‘Whose future?’ she sniffed, wiping her tears on his tunic.
Through the closed door, shouts reached them, but his attention did not waver from the woman in his arms, which amazed and delighted her, having assumed that the first sighting of his friend would take priority over everything. ‘Whose future, sweetheart? Well, ours, of course. Yours and mine. I really cannot let you go to that thick Dobunni barbarian with the beard. Once I’ve set my mind on something, I don’t easily let it go, particularly when that something is a woman of such quality. Brigantian Princesses are not exactly two for a denari, you know, and once a man has one in his clutches, he doesn’t let her go, he marries her.’
‘Marries her? But senators are not allowed to—’
‘You’ve been listening to the enemy, my little hotheaded beauty. I have no intention of becoming a senator. I shall be doing this job for no more than another year or two and then, when we have a family in the making, I shall take you back to Cadiz to breed horses on my father’s farm at Jerez. They’ll be very impressed by my wife’s status, and I shall milk it for all it’s worth. Shall you mind that, sweetheart?’
‘Is it true, Quintus? Am I dreaming it? Before I wake, can I tell you that I love you? Does a soldier-turned-tax-collector wish to know about such things?’
‘This one does,’ he whispered. His kiss roamed over her face and lingered tenderly over her lips, taking into account her recent weeping. ‘This particular one has found the woman of his dreams, intelligent and incredibly beautiful, caring, fierce and loving, too honest for words and generous even to her enemies. You are my heart’s desire, and I want you as I’ve never wanted a woman in my life, my darling. I cannot let you go, for I love you too much. I know you had thoughts of being Helm’s wife, but I would not have allowed it. You’re mine. You have always been mine, right from the beginning. I used you badly and kept you in fear of being sold, but I had to make my ownership marginally more attractive than thoughts of escape. Did I hurt you badly, sweetheart? It was never my intention.’
‘My pride,’ she said, tasting his lips. ‘But I have plenty left, still in good order. But, Quintus, I longed to know.’
‘What my plans are for you?’
‘Yes. It was like being cast adrift without an anchor or a sail. For a woman brought up the way I’ve been, it’s hardly possible to survive without a home or a protector, even one she doesn’t love. And yet slavery was never an option, for me. Not even yours, Quintus.’
‘I can understand that. You’re not slave material. You let me know it, too, didn’t you, lass? Daily, almost.’
‘Blame my father. For all his faults, he was a proud man.’
‘Yes, and he would also have sold you to the Dobunnii, if they’d offered him enough. You might now have been Helm’s other wife. You have your father to thank for that.’
‘I do,’ she whispered, smiling. ‘I do indeed.’
The sounds from the distant room had died down, and for the time they had in private, Quintus comforted her bruised breast with a gentle hand until it could be attended to, taking her mind off its pain with his kisses and the tender words she had sorely missed while his mind was so preoccupied. ‘But now, my love,’ he said, ‘I want you to be patient while I attend to business here at Watercombe. I have to do what I was sent here for, or my next interview with Severus will be even more uncomfortable than the last. We shall have to spend another day or two here, before we return to Aquae Sulis, and then home. I promise I shall not neglect you, my love.’
‘You’ll not go after Helm and his wife, will you?’
‘No, we can stop his recruitment activities, now we know who we’re dealing with and how he’s been funded all these years. Go back to the apartment, my little love, and get Florian to tend you. Then we’ll have something to eat. A celebration feast.’
He escorted her to the door and watched her reach the guard waiting by the room before turning back to the bath-house where his three colleagues had already begun to attend to the very limited future of the owner of Watercombe.
‘Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?’
The voice of Helena Coronis reached the four men who stood at the outer door of the bath-house, still talking. The rain had stopped and the path shone with wet, reflecting the lady’s pale blue chiton that billowed behind her rather like, Tullus thought, one of those statuettes of Astrae, goddess of justice. Instantly, they stood to attention, blocking the access to the door.
‘Where is my husband?’ she said, looking in turn from one man to the other. ‘Helm has just stormed into the infirmary, scooped up his wife and infant, wet through, I might add, and carried them off without a word of explanation. What on earth is the matter with the man? Have they had words? Is that it?’
Quintus went forwards to meet her. ‘Yes, my lady. I think one could say they’ve had words, and more besides.’
‘What do you mean, Tribune? What’s happened?’
Tullus strode past him, courteously holding out an arm to steer her back up the path towards the atrium, the way she had come. ‘I think, my lady, that we need to find a quiet corner somewhere. That would be best. Somewhere private where we can talk. Will you come?’
With a glance at the row of sombre faces, and a lingering look of surprise at one of them, she found something in the deep appreciative eyes of her escort that informed her here, at last, was a man she could trust. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll come.’
Their rejoicing had been done privately where guests could not hear them, for by now the news had spread through the whole estate that the owner, Valens, had been overtaken by fumes in the caldarium, the hottest and steamiest of all the bath-house rooms. It was no more, they said, than a risk run by anyone in his profession who took such care that the pool was clean and in good working order. A terrible loss to the Lady Helena and her two daughters, they murmured, unaware that the furnace had been fed only recently with clippings from the gardens gathered especially for the half-yearly fumigation. Poisonous, of course. His wife was keeping to her rooms. Distraught, they said, lacking any evidence to the contrary.
After a dark and dismally damp morning, the sun had now set leaves sparkling, its beams bouncing off the pools, diamond-bright and mirroring the hands of those who sat on the edges to talk about the year that Alexius had missed, somehow. Passing food and balancing glasses of red wine, they heard how, after unwisely sampling the priest’s dream-inducing potion, he had found himself bumping along in a covered wagon, tied up and aching in every limb.
By now, the men knew that Valens had been supplying young fit men to work the gold mines in Cambria in which Helm and his father had shares. ‘So it’s not state run, then?’ said Lucan.
‘Only partly,’ said Alexius. ‘Our men are there to guard it, but only half of the slave miners are civilians stolen from somewhere. Like me. Those who supply slaves are paid in gold. Helm was responsible for getting them there because it’s not far from his territory and he travels that route regularly.’
‘So,’ said Quintus, ‘he syphoned a few of them off to his own place. It fell apart, didn’t it? Valens suspected.’
‘Neither of them trusted the other,’ said Alexius. ‘But a few months of mining and I’d had enough. The work is killing men faster than they can be replaced.’
‘Is that how you got your injury?’ said Brighid. She nestled cosily in the crook of Quintus’s arm, her bruises salved and bandaged by Florian, her earlier tempestuous challenge now explained by her lover and fully understood by her three admiring friends.
‘Yes, Princess. The tunnels are airless and hot, and the work is back-breaking. But I managed to escape one night, and make my way back to Aquae Sulis with the intention of finding out who exactly was responsible, and whether, as I suspected, it was how Valens was able to mint his own coin. I was picked up off the roadside by the old man you met; he brought me here and nursed me till I recovered.’
‘Wait,’ said Brighid. ‘The old man said that Vale
ns and Lady Helena didn’t know you were here, but that’s not so, is it? She must have suspected, because it was she who suggested that Quintus should go up to see the workshops, after she’d seen your boot. She hoped he’d find you, even though she pretended not to know.’
‘One can hardly blame her,’ said Quintus. ‘Valens would have revenged himself in some unspeakable way if she’d ever involved herself with what he was doing.’
‘Yet she did,’ said Tullus, quietly. ‘As soon as she realised who we were, she saw a way to show us what they were up to. I’ll tell you something else, too, about our friend Helm who’s disappeared with his wife and son.’
‘Go on,’ said Lucan. ‘You are obviously in the lady’s confidence.’
Tullus sent him a withering look. ‘The favour that Helm was doing the lady by marrying her pregnant slave Dora was nothing of the kind. That was his version. In fact, the Lady Helena insisted on it, threatening him with the complete exposure of the whole sordid business if he didn’t agree, even if it lost her everything in the process. She expected him to take Dora away much earlier, out of Valens’s control, but Valens wouldn’t let him. He said she had to stay until the child was born.’
‘So that he could claim it, if it was a boy,’ said Brighid. ‘Which he did.’
‘One step too far,’ said Tullus. ‘But Dora and Helm were always very fond of each other, so the Lady Helena tells me, and Helm was naturally furious when Valens took advantage of her.’
‘Hah!’ grunted Alexius, sourly. ‘I’m glad to hear somebody’s fond of him. I’d like to have strangled the murderous little … Sorry, Princess. I shall have to be satisfied with my revenge on one, rather than both, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Think of what you’ve gained, not lost.’
‘He’s gained a boot,’ said Quintus, caustically, ‘and lost the other one. Serves you right, man. I’ve told you before about leaving them under people’s beds.’
The men would have talked until dawn, but Quintus had other more important things on his mind, now he could see past the dangers that demanded prompt dealings. If Brighid suspected that men’s minds were, on the whole, less flexible than women’s, she had not applied that knowledge to their relationship which, to her, came before anything else. It ought, she believed, to have been dealt with immediately, not put on hold until it was convenient, not when he had taken her to the peak of ecstasy and left her to find her own way down, as it were.
Nevertheless, there was some guilt to their first embrace of the night, for she had discovered that he was no ordinary man with an ordinary man’s job, and this was no holiday villa she had brought him to. It had been, he told her, one of the most dangerous situations he’d faced since leaving the army, for they had walked straight into the hornets’ nest without knowing what to look for.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, snuggling deeper into his arms. ‘Can you forgive me for behaving so badly, at times? I was jealous of your involvement and needed you all to myself. You are the first man I’ve ever loved, you see.’
‘Nothing to forgive,’ he said into her hair. ‘I turned your ordered life upside down, beloved, and I expected you to take it in your stride. It was unreasonable of me, but you did it. Magnificently.’
‘Up to a point.’
‘You were entitled to object. Any proud woman would. I would not change any part of you. Will you stay by my side now, for ever? Will you be my wife, sweetheart? As my very own Brigantian Princess?’
‘For ever, my lord, as whatever you want me to be.’
‘Except a slave, lass. There’ll be no more talk of slaves, I promise.’
‘You said I was not slave material. Is that the reason?’
‘Well, partly. But you’d have to cut your hair off and we couldn’t have that.’
Laughing, he caught her fist before it fell, holding it upon the pillow while he kissed her to silence. Then, as she moaned and responded to him, her palms smoothed over the ripples of muscle and her body was set alight by the feel of his long hard limbs over hers. His sculpted chest pressed tenderly upon her breasts, replacing the cares and heartaches of the past weeks with the love that had waited impatiently, disguised as protection, obligation and the mending of minds and bodies, hers as well as his. ‘I adore you, my lord,’ she whispered. ‘I sent a message to Brigantia at the shrine, asking her for your love. She returned my gift and I thought she meant it not to be, but then she gave it to me free of charge. How blessed am I?’
‘Perhaps, my darling, she knew you already had it.’
Brighid smiled. She had shown him the little silver heart that Alexius had made that now lay safely under their pillow. It was very strange, he had said, how love can sometimes travel such a roundabout route to reach its destination.
End Note
Cambria was the Roman name for Wales where the gold mine at Dolaucothi still exists for visitors to see. It is owned by the National Trust whose guided tours take you back to Roman times, as well as more recent eras. There are practical experiences and exhibitions, rare Welsh gold for sale, walks to take and a nearby castle to explore. The address is: Dolaucothi Gold Mines, Pum-saint, Llanwrda, Carmarthenshire. SA19 8US.
Roman engineers discovered the most efficient way to remove the gold from vertical veins of white quartz, blasting it out by powerful jets of water brought across the valley via aqueducts. This is how our story character Valens became involved, for his local knowledge, his supply of workers, and his water-engineering, not to mention his greed for gold. Across the Severn estuary and over the Brecon Beacons, the journey from Bath might have taken two or more days; today it would take only a few hours.
Watercombe itself is entirely fictitious but is closely modeled on other healing shrines and centres known to exist in that area. The standard of living at such places was very high indeed, though the medical care was high-risk, to say the least.
Epilogue
The one who stayed on at Watercombe to help Helena Coronis with the aftermath of her husband’s demise was, predictably, Tullus, although he was a few years younger than her. The bond they had forged at the outset was strong enough for Helena to recognise a good man, at last, who would give her the love and respect she desired. The estate owed taxes amounting to a fortune, so she sold Watercombe and bought a more modest villa, with Tullus’s help, and with Clodia and Carina lived a peaceful, busy and happy life in the town of Aquae Sulis. They had two sons. Twins.
Alexius returned to Eboracum with Quintus, Brighid and Lucan, to explain his long absence from duties. The Emperor Septimus Severus and his wife, Julia Domna, attended the wedding of Quintus and Brighid only a few weeks after their return, when it occurred to the bride that the family they hoped for might already have commenced. A month later, she was sure of it. It was a boy, born in Brigantia. Two daughters followed, both born in Cadiz.
Math and Florian were inseparable and so, since Florian belonged to Quintus, the brother and sister stayed together as they had been destined to do from the start. Neither of them particularly missed their former life, their new one being much more to their liking. Lucan lived with them, too, when they eventually moved to Cadiz, remaining as an adopted uncle and close friend, never marrying, but never short of female companionship, either. Together, he and Alexius directed a mercantile business in Cadiz, trading in luxury goods from Byzantium and the Levant, which the sons of Alexius eventually inherited.
After Helm’s narrow escape from capture, no more was heard of him or his planned revolt against the state, probably because the Emperor remained successfully in Britain until his death three years later in Eboracum in the year 211. I can disclose, however, that the insult Valens threw at Helm during their fatal quarrel was untrue. Helm and Dora went on to raise three beautiful daughters, and Quintus remained for several years in blissful ignorance about the true nature of Helm’s offer for Brighid’s hand. When Brighid told him about it, during his daily massage, adding that she might have been a Dobunni chief’s wife
by now, she knew by the way his shoulders were shaking that it was nothing Florian was doing. But by now Brighid had learnt almost as many massage techniques as Florian, as well as some less familiar to him, and when she nudged him out of the way, he knew to leave the two of them alone while she took her own kind of sweet revenge for a wholly inappropriate moment of amusement. Predictably, Quintus was not in the least chastened by his treatment.
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IMPRINT: Historical
ISBN: 9781488779954
TITLE: SLAVE PRINCESS
First Australian Publication 2015
Copyright © 2011 Juliet Landon
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Mills & Boon®, Level 4, 132 Arthur Street, North Sydney, N.S.W., Australia 2060.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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