He reached forward and touched her thigh beneath the linen.
'Do you write your words down so that others might read what you want?'
His hand journeyed towards her belly and Nilla's eyes darted about the room to see if a wax tablet sat anywhere. 'Is that your method, husband? To write it all in wax?'
His penis rose from the corner of her vision, but she would not let her eyes leave his. And she knew how badly they must be betraying her fear.
'Why don't you write it for me, husband? Tell me how you feel about our union. Tell me how I might be a good wife to you.'
Ahenobarbus's hand brushed the nipple of her breast and she blushed to realise it had hardened. Was this desire she felt? How could it be?
Ahenobarbus stood up, his erect penis before her face for a moment until his back was turned to her and she realised he was leaving the room. Gratitude overwhelmed her. He had listened to what she said. He was going to find a wax tablet. 'I will wait here for you,' she whispered after him, and then felt foolish. What else would she do?
Somewhere in the rooms below Nilla heard a water clock chime that the hour of Concubia had come. It was very late. Then, after what had seemed like minutes, she heard the hour of Intempesta signalled and she realised she had fallen asleep. The oil lamp was out. Ahenobarbus had not returned. The doors to the connubial room remained ajar from when he had left her. Nilla crept from the bed and stood at the threshold, peering into the blackness of the corridor.
'Husband? Are you there?'
'It's just as well you spat the phallus from your sex, domina.'
Nilla stifled a scream. The aged maid sat huddled on a pallet near the door.
'It is just as well, for the deity would have choked in your hole once he'd sniffed what had been there before him.'
Nilla went white. 'How dare you use such words!'
'You disgust this house,' said the maid. 'And you'll disgust all Rome when the truth gets out.'
Nilla reeled. 'I am a virgin bride.'
'If that's true, then you've sewn up your hole to become one.'
Enraged, Nilla drew back her hand to strike but the old woman snatched at her wrist, twisting it. 'Slave-fucker,' she hissed. 'You and your little slave. He polluted you for the master — polluted you for this house. The torments of the fallen Aemilii are made unending with this marriage. You are a punishment for us!'
Nilla pulled her arm free. 'Burrus is dead,' she sobbed. 'Drowned!' She could have died herself for even mentioning his precious name to this gorgon. 'I never slept with him. Our love for each other was chaste,' she tried to add.
The old woman's spittle struck her cheek. Blinded by grief, Nilla lurched away, fleeing down the corridor towards the stairs to the floor below. She didn't see the descent until too late and her foot slipped in the darkness, throwing her forward to strike her head against the ancient stone. She rolled and fell the full length of the steps, just as Aemilia of the Aemilii had done years before. Nilla came to rest on the cold stone floor at the bottom, slumped like a broken doll.
Sounds of enjoyment awoke her. A man's pleasure, perhaps, or a woman's sensual moans; it was difficult to be sure. The sounds drifted to her ears from somewhere deep in the house as she slowly climbed to consciousness again. Nilla tried to move her limbs. Nothing was broken, only grazed and bruised. Her head throbbed from where it had struck the edge of the stair. She managed to stand.
From the gloom of the cobwebbed atrium, Nilla could see that the curtains dividing that space from the tablinum had been pulled aside. The private study for the master of the house was a shambles, long neglected and thick with dust. Her hand pressed to her bleeding temple, Nilla stood at the room's edge and looked through to the peristyle garden beyond. Years before, the girl Domitia had picked winter flowers for her condemned mother there. The flowers were long dead too.
Ahenobarbus lay on a pallet in the soil, his loins thrusting upwards and down. Astride him was a girl no older than Nilla, her small, pointed breasts glistening in the moonlight as she moaned again in pleasure, riding him. It was Albucilla, the drowned minnow that Ahenobarbus had revived on Capri. She plucked the lit stub of a candle and waved the flame before her nipples, letting it lick her like a tongue. Ahenobarbus echoed her moan and Nilla heard the only noise she would ever know from his throat. Whether they knew she was there, she couldn't tell, so focused were they on the gratification of their bodies. They achieved climax together, gasping with it, clutching at each other's mouths, as Albucilla let the candle wax drip upon her skin.
The hand that reached for Nilla's was warm. It enfolded her palm and fingers in a manner that felt comforting and familiar, before her wits returned and she jumped with fear. The hand let go and she span around. At the other side of the atrium the front door of the house was open, admitting a warm breeze from the street. The room curtains stirred but Ahenobarbus and his lover were oblivious, slumbering where they lay.
The aged maid shut the door, stilling the breeze, before shuffling away to the shadows.
'How could this be?' Nilla whispered. 'How is this possible?'
Burrus pressed his lips to hers and the taste of him was salty. He enfolded her in his strong young arms, browned by the sun and the sea. 'You know better than anyone how well I swim, Lady.'
If patrician marriage was what she had been given, then this union with an accursed house came with features all of its own. The wordless husband had a lover, a whore, with whom he cavorted under the roof that sheltered his wife. Accordingly, if the wife should make a gift of her virginity to a slave, how could it be seen as wicked in such a home, where the normal rules of morality did not apply? And if this house came with an aged, wizened maid who in the one breath condemned and then abetted those she served, it was surely just another thing to mark it as special among the thousands of homes in Rome.
Held tight in her beloved's arms as he carried her up the stairs, Nilla vowed never to question what this strange marriage might give her.
She heard the gentle rise and fall of Burrus's chest beside her in the bed and knew that he was sleeping. Careful not to wake him, Nilla slipped from the sheets and lowered herself upon the low marble bowl that stood behind a screen at the end of the room. She prepared to wash herself, as she had once been shown — the means to prevent a pregnancy. But as she placed her fingers in the water, an object caught her eye. A tiny length of lead, jammed in a crack between the floorboards.
The water dripped from her hand and Nilla leaned forward to try to dislodge the thing, not knowing why it compelled her so fully. The lead did not come loose easily; she had to prise it free with her nails. When she finally held it in her hand, it had surprising weight. She saw that it was really a flattened tablet that had been folded once and then again. She used her nails to open it, feeling certain, somehow, that she should see what was inside.
The tablet held a message, scratched into the surface with a pin. But the writing was reversed. Not knowing how or why she sensed what to do so exactly, Nilla held up the tablet before the polished silver surface of a mirror. The message became clear at once. The course is cooked by a slave-boy's stroke; the fruit is lost with babes.
The words seemed meaningless. She returned to the bed she shared with Burrus and did not use the water bowl again.
Nilla succumbed to her dreams with her hands pressed gently to her belly.
The Ides of January
AD 29
Ten months later: crushed by the weight of Roman taxes, the Frisian tribe of Lower Germany hang the officials sent to collect them