His protestations were cut short at the appearance of silver, and Marcus was steered towards an evergreen grotto of box, bay and myrtle, where even the marble seat was dry. Across the pond, a blackbird trilled from a birch.
‘I don’t suppose you remember Penelope?’ she said with a deep exhalation of breath.
And suddenly the reason for secrecy became clear. Marcus Cornelius felt his stomach flip over. For eighteen years that name had been taboo in his family.
‘Actually, I do.’ It was an effort to make his voice neutral, but he knew he’d succeeded. Penelope, the youngest of Daphne’s five daughters, had committed suicide when Marcus was too young to understand the meaning of the word scandal. But he cherished vivid memories. Her long, fair lashes making butterfly kisses on his cheek. Teaching him to climb trees. Playing tag in the garden. And she bought him a kitten, he recalled, which ran away two days later. ‘She was very beautiful.’
Daphne gave a bitter smile. ‘Perhaps if she’d looked like a carthorse, life would have run smoother for us all.’
A maelstrom of emotion surged up to engulf him. Feelings which, by necessity, he’d kept hidden for most of his life swam now before him. Penelope had meant more to him than his own mother. She’d been brother, sister, friend and conspirator rolled into one, a girl who never walked when she could run and whose laughter and lullabies brightened days like summer heather. For a boy of seven, her death-sudden and without explanation-was like the very sun had set for ever. Who would he chase butterflies with now? Or ride piggyback? The day Penelope died, his childish world became a darker, quieter, rather sombre place and just to speak her name could earn him a thrashing.
For years afterwards he had wondered, was it his fault she was dead? Had he, somehow, failed her?
Secretly, painfully, on each anniversary of her death, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio would consign a garland of poppies, Penelope’s favourite flower, into the Tiber where she’d thrown her weighted body.
He swallowed hard. ‘She’d be thirty-eight by now.’
‘What? Oh. Oh, yes.’ Daphne did not wish to be reminded of her own advancing years. ‘Anyway, the point is, that… that creature back there-’
‘Yes?’ he prompted, inhaling the soothing, aromatic mix of evergreens as a goldfinch searched the germanders.
His aunt gave an imperious sniff. ‘Penelope was touched from birth, singing like a common slave, and was there ever a girl for giggling. No decorum, that child. You won’t remember, of course-’
He saw no gain in contradiction.
‘-but we found her an excellent husband, son of a tribune from Crete. Or was it Mauritania? I don’t recall his name offhand, but he died somewhere in Gaul a year before Penelope…’ She cleared her throat. ‘What I’m saying, Marcus, is that it wasn’t as though she had nothing to show for herself.’
Orbilio felt his world spin. Was this a dream? A nightmare? After eighteen years of the strictest silence, was he really sitting in a sheltered grotto listening to his great-aunt talk about Penelope as though she was the butcher’s wife, and not her own flesh and blood? Did suicide bring such shame that Daphne could not recall things that even he, young as he had been, could remember in such detail? Or had she never cared how Penelope doted on her Cypriot husband? The devastation she’d felt at his death not in Gaul but Pannonia? And, tragically, how the news brought on a miscarriage?
‘I don’t know what got into my daughter,’ muttered Daphne. ‘As soon as we heard he was dead, I fixed her up with a merchant from Alexandria, and how did she repay me? Marcus, as much as I tried to beat common sense into that girl, she flat out refused to marry him and suddenly it was men, men, men. Couldn’t get enough of them, the dirty little slut. I said to your uncle at the time, she’s no child of mine… ’
Her indignation droned on, but Marcus failed to hear the diatribe and his heart cried back through time. He saw a vibrant young woman laid prostrate with grief, seeking love and affection wherever she could find it and whose frantic succession of lovers was her own way of mourning the loss of her soulmate, a means to forget. How hard was Daphne’s heart? Croesus, the girl was twenty, for gods’ sake! Had her parents no pity?
‘What has that to do with the girl in the Forum?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Her!’ Daphne snorted. ‘Crawls out of the woodwork this…this…Annia she calls herself. Tells me she’s Penelope’s daughter-’
‘ What?’
‘Expected me to take her in, you know. Eighteen years on, I ask you! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? I told her straight, you’re lucky to be alive, I said. If I’d had my way, you’d have been strangled at birth. Conniving little cow’s after money, that’s my guess.’
His thoughts were tumbling. He couldn’t take it in.
‘Is…is it true?’ Was that fair-haired sprite really his beloved Penelope’s child?
‘Probably,’ replied Daphne, without a shred of remorse. ‘She showed me the ring we’d tied round her neck when we handed her over. Not an heirloom, of course, just a cheap band.’
Annia. Her name was Annia. ‘She’s very pretty,’ he said carefully. Dammit, he wished he’d paid more attention to the girl. ‘Who’s her father?’
Daphne’s lips pursed. ‘Who indeed? Marcus, that baggage slept with half the men in this city, she could be anyone’s from a senator’s to a peddlar’s, and I can’t think why Penelope made such a fuss when we took the brat away.’
‘Wait!’ Wait a minute. ‘You’re saying she wanted to keep her?’
‘By the gods, Marcus, you should have heard the fuss she made. My baby, my baby,’ mimicked Daphne. ‘Anyone would think she’d planned the bloody thing right from the outset.’
Mother of Tarquin, it was worse than he thought! Distraught after the death of her husband, Penelope had sought to replace him with the love of a child. The same child who was snatched from its birth bed and handed to ‘Who fostered the child?’
‘Fostered?’ Daphne stared at her nephew as though he was covered in lime green spots. ‘Good grief, boy, you don’t foster creatures like that. I handed it over to some Babylonian slave dealer, forget his name now. He raises them like cattle, of course, but they have a decent placement at the end and you’ve only got to look at madam there to see we did the right thing.’
Did the right thing? Wrenching a longed-for baby from its pleading mother’s arms? Handing it over to be raised ‘like cattle’? Blind to the realization that life without husband or child was too much for a bereaved girl to bear…
Did the right thing-?
By the time the whirling eddy in his head had subsided, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was alone in the park. The goldfinch had gone, the blackbird had gone, but the scent of the myrtle had grown sickly and overpowering. He felt sick. Very sick. Putting his head between his knees until the nausea passed, he wondered whether he’d ever be able to speak civilly to Daphne again.
He could not say how many times he walked round the garden, past the swathes of blue Gaulish crocuses and the gurgling fountains. He did not hear the croak of the frogs in the water margins, or the piercing cry of the peacock in the aviary. He saw only a wood sprite, a fairhaired nymph with wide, blue eyes and slender white hands and felt a twist in his gut that he should have mistaken Penelope’s child for a con-artist. How closely Annia resembled her mother he had no idea. Eighteen repressed years had passed, precise features were no longer available to his memory, only vague images which involved sunshine and laughter. But Penelope, too, had had fine golden tresses, he would comb them while they sat on the river bank and she made flower chains and read aloud the poetry she composed for her husband fighting in the Balkans.
Was the shame of bearing a bastard worth the price of one life and the condemnation to slavery of another? The Egyptians had it right, Marcus thought, weighing a person’s heart against a feather for their place in the afterlife. Would Daphne bully her way through that trial as well?