Then Vespasian's son was violently sick all over her feet.
He was mortified. "Oh, lady, I'm so sorry—"
Her new sandals! But he looked better. "Thanks, sweetheart. Come on; try again. I don't think I liked them anyway, and I certainly don't like them now."
Behind her, she suddenly heard the wailing of the slaves who attended a death to clamor in case there was a hope that the victim might after all wake. People had no sense of discretion. This was the ritual, so they performed it mindlessly. Nobody murdered in this palace was required to be revived. People had no sense.
No one paid any attention to Titus and herself. Just as well. Too close an association with this poisoning would do the Flavians no good.
She had been prepared to thrust chicken feathers down the boy's throat, but by now he was being helplessly ill. Caenis talked to him, willing him through, holding him more kindly now. He no longer seemed conscious of his surroundings, but she tried to make her voice reach his brain and drag him back. She was losing him; she could see that.
"Titus! Titus, come on, my Flavian; you can do better than this."
He groaned. Still talking, she massaged his limp, sweating hands. "What a truly awful banquet; I don't know why I came. Abandoned by my host—Titus, make an effort, please!—the floor show was deplorable, and I had to leave before the decent drinking got under way. . . ." He had nothing more to bring up. Wiping his face, she let him rest with his poor fevered head against her upper arm. Tears splashed onto his cheek; her own tears. "Oh, my darling; don't die, Titus! I can never tell Vespasian that I let him lose his son."
Demetrius was back with her litter and its two frightened bearers. She gave them quiet instructions. They were to take the boy to his father's empty apartment; Demetrius would go to explain, or if there were no servants there he would fetch Aglaus instead to look after the boy.
Titus was wrestling against unconsciousness as they lifted him inside the chair. Just before she closed the half-door Caenis leaned in to tuck her shawl around him. He was shivering uncontrollably; she had never seen anyone so white.
He opened his eyes in a moment of puzzled lucidity. "Do you know my father well?"
"Not anymore," stated Caenis tersely. "And you can tell him from me, I can manage without his offspring being sick in my best new shoes!"
Yet she kissed him, before the bearers began to move off—that old social gesture of affection, the light touch on the cheek. So once again, Titus felt the lady's tears.
Perhaps he had glimpsed that a little of the love she once gave to Britannicus had transferred in that dreadful hour to him. Perhaps, too, he recognized the shadow of another kind of feeling. Within the soft folds of that lady's shawl he shuddered, for as he was carried away from the Palace to the safety of his father's house he understood that he had trespassed among the secrets of a grown-up world. Unimagined aspects of his own existence faced him. With the heartrending clarity of someone who was dangerously ill, he was viewing not merely his father, with whom he had always been on the best of terms, and his mother, whom he loved as he should, but also this lady with whom he was sharing the loss of his friend. Love of Britannicus seemed their special interest, a bond even more private than the fact that she had just saved his life.
But there was something else between them too. She had called him her darling. Then, with a flood of sensation as intense as biting on an unexpected clove, Titus Vespasianus understood her warning and her plea. He realized exactly why, when they spoke about tonight to other people, they would have to make such a joke about him ruining her shoes.
TWENTY-EIGHT
They buried Britannicus in the pouring rain.
Someone with enormous forethought had provided a pyre. Slaves must have been building it before the banquet even began. So a small group of friends cremated the son of Claudius on the Palatine that same night, while Nero watched from his dining room, much as Caligula had once watched Antonia's funeral. It was raining from the start, but when they brought the boy's ashes to the Mausoleum of Augustus in the north of the city, all the heavens opened, and this was taken for a sign of the gods' wrath. For Caenis, the filthy weather merely matched the filthiness of life.
It was a pitiful group that trailed out to the Field of Mars, then through the sodden public walks to the Mausoleum. As they approached, the weather was so bad they could barely make out the exterior, mounded with earth in the Etruscan style, though massively terraced and planted with cypress trees. The bronze statue of Augustus that surmounted the great circular tomb was quite invisible in the murk.
The wind keened eerily in the trees. It was night, the company sparse and deeply depressed. When lightning flashed off the obelisks that guarded the entrance to that dark place, those who had been brave enough to attend the cremation understood that all the new optimistic order was now quite lost. Their unexpected Emperor Claudius had been decreed a god; as they brought his murdered son to the family tomb, that was the final irony.
The mourners descended by the flaring light of torches to deposit the urn in the white marble basement. It took place without eulogy or ceremony. Nero had forbidden a procession. There was no time to bring out the masks of Britannicus' ancestors. People came hurriedly; muttered their farewells; departed into the storm. So they buried the last of the Claudians, the son of a deified emperor, yet murdered in boyhood as so many were, with nobody willing or able to raise a hand in his defense. So they buried Britannicus, in the pouring rain.
* * *
Caenis went home.
She was shaking. She was sneezing. She had no shoes and no shawl; she was drenched. She was entering a state of shock. She had been wet for a long time, since before the cremation, when she washed her feet and the hem of her dress in a fountain, leaving her ruined sandals on the rim. Noticing she had lost her litter, Pallas took her in his own. They did not like one another, but as clients of the same family, decency demanded he did not let her walk across the north of the city weeping and barefoot, in the dark, alone. Caenis was past knowing what had happened to her, and had she known she would not have cared. By next day she was seriously ill.
Caenis was so ill, for so long, that she reached a point of not even understanding who or where she was. Aglaus must have coped. She never really knew. Doctors came, though not often; Aglaus told her afterward that despite any delirium, at the first sniff of poppyseed and cabbage water she had managed to be magnificently rude. Even when she started to recover she could barely find the energy to lie in bed, hoping there would be nothing to decide or do.
Eventually she passed into a stage of being bored yet unable to concentrate, so once again she could only drowse, while occasional tears whimpered down the line of her cheekbone and chin. Even her flute girl was more than she could bear; after a few minutes of the softest music her head hurt. People sent fruit, which she did not eat. People came; she begged not to have to see them because she realized she was too miserable to cope—then when she knew they had gone, she became desolate with loneliness.
Every night, when the delirium returned, there was the dream: young Titus falling to the floor at her feet while she begged him not to die. That dream at least grew so familiar, it seemed almost comforting.
* * *
At last the day arrived when she woke and knew she was much better than the day before.
"You have a visitor," Chloe, her maid, offered, at which for the first time Caenis looked keen to know who.
Then a familiar scathing voice burbled, "Don't worry, it's only me! And don't try to turn me out." It was Veronica. To see her was glorious. "Juno, Caenis; look at you! The rumor's true then, that you had pneumonia?"