The Wedding of Strangers

"At every wedding there is a guest who weeps for the wrong reason, and a mother who smiles for the same one."

They were married on the day after the Ides of June, when the unlucky days were past and the whole of Rome smelled of roses.

It was a wedding such as the Palatine had not seen in a generation. The old women said so, and the young ones, and the wine-sellers in the Forum, who had been doing a roaring trade since the first of the month; and for once the old women were right. Claudia had spared nothing. She had ordered a hundred and fifty Greek lamps for the atrium, and four hundred garlands of myrtle and white lilies from the nurseries of Tusculum. She had hired three troupes of flute-players and a choir of boys from the temple of Apollo, a Syrian fire-eater, and an Egyptian who made doves appear from the folds of his sleeve. She had sent invitations, in her own hand, to the Consul and both Praetors and the entire Senate, and to a number of persons who owed her money, and every one of them had come.

There was a reason for the expense. A wedding is a message, and she meant this one to be read from the Forum to the frontier. It said that the house of Tullo had not fallen with its master. It said that the widow of Servius was stronger than the Senator had ever been. It said that the dark young tribune who walked at the bridegroom's side in the white toga of a patrician, with his scarred jaw and his level black eyes, belonged to Rome now, to the oldest bloodlines and the first families, and that anyone who thought otherwise had better have a sharp sword and a short will. And it said all of this in the loveliest possible way, in lilies and music and honeyed cakes, so that the guests who read it smiled and drank and congratulated each other on being invited.

She had been awake since four. She stood now in the doorway of the bride's chamber, in a gown of deep violet silk and a necklace of Indian pearls, and watched the women do their work.

…

In the sunlit room, on a stool with a cushion, in a plain white tunic bound with a girdle knotted in the Herculean knot, Livia sat very still.

She was eighteen, and as lovely as an April morning. Her hair, which had been oiled and combed and parted into six locks by the point of a bent iron spear, according to the ancient rite, lay in thick gold braids against her neck. Her eyes, wide and clear and blue as larkspur, were fixed on the opposite wall with the glassy brightness of a child who is trying hard not to be afraid. She had not spoken for some time. Her hands, folded in her lap, were trembling very faintly, and Claudia, watching from the door, knew that if she looked in the girl's face she would see nothing but eagerness, and that if she looked in her heart she would see a great deal more.

They had told her six weeks before. She had taken it in silence. She had sat on the edge of the fountain with her hands pressed between her knees and listened to the story of her father's will and her duty to the Tullo name, and when it was over she had said, in a small voice, "Is he cruel?"

"I do not think so," Claudia had answered.

"Is he kind?"

"I do not know."

"Is he handsome?"

Claudia had thought of the scar, the broken nose, the black brooding eyes. "Yes," she said slowly. "In a certain way."

Livia had nodded. Then she had lifted her chin, in a small gallant gesture that had made Claudia's throat tighten, and said, "Then I will try to be good to him, Mother. I will try very hard."

She had tried. That was the astonishing thing. In the six weeks that followed she had walked in the garden with her young tribune every afternoon, under the careful chaperonage of a pair of elderly aunts, and had chattered at him like a brook over stones. She had asked him about the legions, and the sea, and what it was like to be on a horse at full gallop. She had asked him if he had ever been afraid, and he had said, "Not often." She had asked him what he was afraid of. He had thought for a long time, and said, "Being kept." She had not understood, and had not pursued it, but she had thought about it for a day afterwards, and the next afternoon she had brought him a bowl of cherries, and a book of Greek poems, and a very serious expression.

On the twentieth day Claudia, passing along the colonnade, had seen the two of them seated on the stone bench under the fig tree. Livia was holding something in her cupped hands. She had turned it to the light, and her face had lit with a sudden delight.

"It's a sun," she was saying. "Look, you can see the rays! And that's where it was broken. Oh, Cassian, how funny. Do you think there was a whole one once?"

"I don't know."

"Then we should find it," said Livia, with absolute conviction. "Don't you think? It would be so dreadful to be half. I'd like to find the other half and put them together and see what it looked like." She glanced up at him shyly. "Would you mind?"

He had looked at her for a long time. The scarred, brooding face had softened by the smallest degree, a thaw, almost invisible, like the first loosening of ice on a river.

"No," he said slowly. "I would not mind."

Claudia had walked on. She had not stopped, or looked back, or allowed her step to falter. But she had gone straight to the library, and shut the door, and stood for half an hour with her forehead against the cool wood, and had not known whether she wanted to laugh or be sick.

…

"The veil, lady."

Phoebe's voice was low and unsteady. She stood behind the stool with the bridal veil folded over her arm, a great gauzy square of flame-coloured silk, the flammeum, and her face above it was the colour of tallow. She had hardly spoken all morning. She had dressed Livia in silence, combing and plaiting with hands that never wavered, and she had looped the wreath of marjoram and orange blossom about the golden head as carefully as if she were setting a jewel. Only now, as she lifted the veil, did Claudia see how her fingers shook.

"Let me," said Claudia.

She crossed the floor. She took the veil from the freedwoman's hands. And as she did, her eyes met Phoebe's, and she saw what she had never seen before in that quiet face, something stark and terrible and entirely without reproach, that made the breath stop in her chest.

Phoebe was looking at the window. Through the open shutters, on the sunlit terrace below, a tall young man in a white toga stood talking to an elderly veteran in a faded legion tunic, with a wooden stick in his hand and a face like a walnut. The young man had his head bent, listening. As they watched, he laughed, a short rough sound they could hear across the courtyard. It transformed his whole face.

"I held him," Phoebe whispered. "For a moment. Before you took him. When you had gone to the basin, and Lucrezia was at the door. I took him from the basket and I held him against my breast. He looked up at me." Her voice was barely audible. "He had black eyes. Black as a well. I have never forgotten."

"Phoebe—"

"I did not tell you that. I never told anyone." The grey eyes turned slowly from the window to Claudia's face. "I watch him now, across the garden, and I think: that is the boy. That is the boy I held. And I look at her, and I think: that is the girl I bore. And I think: she has married my daughter to your son. She has taken the two children she stole from two different mothers and put them in a bed together." A terrible little smile moved her lips. "It is a very clever thing. I almost admire it."

"They have no blood in common."

"No. Only the lie."

"Phoebe, I swear to you—"

"Do they love each other?"

The question was so quiet, so simple, so unexpected, that for a moment Claudia could say nothing at all.

"I do not know," she said at last, honestly. "I think… I think they may."

Phoebe closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the strange small smile had gone. In its place was a look of such weary, bottomless sorrow that Claudia flinched.

"Then may the gods help them both," the Greek woman said softly, "when it comes out."

She turned and went to the stool, and lifted the flame-coloured veil from Claudia's hands, and settled it over the golden head as gently as a mother covers a sleeping child.

…

The ceremony was held in the garden under the old fig tree, in the golden light of late afternoon, with the whole of the Roman nobility standing about on the lawns in white and purple and saffron, like a great flock of exotic birds.

The auspices were declared favourable. The pig was sacrificed, and the entrails examined, and the omen pronounced good. The marriage contract was signed on a wax tablet with twelve seals. Then Claudia, who as the bride's guardian was to stand in the old office of the pronuba, the woman who joins the hands of the wedded, came forward across the grass with her violet silk whispering round her ankles, and stood between them.

Livia was a vision of white and flame. She stood very straight, the orange blossom trembling in her hair, her face veiled to the chin in bright silk, so that only her eyes could be seen: great and blue and shining with a naked, hopeful, trembling light. Beside her, Cassian looked like a statue. His toga hung in perfect folds. His shoulders were squared, his face composed, his bronze skin rich against the white cloth, and at the base of his throat, just visible above the folded edge of the fabric, there hung a thin leather cord, which he had refused all morning to remove.

Claudia took the girl's right hand in her own.

It was small, and slender, and cool, and shaking. She laid it in the palm of the man's. His fingers closed over it, big and hard and scarred across the knuckles, and for the briefest of instants she felt the heat of his skin against the back of her own hand, the same fierce dry heat that had once burned in a dungeon, and she thought: I am holding my son's hand. I am holding my son's hand, and I am giving it to a girl I stole. The lilies smelled of death. The choir of boys began to sing, high and sweet and pure, and the sunlight poured down through the leaves of the fig tree in long gold dappled bars across the faces of the three of them.

"Be fruitful," Claudia said. Her voice shook, a very little. "Be faithful. Be happy."

She had not meant to say the last word. It slipped out of her.

Cassian's black eyes lifted to hers. There was a question in them, brief and puzzled and strangely gentle. She held his gaze for the length of a breath. Then she stepped back, and the guests broke into applause, and the flute-players struck up the nuptial song, and the dancers came running over the lawns with torches and handfuls of nuts.

"Io Hymen Hymenaee!"

…

At the banquet, among the long tables heaped with roast peacock and honeyed dormice and pyramids of crystallised fruit, an old man in a faded tunic came and stood beside her.

He did not sit. He had never sat easily in the company of the great. He stood with his weight on a battered stick, a short, thick, bow-legged figure with a face like weathered oak and a nose that had been broken in a dozen brawls, holding a cup of watered wine in a hand like a grappling hook, and for some time he said nothing at all. She did not need to ask who he was. She had been writing to him for eighteen years.

"Gnaeus Rufus," said Claudia.

"Lady." He bowed, stiffly, from the neck. "I did not like to come. But the boy asked."

"I am glad you did."

"I am an old man. I speak plain." His shrewd little eyes slid sideways, and fixed on the head table, where Cassian and his bride sat side by side among the flowers, not touching, with their eyes carefully averted from one another and their hands twisting under the cloth. "I never asked, all these years. Whose he was. What the gold was for. A man learns not to, in my trade. It's safer. But I'm not a fool, lady, and I've eyes in my head." He took a swig of wine. "I looked at you across the grass, just now, while you joined their hands. And I've been trying to think, ever since, where I'd seen that look."

Claudia said nothing.

"On a sergeant's face, I think," said Rufus, slowly, "the day his own lad was sent into the line." He turned his face aside, and spat delicately into the grass. "That's all. That's all I'm saying. You raised a good boy, lady. Or I did. I never know which."

He bowed again, awkwardly, and moved off through the crowd with his stick tapping on the flags.

She stood a long time looking after him, with her cup untouched in her hand.

…

Dusk fell. The lamps were lit, and the garden filled with the soft gold light of a hundred and fifty small flames. The dancers whirled. The musicians played. The wine flowed. Somewhere beyond the hedges a drunken praetor was singing a very rude song about a goat, and the guests laughed and clapped. The tables were cleared and the cushions strewn and the long procession formed, as it must, to lead the bride to her husband's door.

And at the head of the great table, with the torchlight dancing on her face, Claudia Marcellina rose to her feet and lifted her cup.

The hall fell quiet. Every eye turned toward her.

She stood tall and still in her violet silk, with the pearls glimmering at her throat, and looked slowly down the long table at her guests. She saw the Consul and the Praetors. She saw General Marcus, who raised his cup to her with a worshipful leer. She saw Decimus Tullo, sulking, on the farthest bench. She saw the gleam of the lamps on a hundred jewelled collars, the flushed laughing faces, the slaves moving noiselessly behind the couches with their ewers of wine. She had held this hall in the palm of her hand for four months. She held it still. And then her gaze came to rest at last on the two seated before her, side by side, the tall dark young man with the scarred jaw and the slender fair girl in the flame-coloured veil, who were looking up at her, both of them, with identical expressions of expectation and unease.

One was her own flesh. One was a piece she had taken from a slave's arms in the dark.

She looked from the one to the other. She looked at the lamplight on their faces. And Claudia smiled.

It was a small smile. It was neither bright nor brittle, neither false nor wholly true. No one in that glittering hall, not the Consul, nor the Praetors, nor the grey old men who had learned to read faces in the Senate House, could have said what it meant. Only the freedwoman Phoebe, standing against a pillar in the shadows with her hands knotted in her apron, saw it plainly, and shut her eyes.

"To the bride and groom," said Claudia, lifting her cup. "May their house be long."