Lucilla and I lie naked on the terrace of our room, reclining on thick sheepskin mats, enjoying the mild autumn evening. The sky and the sea are the same shade of gray-blue. It’s hard to tell where the boundary lies between the one and the other. Thickly wooded cliffs rise vertically from the water just across from us. Heavy-winged birds swoop through the dusk. In town, far below, the first lights of evening begin to shimmer.
“I don’t even know your name,” I say, after a while.
“Of course you do. It’s Lucilla.”
“You know what I mean. The rest of it.”
“Lucilla Junia Scaevola,” she says.
“Scaevola? Related to the famous Consul Scaevola, by any chance?”
I’m only making idle talk. Scaevola is hardly an uncommon Roman name, of course.
“He’s my uncle Gaius,” she says. “You’ll get to meet him when we go up to Roma. Adriana adores him, and so will you.”
Her casual words leave me thunderstruck. Consul Scaevola’s niece, lying naked here beside me?
Gods! These girls and their famous uncles! Uncle Gaius, Uncle Cassius. I am in heady company. The whole Roman world knows Gaius Junius Scaevola—chosen again and again as Consul, three terms, perhaps four, the most recent time just a couple of years before. By all accounts he’s the second most powerful man in the realm, the great strong figure who stands behind the wobbly young Emperor Maxentius and keeps him propped up. My uncle Gaius, this one says, so very simply and sweetly. I’ll have quite a lot to tell my father when I get back to Cornwall.
Consul Scaevola’s niece rears up above me and dangles her breasts in my face. I kiss their pink patrician tips and she drops down on top of me like one of those fierce swooping birds descending on its prey.
In the cool of the morning we take a long hike up one of the hills behind town to the Villa Jovis, the Imperial palace that has been there since the time of Tiberius. He used to have his enemies thrown from the edge of the cliff there.
Of course we can’t get very close to it, since it’s still in use, occupied by members of the Imperial family whenever they visit Capreae. Nobody seems to be in residence right now but the gates are heavily guarded anyway. We can see it rising grandly from the summit of its hill, an enormous pile of gleaming masonry surrounded by elaborate fortifications.
“I wonder what it’s like in there,” I say. “But I’ll never know, I guess.”
“I’ve been inside it,” Lucilla tells me.
“You have?”
“They claim that some of the rooms and furnishings go all the way back to Tiberius’s reign. There’s an indoor swimming pool with the most absolutely obscene mosaics all around it, and that’s where he’s supposed to have liked to diddle little boys and girls. But I think it’s all mostly a fake put together in medieval times, or even later. The whole place was sacked, you know, when the Byzantines invaded the Western Empire six hundred years ago. It’s pretty certain that they carried the treasures of the early Emperors off to Constantinopolis with them, wouldn’t you think?”
“How did you happen to see it?” I ask. “You were traveling with your uncle, I suppose.”
“With Flavius Rufus, actually.”
“Flavius Rufus?”
“Flavius Caesar. Emperor Maxentius’s third brother. He loves southern Italia. Comes down here all the time.”
“With you?”
“Once in a while. Oh, silly, silly! I was sixteen. We were just friends!”
“And how old are you now?”
“Twenty-one,” she says. Six years younger than I am, then.
“Very close friends, I suppose.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fool, Cymbelin!” There is laughter in her eyes. “You’ll meet him, too, when we’re in Roma.”
“A royal prince?”
“Of course! You’ll meet everyone. The Emperor’s brothers, the Emperor’s sisters, the Emperor himself, if he’s in town. I grew up at court, don’t you realize that? In my uncle’s household. My father died in the war.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Commanded the Augustus Legion, in Syria, Aegyptus, Palaestina. Palaestina’s where he died. You’ve heard of the Siege of Aelia Capitolina? That’s where he was killed, right outside the Temple of the Great Mother just as the city was falling to us. He was standing near some old ruined stone wall that survives from the temple that was there before the present one, and a sniper got him. Cassius Frontinus delivered the funeral oration himself. And afterward my uncle Gaius adopted me, because my mother was dead, too, had killed herself the year before—that’s a long story, a scandal at the court of the old Emperor—”
My head is swimming.
“Anyway, Flavius is like a brother to me. You’ll see. We came down here and I stayed the night in the Villa Jovis. Saw all the naughty mosaics in Tiberius’s swimming pool, swam in it, even—there was a gigantic feast afterward, wild boar from the mountains here, mountains of strawberries and bananas, and you wouldn’t believe how much wine—oh, cheer up, Cymbelin, you didn’t think I was a virgin, did you?”
“That isn’t it. Not at all.”
“Then what is it?”
“The thought that you really know the royals. That you’re still so young and you’ve done so many astonishing things. And also that the man I was arguing with the other night was actually Cassius Lucius Frontinus the famous general, and that you’re the niece of Gaius Junius Scaevola the Consul, and that you’ve been the mistress of the Emperor’s brother, and—don’t you see, Lucilla, how hard all this is for me? How bewildering?”
“My poor confused barbarian!”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. Even if it’s more or less true.”
“My gorgeous Celt, then. My beautiful blond-haired Briton. That much is all right to say, isn’t it?”
We hire one of the little one-horse carriages that are the only permissible vehicles on Capreae and ride down to the beach to spend the afternoon swimming naked in the warm sea and sunning ourselves on the rocky shore. Though it is late in the day and late also in the year, Lucilla’s flawless skin quickly turns rosy, and she’s hot and glowing when we return to our room.
Two days, two unforgettable nights, on Capreae. Then back to Surrentum, where our charioteer is dutifully waiting for us at the ferry landing, and up to Neapolis again, an all-day drive. I am reluctant to part from her at my hotel, urging her to spend the night with me there, too, but she insists that she must get back to the villa of Frontinus.
“And I?” I say. “What do I do? I have to dine alone, I have to go to bed alone?”
She brushes her lips lightly across mine and laughs. “Did I say that? Of course you’ll come with me to Frontinus’s place! Of course!”
“But he hasn’t invited me to return.”
“What a fool you can be sometimes, Cymbelin. I invite you. I’m Adriana’s guest. And you’re mine. Go upstairs, pack up the rest of your things, tell the hotel you’re checking out. Go on, now!”
And so it is. In Druso Tiberio’s absurdly splendid quadriga we ride back up the hill to the villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus, where I am greeted with apparently unfeigned warmth and no trace of surprise by our jolly host and given a magnificent suite of rooms overlooking the bay. Uncle Cassio is gone, and so are the other house guests who were there on the night of the party, and I am more than welcome.
My rooms just happen to adjoin those of Lucilla. That night, after a feast of exhausting excess at which Druso Tiberio and his gladiator playmate Ezio behave in a truly disgusting way while the elder Frontinus studiedly turns his attention elsewhere, I hear a gentle tapping at my door as I am preparing for bed.