A Day of Fire: a novel of Pompeii

by Stephanie Dray

  “It is locked.”

  “There is a key in the niche beside the small oven in the kitchen. It is hidden beneath an amphora. You could get it.”

  How does he know this? He leans forward stealing a quick kiss, and my curiosity fades as my heart begins to race. “All right.”

  My feet have wings. By the time I reach the stairs in the small garden, I am out of breath, as if I have run much further. Opening the door, I duck inside and light a lamp in an arched niche on the wall. Wines are my father’s passion and these are the best he holds. The space is more crowded than when I saw it last, doubtless because the wine for my wedding waits here. I notice something on the ground, a band of cloth such as one of the kitchen girls might wear around her head. Perhaps it was lost when someone was sent for wine—though it seems an odd task for a female slave. The door behind me eases open and someone slips in. I know it is Faustus even before I feel him pressing against me, feel his mouth where my neck meets my shoulder. His hand slips around and takes hold of my breast through my tunic.

  I lean back against him, momentarily overwhelmed by the sensation.

  He whispers in my ear, “Did you let Sabinus touch you like this last night?”

  I jerk away and turn to face him. “I told you, he merely came to my rescue. Nothing else.”

  “I can’t help it. I am so jealous. I long to be your husband, but he will have you. In two short days, you will be in his arms.”

  “Do not speak of it.” My dream of the night before comes back to me.

  Faustus pulls me into an embrace and kisses me. As our lips part he whispers, “He will have you, but let me have you first. I know a way—”

  “We can’t.”

  “He won’t know, your husband. No one will. There are places I can enter—”

  For the second time I pull free of him. “I am not a whore, Publius Crustius Faustus!”

  “But you say you love me. And I love you. I burn for you. I am in agony. If you love me, you will offer some relief.” His voice is pleading, his eyes too. “This is the last time we may meet in private before you are wed. I will not be in the house tonight. Like the rest of the workers, I will lodge in the city.” He takes a step forward. I do not retreat and he kisses my throat. When his lips move up to mine, I kiss him back. I think, or rather hope, he has forgotten his ugly suggestion, then he murmurs, “I will be gentle. I will not hurt you.”

  Another man who is not listening to me! I shove him with both hands—hard. “Get out!”

  A beseeching look. It wrings my heart. I am on the verge of repenting my harsh order to go. Then he shrugs. The nonchalance of the gesture makes my anger return and stills my tongue. Another moment of silence and he is gone. I need to compose myself. Moving toward the niche to extinguish the lamp, my steps unsteady, I remember that I have a hair comb in my pouch. I will hide it while I am here. As I reach out to place it between two large amphorae, my fingers trembling, my eyes catch a bit of writing on the wall, low and almost hidden. It is a strange place for words to be painted. Lifting the lamp I lower it until I can read clearly:

  Here I have penetrated a girl’s open buttocks; but it was vulgar of me to write these verses.

  Suddenly the scrap of cloth on the ground makes sense, as does Faustus’ knowing where the key to this place was kept. My cheeks burn. What he would have done to me had I let him, Faustus did to a slave girl on this very spot! Bile rises in my throat. I feel sick. How could I have allowed myself to believe he loved me? And if he does love me, how could he bear to shame me so? I blow out the lamps as quickly as I can so that I will not have to see the words—they are his strokes, in the very paint he uses to restore my father’s frescos—content to feel my way back to the door, though I stub my toes and scrape an ankle in the dark. Better such little injuries that the greater one the horrible words inflict.

  I climb the few steps to the garden and find myself face to face with Sabinus. He blanches at the sight of me. Oh gods, has he been here long enough to see Faustus emerge? If Sabinus tells my father, and they go below will they think the graffiti Faustus left refers to me? If they do I will be disgraced in the most horrible manner. Would all of my Father’s love save me from a beating, from being turned out, or even worse if he believed I permitted Faustus the use of my body?

  “Aemilia Lepida, I came to see how you are.” Sabinus’ tongue trips over the words, reinforcing my sense he saw Faustus.

  Exposed, frightened, embarrassed. But I must say none of these. “I am fine, Sabinus,” I manage to get the words out. I take a deep breath. “Thank you for asking. And thank you for coming to my aid yesterday.” I ply him with civility, hoping to assuage him if he has the power to compromise me.

  He smiles. I cannot remember the last time I saw him smile. “I will always come to your aid. Such is my duty and my pleasure. I will protect you from harm as best I can. You have my word.” He says the last very solemnly.

  Relief floods me. He will not tell Father. Whatever he saw. Whatever he thinks. I am so thankful, so very thankful, that I offer my hand. He hesitates, then takes it in his own quite gently. He fumbles in his pouch.

  “I believe you lost this last evening.”

  My betrothal ring! Sabinus spares me not only possible ruin, but this embarrassment as well. For if its absence were not noticed before, it should certainly be remarked upon at our wedding and even my considerable imagination might not be up to the task of devising an explanation for its loss.

  “I do not like to see you without it, Aemilia Lepida.” He slips it back onto my hand.

  “I believe, Sabinus, you should call me Aemilia. I will be your wife in two days.” It is the first time I have acknowledged as much out loud in front of him. The eagerness my pronouncement sparks in his eyes reminds me of a very young child being praised by its mother. In that brief, unguarded moment he seems a good deal younger than my father, and a good deal less the always-in-control man with a penchant for mechanical things. “Do you think you can manage that?” I ask, teasingly.

  “Yes, Aemilia, I believe that I can.”

  SABINUS

  SEEING his ring on the ground among the oil and broken pottery on her chamber floor the previous night had twisted his heart. Seeing the handsome painter emerge from the cellar just before his Aemilia moments ago had nearly broken it. Sabinus would confront the boy and warn him off.

  But halfway to the servants’ quarters, he reconsidered. Such a confrontation would be undignified. It might start gossip. More than this, Sabinus recalled what Capella had said—Aemilia was a wellborn girl and well raised. If she was infatuated, it surely went no further … and if it went further, what good could come of dwelling on that or shaming her? He was not willing to lose his friendship of many years with Lepidus. Nor did he desire to call off his wedding.

  Gods be damned! Capella was right, he was a starry-eyed fool. His heart did belong to a fifteen-year-old girl with a lithe figure and red hair that curled about her pale forehead when the weather was humid. He’d had a hard time letting go of her hand when they parted in the small garden. And to own the truth—at least to himself—he’d had absolutely no interest in the stars when he’d gone to sit in that same garden last evening. He had just wanted to be near her. He pulled the small doll in blue silk from his pouch. Sabinus had found it last night as he’d sat on the ground, head on his knees, against a myrtle—hoping its scent would soothe him.

  Just three days, he told himself, gazing down at the toy. In two, Aemilia would be his wife, and in three, they would be trundling toward Nuceria, safe. Safe from both the temptation of the boy artist and the massive quake that he felt in his bones was imminent. Let Pansa and the other officials deal with what came to Pompeii. He had made up his mind: he, his bride, the whole of her family, and his grandmother would avail themselves of the hospitality of Lepidus’ younger brother until word of the new quake arrived. Doubtless everyone from Pansa to Admiral Pliny would be sorry they hadn’t listened to him. But he would be sor
ry, too. So sorry. Will you be sorry you left them, he wondered. So many died in Nero’s quake. How many might die in Pompeii if he was right about another quake, this one cataclysmic?

  Sabinus tucked the doll away. Pondering the death of many reminded him of his own mortality. There was something he wished to tell Lepidus, something he had meant to tell him last night.

  Sabinus found his friend in the torcularium, admiring the windlass mechanism on his new press. “Ah, Sabinus, though you are not the most discerning wine drinker, the lover of machines in you must admire the efficiency of this.” Lepidus slapped his friend on the back, and Sabinus found himself grinning despite his general melancholia.

  “Stand aside, old man, and let me have a look.” The jest was not new—Sabinus had begun to rib his friend the moment the betrothal ring had slipped onto Aemilia’s finger—but Lepidus still enjoyed it.

  “I will demand more respect from you when you are my son.”

  “It is a strange thing,” Sabinus replied, “but you will be both my father and—until your daughter and I have one of our own—my son of sorts.”

  Lepidus’ brows rose. “Here’s a riddle.”

  “Not at all. I have been meaning to tell you this for weeks, but have been distracted”—he didn’t need to say by what, not to poor, longsuffering Lepidus—“in preparation for my wedding, I have made a testament. Should I die, I have left my grandmother enough to make certain of her comfort and have bequeathed the balance of my property to you.”

  Lepidus rocked back on his heels and regarded Sabinus disbelievingly. “If I did not know you better, I would think this another jest. Come, man, look around you. I would not boast and draw the wrath of the gods, but I do not need your money.”

  “If I die, I still wish to do my duty by your daughter. I wish to provide for her. Besides, who else should I leave my things to? Thanks to Nero’s quake and a certain regrettable run of bad luck in my family line, I am paterfamilias—and a paterfamilias, sadly, without an heir. You are my oldest friend.”

  “One more poke at my age, Sabinus, I warn you!” Lepidus feigned a glower. Then his face softened. “I am touched. We will drink to it—”

  At that moment one of Sabinus’ slaves entered. “Master,” he said apologetically, “a deputation of shepherds arrived at the house, come all the way from the slopes outside Herculaneum looking for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Well, for the man who talks to everyone of the increasing tremors.”

  “Ah, Sabinus, it seems you have made a name for yourself with your madness.” Lepidus smiled indulgently.

  “They were most insistent, so I brought them here,” the slave continued.

  “Your petitioners, my atrium. A fitting union considering we are on the cusp of being family. Come, Sabinus, aren’t you curious?”

  Sabinus was curious, but as they made their way to the atrium, a different sensation overwhelmed him—dread. Shepherds were not men of leisure. If they had left their flocks in the care of others to journey so far in search of a man whose name they did not know, if they had shown the necessary tenacity upon arriving in Pompeii to track him down, there could be nothing good in it.

  There were three, tanned and wizened, perhaps with age, perhaps with weather. The man in the center spoke. “Are you the one? The man who collects information on the aquifers and the wells at the farms and vineyards? The man who tries to convince others that the recent shaking of the earth presages something ill?”

  “I am. Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus, at your service.”

  Quite unaccountably to Sabinus’ mind, the man bowed, and as he straightened Sabinus saw it. Around his neck, the shepherd wore a symbol Sabinus wouldn’t have recognized save for seeing it on Capella. It was exactly like the charm she wore at her ankle. Like her, this man must be a follower of Isis. “The ground where we graze our flocks lives.” The shepherd said it simply, as if it were an ordinary thing. “It growls like an animal and sometimes claps like thunder when the sky is clear. It coughs up wisps of smoke.”

  Smoke. It put Sabinus in mind of last night, of the smoke in Aemilia’s room, of how she clutched her neck. How the acrid vapors made it difficult for him to breathe as he began to beat out the flames. Fire, Capella, fire. But what is the dark river and what the sea? When will they come?

  Nonsense, Sabinus thought. Get hold of yourself, man.

  “Why come to me?”

  “Who else will listen? We tried others first: men in Herculaneum, patricians who own villas, overseers of farms between there and here. They would not heed us. And somewhere along our journey we began to hear of a man who, like us, begged others to attend to such observations.”

  “If you heard that, you must also have heard that no one pays me any more mind than they have paid you.”

  The shepherd looked pained. Clearly, Sabinus thought, he has heard other people ridicule me, but he does not wish to offend. He felt a flash of irritation, but it would be wrong to take out his frustration on this tired, well-meaning delegation. “I will put what you have told me in my notes. Your observations will be part of the record I am keeping.”

  This appeared to satisfy, for all three men nodded as if he had made some sage pronouncement and, after pressing his hand, they left.

  Sabinus himself was not satisfied. He longed not merely to record but to understand the phenomenon the shepherds reported. But their disturbing observations of Vesuvius were incomprehensible. Fool, he thought, if only you were a brighter man. He wondered what other heretofore unknown occurrences such events might portend. Was the mountain somehow the source for all that was currently unnatural in nature?

  Sabinus looked at Lepidus. “Why not tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve spent a fortune on this wedding and because I had thought you eager to be a groom. Are you sure this is about earthquakes and not nerves?”

  “I will marry Aemilia today.”

  “And what about the wedding guests? I am known for the liberality of my hospitality. What will be thought of me if I uninvite everyone? Or do you propose we sneak off under cover of dark and allow the guests to find this place empty and shuttered when they arrive two evenings from now?”

  Sabinus had not thought about the guests, dozens of them, from all the most important families in the city. And that realization sobered him. Truly, this has become a mania with me. I must master myself and my thoughts before I am made an irredeemable fool.

  AEMILIA

  “WAKE up, sleepyhead! When you are a married woman you will not be able to lie in so late, I assure you.” My friend Julilla laughs lightly as she pulls the covers from me. She is hugely swollen with child and seems to think this fact makes her even more of an expert on a wife’s role. I am about to say something to that purpose but realize that Mother, who stands just behind my friend, is unlikely to appreciate such a comment. She urges me to mimic my friend’s behavior nearly as often as she encourages me to emulate former Empress Livia, deified and held up to Roman girls everywhere as the personification of ideal womanhood.

  A whole day to make me ready—Father warned me yesterday. I normally love beauty rituals, but today they will remind me of tomorrow’s inevitable wedding. And for the first time a slave’s tweezers will pluck the hair from more than my eyebrows. They will remove the hair that has guarded the entrance to my virginity since I became a woman. Thanks to a private conversation with Julilla, I have an idea this process will prove painful. I wince at the thought.

  It turns out the pain I anticipated was nothing compared to the exquisite agony of the actual experience—possibly the first time my fertile imagination has proved insufficient. How grateful I am for the plunge into the cold pool! As we move to the tepidarium, I find myself walking very carefully.

  “You think you are sore down there now,” Julilla says with a knowing look. “After tomorrow night when Sabinus claims you …”

  I expect Mother to shush her. Never mind the graffiti I’ve read over the years on Pompeii�
�s walls, or the gossip of slaves I’ve overheard, Mother generally permits no discussion of acts of intimacy in my presence. But this time, as the slaves begin to oil and scrape me, Mother gives Julilla a look of encouragement.

  “You know how blessed I feel to be expecting, Aemilia, but if you choose not to undertake motherhood too early there are things you can do to defer it.” Julilla strokes an absent hand over her belly. I know full well how important the babe inside is to my friend. She lost her first, miscarried dead, and was devastated.

  Mother nods. I feel uncomfortable. Not so much because of the allusion to that which must precede motherhood—over the past weeks as my attraction to Faustus awakened my body, I have found myself eager to explore such acts—but because I do not wish to think of Sabinus in that way. Do not want to imagine him naked. Do not wish to wonder, as I find myself doing, if he looks like the phallic door knockers, symbols of prosperity, scattered liberally throughout Pompeii.

  “You can buy little packets of elephant dung imported from the east in the marketplace, if you know the right stalls.” Julilla bites her lip. “You place such a pessary inside yourself before your husband comes to you.”

  “Or,” Mother chimes in, “many women have excellent luck by squatting and sneezing after their husbands are finished.”

  “And a man does not have to …” Julilla glances at Mother, her face coloring. “There are other places he can put himself.”

  One of the slaves working on me titters. I do not know where to look. All I can think of is the graffiti in my father’s cellar—of Faustus putting his organ into the slave girl from behind, and worse still of his suggesting such a thing to me! Thank the gods I cannot imagine Sabinus proposing such an act. He is far too reserved. A serious man. I find myself glad of that.

  “But remember,” Mother says, “though you may permit such things, you must show disgust in them. You are a wealthy, well brought up girl—not some whore willing to take a man into her mouth for the price of a bit of bread. So struggle and make every appearance of being repulsed.”