Time did little to diminish my grief. I spent the long, cold winter mostly staring silently at the door of my son’s mausoleum at the new villa on the Via Appia. In fact, I was rarely in Rome and even then only when some matter became urgent enough that Volusianus would come out to the villa and drag me back to the Palatine. Then, when the job was done, I would be straight back to the maudlin peace of the new villa and Romulus’ mausoleum – a tomb within a tomb.
I think I started to worry my villa’s staff when they kept having to urge me back to my triclinium for food. They would invariably find me sitting on one of the huge blocks of masonry from the unfinished hippodrome , staring through the bars and into the gloomy interior of Romulus’ sepulchre.
Euna, the ageing nurse, had come to the villa with young Aurelius, and the poor twisted lad was the only thing able to tear my attention from the resting place of my older son for even a moment. But never for long. For I could only hold so long a conversation with my younger boy before the tears came and I had to look away. I was truly lost.
I had paid no attention to Valeria during the winter, which, looking back was a failing I should have attended to. Despite that one crack in her icy armour in the room of our dead son, she had remained silent and cold, isolated and unwilling – unable? – to share in my grief. But then, I knew not what icy knives were turning in her own heart.
It was the kalends of the month, and finally the weather was changing. The winter had been unforgiving in its cold and bitterness, and the spring to which it had given way was little better. Filled with sleet that gradually transformed to unremitting rain, it had waterlogged the land, dragging all joy and humour from what was traditionally the season of hope. It mattered not to me, of course, for it snowed in my heart regardless of the outside weather.
Two days earlier the rain had stopped, at least. The ground still squelched and the sky still gloomed with dark grey ribbons of threat, but the air was warmer and the builders, who had by necessity withdrawn during the inclement months, were now once again raising the two great towers that would mark the ends of the carceres of my new private circus. The sounds of chiselling and hammering echoed across the landscape and drowned out the approach of the small party such that I did not even realise I had company until they planted themselves between me and that dark doorway into despair.
I blinked and looked up.
Valeria?
It seemed so unbelievable that my distant, loveless wife might deign to visit me that I actually rubbed my eyes to be sure that I had not simply drifted off to sleep on that block before the tomb. No. It was really her. And behind her, Volusianus.
I frowned. My wife’s face might be implacable, but her eyes were racked with emotion which in itself was such a phenomenally unexpected thing that it actually snapped me out of my moody oblivion and made me pay attention. Volusianus’ face, in stark contrast, was energetic – I might have even said gleeful.
‘Valeria?’
‘Father’s health is failing.’
I scratched my head, trying to pull my thoughts together, wondering how she knew what was going on in the court of Constantine before it struck me that she was talking about her father and not mine. Her father, the all-powerful emperor of the East, truly ill?
That explained Volusianus’ face.
‘Galerius is ill? How ill? Dying ?’
I tried not to sound enthusiastic over the possibility that my greatest enemy in the world might be suffering. Valeria’s expression suggested I’d failed. Probably ‘Dying’ had been a touch too far.
‘Critically, I am told. My stepmother informs me in a rather curt and unpleasant letter that Father is suffering endless bleeding from an infection in his belly and that whatever the physicians do to try and cure it continually makes it worse. She does not believe he will live to see another winter.’
I sat silent, staring. Despite the hole in my heart that echoed the hole in the tomb before me, the news made me want to stand and praise Apollo and Aesculapius for inflicting that most foul abomination of a human with something so dreadful and seemingly incurable. I am not by nature a vengeful or ruthless man, but when it came to Galerius, I had found I could wish him a thousand such deaths and retain a good conscience. I could easily have cheered on that blood loss. No, I’d never have made a Christian, would I? Valeria stood before me, her body soberly clothed, her soul naked.
Her eyes were the heralds of her heart. Her face might be a marble cast, but her eyes were filled to overflowing with fear, anguish, loss and perplexity. Galerius may have been the most appalling human being this side of the Styx, but he was still her father. How many times had I overlooked the endless faults of my own sire before I finally broke, and even now some small part of my soul urged me to heal the rift between us, even though I knew he would kill me, had he the chance. Parents have an indefinable hold on our souls.
So do children. I recognised in the swirl of emotion within Valeria’s eyes some dreadful mirror of what had been happening to me since Romulus’ death. Worse, perhaps. She had lost a son, and now stood to lose a father too.
Volusianus was almost vibrating, waiting for me to cheer or leap upon this new hope. He was going to be disappointed.
Swallowing the righteous pleasure that Galerius’ suffering brought, I kept my face straight, my voice grave, and I rose, placing a hand upon each of Valeria’s shoulders. Something had changed. Months ago she would have shrugged off that gesture with some sharp, icy comment about my manhood. Now, she looked into my eyes and I could see she was almost as lost as I.
‘I am sorry, Valeria. Truly I am.’
And I was. I was sorry Galerius was not already dead, yes, but I was also sorry that she had to go through this.
Her eyes hardened. ‘You hate him.’
There was no denying that.
‘Yes. I hate him, as he hates me. But I do not hate you, Valeria. I never have, and so I am sorry.’
‘Hm,’ she replied curtly, her lips a straight line as she fought her longstanding instinct to be harsh with me, even in the face of my sympathy.
‘You wish to go to him?’ I asked quietly.
‘My stepmother advises against it.’ Her voice trembled as she spoke, and I knew just how deeply this was hurting her.
‘What can I do to ease things, Valeria?’
Behind her I caught sight of Volusianus, who was scowling. He wanted me to celebrate the news, not to play the supportive husband. Galerius’ illness was a victory for the West, whether the West be mine or Constantine’s – or both. Volusianus would want me to stand in the forum and announce the news to the people of Rome, to give them hope, and to denigrate our enemy. He would want me to proclaim that the illness was a fitting punishment sent by the gods. I could quite imagine, given that bloated sack of offal’s history, that the Christians who had suffered under his persecutions would now be claiming that their ‘all-powerful God’ had visited his vengeance upon their oppressor.
Valeria suddenly cast her eyes downwards, and when they rose once again to meet mine, there were tears on her cheeks – the first I had ever seen, I think.
‘It is too much, Marcus.’
Marcus? My given name?
‘First Romulus, and now Father. It is too much.’
And, brushing aside years of division and iciness, I pulled my wife towards me and wrapped her in my arms, crushing my own satisfaction that my enemy was dying as I held Valeria in a tight embrace, listening to her sobs as she shuddered again and again in my grasp.
And I was crying now too. For Romulus. For a closeness with my wife that I had never felt while our son was alive. For the fact that finally, at the last, she had shown a connection to the boy. For the world of what was not, but what could have been. I felt sure this bond could not last, but for that single morning it was the most important thing in the world.
And as we stood there in each other’s arms, surrendering to grief, Volusianus, his face full of disapproval and irritation, turned and marched away.