‘Those oysters were delicious!’ said Flavia. ‘Who sent them?’
‘Pliny again,’ laughed her father. ‘He heard we were all at the Gates of Hades and he sent us four dozen, on ice if you can believe that! We still have a dozen if you want more.’
‘No thanks,’ said Flavia. ‘I think my stomach shrank while I was ill. Lupus, do you want another one?’
Lupus shook his head, then uttered a deep, textured burp.
‘Thank you for that compliment, Lupus,’ said Captain Geminus and everyone laughed.
Jonathan tried his best to burp but could only manage a small one.
Flavia tried, too, without success, but Cartilia managed a rich yet ladylike belch.
Lupus clapped and Jonathan raised his eyebrows in admiration.
‘Cartilia!’ said Marcus, laughing, then he leant forward and kissed her quickly on the cheek.
‘Marcus!’ she said with a blush. ‘Not in public.’
‘It’s not public. It’s my home. I’m the paterfamilias and I’ll do as I like. Any objections?’ He looked around, his grey eyes bright.
‘No, pater!’ said Flavia with a smile. She was glad to see him happy again.
‘I’m already feeling the effects of those oysters,’ said Aristo. ‘I feel like a new man. Nubia, shall we play some music?’
Nubia nodded.
‘Oh yes,’ said Flavia. ‘I need to hear music so badly. Did you bring your barbiton, Jonathan?’
‘Of course!’ He smiled and pulled it out from beneath the couch.
Lupus already had his drums ready.
Flavia slipped off the couch and ran upstairs. A moment later she came back into the dining room. She went to Cartilia and solemnly held out her tambourine.
‘Here, Cartilia,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to play it.’
‘Thank you, Flavia!’ Cartilia’s eyes were moist. ‘Thank you very much.’
Flavia sighed and looked at her father. He gave her the merest nod, and a smile. Flavia went back to the couch and stretched out beside Nubia. She still felt weak.
Aristo was tuning his lyre. He hadn’t played it in several days.
Then he looked at Nubia and she looked back at him and they began to play together.
Presently Jonathan came in on his barbiton. Lupus was drumming but he’d found some ankle bells and wore them on his right wrist. They made a sparkling noise as he beat the drum. Cartilia’s tambourine was perfect. It was as if she’d practised with the others for years.
Flavia smiled. They were playing ‘Slave Song’.
As they played, she remembered another dining room in another time and place. And suddenly she felt his presence. As real as if he was reclining on the couch beside her.
He wasn’t, of course, but when she closed her eyes she saw his face with its amused half-smile and beautiful dark eyes.
He hadn’t come to save her. He probably hadn’t even thought about her more than once or twice in the past few months. She knew it now with a terrible certainty. She knew the object of her passion was only a phantom.
The music and his image brought a surge of emotion from her so strong that she had to bite her lip to stop the tears coming.
‘No,’ she whispered, digging her fingernails into her palms. ‘No, no, NO!’ And once again she slipped off the couch and ran upstairs.
‘Flavia. Are you all right?’
Flavia lifted her head to see Cartilia standing at the door.
‘Flavia,’ said Cartilia. ‘What’s the matter? You look perfectly miserable.’
‘You wouldn’t understand . . .’ Flavia dropped her head back onto the pillow.
The bed creaked a little as Cartilia sat on the edge of it. ‘I might.’
Flavia buried her face in the damp pillow. After a moment she said in a muffled voice: ‘I’m hopelessly in love.’
There was a pause.
‘Tell me about him.’
Flavia slowly turned and looked up. Cartilia wasn’t mocking; her expression was grave.
‘He’s married,’ said Flavia. That should wipe the understanding look off Cartilia’s face.
But it didn’t.
‘It’s a shame he’s married,’ said Cartilia, ‘but we can’t always choose whom we fall in love with, can we?’
Flavia shook her head. ‘And he’s very old,’ she added.
‘How old?’
‘As old as pater. Older maybe.’
‘Lots of women marry older men. My sister in Bononia married a man twenty years her senior.’
‘She did?’ Flavia sniffed, then wiped her nose on her finger.
Cartilia nodded. ‘And they have a very happy marriage.’ She gently brushed a strand of hair away from Flavia’s forehead. ‘Tell me about this man,’ she said. ‘Why do you love him?’
Flavia had been longing to talk to someone about him. And Cartilia was listening. So she pushed her pillow against the wall and sat up in bed.
‘I met him three months ago,’ she said shyly. ‘After the volcano exploded. He’s not the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, but his eyes. The way he looks at you. And I love his voice and the way his hair smells and he’s very important and everybody respects him but when he looks at me he really looks at me and I just melt inside. And I love him so much,’ her chin began to tremble, ‘but he doesn’t even . . .’ She was crying again.
‘Good heavens,’ said Cartilia. ‘He sounds like an extraordinary man. May I ask his name?’
‘Felix. He lives in Surrentum and he’s—’
‘What?’ interrupted Cartilia. ‘Not Publius Pollius Felix?’
Flavia’s stomach flipped when Cartilia said his name. She nodded.
Cartilia burst out laughing.
Flavia felt fresh tears well up.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cartilia. ‘I shouldn’t have laughed. But I suppose you know that half the women in Campania are in love with him.’
‘They are?’
Cartilia nodded. ‘I’ve never met him, but . . .’ She smiled down at Flavia and then her eyes opened wide as Flavia shyly took her Felix doll out from under the pillow.
‘Is this him?’ said Cartilia, carefully taking the small wooden figure.
Flavia nodded. ‘Jonathan and Lupus gave it to me for the Saturnalia. It looks just like him.’
‘He’s very handsome. I can see why you love him. But Flavia?’
‘Yes?’
Cartilia held up the Felix doll. ‘Isn’t he a bit short for you?’
Flavia looked at Cartilia, whose eyes were wide and solemn. Then they both burst out laughing. They laughed for a long time and presently Cartilia said:
‘Do you feel better now that you’ve told me and we’ve laughed about it?’
Flavia nodded and smiled.
‘Will you still think about him all the time?’
‘Maybe not . . .’ But even as Flavia said it a lump rose in her throat and her heart felt too tight. She felt the tears well up again.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I’m still going to think about him.’
‘Flavia, you know the story of Pygmalion, don’t you?’
‘Of course. He was an artist and he made an ivory statue of the perfect woman. And then he fell in love with the statue and prayed to Venus and asked her to make the statue real.’
Cartilia took the Felix doll and gazed at its face. ‘We are all a bit like Pygmalion,’ she said. ‘We create our perfect mate.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Flavia hugged her legs and rested her chin on her blanketed knees.
‘Pygmalion carved his ideal woman in his studio. We women carve the ideal man in our hearts.’ Cartilia held up the Felix doll. ‘We find someone whose appearance pleases us and then we create a man in their likeness and place him in our dreams. We build a whole life. One scene on another. And because we build them in our dreams, they’re perfect. So we fall hopelessly in love. But we love a phantom. An image.’
‘Yes,’ said Flavia. ‘That’s exactly what I was th
inking.’
‘You don’t really know anything about Felix, do you?’
‘Not really,’ said Flavia. ‘But I still love him so much I could die.’
Cartilia sighed. ‘You know what you have, don’t you Flavia? You have the bite of the tarantula.’
‘I don’t think I’ve been bitten by one of those,’ said Flavia. ‘Unless it was at night while I was asleep.’
‘No.’ Cartilia smiled. ‘The wise women of Calabria, that’s where my mother comes from . . . they believe that the awakening of first love is the most passionate love of our lives. This first love is so fierce that they call it the Tarantula’s Bite.’
‘Is it a bit like Cupid’s arrow?’ said Flavia.
‘Exactly,’ said Cartilia. ‘That’s exactly it. We just call it something else in Calabria.’
‘Pater doesn’t believe I’m in love. He says that I’m still just a child and it’s only a “girlish infatuation”.’
‘I think he’s wrong,’ said Cartilia. ‘Girls your age, on the cusp of womanhood, feel awakening love more acutely than at any other time in their lives. Your love is very strong. But Flavia,’ she said, gently tipping Flavia’s chin up and gazing into her eyes, ‘you do know it can never be, don’t you?’
Flavia nodded. ‘But I love him so much. The longing won’t go away. I’ve tried but I can’t stop thinking about him.’
‘If I told you I know a way to cure the Tarantula’s Bite,’ said Cartilia, ‘would you be interested? Do you want to be cured of your longing for him?’
Flavia thought about it. Part of her loved being in love. But mostly it hurt too much. She looked up into Cartilia’s warm brown eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want to stop thinking about him all the time. I just want to be normal me again and think about puzzles and mysteries and stories. Is there a cure?’
‘Yes,’ said Cartilia. ‘There is. It’s a dance called the Little Tarantula. If you like, I will teach it to you.’
‘Yes,’ said Flavia. ‘Please teach me.’
‘Me too,’ said Nubia, stepping shyly into the room. ‘I would like to dance the Little Tarantula, too. I also have the spider bite.’
Nubia was trembling. At last she had told someone.
‘You’re in love, too?’ cried Flavia.
Nubia nodded.
‘Who is it?’ said Flavia.
‘I think I know,’ said Cartilia softly. ‘You love Aristo, don’t you?’
Nubia dropped her head and nodded again.
‘How did you know that?’ Flavia stared at Cartilia. ‘Even I didn’t know.’
Cartilia beckoned Nubia, who came to sit beside her on Flavia’s bed.
‘I can tell by the way they play music together,’ said Cartilia, putting her arm around Nubia’s shoulder.
Presently she spoke.
‘Usually we dance the Little Tarantula at the end of May, during the festival of Dionysus. But tomorrow night there is a full moon. We’ll dance in the Grove of Diana.’
‘Outside the city walls?’ gasped Flavia. ‘But what about the spirits of the dead?’
‘They won’t bother us,’ said Cartilia. ‘The god Dionysus will protect us.’
‘It will be cold and dark,’ Nubia shivered.
‘Yes,’ said Cartilia. ‘At first. But as long as the weather stays dry, we’ll be fine.’ She squeezed Nubia’s shoulder and laughed. ‘You look at me reproachfully with those big golden eyes, but I promise you won’t be cold. The dance will heat your blood.’
In the end there were ten of them.
Somehow, the young women of Ostia heard about the Little Tarantula and they slipped out of their homes and gathered at the house on Green Fountain Street. Alma let them in.
The men – Flavia’s father, Aristo and Caudex – retreated to their rooms. If the sound of feminine chatter disturbed them, they gave no sign of it.
The young women drank hot spiced wine and gossiped and warmed their hands round the brazier in the triclinium. At last, when the moon’s silver disc was at its zenith, they opened the back door and slipped out into the night.
Each one held a smoking torch and when they reached the grove they planted a circle of fire flowers.
Cartilia showed Flavia and Nubia how to hold the tambourine, not in the left hand, but in the right. She showed them how to keep the wrist and elbow moving but the forearm strong. She showed them how to let the emotion flow down the legs to the soles of the feet and through the arms to the fingertips.
‘There will come a moment,’ she said, ‘when your feet will hurt, your forearms ache, your fingers might even bleed. You must keep playing; that is the point at which the god takes you and burns the passion from you.’
They nodded. Cartilia slowly started to beat her own tambourine and to sing. The women joined her and shook their tambourines, or castanets, or clapped their hands. Some were peasants and a few were highborn. Most were in their teens. Cartilia, at twenty-four, was the oldest.
Presently they settled into a rhythm and they began to dance.
At first Flavia felt foolish, self-conscious. What was she doing, dancing in the woods on a cold winter’s night with strange women around her? But the beat was strong and soon the music filled her head.
Nubia was dancing the Little Tarantula as if she had known it from birth. Cartilia was lost in the music, too. Her beautiful dark hair – the colour of sesame oil – swung about her face. Flavia’s forearms ached and her feet hurt, but the driving beat would not let her rest.
And then a figure appeared out of the darkness and joined them. It was Diana. She did not have a tambourine but she sang in a high, sweet voice and she begged the god to free her of her obsession.
It was then that the music took Flavia. Like a wave, it lifted her up and carried her and she was no longer tired. She closed her eyes and his face was there, so she danced out her yearning and her regret, her anger and her tenderness, her love and her hate.
Once, she opened her eyes and thought she saw him standing in the deep shadows outside the torchlight. But she realised that if it was not her imagination, it must be the god Dionysus, watching his women with approval.
Flavia lost all sense of time. Above her the stars blazed in the cold black sky and it seemed to her that she saw their shining paths, like snail silver, arc across the sky. As she danced, his beautiful face faded and presently, when she closed her eyes, she saw only the red-brown flicker of the torches through her eyelids.
And by dawn, when the watery sun had diluted the dark wine of night, Flavia knew that at last she was free of love’s poison.
Tired but happy, with dishevelled hair and bloodshot eyes, the group of women went chattering through the Laurentum Gate, laughing at the expression on the watchmen’s faces. They had their arms round each other’s waists. Flavia walked between Nubia and Cartilia, whose other arm encircled her sister Diana.
They went to the Baths of Minerva as the doors were opening and they paid their coin. They took off their sweat-stained clothes and sank gratefully into the myrtle-scented hot plunge. There, they let the steaming water soak away any remnants of passion, bitterness, jealousy and regret.
Back at Green Fountain Street, Flavia and Nubia slept all that day and through the following night. And when Flavia awoke from a sweet dreamless sleep, she rose and dressed and took her Felix doll to the Temple of Venus.
And there she laid his image down on the altar.
‘Venus,’ she prayed. ‘I give you all my dreams of love and marriage and romance. I lay them on your altar.’ Flavia bowed her head for a moment. The verse of a song Miriam often sang came into her head: ‘By the gazelles, O daughters of Jerusalem, do not awaken or arouse love until it so desires.’
Flavia looked up at the statue of Venus. The marble goddess – caught in the act of slipping on her sandal – looked back at her in surprise.
‘Venus,’ whispered Flavia. ‘Please do not arouse or awaken love in me until I’m ready.’
And it
seemed to her, though it may have been a trick of the light, that the goddess smiled kindly.
That evening, after dinner, Cartilia came up to the girls’ room to tuck them into bed.
After she had kissed Nubia’s forehead she came and perched on Flavia’s bed. Scuto thumped his tail and Cartilia scratched him behind the ear.
‘I should have known you weren’t evil,’ said Flavia, ‘because Scuto likes you.’
‘Why did you think I was evil?’ asked Cartilia, with a laugh.
‘I thought you were the one who criticised pater for letting me be too independent,’ said Flavia. ‘I thought it was your idea to marry me off.’
‘Not at all,’ said Cartilia. ‘That was your father’s patron Cordius. He strongly disapproves of independence in women. That’s why I told him my husband had died. If Cordius had found out that my husband divorced me for being too independent . . . Well, he never would have introduced me to your father. So my family all agreed to say I was a widow. It was foolish. I see that now. But I wanted to meet your father very badly.’
‘Tell me again about the first time you saw him?’
‘The very first time was over half a year ago. He was walking along the docks, talking to one of his sailors. The wind was in his hair and he was laughing and I remember thinking to myself: perhaps it’s time I remarry. I asked my father to find out about him. Pater said he was a widower with one daughter and that his patron was Cordius, a very conservative man.’
‘And then what?’
‘He went away before I could meet him, but then he came back, as if from the dead. I thought I’d better seize the day.’
‘Carpe diem!’ laughed Flavia.
‘Exactly. Pater invited Cordius to dinner and he invited us back. That was when I met your father.’ She smiled. ‘We got on very well. We laugh at the same things. He’s kind and thoughtful. And he’s honest.’
‘So you weren’t like Pygmalion. You didn’t make him into your dream man. You didn’t just fall in love with the way he looks.’
Cartilia flushed slightly. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I do have to admit I find him very attractive. Plus, he still has all his teeth.’
The Roman Mysteries Complete Collection Page 80