. They're at Argentoratum now; ideal candidates for your British scheme."
Argentoratum was one of the big military bases on the Rhine. Caenis knew the legions there had been fractious for years. It would be useful to pull them out of their secure site, where they fraternized too closely with the locals and were apt to forget they owed allegiance to Rome. In other respects the legions in Germany were first-class. It would be a good command.
Claudius had turned to her. "I know Vespasianus, don't I?"
She reminded him quietly, "You met him, sir; at your mother's house."
"Yes . . . oh yes." He had taken on his wandering air. Oddly, it seemed to be settled at that. The freedman winked at her.
"If you take to him," Narcissus mentioned to Claudius after a time, "he has a boy we may educate with your own." Suddenly Caenis understood why he had been so interested in Vespasian's son.
Messalina had crowned the Emperor's astonishing rise to power by presenting Claudius with a male heir just twenty-two days after he accepted the throne. It would be seven years before the little prince went formally to school; Narcissus must be making long-term plans. With one Caesar barely pinned into his gown of woven gold, he was already plotting the school curriculum to produce a dynasty.
* * *
Narcissus himself handed out wine. Caenis had withdrawn into herself, winded by a vision of Vespasian with a baby on his arm. She was also having some difficulty hanging on to the dish of sweetmeats; Claudius was addicted to food.
"To the Emperor!" murmured Narcissus, the civil servant at his most wickedly urbane. Claudius ducked his head, not fooled by it.
"To good government!" Caenis staunchly returned. She grinned at Narcissus, aware that she had for once embarrassed him. "Sorry. I forgot to tell you; I'm a secret republican."
"Forgot to tell you, Narcissus," mused Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, with the slight melancholy of a man sitting quietly at dusk among his friends. "I am a secret republican myself!"
And as they all sat eating Greek sweetmeats, they laughed.
It was a new world, a new order, staffed by people with like minds. Caenis could hardly believe it; she was part of this.
* * *
She had an interview with her landlord later that week. Eumolpus came into her room without knocking, as she knew he did when he thought she was out.
"Ah!" exclaimed Caenis quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the slimy bastard jump.
He stared at her so, the tendons set in the back of her neck. His provocative eyes lingered on her skin and on the subtle folds of her dark-red dress. The dress had loosely draped sleeves, fastened to the elbow five times along each arm. "Always so smart! I do like that dress, Caenis. Those with the little buttons are the most seductive kind; a man always imagines them being very slowly unfastened one by one for him. . . ."
"Actually," Caenis crushed him, "these are purely decoration—permanently sewn up." She could hardly bear to be in the same room. "So glad you called; I can serve you my notice. I shall not charge you," smiled Caenis gently, "for all the painting and shoring up of your walls and woodwork I have had done—though I may suggest to the incoming tenant that she changes the lock!"
And in answer to the gratifying curiosity she had caused, "I am fortunate," she said modestly. "The new Emperor has offered me a suite in his mother's house."
It was a lie, because she would never accept the offer of returning to the House of Livia. And this was the only time Caenis, who was no snob, ever used her connections so publicly.
She did it on behalf of all the struggling women down the years who endured invasions of their privacy and acts against their person from men whose only advantage was the possession of property. She did it for them, and she did it for the bitter, barefoot slavey she had once been herself.
She was fortunate now. Emperors would come and go. But as Narcissus so shrewdly deduced, Antonia Caenis would in many ways be bitter and barefoot all her life.
TWENTY-ONE
Narcissus went to Britain himself.
In fact, he almost went to Britain by himself; all the more ludicrous, since according to his plan he should have been nursing things along in Rome.
The plan was: The troops would sail over, establish a foothold, batter the heads of a few southern tribesmen, then invite the Emperor to join them for finishing off the by now groggy tribes; afterward he would push off home as Claudius Britannicus, leaving the army to pin down as much territory as they could without serious expense, loss of face or loss of life.
It was a perfectly sound plan. Once Narcissus wound the machinery into action, like some solemn donkey toiling at a plod around his eternally creaking water screw, the plan worked pretty well. Once, that is, he got himself to Gaul and moved the invasion force.
* * *
The troops refused to go.
"That was not in the Daily Gazette!" Caenis exclaimed, when she saw Narcissus after he returned to Rome. She had found him at his house, which had been redecorated meanwhile with a great deal of Carrara marble and flagrant use of gold leaf; all rather wearing on the eyes.
"It seemed to us," returned the freedman, meaning it seemed to him, but he possessed a shrewd degree of modesty, "that it would be ill advised to let it be known too widely how four of the Emperor's best legions, forty thousand of the finest, in the peak of condition, all flush with their recent bonus for the Emperor's accession and looking up to a general (Aulus Plautius) against whom no troops could possibly hold a grievance—utterly decent all-around sort of chap—as I say, four spanking legions had trudged their way through Gaul, to camp at Gesoriacum (pig of a hole; just a dot on the map), only to sit on their beds looking out of their tents, staring boot-faced at the sea."
"I understand," suggested Caenis gently, "that the Gallic Strait is very rough."
Narcissus, who had been across in both directions, shuddered wordlessly. It was accepted by cultivated people that the thirty-odd miles between Britain and Gaul formed the wildest stretch of water in the world. That was the main reason, as the legionaries had advised their general frankly, why they did not want to go.
"I told them," said Narcissus, "I thought they had a point."
Caenis slowly sucked a red-rimmed peach between her teeth. "You told them!" she repeated thoughtfully, imagining the scene.
Fortunately Aulus Plautius was a rare specimen: a general who never panicked. Faced with a polite though stubborn mutiny, he had written to the Emperor for advice. The Emperor sent the head of his secretariat to represent his views. So Narcissus had dragged himself seven hundred miles overland across Europe from Massilia, which was itself five hundred miles from Rome by sea.