The Daughter of Another

"There is no thief so careful as the one who has stolen a child; she must love it twice, once for the child and once for the lie."

Livia Tullia laughed as other children breathe, without noticing, and the whole cold house of the Tullo turned toward the sound like a field of flowers toward the sun.

She was eight years old that summer, and the most delightful creature on the Palatine. Everyone said so, from the old steward who had dandled her on his knee to the dour Egyptian porter who permitted her, against all regulation, to ride the great bronze gate as it swung open each morning, and the praetor's wife who called every week in her litter, with a basket of figs and a pretext, in the hope of a glimpse of that bright small head. She was a slender, long-legged girl with hair the colour of ripe wheat, which no ribbon could keep in order, and a pair of wide pale-blue eyes set in a face so open and so guileless that strangers stopped in the street to look at it. She sang. She climbed. She talked to the peacocks in the garden in a language of her own invention, and conducted lengthy and solemn negotiations with the household cats, and had once brought a half-drowned sparrow in from the rain and nursed it for three weeks on soaked bread and sugar-water in a basket by her bed, sitting up at night to keep it warm, only to weep as though her heart would break when at last it flew away.

Claudia watched her from the window of the library, with a scroll of accounts forgotten in her hand.

She had never been able to say, precisely, when it had happened. It had not come at the birth, nor in the first white-hot months of the nursery, when she had sat beside the cradle in the early hours and looked at the tiny sleeping face with a feeling that was part terror, part distaste, part something she dared not name. It had come slowly, by degrees, like the creeping of the tide up a flat beach; a little more each year, until she woke one morning and found it lapping at her knees. Somewhere in the long routine of baths and tutors and quarrels about hair-ribbons, the child that she had stolen had put out a small warm hand and taken hold of her heart.

It was a monstrous thing. She knew that. She knew precisely what she had done, and why, and how it must end. But there it was.

"Mother!"

The shout rang across the garden. Livia had seen her at the window and was waving with both arms, her bare feet planted in the fountain, her hem soaked to the knee, her whole small body vibrating with the joy of having a new idea. "Mother, come and see! The frog has learned to sit in the water-lily! He's quite tame!"

"I shall come when you have put your shoes on!" Claudia called back.

"They're drowned!"

"Then I shall come when you have found them!"

The girl shrieked with laughter and plunged away through the box hedge, and Claudia, who had not meant to smile, found that she was smiling. She put down the scroll. She stood a moment at the window with her palm against the sunlit glass. And then, as she had done almost every day for eight years, she thought of another child, in another garden, under another sun, and the smile went out of her face like a lamp being turned down.

…

There was a bench by the north wall of the garden, in the shade of an old fig tree, and on summer afternoons it belonged to Phoebe.

It had been her place for as long as anyone could remember. She sat there with her spindle in her lap, and a basket of wool at her feet, in a plain linen gown with a freedwoman's cap on her fair head, and watched the child at play with a patient, bright, motionless attention that never wavered. She had been freed, as promised, on the morning Livia was weaned. Claudia had put the document into her hands herself, in the empty library, with the Senator's seal on it and her own beneath; had bought back the lame Thracian stableman from the slave-dealer at a ruinous price; and had given them, in the hills beyond Veii, a small farm with a stone house and an orchard of pears. They had taken it. They had gone out to it, on a clear spring day, in a hired cart, with their bundles. And three days later Phoebe had walked back into the villa, alone, through the kitchen door, with her cap in her hand, and asked the steward, with a face of stone, whether the lady required a governess.

Claudia had not had the heart to refuse her. In truth, she had not wished to. She had known what the girl was asking, and she had known that she had no right to say no.

So Phoebe lived in a little white room above the stable and went out on Sundays to the farm, where Eumolpus waited for her in the pear orchard, and for the rest of the week she belonged to the child. She sang to her in Greek. She taught her to spin and to count, to tell the hours by the shadow of the sundial, to read the weather in the clouds. She slept on a pallet beside the nursery bed through every fever and every nightmare. And every day, for eight years, she had looked at her mistress across the head of the golden child with a gaze that held neither complaint nor hatred nor even reproach, but a plain bleak knowledge, unspoken and unforgotten, as a scar knows the knife.

They had never spoken of it. They had not needed to.

That afternoon, as Claudia came down the garden path with her shawl over her arm, she found the Greek woman alone on the bench with her spindle motionless in her lap, staring at the fountain. Livia had vanished somewhere into the shrubbery. The air hummed with bees. Claudia hesitated, then sat down beside her on the warm stone, a little distance away, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

"She is growing very fast," Phoebe said at last.

"Yes."

"She will want a new tunic by the Ides. And her sandals are small."

"I will see to it."

"She asked me yesterday why the moon follows her." There was a tiny dry flicker at the corner of Phoebe's mouth, there and gone. "I told her it was because it was fond of her. She said she thought it was a very silly moon."

Claudia laughed. It surprised her, how it hurt.

"You have kept your word, lady," Phoebe said, in the same quiet tone, still looking at the fountain. "I will say that for you. In eight years I have never gone hungry, and she has never been struck, and no one has ever called her slave. I have nothing to complain of."

"And yet."

"And yet I have not forgiven you." The Greek woman turned her head, and the pale grey eyes, steady and unreadable, met Claudia's. "I want you to know that. Not because I wish to hurt you. Only so that there is no misunderstanding between us. I would not like you to think that gratitude had bought what it could not buy."

"I would never think so."

"No. I did not believe you would." Phoebe looked down at the spindle. She turned it slowly between her thumb and finger. "May I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"The boy." Her voice did not change. "Is he alive?"

The garden seemed to go very still. A bee drifted by with a drowsy hum. Claudia sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking at the rose-coloured dust on the path, and for a space of three heartbeats she was entirely unable to speak.

"Yes," she said.

"Is he well?"

"He is strong. He is... very strong."

"Does he know whose son he is?"

"No."

"Does he know that he has a mother?"

"No."

Phoebe nodded slowly. She took up the spindle again and gave it a twist, and the thread ran out from her fingers, thin and pale and unbroken, while the whorl spun and swung and gleamed in the green light.

"Then I think," she said, very gently, "that you are a good deal lonelier than I am."

Claudia did not answer. She could not. There were no words in her. She sat beside the woman whose child she had taken, in the hum of the summer afternoon, and watched the thread lengthen, and understood that she had just been given something, perhaps the only gift that Phoebe would ever make her. It had been given without warmth, and without malice, and it hurt like a clean cut. It was the knowledge that she was not alone in her grief, nor in her guilt, and that the woman who shared it with her would never, in all the years to come, say a word.

…

The question came on a night in September.

It was warm still, and very clear, and a bright round moon stood over the Palatine, so that the marble of the courtyard shone like milk. Servius had gone out to dine with Pollio, and the house lay silent. Claudia was sitting at her dressing table in her nightgown, with the lamps lit and her hair loose about her shoulders, drawing the silver comb through the long dark curls, when the door opened softly and a small figure in a white shift slipped into the room and climbed up beside her on the stool.

"I couldn't sleep," said Livia.

"I see that." Claudia put down the comb. "Have you been to Phoebe?"

"She's asleep. She snores." The child tucked her bare feet up beneath her and rested her chin on her knees, regarding her mother with solemn blue eyes. "Can I stay with you? Just till I'm sleepy?"

"Only if you promise to be quiet."

"I promise." She was quiet for almost half a minute. Then she leaned toward the polished bronze mirror, and propped her elbows on the table, and studied the two faces looking back at her from its shining surface, one pale and dark and exquisite, the other small and round and golden, framed by the lamp's soft halo.

"Mother," said Livia thoughtfully.

"Yes, little one?"

"Why don't I look like you?"

The comb, which Claudia had been about to lift again, remained where it lay.

It was the quietest of questions. It came with no more weight than a child's idle remark upon the colour of a flower. But in the silence of the lamplit room it dropped like a stone, and Claudia felt every nerve in her body draw tight. In the mirror, over the child's shoulder, her own reflection had not altered by a hair. The face was calm, the eyes warm, the mouth soft; and yet she saw it as another person might see it, a stranger standing at the edge of a cliff.

"What do you mean, my darling?"

"I mean that you have dark hair, and I have gold. And your eyes are brown like the earth, and mine are blue like the plates in the dining room. And Father is brown and fat, and I'm not." Livia screwed up her small face in earnest thought. "I'm not like either of you. Not even a little. Marcia says that children always look like their mothers, or their fathers, or both. She says her baby brother is exactly like her uncle Gaius, only smaller. But I don't look like anybody."

Marcia, thought Claudia. The praetor's daughter. Two doors along. I shall speak to her mother.

She turned on the stool, slowly, and took the girl's chin between her thumb and finger. The skin was soft and cool. The wide blue eyes looked up at her with perfect trust. And Claudia smiled.

It was a lovely smile. It was warm, and amused, and tender, and entirely natural. It was the smile of a mother indulging a charming fancy, and she produced it as easily as she would have drawn breath, and watched it spread across the child's face in the mirror like a reflection upon water.

"Oh, my sweet," she said softly. "Did no one ever tell you about your great-grandmother?"

"No."

"She was a princess. A princess of the Treveri, in the forests of the north, where the winters are long and all the people have hair like the sun. When Caesar conquered Gaul, my great-grandfather, who was a young tribune in his army, saw her on the walls of her father's city and fell so madly in love that he carried her off to Rome on his own saddle." Claudia let her voice drop, conspiratorially. "She wept for a month. And then she laughed, and she never stopped. She had hair like spun gold, and eyes the colour of cornflowers, and a voice that made the wild birds come down out of the trees. Every portrait that was ever painted of her is in my father's house at Tusculum." She touched the tip of the child's nose. "It's a very old secret, you know. Very rare. It sleeps in the blood for a hundred years, and then, one day, it wakes up. And it chose you."

The blue eyes grew round.

"Really?" breathed Livia.

"Really."

"Like a princess?"

"Exactly like a princess."

"Oh!" The child threw her arms around Claudia's neck and clung there, shaking with delighted laughter. "Oh, I knew it! I knew there was a reason! I'll tell Marcia tomorrow. She'll be sick with envy." She drew back, glowing, and pressed a damp kiss to her mother's cheek. "You do tell the best stories, Mother. You tell them so beautifully that they must be true."

Claudia stroked the golden hair back from her forehead and held her close, and was still smiling when she raised her eyes to the mirror and saw, in the shadows by the door, the figure of the freedwoman Phoebe, standing quite motionless in her night-robe with a lamp in her hand.

She had come, no doubt, to carry the child back to bed. She did not move. She did not speak. Her fair head was lowered, her face half hidden, but the lamp trembled very slightly in her hand, and her knuckles on the handle had gone the colour of bone.

So smoothly, thought Claudia. So prettily. Oh, you have grown very good at this.

She went on stroking Livia's hair. And for the first time in her life, the lie that tasted of sugar seemed to leave a faint, metallic, bitter taste behind it, like a coin held too long upon the tongue.