With the girl in tow, Livia marched through the dimly lit house directly to her and Octavian’s bedchamber, forcing her sober expression to transform into a flirtatious smile before opening the door a crack and peeking around the corner like a mischievous child playing a game.
“Hello, dear,” said Octavian. He was lying on top of their luxurious four-post bed. The red silk canopy that was draped over it was blowing lightly in the breeze of an open window. When he noticed her expression, he set down the scroll he was reading and looked sideways at her impish grin. “What are you up to, you little minx? You look like Discordia about to strike.”
“I have a gift for you, husband.”
He folded his hands across his chest and clucked his tongue. “And what might that be?”
Livia opened the door wider and led the slave girl to the foot of the bed. “Husband, this gift is wrapped in pure white”—she lovingly smoothed the veil that fell down the girl’s back—“and for a reason that you will soon discover.”
“Oh?” Octavian tried to maintain a dispassionate expression, but Livia could see evidence of his arousal already forming beneath his tunica. “Tell me, wife, are you going to share this gift with me?”
“I think not,” Livia said naughtily, “but I will share a cup of wine with my husband when he is finished with it.” She put her hands on the slave girl’s shoulders to urge her onto the bed and then glided giddily back to the door, winking at her husband as she departed. “Hail, Caesar,” she said.
As the door closed behind her, Livia exhaled and leaned against it. Medousa was already waiting in the hall.
“It will be over in less time than it takes to boil an egg, Domina.”
“When it’s over, take the girl to the slave quarters for the night. Bring her back to the market first thing in the morning and sell her.”
“She won’t be worth as much now.”
“I don’t care about that,” said Livia. “And next time, Medousa, pick one that isn’t quite so pretty.”
“Yes, Domina.”
“Have some fresh linen ready,” Livia ordered. “I want the sheets changed as soon as it’s over. And bring a washing bowl for Caesar too.”
“Yes, Domina.”
“And then come back with some refreshments. Wine. Perhaps some pears or figs, and a little cold meat. I will eat with Caesar.”
“All will be done, Domina.”
Livia watched Medousa disappear down the hall. She pressed her ear to the door. A grunt. A cry of pain. Less time than it takes to boil an egg.
Livia knew that she had failed to fulfill her primary purpose as the wife of Caesar: to provide her powerful husband with a son and heir.
As a divorced woman with children from another man, neither could she exploit the univira virtue that Caesar loved to preach about. Although she had a good family name, her personal past lent little weight to his public persona as a man who upheld traditional Roman morals and sexual values.
Yet there were other ways to be useful to him. And as long as she kept bringing those ways to his bedside—dressed all in white and pure as Alps snow—her status as Caesar’s wife would be secure.
* * *
“Aargh.” Pomponia lifted her stola above her ankles as she navigated her way through a patch of sticky mud in the Vestal stable. She glared at several stable slaves who were hurrying toward her. “Why is this not cleaned?”
“Deepest apologies, High Priestess. It rained last night.”
“It rains every night in October,” she scolded, “hardly a supernatural event.” She bit her lip. She was sounding more like Fabiana every day.
As she sat down on a bench, a female slave rushed toward her with a washing basin. She untied the priestess’s sandals and placed her dirty feet in the warm water. With her feet soaking, Pomponia waved her hand in irritation at the slave.
“Move,” she said, “I can’t see.”
She looked toward the riding arena, where Quintina was cantering a white horse in wide circles. The girl caught on quickly to everything, and learning to ride a horse was no exception.
Every Vestal was trained to tack and ride a horse in the event that a hasty exit from Rome—whether on account of fire, flood, or invasion—was required, and the Vestal order had its own stables not far from the temple for such training.
Riding for pleasure was also one of the many privileges that Vestal priestesses enjoyed. Tuccia could be found quite often at the stables. Pomponia, however, rarely had the time—or the inclination. She had always preferred scrolls to saddles.
The stable manager—a tall, muscly freedman named Laurentius—waved politely to Pomponia as he approached. Quintus was walking beside him, and the two men were chatting casually. Quintus’s visits to watch his daughter ride had become a regular occurrence, and today was nothing unusual.
“High Priestess,” he said, “Quintus Vedius Tacitus is here to see Miss Quintina.”
“Thank you, Laurentius.”
The stable manager left, and Quintus scraped the bottom of his sandal on the low rung of a fence, leaving a lump of mud on it. “You should beat your slaves,” he growled.
“Perhaps I should let you do it,” said Pomponia. “It might put you in a better mood.”
Quintus stopped scraping his sandals and looked squarely at her. “This is my normal mood.”
“I know.” She rubbed her bare feet together in the water to scrape off the last of the dirt as Quintus sat down beside her, albeit at a respectable distance. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees.
It was the way Quintus always sat when he was beside her. Still awkward. Still uncertain, even though Quintina was nearing her fourth year of training with the Vestal order and he always scheduled his visits to the stables when he knew Pomponia would be present.
In fact, those visits had been growing more frequent these last months. They had also been growing more personal. Their shared interest in Quintina had cleared common ground upon which an uneasy but evolving friendship had, after so many years of knowing each other, finally taken root.
It was a different relationship than it had been during those years they had performed their religious duties together, always rigid and self-conscious in the public eye. Now, without the scrutiny of the whole of Rome watching his every interaction with Pomponia, Quintus could breathe a little easier. Of course, Quintus was still Quintus. Hard, critical, authoritarian. If he was learning to talk to Pomponia like a real person, it was by degrees.
“How is Priestess Fabiana?” he asked.
Pomponia shrugged. “Good days and bad. She is starting to forget things.”
“And how is Perseus?”
“Perseus is a wretched little hellhound who digs up the flowers and chews my sandals. That dog must be a hundred years old by now. He is an immortal.”
Quintus smiled widely.
Pomponia hated when he did that. His face opened up in that rare way, and for a passing moment the normally detached, choleric Quintus became accessible, even inviting. It always disarmed her, and she found it hard to pull her eyes away. It reminded her of that day, years ago. In Caesar’s house, by the fresco in the alcove.
Pomponia, what do you think of me?
I think you’re a savage in a good toga who has to control every situation and who delights in telling me what to do.
You have me there. Tell me that I’m the only man you’ll ever love. Swear it on the Altar of Juno.
They had not spoken of that day since. Nor had they spoken of the day years ago when Quintus had first brought his daughter to visit the temple, the day he had abandoned all pretense by daring Pomponia to meet him in the Regia after nightfall.
They never spoke of these things, yet the memories were part of every conversation, every glance, and every interaction between them. From the words they chose to the way they sat next to
each other, the tension was always there. The unspoken past was ever-present.
“Your wife and younger daughter, Tacita, are well, I trust,” said Pomponia. She splashed her feet in the water to emphasize how carefree the question was.
Quintus’s smile suddenly turned into a snigger. That was nothing new. One moment he would be pleasant enough, the next he would snap back into his usual sullen, fractious self. There was no predicting it.
Even at his most tolerant, he was always a breath away from flashing Pomponia a scolding glance or chastising her for some real or imagined misstep. She had learned to live with it. To ignore it.
He shook his head in irritation for a moment, and then turned to her. “Why must you ask questions you know the answers to?”
“Why must you be so changeable?”
He fumed quietly for a moment and then said, “My younger daughter is well enough. My wife is . . .” He shook his head again. “Irrelevant.”
“I’m sure she would be delighted to hear so.”
Fully expecting Quintus to stand up and storm off, Pomponia forced herself to casually take her feet out of the basin as if she didn’t care one way or the other what he did. She reached for the towel beside her, but Quintus wrested it from her hand.
To her open-mouthed shock, he knelt on the ground before her. He spread the towel over his legs and then set Pomponia’s bare feet on top, lifting the edges of the towel to softly, almost reverently, dry her feet.
The act was forbidden in a thousand ways.
“Quintus . . .” She told herself to pull her feet away from him, but for some reason they felt like they were too heavy to lift off his legs. The soles of her bare feet tingled with the warmth and sensation of his body beneath them. The sight and feel of his hands moving over the top of her feet quickened her breath.
“I saw Medousa in the market again,” he said, as if nothing unusual was happening.
Pomponia caught her breath. “What was she doing?”
“Just buying more slaves for Caesar’s house, I assume.” He held the towel in one hand and moved it above her ankle to absorb the moisture there.
At the same time, his other hand caressed her lower leg, moving slowly upward, until his fingers slipped behind the bend in her knee to stroke the soft, sensitive skin.
“Quintus, stop.”
He didn’t stop, of course. He never did what she told him. But this time he wasn’t being defiant. He was simply lost in the feel of her. He stopped stroking and gripped her leg more tightly.
“Caesar is sending me to Egypt,” he said abruptly. “Queen Cleopatra has stopped paying her taxes to Rome. Worse, the grain shipments are getting smaller. Caesar suspects that Marc Antony is conspiring with Sextus Pompey to starve Rome and overthrow him. I am to meet with General Antony and assess the situation.” He loosened his grip and again caressed her more gently. “A war is mounting between Caesar and Antony. It will happen soon. General Agrippa is already planning his campaign.”
“I knew it was bad,” said Pomponia. “I didn’t know it was that bad.” She pressed her feet into his legs. He responded by wrapping his strong hands around her ankles. “When do you leave?” she asked breathily.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I only found out this morning.”
“How can he send you so soon? With no warning?”
“He is Caesar. He can do as he likes.”
She pressed her lips together. “How long must you stay there?”
“Indefinitely.”
Pomponia put her hands to her face. “Then you will be there when the war between Egypt and Rome begins?”
“Without doubt,” he said, “but I have seen battle before.”
“Not like this. Caesar will be relentless, and Antony will fight like a cornered animal.”
“That is like any battle, Pomponia.” He realized he had said her name without the honorific Priestess, but did not apologize. Instead, he got up and stood in front of her so that she had to look up to meet his eyes. “You will meet me at the Regia tonight after dark,” he said. It wasn’t a request. It was an order. “We will say our goodbyes then.”
And then he was gone, picking his way through the mud toward the riding arena and the waving form of his daughter on horseback.
A female slave returned carrying Pomponia’s washed and dried sandals. She knelt down to tie them, but Pomponia waved her away. “I’ll do it myself.”
She tied them quickly and then marched toward the stable house, where Laurentius was busily repairing some tack on an outdoor workbench.
“I must leave now,” she said to the stable manager. “Quintina’s guards will bring her home after her lesson. And Laurentius, send a few extra slaves from the stables to accompany them, would you? Make sure they’re armed.”
“Is anything wrong, Domina?”
“No, I am just feeling a bit jumpy today.”
“Always wise to heed such feelings, High Priestess. It is how the gods speak to us. I will send my best men with her litter.”
“Thank you.”
Pomponia stepped into the lectica and let her body collapse back onto the cushions before the litter-bearers had even taken up their positions.
There was no way she would meet Quintus in the way he had said. His words and his presumptuousness were grossly insulting to her, and worse, they were a sacrilegious affront to the great goddess and the Vestal order itself.
If that weren’t enough to condemn him—and it was—there was his barbaric lack of judgment and total disregard for the danger he was putting them both in. Her reluctance to see him flayed alive in the Forum was matched only by her reluctance to see herself buried alive in the Campus Sceleratus.
But now Quintus was leaving for Egypt, possibly to never return.
Keenly aware of each passing hour, she moved through the rest of her day’s duties. She supervised the inventory of wood kindling and sacred wafers, and then inspected the mill. She wrote letters to other temples. She reviewed Caecilia’s curricula for the novices, confirmed documents in the vaults, and spent some time in the archives. She checked on the construction happening in various areas of the House of the Vestals. She scheduled Tuccia, Caecilia, and Lucretia for upcoming rituals, festivals, and public events.
Yet no matter the task, she found her mind wandering back to the stables, and to Quintus. To the feel of his strong hands wrapped around her ankles. To the sound of his voice. To the thought that he would be walking out of her life soon and crossing the Mare Nostrum to whatever the Fates had in store.
It was one of those long days when her Vestal duties didn’t bring her anywhere near the temple’s fiery hearth. It was one of those days when she longed for simpler times, when she would spend quiet hours in the temple tending to Vesta’s sacred fire with her own hands.
Life was simpler before Fabiana had retired. Life was simpler before Quintus too.
She told herself she would meet him tonight, although only to say goodbye. Only to say that, despite his vulgar insolence and her sacred vows, she hoped in her heart that he would be safe. She would pray daily and offer to the goddess to make it so.
Finally, sunset descended on Rome like a vibrant orange blanket putting the city to bed. Pomponia wandered through the still House of the Vestals. The other priestesses were either on watch in the temple or in their private quarters. Except for a few slaves whose work was never finished, she alone was awake. Or so she thought. Perseus came trotting down a corridor to greet her, his nails clicking on the marble floor and his tongue hanging out.
She bent down to scratch his ears. “I am afraid to go alone, Perseus,” she whispered. “You can come with me.”
Pomponia slipped out of the portico and onto the empty cobblestone street of the Via Sacra. She looked over her shoulder. The setti
ng sun had cast a deep-orange glow onto the white marble of the circular Temple of Vesta. It looked even more beautiful than it usually did. She watched the smoke from the sacred hearth bloom out of the opening in the temple’s domed bronze roof and spiral upward into the evening sky, up toward the goddess.
She could hear Caeso and Publius laughing and telling off-color jokes with other Forum guards on the other side of the Temple of Vesta, by the Temple of Castor and Pollux. The Forum Romanum was securely walled and closed to the public after dark, so their laxity was not a problem. In fact, it worked to her advantage as they could not see her from their position.
Pomponia hesitated for a moment, but then Perseus tugged on his leash, as if daring her to go through with it, and she walked toward the Regia with renewed purpose.
There was no doubt that the Regia, located only steps from the Temple of Vesta, would be empty. As the historic residence of the first kings of Rome, including Numa, and the current office of the Pontifex Maximus, it was only used during the day and, then, only when Lepidus was in Rome, which he currently wasn’t.
As she approached the portico of the Regia, her eyes moved to the nearby Temple of the Comet Star. This was the temple that Octavian had dedicated to Julius Caesar several years earlier. It stood on the exact spot where the frenzied mob had erected a makeshift funeral pyre and burned the dictator with flames taken from the sacred fire of Vesta.
Pomponia remembered it well. As the crowd—roused to action by Antony’s funeral speech—had pushed forward to carry Caesar’s body off the Rostra, Quintus had appeared at her side. He had seen her through the chaotic streets of the Forum to the safety of the temple’s steps. But Valeria was already there. She had gripped her husband’s cloak in anger: I knew you would be here!
A pang of guilt stabbed at Pomponia. While she wasn’t strictly violating her religious vows by meeting Quintus—they would only speak—their affection for each other meant that she was dishonoring the marriage vows he had exchanged with Valeria.
She wound Perseus’s leash so tightly around her hand that it blanched and began to throb.
I am losing my way, she said to herself. I am losing sight of who I am. I must commune with the goddess.
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