For over a month I tried to pull together the maelstrom of everything that was happening around me. It was as if I were being torn to pieces by my own heart, which wanted to lurch in so many directions… or occasionally to stop altogether.
I was still consumed by such soul-crushing grief for Romulus that whatever else happened in my life, it was always tainted by that numb ache, and rarely did a night pass where I did not cry into my pillows. I tried to turn to Valeria. I had seen an odd moment of hope in our sudden embrace following the news of her father’s illness, but after the initial shock wore off, she became distant again, unapproachable.
And then there was the world outside our family.
There was Volusianus, who constantly hovered like a hornet, expecting me to do something important, when I found it hard enough even to manage the inane and mundane. And because of his ever-present shadow, I could not forget that Africa still held out against my rule, that Zenas was still unable to bring that great southern beast to heel, no matter how great the resources I sent him.
And I was never able to forget the threat my old friend Constantine posed in the north, nor the threat in the East. Galerius may be riddled with rot and dying a well-deserved death in his charnel palace, but his mastiff Licinius was ever picking at the border of my own lands regardless.
And the Christians, too. I had thought that the change in their leadership that I had imposed would quell those issues and, for a time, things had been quiet, though what I had thought to be peace had turned out to be merely silent trouble. That difficult sect was once again rising in terms of both voice and anger.
And to cap it all, Anullinus’ troublesome brother Gaius Annius had returned from a posting in Sicilia – with middling success at best – and now pestered me for a position of import in the city. I had half a mind to oust the current Aedile in charge of the city’s latrines and appoint Gaius in his place. A ‘shit job’ was the common joke.
You see? Everything for which I had no real interest or love picked at me and demanded my attention, while everyone that I loved and needed consolation from had turned from me or left me.
I felt curiously solitary for a man who lived in a city of a million people and ruled over them from a palace of a thousand servants.
I made my mistake at the festival of Fors Fortuna. I had been hurrying through my work so much one morning that I had unwittingly appended my name to an invitation to a private social engagement. Once I realised I had confirmed my intention to attend, I tried to rectify the matter, but Volusianus persuaded me that the bad public feeling such a move would create could be very harmful. And so I had, with due dread and irritation, alighted from my carriage at the town house of the senator Lucretius Ballator.
A prime example of the more odious, obsequious and generally verminous end of the senatorial scale, Ballator had been the man I had left quivering and quailing in the forum four years earlier, when I had almost been mobbed by a riotous crowd. He had not improved over time, and my accession to the purple had merely changed the title by which he addressed me, not his unpleasant manner.
I spent the first hour of the occasion swanning around the domus trying to be the emperor they all wanted to see and speak to. Ballator was somewhat off with me, though that might have more to do with Volusianus and the eight Praetorians in togas who moved among his guests for my safety than with my own actions. Everyone wanted to make themselves known to me, and many wanted to elicit my opinion on something or make veiled hopeful requests. None of them were interesting or entertaining.
Nor was the entertainment. Gauls cannot play lyres, apparently, and certainly one horse-faced young woman from Leptiminus could only drive animals back into their deep burrows with her warbling song. And as for the wrestlers… well I shudder even at the memory. Had they tried some of those eye-watering moves at the Olympic Games in the old days, Greece might have collapsed even sooner.
The gathering was not a banquet or formal meal so we were not tied to one place and consequently, in the end, I sought out peace and quiet wherever I could. Despite the summer heat, a thin veil of cloud had drawn across the city as the evening descended, and soon a gentle patter of rain began to rattle off the roof tiles and plip-plap into the impluvium pool of the grand atrium. The guests massed into the warmer rooms and left the atrium to the gentle rain. I spied the dozen or so folk who had been taking the air rushing in from the garden, shaking their heads with a fine spray of water. And I saw – and seized – my chance.
As I emerged into the wet gardens, two of the toga-clad Praetorians followed me, but I stopped them on the doorstep and told them to go inside. They were unhappy, but I smiled and laughed, asking them what predator I might find in such a well-tended walled garden in the heart of the city.
What predator indeed.
I walked out into the extensive grounds, enjoying the fine patter of rain on my face. It would take an hour in this light drizzle for me to even feel wet through my heavy toga, so I strolled, enjoying the freedom that the gardens brought.
I almost bit through my tongue when a voice murmured right behind me.
I had wandered beneath an arbour covered with thick vines, which the rain had yet to penetrate and where a marble seat lurked. The voice had said ‘Domine’ , in a sultry, sibilant hiss. Startled, I turned, bringing up my hands defensively.
A woman stood behind me. She was a little older than I, though not much. I think she was pretty. I hope she was pretty. It was rather hard to tell in the patchy shadows of the gazebo and with white lead on her face and the elaborate coils of a carefully constructed hairpiece atop her head. Certainly her shape was attractive enough, and the gauzy stola that she wore left me in no doubt about that. It bordered on scandalous. I started again, recoiling a step from her closeness, as I recognised her from the initial introductions. This was Lucretia, Ballator’s wife!
‘Really, Domine,’ she said in her exotic voice, ‘do I look like I might harm you?’
I realised my hands were still up to ward her off and dropped them, flushing.
‘And where might I conceal a weapon if that were the case?’
She made a point of accentuating every curve with movement so that I could be sure she was unarmed. I was beginning to sweat and seemed to be having difficulty swallowing.
‘You like what you see?’
I coughed a non-answer. Her forwardness was astounding and most un-Roman. In my better days I would have been horrified at such behaviour. That night? Well, let’s just say that I was at an all-time low ebb.
‘I… er….’
She chuckled, and there was a hoarseness to the laugh that I found awfully enticing.
‘It would appear that of all Rome’s nobility, only you and I are alive enough to enjoy the feel of water trickling upon our skin, Domine.’
I was grateful that the shadows of the arbour would hide my crimson cheeks.
‘I… er… I needed some air. The guests can be… er… cloying.’
‘They can, Domine.’ She smiled, taking a step closer again, so that I smelled the exotic oils and rose-petal perfume in which she had liberally doused herself. It was heady, bordering on eye-watering. She could have anaesthetised small animals with her scent. ‘And few can be as dull-witted and tedious as my husband. I was surprised you accepted his invitation. Surprised and very pleased.’
She took another half step forward and I made some kind of strange strangled noise.
Lucretia… My mind furnished me with rumour. A little ditty I had heard somewhere.
Lucretia likes them young and strong,
She doesn’t care for right or wrong,
She’s had the public in the street,
And even the Ravenna fleet.
I blinked in revulsion, panic, excitement and desire. Somehow, suddenly, I found it very easy to see a truth behind those words.
I raised a pointed finger to admonish her and almost leapt back in shock when she closed her mouth over the digit and licked my finger. I couldn’t believe the audacity of the woman. She was a Roman matron with a respectable husband. Of course, he was an idiot, and unpleasant, and boring, and she knew all that. But she was in his house. And I had a wife. I had…
I pictured Valeria, the icy maiden with her back to me. I saw myself over the past month standing outside the door to her suite, wishing she would even look at me, wishing I could feel her embrace to help me deal with the dreadful, grief-filled loneliness.
I kissed her.
It was the most impetuous thing I have ever done. I have invaded nations, sent men to their deaths and claimed a throne that some would say wasn’t mine to claim. And yet nothing felt as wrong, illicit and dangerous as that kiss.
She had desire. I had need. They were not the same thing, but they fitted together like a puzzle.
Half an hour later, she lay on the bench with a rosy glow, feeling the first drips of rain beginning to make their way inside the covered gazebo, so helpfully hidden from view from the house, and splat on her sizzling skin.
I tried to brush down my hair, horribly aware that it probably looked like a bird’s nest. My toga hung all wrong and without a body-slave to make the task easy I spent quite some time adjusting the shape so that it looked even remotely acceptable. As soon as I was upright, I felt ashamed and stepped out into the rain, where we could not see each other and the rain could flatten my coiffure and wash away my immorality. After long moments I decided that I would be all right returning to the public gathering. The sodden toga and hair would masque my activity and hopefully douse the worst of the rosy-oiled scent that I had acquired. I turned to scurry back and jumped again.
Volusianus stood, sopping wet, in the centre of the garden with an incredulous look, shaking his head.
I hurried over to him, mortified, trying to find the words I needed. He found his own first.
‘That was stupid.’
No preamble. No acknowledgement of rank. This was like having Anullinus back in my life. In fact, it was so familiar and oddly welcome, that directness, that it washed aside my fear and left me calm.
‘It was a reaction. Regrettable. Nothing more.’
As I started walking back to the house, Volusianus fell in alongside me. ‘If word of this gets out – and it will get out, for Lucretia has quite a mouth on her, as I’m sure you’re now well aware – then your reputation will crumble.’
‘I think you overestimate the matter.’
He frowned. ‘No. You underestimate it. The higher classes of Rome could easily turn on you. Half your perceived legitimacy on that throne is through your Romanitas and your moral right. Lose that: lose your throne.’
I rounded angrily on him. I knew it had been wrong, but it had also been unstoppable. In my situation I could no more have resisted that tryst than I could have walked on the air.
‘Volusianus, I am not about to apologise to you or anyone else for finding much-needed solace after months of solitary grief. If I need to apologise to anyone it is Ballator, and he must be used to this sort of thing by now.’
‘Domine…’
‘No.’ I held up a hand. ‘If you think this is dangerous or a problem, then you deal with it. You always know best, after all.’
I walked off. Jove, how I regret that ending.
*
Two days later, things came back to bite me.
I was working through my daily records, correspondence and so on. I had cause to pause, for I had just come across something that had surprised and saddened me. In the pile of paperwork was a report from one of my Praetors, pinned to the deeds of a house down below the Palatine, near the great Flavian amphitheatre. Anullinus’ house. I was being asked by my administrators what to do with the property. I should probably have given the house to its former owner’s brother, but the idea of having a man Anullinus disliked inheriting the place of his death seemed… wrong somehow. Inappropriate. His property went to nobody, then, and had stayed in imperial hands for a while. The recommendation of the clerk who wrote me the request was that the house be auctioned to help fill the treasury.
Somehow I couldn’t. I kept thinking back on the day I saw his butchered body in the place. I felt a wave of anger at Volusianus, who was so clearly the culprit, but let it pass. Recriminations now would do more harm than good. But I couldn’t let the house go. And I didn’t want to live in it. And, in fact, I didn’t really want anyone else living there.
I made up my mind. I would keep it. Nothing more. It would be my property, but would stay empty and unused for now. And because I felt sure that the ever-argumentative Gaius Annius would argue, I had his brother’s house’s value paid to his estate to ward off trouble in advance.
Satisfied that I had made an acceptable decision, I scribbled my answer down on the vellum, blew the ink dry and put down my stylus. I moved the document aside to my pile of completed work and looked down to see the effects of my recent tryst staring back up at me.
I blinked at the documents before me.
I rose and crossed to the door, opened it and shouted ‘Artemas?’
My principal secretary came scurrying over, bowing, and I beckoned him back to my desk. I pointed down at the paperwork.
There, on the wooden surface, stood the deeds to seven properties, including a horribly familiar town house. The name Lucretius Ballator was scribbled atop them all. They were, like Anullinus’ house before them, being placed in the imperial trust with recommendations for sale and queries about their fate.
‘What is this?’
Artemas peered at the vellum sheets. ‘Senator Ballator’s estate, Domine, for your disposal.’
‘Why?’
Artemas frowned. ‘Criminals’ property is usually taken from them, Domine.’
‘Criminal?’ I felt as though I were attending some kind of child’s theatre, and gestured for my secretary to be a little more forthcoming and elucidating this time.
‘Senator Lucretius Ballator, Domine. Murdered his wife two nights gone. A very big trial, but very quick. Not much need for a trial, really, since it was witnessed by the Praetorian Prefect himself.’
‘Was it?’ I whispered. ‘Was it indeed?’
‘Yes, Domine. The senator drove a sword through her in their gardens after the party on the feast of Fors Fortuna. Ballator denied it, of course, but with such a credible eyewitness as the prefect, the entire case was dealt with in brief and the sentence carried out this morning.’
I stared. Ballator? Confusion filled me for a moment. Had Ballator found out what had happened in the garden earlier that night, he might quite understandably kill his wife in a fit of rage. But I could hardly picture that wet sop of a man encountering rage, let alone wielding a sword. And why would Volusianus be there too? The answer, of course, was plain and simple, and this would not be the first time Volusianus had plunged a sword into a back to overcome a troublesome situation.
Guilt riddled me. Guilt that I had unwittingly put Lucretia in such a position. And guilt that I had equally unwittingly given Volusianus free rein to deal with the problem as he saw fit. I remembered Ballator. The very idea of him murdering someone was laughable. He would run away from a bad cold!
I made a mental note to pay Volusianus back for this sometime. Between this and the still-rankling murder of Anullinus, he was racking up debts of blood surprisingly fast.