The Roman Lady's Illicit Affair

by Greta Gilbert

  Lepidus narrowed his eyes. ‘This is growing rather tedious, Vita.’

  ‘My deepest apologies, Lepidus,’ she said. ‘I must say that I feel selfish and not just for this small inconvenience. In many ways I am a greedy, insatiable woman.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I am burning to know about your time in Greece. Did you not say you learned a new technique for raising columns?’

  * * *

  Thus during the second leg of their journey northwards through Gaul, Vita managed to avoid misery of a certain kind and for that she was eternally grateful.

  What she could not seem to avoid was another kind of misery. It came in the form of Ven, who sat exactly across from her in the carriage throughout the journey. For hours each day, he and Lepidus studied drawings and discussed architecture together, during which time Vita had to keep her eyes averted, lest she accidentally catch Ven’s eye.

  The problem was not just Ven’s proximity, which functioned as a kind of magnet for her attention. It was also that the men’s discussions were interesting and she yearned to take part in them. They spoke of a wall that would stretch over seventy miles from coast to coast. In the east it would be constructed of stone and in the west of turf and timber, to be replaced with stone over time.

  Why? she wondered. Perhaps it had something to do with the availability of materials, or some urgent need for a barrier.

  It would be a formidable barrier indeed. Lepidus had designed the eastern wall to be fifteen feet tall and ten feet wide with a deep earthen ditch dug along its northern side: a sizeable obstacle for any foe. Vita wondered who the foe was exactly. Did the Brigantes not hold territory on both sides of the wall?

  The men spent much time speaking of the design of the wall’s towers, which would be constructed at every third of a mile. At every mile there would be a small castle and gateway that would allow for the passage of travellers.

  Why build a wall at all if you were going to place so many passageways through it? Vita wondered. And what is the purpose of so many towers so close?

  She wondered fervently as the men spoke, sometimes biting her own tongue.

  She gazed out at the passing landscape until her neck became tired, then stared down at her hands as if they could give her the answers she craved.

  Sometimes she would indulge in wishful fantasies. She imagined the cabin of the carriage lurching suddenly, causing her to lunge forward and fall into Ven’s lap. It was not so very unlikely a scenario, especially given the deteriorating quality of the Via Aquitania.

  All it would take was a small bump to result in an accidental touch and she found herself imagining such a happy accident in a thousand different ways, knowing all the while that she was flirting with danger.

  The more she thought of Ven, the more she could not stop thinking about him. She had observed him now for many days—his quiet competence and strong, serious manner. He seemed to be always a step ahead of everyone else: anticipating needs, solving problems, shouldering burdens. She had never met a more capable man.

  He was the perfect companion for Lepidus, who unfortunately displayed none of those talents. On the other hand, Lepidus did seem to have a special gift for making complaints and his protestations over the quality of the road gradually morphed into grievances about his aching back. At the end of each day the old man was interested in little more than a solid meal and a good sleep and Vita was saved once again by circumstance.

  * * *

  When they finally arrived in the port of Burdigala on the estuary of the Garonne River, Lepidus announced that they would stay a few days to recover before continuing on their journey.

  ‘I want nothing as much as a bath,’ Lepidus pronounced on the afternoon of their arrival and soon they found themselves inside a bathing complex to rival any of those in Rome.

  ‘I will meet you outside the baths at sunset,’ Lepidus told Vita, making his way to the men’s large entryway. ‘Do not forget to shave in the manner of the Egyptians. And, by the gods, oil yourself clean. You look a mess and stink of the road.’

  Vita nodded obediently, then watched in wonder as Ven, Zia and the Scythian followed dutifully behind Lepidus, leaving Vita utterly alone. She glanced around the spacious entrance hall, wondering if it was all a dream. After over a month of travel, she found herself suddenly and gloriously on her own.

  She sighed, wishing that Zia could join her. It seemed that she would be performing Lepidus’s massage today all on her own, for slaves were the only women allowed inside the men’s baths. Vita vowed to make it up to her Dacian friend somehow, then set off across the hall.

  The women’s section of the bath complex was much smaller than the men’s, of course, but Vita could not complain. In many Roman baths, women had full run of the facilities, but they were allowed to enjoy them only in the mornings and for a limited time.

  Here in Burdigala, there was an entire area reserved just for women, including a fine caldarium with a hot pool and a smattering of massage benches, and a frigidarium with a small plunge pool and sitting area.

  They were no Baths of Trajan, but they were more than Vita could have hoped for in this northern outpost.

  Still, she could not completely enjoy the unexpected treat. Later that night, fresh from his bathing, Lepidus would surely call on Vita to perform her duties. It was the true reason they were here, she feared. He was expecting her to prepare for their first encounter.

  Vita purchased a vial of oil and drying cloth and tried to keep her spirits up. She stepped into the dressing room and removed her tunic and sandals, but kept her loincloth tied. She knew that the Romans of Gaul had different customs than those of Rome and she did not know who she would find inside.

  To her surprise, when she stepped into the steamy caldarium, she found not a single soul. She placed her drying cloth on a massage bench and lay down on her stomach, feeling instantly relaxed. Sunlight poured in from one of the high windows and she reassured herself that there was still much time before the unsavoury part of her day began. She closed her eyes.

  * * *

  She must have dozed off, because when she opened her eyes again the light was lower and she found she was no longer alone. A long shadow passed by her side. Before she could look up to see who it was, she felt two strong, familiar hands gently squeezing her shoulders.

  Her heart leaped and she moved to sit up, but those hands pressed downwards, keeping her in her place.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she managed.

  ‘Giving you a much-deserved massage.’ His deep, familiar voice echoed against the walls, though there was a different quality to it—a kind of edge. He dug his fingers beneath her shoulder blades.

  ‘You should not be here,’ she said, stifling a moan of pleasure. ‘You should leave right away.’

  ‘As a slave, I am perfectly within my rights to be inside the women’s baths.’

  ‘I mean to honour my commitment to Lepidus.’

  ‘I would expect nothing less.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’ she repeated, though there was no need to keep her voice so low. The two were truly alone.

  ‘Lepidus fell asleep halfway through his massage,’ said Ven. ‘I had nothing to do.’

  ‘You should return as soon as you can. Surely he will be up soon.’

  ‘If I know him at all, he will sleep for some time.’

  ‘How much time?’

  How much time? It did not matter. There would never be enough. They had this moment and hopefully the moment after. They had whatever memories they could produce and whatever fantasies those memories could grow. They had this thing between them—this strange, forbidden thing that seemed larger than them somehow, as if it would always exist, had always existed.

  ‘Perhaps an hour.’

  ‘You risk too much,’ Vita said.

 
‘If he wakes early, Zia will tell him I have gone to the latrine.’ Vita laughed softly as he rubbed his thumbs over the knobs of her spine. ‘I understand you have been inventing some even better excuses lately.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Lepidus himself. The one about your courses was impressive.’

  ‘I fear that the time for excuses is over. The more I delay, the angrier he will become...and possibly the rougher.’

  Ven clenched his teeth together. ‘Just tell me what I can do to stop him and I will do it.’

  ‘There is nothing you can do,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It is inevitable.’

  He moved to the other side of the bench and watched with interest as she gathered her hair together and tucked it beside her neck. He wanted to kiss that neck so badly that it pained him.

  ‘You think I am a fool,’ she said.

  ‘I think you are the bravest woman I have ever met.’

  He dribbled oil on the exposed part of her neck, then began to rub it in gently. His lust rose like a serpent.

  ‘Not there,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  He dribbled oil on her arm, then lifted it as if raising a sacred blade. ‘You are also the loveliest woman I have ever met.’ He lowered the arm and began to knead.

  She laughed. ‘Such rhetoric!’

  ‘Truth!’

  ‘Tell me, where did you study?’ she asked.

  He crossed to her other arm and continued his work. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because only educated men know how to flatter so well.’

  She was scolding him after all, it seemed, but for the grave sin of seeing her truly. He lowered his voice. ‘I will not allow you to serve the misguided tale you tell yourself by discrediting my sincerity.’

  ‘More rhetoric!’

  Ignoring the slight, he folded his arms over his chest. ‘There is none of you left to rub.’

  Without driving one or the other of us mad.

  ‘Then let us simply converse.’

  ‘If someone walks in, I should be at work.’

  ‘Then continue to work. You forgot the backs of my knees.’

  He spied a strigil on a nearby bench. ‘I should scrape you down instead. Did Lepidus not command an oiling?’

  ‘Very well,’ Vita said, ‘but you are trying to avoid my question. Speak plainly, Brigante. Where did you study?’

  Ven fetched a strigil and a drying cloth, then placed the curved blade of the instrument against the back of her thigh. ‘Study?’ He smiled to himself as he moved the strigil slowly over her well-oiled skin. He switched to his native tongue. ‘I will tell you sincerely that I was educated in the wilds of the north. My father was my grammaticus. He taught me to fish in the roiling waters of the sea, stalk deer in the silent forests and sow wheat in the fields outside our small settlement.’

  He arrived at her ankle and wiped the accumulation of oil from the blade, then moved to her other thigh. ‘My father’s mentorship was brief, however, for in my twelfth autumn, he was killed in a battle against our Roman occupiers.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Vita whispered. ‘May he rest for ever in the fields of paradise.’

  Ven completed her other leg, cleaned his blade, then started on her back. ‘After the battle, few men were left to defend our settlement. A rival tribe raided.’ He paused, swallowing his grief. ‘I was hunting in the forest during the raid. When I returned, there was nothing, and no one, left. They had enslaved everyone, including my mother. It was a difficult winter.’

  ‘Did you not have anyone to look after you?’

  ‘None. I was alone.’

  She lay quiet as he moved the strigil down her back. ‘Though in difficult times one often discovers the best of oneself, yes?’

  ‘You were only twelve,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, and that is when I acquired new tutors: the hunger and the cold. They taught me how to coax a fire from wet branches and dig for roots deep beneath the snow. They taught me how to run, really run—in the simple effort to warm my bones. Hunger and cold were terrible task masters, but they taught me much. And yet...’

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘They taught me nothing of courage.’

  ‘It sounds as if you displayed a good deal of courage,’ Vita insisted. ‘What more did you have to learn?’

  ‘I am afraid we have run out of places to scrape clean,’ Ven said in Latin.

  ‘Will you not answer my question?’ she returned in Celtic.

  He drew a breath. What would she think of him if he told her the truth? What would she say when she realised that the man who stood before her was not a man, but a coward?

  ‘Please, Ven, tell me what happened next.’

  He would be a fool to go on, yet he yearned to. It was as if his sad story were made of clothing—layers of heavy furs that had burdened him for years. Telling it aloud made him feel as if he were finally shedding their weight.

  ‘We must find me a new task,’ he whispered in Celtic, ‘lest someone enter and see us conversing like old friends.’

  She leaned up on to her arms suddenly and twisted to the side, as if to address him. She did not stop there. In a blur of movement, she rolled on to her back.

  He blinked, hardly believing what he was seeing. Now she lay before him facing up, bare-breasted and lovelier than any fantasy he could have ever conjured. Her generous breasts sprawled to the sides, just begging to be touched. Below them her shapely stomach moved with her breaths, tapering to gloriously curving hips swaddled in cloth. It was as if she were inviting him to consider that there were things in life beyond pain and survival.

  ‘What did you learn next in your education?’ she asked in Celtic. There was a waver in her voice and he could discern the pounding of her heart at the base of her throat. It occurred to him that she had just been quite brave and she had done it for him.

  Humbled, he willed himself to continue.

  ‘I learned how fear can twist the mind.’

  He dribbled oil on to her leg, then poised the strigil at the top of her thigh and stared down at her flesh. He could not seem to decide what to do next. He felt the softness of her hand atop his own.

  ‘You once told me not to despair,’ she whispered, her fingers weaving with his. ‘That all would be well. It has helped me more than you know.’

  ‘I am glad of it.’

  ‘But sometimes it is necessary to despair,’ she said. ‘Sometimes one must raise one’s muzzle to the moon. Do you understand?’

  Ven felt himself smile. ‘You are an unusual woman.’

  She frowned. ‘If fear can twist the mind, then silence can twist the heart.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Tell me, Ven. Tell me so that you can let it go.’

  She was right. He needed to say it aloud, to confess to what he did. He needed her to see what lay within his wretched heart.

  Ven took a breath. ‘Before my father died, he made me promise him that I would keep my mother safe. But after she was taken, I did not keep her safe. I did not fulfil my promise. I could have rescued her, but I did not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He scraped the strigil down her thigh and paused. ‘I do not know. Ignorance. Fear. What would compel a young man to remain in his home when everything that made it a home was gone?’

  ‘It was all that was known to you.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘Surely you feared to leave.’

  ‘I did, for it was unusually cold that winter and there was nothing to eat. I was afraid that if I went looking for my mother, I would die myself.’

  ‘That is not cowardly, Ven. That is human.’

  ‘But I could have saved her. The Parisi hill fort where she was taken was not far from our settlement. In the spring when I finally set out, it took me only a handful of days to reach her, but b
y then she was already gone. I failed her.’

  ‘Did you know the Parisi hill fort was near?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then how can you blame yourself? As you said, you feared death.’

  ‘I made a promise to my own father. I told him I would put my mother’s safety first. I failed them both. I failed myself.’

  She said nothing more and he was grateful. It was enough to say the words and know she heard them, to release them into the hot, steamy air. Surely she was judging him now, condemning him, as he deserved. He pulled his hand away from hers and dribbled oil down her other thigh.

  ‘Please, continue your story,’ she said at last. ‘How did you arrive in Rome?’

  ‘I was enslaved by the Parisi. I took up the very position that had been occupied by my late mother. The Parisi were enemies of the Romans and it was not long before the Romans invaded their hill fort.’ Ven laughed bitterly. ‘Then we were all enslaved together—Parisi and Brigante alike. Our tribal divisions meant nothing to the Romans. We were all just barbarians to them.’

  ‘You were brought to Rome on a ship then?’

  ‘Thankfully, yes. There were others who were forced to walk across Gaul, but because of my age I was placed on a vessel and in less than a month I was standing on the auction block at the Roman Emporium being sold alongside several tons of grain. I was barely thirteen.’

  There was a long silence and he could sense her emotion. ‘My own mother once shared a similar fate,’ she whispered. ‘But you already know of that.’

  ‘I can only imagine her suffering,’ said Ven. ‘What the Romans have done here, to our beautiful Albion, to us...’ He stopped himself, surprised. He did not usually indulge in such piteous talk.

  ‘Your education did not end on the auction block, however,’ she said. ‘I know that for certain.’

  ‘In Rome I began a new stage of my education,’ continued Ven. ‘It happened the day my master tossed me on to the floor of his tablinium and gave me my first beating. After that, pain and humiliation became my mentors. They taught me how to survive in the wilderness of Rome.’