Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  Helva made a rude noise in her throat, and Appius nodded.

  “You didn’t think she was good enough for him, and neither did I, but I think the bond was deeper than either of us realized. You’ll just have to give him time.”

  Helva narrowed her eyes. “That isn’t all, Appius.”

  Helva had always been shrewd, too shrewd for comfort. Appius looked at her blankly, carefully. “That’s all I can discover. As for what he’s doing, he’s marching with Julius Agricola, which is the best thing he could be doing in terms of his career, Agricola is going to be remembered, and so are the men who go with him.” Agricola had also taken an unwarranted amount of trouble for an obscure British princess, but Appius wasn’t going to tell Helva that, not until he had figured out why.

  Helva had known Appius long enough to know when there was no more information to be had. She came lightly around the desk and kissed him with the familiarity of long privilege and disappeared in a cloud of blonde hair and primrose draperies, leaving a faint smell of oil of roses in the air.

  Appius leaned forward on his desk and stared out at the falling leaves in the garden. Helva had left the door open deliberately, he suspected, so he could see what a charming exit she made, with the light breeze blowing the primrose silk around her. It wasn’t particularly cold, so he left the door open and thought about Julius Agricola and Correus. He had begun to have suspicions when it dawned on him that the “kid” his son had referred to in other letters was sixteen now and that the two of them had apparently spent one entire spring living in each other’s pockets in the British hills.

  He passed the letter on the next day to Flavius, who was in Rome with the praetorian prefect for the emperor’s birthday games, and Flavius raised an eyebrow and came to much the same conclusion.

  “He’s ignoring it,” Flavius said. “I think he’s scared.”

  Appius began to say that Correus had never been afraid of anything, and then dropped it in mid-sentence. Any man with any sense was afraid – Correus just didn’t show it.

  “Well, he’s afraid of this,” Flavius said. “I’d wager my best horse and half my wife’s jewelry.” He looked his father in the eye. “And if he comes round and you don’t let him marry this one, I’ll go over your head to the emperor, so help me Juno.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Appius said irritably. “It’s not what I’d hoped for him, but I wouldn’t forbid it. This one has citizenship and some money of her own and rank in her own country.”

  Flavius grinned at him. “And Helva will hate her.”

  “Helva is my concern.”

  “No offense meant. Anyone who’s managed that she-cat all these years has my utmost respect.”

  “Then see that you show a little more of it. And I forbid you to mention this British girl to Helva. I have enough problems at the moment with Helva brangling with your mother, without you starting something else. I’ll make suitable arrangements if anything comes of it, so let that inspire you to tact.”

  “It inspires me to be faithful to my wife,” Flavius said unrepentantly, and went off whistling, while Appius glared after him.

  “Don’t let Flavius tease you.” Julia dropped a kiss on her father’s forehead and sat down beside him on the bench by the atrium pool. “He’s just set up because Aemelia thinks she’s pregnant, but she won’t let him tell anyone yet, so don’t say anything. You’ll be surrounded by grandchildren in no time at all.” Her own small daughter beamed up at Appius and made a beeline for the pool with three-year-old Felix behind her.

  “No,” he said firmly, tugging her back from the edge. “Wet. You sit with me.”

  “Correus should come home,” Julia said. “That child thinks Lucius is his father.”

  Appius sighed. “My dear, I don’t know what he could do if he did come home. My boys thought old Alan was their father, for all they ever saw of me. He could hardly take the child with him.”

  “He could if he got married,” Julia said.

  Her father gave her a look. “If you turn into a matchmaker, you’ll be a menace, my girl. Are you thinking of that British girl none of us has ever seen?”

  “Correus wrote me about her,” Julia said. “She doesn’t sound much like Freita, but I expect I’d like her. She wasn’t afraid of the governor. Besides,” she added, “I’m very happy with Lucius, and Flavius and Aemelia are getting on now. I haven’t anyone left to meddle with except Correus.”

  Appius gave a shout of laughter, and small Paulilla smiled up at him and toddled over and sat down on his foot. Felix followed her and began with great concentration to unlace the thongs of his grandfather’s other sandal.

  “You aren’t so tough,” Julia said affectionately.

  “I’m getting old,” Appius said. “Where’s their nurse?”

  “I expect she’s run away,” Julia said. “Felix put ink in the bathwater this morning.”

  Appius looked down at his grandson. “Why?”

  “Pretty,” Felix said succinctly.

  “Pitty,” Paulilla said experimentally, and her mother blinked at her.

  “She doesn’t even say ‘mama’ yet,” Julia said indignantly.

  “Your first word was ‘gimme,’” her father informed her. “I was here.”

  “Pitty,” Paulilla said. “Pitty pitty pitty pitty pitty pitty—”

  “That will do, darling.” Her mother scooped her up.

  “Julia—”

  She turned, the baby balanced on one hip. Felix detached himself reluctantly from his grandfather.

  “Do you think this British woman can be… Roman enough? It will matter whom he’s married to, later on.”

  “When he’s a great man,” Julia agreed solemnly. “I expect she can. Aemelia says she probably wears trousers and paints herself blue, but I think that’s just spite. Aemelia still sees Correus as something just short of Alexander, but that’s only when he’s not around. When he is there, he scares her to death. She got cured of that infatuation in Aquae Sulis, I think, but she doesn’t like admitting it. She and Flavius do very well together, and she had the praetorian prefect and all his generals eating out of her hand. Even the emperor told her she was an ornament to the staff and gave her a pearl necklace.”

  Appius groaned. “He’s not—?”

  “Oh, no. Aemelia fairly exudes virtue. He just thinks she’s cute.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it. It’s hard to turn down an emperor gracefully. But a wife who’s a social asset is good to have, and Correus will need one, too, eventually. We’ve got off the subject. What about the British girl?”

  Julia looked thoughtful. The question was important enough. An unacceptable wife was one thing for a junior officer in the field. For a senior official it was quite another, and few junior officers with unacceptable wives were promoted to be senior officials. Except for the Praetorian Prefect Titus, of course, and his difficulty was only a mistress, not a wife, a Jewess of a princely house, and even so, questions were always being asked in the Senate. If he ever got to be emperor, he was going to have to leave her. It wouldn’t be so important for Correus, who was never going to be emperor, where his wife came from in the first place, as long as she was adaptable. But if she wasn’t, Correus wouldn’t divorce her. Julia was pretty sure of that.

  “I don’t know,” Julia said dubiously. “I suppose I hadn’t really thought it through. Not that way.”

  Appius handed her the letter from Agricola, and she sat back down, giving the baby the sash of her gown to play with. Paulilla stuck the tassel in her mouth.

  “Well! Julius Agricola certainly thinks she’ll do,” Julia said when she had finished. “Do I read between the lines correctly?”

  “I had the same impression,” Appius said. “He’s obviously hoping I’ll be pleased, so she can’t be out of the question, I suppose. It’s not what I wanted for him.”

  “If he wants her, you let him have her,” Julia said firmly. “You didn’t see him in Aquae Sulis. He can’t spend the rest of
his life grieving for a dead woman.”

  “My children have grown up to conspire against me,” Appius said. “By the way, yours is getting your girdle wet. Very well, if Correus wants her, he shall have her.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Julia said. “If he wants her.”

  * * *

  The garden was empty, a little dreary in the fall air, deserted. Julia had gone home with her brood and their nurse and her personal maid in her opulent traveling coach. It was only a few miles, but Julia believed in taking advantage of such comforts while she could. Now that the baby was a year-and-a-half, Julia would probably accompany her husband on the next of his foreign jaunts. Flavius would, go, too, as soon as Titus did, and there was no telling when Correus was coming home.

  One of the cook’s small daughters trotted through the gate into the kitchen garden with a pair of herb snips in one hand and a basket in the other. She made a hasty obeisance to the master when she spotted him and zipped through the gate. A red chicken feather drifted from somewhere past Appius’s nose, which pretty well predicted dinner: chicken in an herb sauce, with the inevitable olives, wine, cream cake – Antonia’s weakness – and hot bread and honey – his. The master and mistress found themselves dining alone tonight and were old-fashioned enough to believe that such dishes as peacocks and cold larks were best kept for company. A plain table, with little inspiration to set a more elaborate one. Appius looked around the empty garden. I miss them, he thought. More than he had thought he would.

  When he had first retired, Appius Julianus had thought that his army days would never fade from him entirely, that his beloved legion, and later the military governorship that had been its reward, would hold a place in his heart that no family could quite match. But lately he had found the old days slipping away, and his pleasures here, bounded by the stables and garden and the wide acres he had always loved but had never really known. And his children. His sons, and the daughter who had somehow undergone a transformation of her own, from her mother’s replica into a force to be reckoned with.

  Flavius had always known the joys of other pleasures than the army, Appius thought suddenly. Maybe Flavius had been right. And Correus? Correus was his father over again, in love with his legion; but Correus, too, needed something more – Correus had seen too vividly the other side of life. It’s being slave-born, Appius thought. It still turns him inside out. It makes everything matter so much to him. Maybe it would have to me. The gods knew there was something in a man’s birth that drove him. With Appius Julianus, it had been equestrian rank, a proud heritage of seven generations’ service in the Eagles, but still not enough to take a man to the top. Not enough for the political offices that led to the top of the army commands. Appius had reached the top of his own anyway and found himself a famous man for it, with the pleasant privilege (and good sense, he thought now) of refusing senatorial rank when it had been ultimately offered. But he had paved the roadway, for Flavius, at least. Flavius could have a senator’s rank as soon as his career required it. Correus would have to do it his father’s way or not at all.

  The low murmur of voices outside the garden walls drew him back from his thoughts – the field slaves coming in from their work. Appius looked at the sundial and did a quick mental calculation as to how much it would be off at this time of year. He had an appointment with Forst before dinner.

  * * *

  “It’s early yet, lord, but I think we’ll see results with the two-year-olds this spring.” Forst spread a fan of thin wooden tablets on an iron ring out on the master’s desk – the breeding records of foals born two seasons ago. “There’s one in particular – that black colt out of Windy Day, that looks to me like what we’re after.”

  “I’ve seen him,” Appius said. “There’s a strong strain of his sire in him, all right. What does Alan say?” Alan had retired a year ago, but he still came down to the pastures, as Forst put it, “to meddle about a bit.”

  Forst grinned. “That batch is all Alan’s match-ups, so he’s pleased enough. It’s when the fillies out of it are old enough to breed back in that we may not see quite eye to eye. There are three or four I’m pretty sure I want already.”

  “Keep any you want to, but we’ll have to sell off the rest pretty ruthlessly, or we’ll have more horses than the farm will carry. Diulius has been after me for a new barn for the chariot stock, but there’s no place to put it without running over our own pasture.”

  “To the east, sir? That meadow’s not much good for grass. Something in the soil, I think.”

  “I gave that tract to Flavius. I can’t put a horse barn under his balcony.”

  Forst laughed. “No, I suppose not. Let me talk to Diulius, sir. He’s got his old nose twisted by the attention the new stock is getting, I expect. Maybe I can sweeten him some.”

  “I should like to see that,” Appius murmured. Forst made an unlikely diplomat, with his strange, pale hair coiled up in a knot on one side of his head, and the old sword scars showing on his arms and under his tunic hem. But he had proved undeniably valuable. It made this interview a gamble. Appius cocked an eye up at Forst, standing above him, looking cheerful and unruffled. “You’re free.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “You’re free. I have signed your manumission papers. Your hide is your own now.”

  “Why?” Forst looked suspicious.

  “Because you have earned it,” Appius said. It was a fairly silly reason, since Forst would undoubtedly be gone over the Alps to Germany as soon as he could buy a horse to carry him, leaving Appius to whistle for his time and training and his breeding program. The real reason had something to do with Correus. Appius was willing to acknowledge that, but not to go into the particulars, not even in his own mind. “I will pay you a suitable wage if you stay on,” he said. “If not, I will understand.”

  Forst looked thoughtful. “I can’t say I know what you’ve done it for, sir.”

  “Neither do I,” Appius said, suddenly honest.

  “It’s been a long time since I was home,” Forst said. “I don’t suppose I’d find much now.” His eye rested on a spearhead with a white collar of heron’s feathers, lying among the curios on Appius’s shelves. “Best to bide and mind my horses than go and look for ghosts, I’m thinking.”

  “I expect so,” Appius said. “If I may presume to offer advice, nothing is ever the way you left it. A lot of people have broken their hearts on that fact.” And what am I doing now, but trying to go back and meddle with the past, freeing Forst because I feel at fault that my son is still grieving for a German woman? Correus will hardly see Forst as a substitute. There wasn’t much to be gained from that line of thought, and it wasn’t explainable to Forst. “It is a custom in my house” – Appius turned his mind to practicalities – “that when a slave is freed, he may ask one further reward, within reason. You have certainly earned that as well, and I’m inclined to stretch the limits of reason fairly far, since you are inclined to stay with us. Do you want land, Forst? Horses of your own?”

  Forst shook his head. “You are generous, sir. But I can buy a horse with my wages, if I should run out of ones to ride here.”

  Appius chuckled. “All right, man, what do you want?”

  “I want Emer, out of your kitchen, lord.”

  “The red-haired one?” As far as Appius could tell, all she did with Forst was quarrel with him. He had come upon them one day in the orchard, arguing in fierce, low voices, and Emer had stamped her sandal down hard on Forst’s bare foot and run off, before she had seen the master coming. Forst had glared after her, nursing a lacerated toe, and Appius had tactfully pretended not to notice. Every man deserved his dignity. But there were better rewards than a kitchen maid with a temper who was no longer young. He said so bluntly, but Forst just shook his head. Appius thought he looked amused and wondered if he would repeat the master’s description to Emer in his wooing.

  But he got her, with manumission papers signed and witnessed, and Appius wen
t in to dinner in a philosophic mood. Love – between himself and a woman – had never seemed particularly important. Lust and affection for Helva, respect and affection for the wife who reclined in her familiar place across the table from him – those were familiar emotions, the stuff on which a solid way of life was built. But his children had found otherwise – Julia with Lucius Paulinus, Correus with his impossible German, even Flavius in what had begun as an arranged marriage with Aemelia. And now Forst, politely, but with a pigheadedness that would grace a lover out of a legend, turned away the chance of a real reward to ask for a redhaired kitchen maid who was no longer young and certainly not a virgin. What was it that pulled at them in that fashion, and what did it feel like? Appius wondered wistfully, over the bread and olives, if he had missed something that he was far too old to go looking for now.

  Niarchos the majordomo came in with a trio of young slaves while the olives and the salad and the herbed chicken were cleared away and the beautiful silver wine cups refilled and watered to the exact degree the master and mistress preferred. It was warm for November, and one of the boys stood beside the table to wave a palm frond fan over their heads. A plate of cream cake appeared while Appius sipped his wine, and another of bread hot from the oven, with a glass pitcher of honey that bore three glass bees on the bowl. Antonia took a piece of cake while Appius poured honey on his bread, and they stretched out comfortably under the palm fan.

  “Aemelia is pregnant, did you know?” Antonia said over her cake and wine.

  “I thought it was a dark secret,” Appius said.

  “Oh, it is,” Antonia agreed. “But she’s just embarrassed. She’ll get over it. I did.”

  She still looked young, he thought, even with the streaks of gray in the dark waves of hair about her face. Too young to have grandchildren. But she had married young, of course. He wondered if she wished she hadn’t. No one had asked her opinion at the time, he supposed. “What, my dear?”

  “Are you falling asleep?” She smiled at him. “It was nothing particularly important. We are going to have to rebuild the north wing in the slave quarters – it’s beginning to be a disgrace to us. And Cook wants a new kind of stove that Julia’s cook has told him about. I’m afraid I see a temperament coming on, but I can deal with him if you don’t think we should get it.”