Alumnus

"A mother's love, when it must hide, learns to speak the language of cruelty, and is understood by no one."

The thunder rolled away over the Alban hills, and the rain began, and in the dim lamplit chamber of the lady Claudia the two women who had stolen a child from each other spoke at last in whispers.

It was a conversation that neither of them would ever forget, and neither would ever speak of. Claudia remembered it afterwards only in shards, as one remembers a fever: the hiss of the downpour on the roof tiles, the sour smell of sweat and blood and torn linen, the trembling of the flame in the oil lamp as Lucrezia, wrapped in her shawl by the door, stood guard with her ear against the wood. And Phoebe, sitting on the stool with her back to the wall and her white face turned toward the bed, listening to every word without a single sound.

She did not plead. She did not threaten. She had tried both in the long dark hour before the dawn, in her thoughts, and had found them equally useless. What she did instead was set out the truth in a low even voice, bare and plain, as a physician lays instruments on a cloth. She said that the child in the basket was the son of a man the Senator had tried to kill, and that if he were discovered in the house he would be killed, and so would his mother, and so, in all likelihood, would any servant who had held her tongue. She said that the child in the bed was a girl, and a slave's daughter, and that a slave's daughter in the Tullo house had one future, and that it was neither short nor gentle. She said that she herself was no angel, and had never claimed to be one, and had used the girl as she used everything, because it was the only way she knew to live.

"But I will tell you what I will do," she said. "And you may decide whether it is a bargain."

Phoebe's lips moved. "Lady…"

"She will be mine. I will name her, and raise her, and dress her in silk, and no one in Rome will ever call her anything but the daughter of Servius Tullo. She will have a dowry of three hundred thousand sesterces. She will be taught Greek by the best tutor in the city and play the lyre before the Emperor's wife. She will never be sold. She will never be beaten. She will never kneel to anyone but the gods." Claudia drew a long breath, and her voice, for the first time, shook. "And you will be her nurse. You will feed her at your breast and sing her to sleep. You will hold her every day of her life that I can contrive. And on the morning she is weaned I will put a document of manumission in your hand with the Senator's own seal on it, and buy back your husband from the dealer, and give you a farm."

She stopped. The rain beat on the roof.

"It is a monstrous thing I am asking," she said. "I know it. If you refuse, I will not harm you. I could not. But the Senator will sell you before the month is out, and he will sell her with you, and the dealer who buys you will have you both in a mining camp in Spain before the winter. She will grow up with an iron collar on her neck, and you will not be there to see it." The brown eyes were bright with tears. "I do not ask you to forgive me. I ask you only to choose which of us, in the end, will be the one who can help her."

For a long time, Phoebe did not answer.

She sat with her hands pressed against her belly where the child had been, her grey eyes huge and unfocused, staring at the small pale shape on the bed. A tear ran down the side of her nose. Then another. She did not wipe them. In the corner, wrapped in a shawl, the dark baby gave a soft hiccuping cry, and her head turned toward it with a jerk, and for a moment her face was naked with some emotion that was not hatred, not yet, but a kind of dreadful tenderness, the recognition of one mother for another's grief.

"He is very like his father?" she said, in a whisper.

Claudia shut her eyes.

"Yes."

"Then he must go." Phoebe's voice broke. "Oh, lady, he must go quickly. For if they see him—"

"Yes."

"And she…" The Greek girl's gaze slid back to the bed, to the tiny sleeping face, the bleating, perfect mouth. "Will she be warm? Will she have enough to eat?"

"She will want for nothing."

"Will you let me hold her?"

"Every day."

The girl bowed her head. Her shoulders shook, once, and were still. When she lifted her face again it was wet, and drawn, and ten years older, and she looked at Claudia with an expression that was neither gratitude nor accusation but something more terrible than either: the plain unflinching gaze of a creature who has understood exactly what has been done to it, and has decided to survive.

"I will do it," Phoebe said. "But I will not forget."

"I would not ask you to."

"Then we understand each other, lady."

"Yes," said Claudia, very softly. "I think we do."

…

At first light, in the corner of the garden under the fig tree, a small bundle of linen was buried in a hole the length of a man's forearm.

Lucrezia dug it herself, with a trowel from the herb garden, and her hands shook so hard that she twice dropped the blade. She worked with her back to the house. Behind her, the storm had blown itself out, and the sky above the cypresses was clearing to a washed pearly grey, and the air smelled of wet earth and crushed thyme and a thousand sodden leaves. Birds were beginning to sing. In the kitchens, someone had lit the ovens, and a thin blue thread of smoke rose from the roof into the dawn. And in the quiet, from the open window of the lady's chamber, there drifted down a thin, bereft, heartbroken sound, the weeping of a slave girl who had lost her first-born in the night.

It was a good performance. It was the best that Phoebe would ever give. The kitchen servants who crept out to the garden to watch the burying wept with her, and said that it was a cruel mercy, a stillborn child on the very night of the mistress's labour, and brought her barley soup and a clean blanket. Not one of them thought to ask why the Greek girl's grief had no weight of surprise in it. Not one of them wondered what was in the bundle.

The linen held a stone, a lump of wet clay, and a few handfuls of earth.

Lucrezia patted down the soil. She stood up, wiping her hands on her skirt, and for a long time she looked at the small raw mound beneath the fig tree, her lips moving soundlessly. Then she turned and went back into the house, and did not speak of the matter again until the day she died.

…

Servius came home at the third hour, grey-faced and sour-breathed and trailing a wreath of crushed roses, smelling of Pollio's cellar and somebody else's perfume.

He burst into the chamber with his arms flung wide and his mouth already open to roar for a son. Claudia was waiting. She had made certain of it. She lay propped on a nest of cushions in the great bed, in a fresh white gown, her hair combed and plaited, her face pale and drawn and exquisitely touched with tears, with the baby sleeping in the crook of her arm and the old nurse hovering behind her with a basin. Everything was exactly as it should be. She had spent an hour arranging it.

"A girl," said Servius.

His voice fell flat in the room like a dropped plate.

"A girl, my lord," Claudia whispered. A tear slid down her cheek. "Oh, Servius, forgive me. I know how you hoped… I prayed to Juno all night. I begged her. But the gods…"

She faltered, and turned her face into the pillow.

For a moment the old man simply stood with his arms hanging, staring at the pink wrinkled bundle with the expression of a merchant who has been sold a cask of water for wine. His jaw moved. His squinting eyes travelled over the little face, the light fuzz of fair hair, the pale fine skin, and the veins began to stand out on his purple forehead, and Claudia, with her face half buried in the linen, held her breath.

Then he looked at the baby again.

Fair, she thought, with a sudden fierce clarity. Fair as milk. He sees what he expects to see. He sees a Tullo.

And she watched his face change.

It was a slow, ugly, almost comical thing, like a man waking from a bad dream into a good one. The black fury drained out of it. The jaw slackened. Something else came creeping up in its place, a thick slow gloating satisfaction, and a hand like a ham reached down and, with astonishing gentleness, lifted one of the tiny fingers.

"Well," he said. "Well, well, well."

"Servius?"

"She's got my chin." He peered closer. "Look at that. Look at the set of the mouth. Born obstinate, this one. A Tullo, through and through." He gave a gurgling laugh. "Who needs a son? The Metelli have done well enough with daughters. A pretty girl is a bridge, my dear, a bridge! She'll marry a consul, mark me. A consul or a praetor. We shall have a grandson in the Senate before I am cold." He bent and kissed Claudia noisily on the forehead, and she smelled the wine and the roses and the stale sweat of his body. "Livia. We'll call her Livia. After my mother. That was a woman. Eh? Livia Tullia. Has a ring to it."

"It is a beautiful name, my lord."

"And no more of your tears. There'll be a son next year. You see if I'm not right. We'll get to work on it as soon as the doctor allows."

"Yes, Servius," said Claudia.

He departed in a gust of triumph, bellowing for wine. The door slammed. And in the silence Claudia sat looking at the infant in her arm, who had woken and was regarding her with solemn grey-blue eyes, bright and wet and blank as a pool, and thought: There. It is done. You have lied to a Senator with the face of another woman's child, and he kissed your forehead.

The baby yawned. Her tiny fingers curled round the edge of the sheet.

Phoebe, standing quietly against the wall with her swollen eyes lowered, did not move. But Claudia saw her hands twist together in the folds of her apron until the knuckles went white as bone.

…

The cart left the villa at noon.

It was a laundry cart, a big shabby two-wheeled affair, piled with wicker hampers and bundles of soiled linen from the lady's lying-in, and it rolled out of the service gate in the sun-drenched heat beside a sleepy mule-driver and a spare, grey, balding gentleman in a clerk's plain tunic, who rode on the tail with his hat pulled over his eyes. No one looked twice. A laundry cart left the Tullo house every week. There was nothing remarkable in it at all.

Claudia had seen to the packing herself.

She had risen from her bed in defiance of Lucrezia's pleading, wrapped in a shawl, her knees shaking, and made her way down the back stair to the dim storeroom where Quintus waited with the largest of the hampers. The boy lay inside, in a nest of clean linen, asleep. He was a day old. He looked tiny in the great wicker basket, and utterly peaceful, one dark fist curled by his cheek.

Beside him she laid a small leather purse heavy with gold aurei. She laid a folded tablet, sealed, addressed in her clear hand to Gnaeus Rufus, veteran of the Fourth Legion and sometime trainer of gladiators, who kept a modest training-school outside the walls of Capua and whose name Quintus had found, after months of patient inquiry, in the records of the Praetorian clerks. The bearer of this letter brings a foundling, she had written, with a steady hand. He is to be raised as your own foster-child, an alumnus, in your house. He is to be given letters and a trade. He is to be taught to fight, and taught it well, and taught to survive, for the world will be hard to him, and the harder he is, the better he will live. He is never to be told his origins. He is never to be told of me. The enclosed sum will be repeated every year, in this hand, so long as these conditions are kept.

She had read it three times. She had signed it with no name.

And then, last of all, with fingers that would not cease to tremble, she drew from the bosom of her gown a fine silver chain, and from the chain a small curved fragment of ebony bound in copper, the lower half of a broken sun, warm from her skin. She had worn it every day for ten months. She had slept with it against her heart. She had held it in her fist in the dark, in the hours before the arena, and in the hours after, and when the rumour of the Saturnalia had crossed the city, and when the pains had begun. It was the only thing she possessed that he had ever given her.

Keep it where no one will find it, he had said.

She bent and slipped the little moon of wood into the swaddling at the child's breast, tucking it deep into the fold where the cloth was thickest, and sewed it down with three quick stitches of black thread. It lay against his heart. It was no bigger than a coin. And he slept on, with the full pale light of noon through the storeroom window across his cheek, and did not stir.

"Rufus must not take it from him," she said. Her voice was almost inaudible. "When he is old enough, he must wear it. Let him think it a toy. A trinket. But he must never be without it."

"It shall be done, lady," said Quintus quietly.

"Go."

The clerk closed the lid.

…

She watched the cart from the terrace.

It was the highest point of the villa, a long marble balcony on the western face of the Palatine, where on summer evenings the Senator liked to take his wine and look down on the city spread out in the haze beneath him: the red roofs, the white temples, the shining coil of the Tiber, the dark mass of the Circus Maximus like a sleeping beast. She had no business there. She stood in the shadow of a column, in her nightgown and a shawl, with her arms wrapped about her, swaying slightly, and watched a small brown speck move along the road below.

It was almost invisible. It crept along the ribbon of the Via Appia among the carts and the mules and the swarming crowds, no bigger than a beetle, no brighter than a stone. It passed the gate of Capena. It passed the great tomb of the Scipios. It dwindled, and shrank, and she lost it in a glitter of heat, and found it again, a speck, a dot, a grain of dust on the long white road that ran south into the shimmering plain.

She stood quite still, her hands clenched in her shawl, and watched until there was nothing more to see.

Then her knees gave way.

She sank down behind the column on the hot marble, and drew her shawl about her face, and made a sound that she had not made in six years. It was a small sound. It was almost silent. A thin broken keening, like the cry of a wounded animal that does not wish to be found, and it went on for a long time, rising and falling, with her forehead pressed hard against the stone and her whole body shaking in dry, tearless, terrible spasms, as though something were being torn out of her by the roots. She bit her fist. She pressed the other hand over her belly, where nothing was any longer. And the sun burned down on the white marble, and the cicadas screamed in the cypress trees, and the city roared on below her, going about its business, never knowing what it had lost.

She could not have said how long it lasted. A minute. An hour.

But when at last Lucrezia came out through the arch, stumbling, wheezing, with a bowl of broth in her hands and terror on her face, she found her mistress standing at the balustrade with her back straight and her head high. Her hair was smooth. Her shawl hung in tidy folds. The face she turned toward the old woman was calm and white and perfectly composed, with eyes as dry and clear as polished stone, and a small, gentle, faintly regretful smile, as of a lady who has stepped out for a breath of air.

"Is it time for the broth?" said Claudia Marcellina. "How kind you are, Lucrezia. I am quite well."