They passed through a meadow watched over by a fig tree so massive and gnarled it might have been older than the empire. Their tunics rasped faintly against sharp, stiff blades of tall grass, brown and crisp at the end of the dry summer.
Worried by Peter and Hypatia’s experience, John studied Cornelia. Was she distressed by it all? Had his sentence of exile widened the gray streaks in her dark hair, or was it merely that the unforgiving sunlight called attention to the gray, causing it to glitter like frost when she moved her head to look at the sea or the hills or down at a yellow flower in the grass? When she bent to pick it John took the chance to let his fingers fondly brush her small shoulder.
“Don’t ask me its name,” he said. “Hypatia might know, especially if it has medicinal value.”
Cornelia turned the flower about in her fingers, narrowing her eyes to examine it in the glare, accentuating the fine wrinkles in her deeply tanned skin. She paused thoughtfully, then resumed walking. “I’ll take it back to the house. Back home. And see what Hypatia has to say. Do you know, I had the urge…but then, it would look foolish for me to come back with flowers in my hair like a silly young girl or one of those nymphs the gods were always chasing about, wouldn’t it?”
“When did you stop being a young girl? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You are an old silver-tongue!” She strode off through the meadow, the shape of her slender, well-muscled legs outlined under her thin, pale green tunic.
“No, I meant it,” John called after her, immediately realizing he sounded like a feckless, lovestruck boy. He watched her move away. The gray in her hair, like the wrinkles in her face, were nothing more than bits of strange adornment. Cornelia was no different to him than ever.
He caught up to her with a few strides, took the flower from her hand and threaded it, clumsily, into the gray strand that fell across her temple.
She smiled up at him and then said, quite unexpectedly, “John, why can’t you be happy here?”
He withdrew his hand. “It isn’t that I’m unhappy, Cornelia. It’s just that everything is in such disarray.” He nodded in the direction of a field down the slope between where they stood and the sea. “That should have been plowed by now, there’s harness in need of mending, the fish pond requires cleaning and restocking.”
Cornelia beamed and adjusted the flower in her hair. “There speaks the farmer! You’re recalling these tasks from when you were a boy?”
John took her arm and helped her over a dry weed-choked ditch. “As to the fish, at least we can be certain Peter won’t follow the example of the cook who deceived his master, a certain Bithynian king, with slices of boiled turnip shaped like anchovies when none were available.”
“You could have changed the subject more subtly! I know we’re in a difficult situation. Perhaps a dangerous one, judging from what happened to Peter and Hypatia in the marketplace. When the townspeople get to know us they won’t be afraid. They’ll stop hating us.”
John thought it better to say nothing.
They passed along a rutted path leading to a field dotted with sheep. From behind a knoll rose a column of black smoke.
“The blacksmith is at work in his forge again,” John observed, “but there’s no evidence of his labors anywhere. There are broken rakes and hoes in the barn. A farm with equipment left in that state has either been neglected for too long or run in a careless fashion. Since there are signs of some work being carried out, I am inclined to suspect the latter.”
“There were worse things than broken rakes lying in wait at the Great Palace, John.”
“But I understood Justinian’s court and its intrigues,” John pointed out.
“Only after spending many years there.”
He squeezed her arm lightly. “I begin to feel guilty for bringing you to this place.”
“Oh? Did you force me to accompany you? I recall I came of my own accord. It’s what we’ve both wanted, John. To live in the country and farm.”
They approached the remains of a small temple-several columns, portions of three walls, a part of the roof. It was a place they had visited before. From the slight rise where the ruins stood, the land sloped downward allowing a vista of the sea, enticing them with its offer of relief from the honeyed heat coating the landscape. Between the sea and where they stood lay the vineyards and gardens of a monastery. The buildings of the monastery were near the sea, in the direction they had just come, not quite opposite the temple. Close by the monastery, farther back in the direction of their house, sat the blacksmith’s.
The temple occupied the furthest corner of the farm once owned by John’s family. Perhaps the monastery’s founder had purposely drawn the boundary there.
“Is today the day you will finally show me the farmhouse where you grew up?” Cornelia asked.
“Why would you want to see it? It’s like any other farmhouse.”
They walked on to the temple. Heaps of earth lay here and there, evidence of recent excavations.
“It appears that shoring up the foundation has received attention at least,” Cornelia observed.
“Perhaps old beliefs remain stronger than many realize,” John replied. “Rather risk the new owner’s displeasure than the wrath of Demeter. However, I don’t think that man sitting inside is there to worship or wield a spade.”
A figure had moved in the shadowed interior, a gray-haired man seated on a fallen column. He pushed himself to his feet as they neared. Once he had been a big man; now he was merely tall and stooped, with knobby wrists protruding too far from the sleeves of a shabby tunic. He was almost completely bald. Beads of sweat ringed his sunburnt head in a crown-like way and ran down into his watery faded-blue eyes. He gave them a crooked smile, his few remaining teeth all clustered on one side of his mouth.
“John! What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy to see your father again?”
Chapter Two
“Don’t call yourself my father, Theophilus.”
Cornelia sensed a suppressed fury in John’s quiet voice of a depth she had never heard before. It was so shockingly cold and unexpected it made the skin on the back of her neck tingle.
“Get off my estate,” he had continued, “and stay off it.”
The intruder was John’s stepfather. That was all Cornelia learned during their strained, mostly silent march back to the house. She had known John hated his stepfather, but the depth of his hatred she would never have guessed until now.
She knew John well enough not to question him when, as they came to the courtyard gate, he made a vague excuse about having matters to look into and wandered off toward the back of the house. Matters to think through was what he meant, and he needed solitude for that. It was his nature. She would have liked to have offered comforting words or listened until he had unburdened himself, but that was not John’s way. Perhaps he would walk to the other end of the estate until he had reasoned himself out of his anger, or it might be he intended to return to the temple and make certain Theophilus had gone.
How little she knew of John’s past. He rarely spoke of his family, had instead been almost secretive about them over the years. When questioned, he would tell her they were part of a different life and then change the subject. All she knew was that he never returned to them after he ran away from Plato’s Academy as a young man to take up the life of a mercenary.
No doubt he had good reasons.
She crossed the courtyard and went into the kitchen, a big room with stairs in one corner leading up to the owner’s quarters. The air was humid from pots steaming on the brazier. Hypatia sat at a well-scrubbed wooden table stirring a yellow mixture in a ceramic bowl.
“You’ve accomplished wonders in a short time, Hypatia.” Cornelia glanced around the tidy, clean room with pans, bowls, and utensils arranged along the shelf by the brazier, remembering the sour-smelling rats’ paradise that had greeted them at their arrival.