She moved slightly.
It struck me she had been awake all the time.
"Sorry!" M Didius Falco was quaintly embarrassed. Thought you were asleep."
I was whispering, though there was no need since the constant shuffling of his fidgety hooves said the damn horse was still wide awake too. Probably half Rome knew what I had done. I heard Helena murmur in her sceptical way, "Is a goodnight kiss on the forehead a service your ladies find on your expenses sheet?"
"All I could reach." I fell back on bluff. "When I land a lady in a garden stable her kiss is complimentary of course."
The senator's daughter lifted her head, leaning up on her elbow as she turned, close above my madly pounding heart. Still holding her lightly, I skulked down into the straw, trying to ignore my fierce consciousness of her body lying against me. She must have felt the tightening of my chest. She looked different with her hair loose. Perhaps she was. I had no way of knowing whether I had stumbled upon some new person, or the woman Helena Justina had always been. But I knew the person she was tonight was someone I liked a great deal.
"And how often does this happen, Falco?"
"Not often enough!"
I glanced up, anticipating hard words, but found her face unexpectedly soft. I smiled ruefully. Then, as my smile began to fade, Helena Justina leaned forwards and kissed me.
I had my free hand tangled in her hair to stop her if she tried to move away, but she did not try. After an aeon of blissful disbelief I remembered to start breathing again.
"Sorry!" she teased gently. She was no more sorry than I was. I tightened my grip to bring her back, but found her already there.
Until then my encounters with women had relied on strategic wine jugs and heavy-handed wit, followed by an elaborate ballet I choreographed to arabesque me and my partner offstage into some convenient bed. The experiences of Didius Falco had been less frequent, and far less interesting, than constant allusion may suggest, but to my credit I did usually manage to supply a bed.
Now, without seriously intending it, I was kissing Helena in the way I had been wanting to kiss her for so long I had no idea when the yearning began. She looked at me quite calmly, so I went on kissing her just as I ought really to have kissed her at Massilia, and every night for a thousand miles before while she kissed me back until I knew this time neither of us thought it was a mistake. I stopped.
"We're embarrassing the horse…" One of the first facts of life a man understands is that you never tell a woman the truth. Yet I told this one the truth; I always had done and I always would. "Helena Justina, I gave up seducing women." I held her face between my two hands, keeping back her hair.
She considered me gravely. "Was that a vow to the gods?"
"No a promise to myself." In case she felt insulted, I kissed her again.
"Why are you telling me?" She did not ask why the promise, which was just as well because I did not really know.
"I want you to believe it."
Very carefully, Helena kissed me. I turned one palm against hers; her cool fingers interlaced with my own. One of her bare feet was making friends with mine as she asked, Ts this a promise you want to keep?"
I shook my head in silence (she was kissing me again).
Various connected circumstances forced me to admit: "I don't think… I can." It was so long since I wanted a woman so intensely, I had almost forgotten the pain of acute physical desire. "Tonight I don't want to anyway…!"
"Marcus Didius Falco, you are not seducing me," smiled Helena Justina, as she solved my moral dilemma with the sweetness I had for so long failed to recognize in her. "I am trying as hard as I can to seduce you!" I had always known she was a forthright girl.
I have no intention of describing what happened next. It is private between me, the senator's daughter, and the gardener's horse.
XLVIII
It was two hours before morning and most of Rome lay asleep. All the waggons and carts had retreated to their berths. Late diners had braved ambush at street corners to straggle home; prostitutes and pimps were dozing on the rushes among their sordid snoring clients; the lights in the palaces and mansions were dim. It was cold enough for a fine mist to have curled among the valleys between the Seven Hills, but when I woke I was warm physically and felt the slow, strong, welling emotion of a man who had convinced himself the girl in his arms would be the woman in his life.
I stayed completely still, remembering. I watched her sleeping face, at once so familiar to me, yet in deep slumber strangely unlike itself. I knew I must not expect to hold her, or watch her sleeping, ever again. Perhaps that was what made me feel I could not bear to let her go.
She woke. Her gaze at once dropped. She was shy not because of what we had done, but in case she found me changed. Her hand stirred against me, in a somewhat private place; I saw her eyes widen, startled, then she settled again. I smiled at her.
"Helena…" I studied her closed, cautious face. A sculptor might have quibbled, but to me she was beautiful. Anyway, if sculptors knew anything they'd take up a more lucrative line of work. "Nothing to say?"
After a time she replied, with typical honesty, "I suppose last night was how it is meant to be?"
Well; she had told me something about Pertinax. My answer was equally subdued.
"I imagine it must be." Which, if she was interested in past history, told her something about me.
I started to laugh: with her, at myself, at life, helplessly. "Oh Helena, Helena!… I learned some wonders about women with you last night!"
"I learned some about myself!" she answered wryly. Then she closed her eyes against my inner wrist, reluctant to let me see anything she felt.
Despite her restraint, or because of it, I wanted her to understand. "It's like studying a foreign language: you pick up a smattering of grammar, some basic vocabulary, a terrible accent that just gets you understood; you struggle for years, then without warning everything flows, you grasp how it all works"
"Oh don't! Falco She stopped; I had lost her.
"Marcus," I begged, but she hardly seemed to hear.
She forced herself on: "There's no need to pretend! We found a comforting way to pass the time' O Jupiter! She had stopped again. Then she insisted, "Last night was wonderful. You must have realized. But I see how it is: every case a girl, every new case a new girl"
All this was what a man expects to think. In a leaden voice I raged, "You are not some girl in a case!"
"So what am I?" Helena demanded.
"Yourself." I could not tell her.
I could hardly believe she did not realize.
"We ought to leave."
I hated her sounding so unapproachable. Oh I knew why; dear gods how I knew! I had done this to other people. The hardened attitude so ungracious, but oh so sensible! A brisk departure, in deep anxiety that one hour of passion might be held against you as the excuse for a lifetime of painful commitment which you had never pretended to want…
Now here was an irony. For the first time in my life I felt everything I should, everything most women believe they need. The only time it mattered, yet either Helena simply could not believe it or she was frantically trying to evade me. I locked my grip on her.
"Helena Justina," I began slowly, "what can I do? If I said that I loved you, it would be a tragedy to us both. I am beneath your dignity, and you are beyond my reach"