Stripped

"No one takes a crown from a woman who holds it. They wait until she has set it down to look at something else."

The Emperor died on the first of May, in the third watch of the night, without opening his eyes.

It was a small death, and the city took it quietly. For six years he had lain in the upper chamber of the old palace under his canopy of gilded eagles, a swollen yellow ruin of a man who could not speak, and for six years the machinery of the Empire had gone on turning without him, driven by a woman in a plain dark gown who sat each morning in the library of the Tullo villa and put her seal to the papers that were brought. The senators had grown used to it. They had come to speak of the Emperor's will as one speaks of the weather, as a thing that came from above and could not be questioned, and no one had been quite sure, for a long time, where the Emperor ended and the Lady Claudia began. When the bell of the Capitol tolled, thirty-three slow strokes, one for each year of his reign, a great many people in Rome crossed themselves and said, with something like relief, Now we shall see.

What they saw, on the morning of the third, was the Dux of the southern armies riding into the city at the head of six thousand men.

It was a legal march. He had a decree. He had had it drawn up in February, in the hand of the second-best jurist in Rome, and sealed with the great seal of the Republic, a document of nine paragraphs setting out in dry and impeccable Latin the powers of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in the event of a vacancy in the imperial office. It had been presented to the Senate on the last day of April. It had been read aloud, to a silent house. There had been a short, careful debate, in which a number of men had said that it was irregular, and a number of others had said that the times were irregular, and a very large number had said nothing at all and looked at their sandals. And when the vote was taken, in the dusk, by a show of hands, it had passed by three hundred and eleven to nine.

Claudia had not been in the house. She had been told that the session was a formality. She had been told so, kindly, by Senator Lucius, with his thin smile, and she had believed him, because she had believed him for twenty years.

…

She was sitting at her desk when the sound began.

It was a low, dull, rhythmic thunder, rising from the direction of the Forum, and for a moment she took it for a storm. She laid down her pen. The library was full of morning sun, and the window stood open to the garden, where the fig tree was putting out its first pale leaves and a gardener was raking the gravel. Then the thunder resolved itself into tramping, into the hard regular tread of hobnailed boots on stone, and the first brazen note of a trumpet came up the Via Sacra and was answered by another from the Palatine. She rose slowly. She went to the window and looked out, and saw, on the far side of the garden wall, the tops of the standards moving through the trees: the silver eagles, the bronze wolves, the scarlet pennants of the Fourth and the Eleventh, going by in the clear light like a procession of gods.

So, she thought. It has come.

She was not afraid. That surprised her, a little. She stood at the window with her hand on the sill, watching the standards, and examined the state of her own heart with a kind of detached curiosity, as a physician examines a stranger's pulse. It was slow, and even. It was the heart of a woman who has been told, at last, that the thing she has been dreading for six months is going to happen, and who finds the knowledge almost a relief. She had waited for it so long. She had lain in the great bed in the dark and listened for the sound of boots on the gravel; she had burned the letters she wrote to him; she had gone to the temple of Juno and sat for hours before the image of the goddess, with her hands folded and her eyes dry, not praying, only sitting. She had known what he would do. She had known it from the moment he walked out of the pavilion with the joined sun in his fist. She had made him. She knew the pattern of his mind as she knew the pattern of her own.

He will strip me of everything, she had said to Phoebe's empty chair, in the dark. He will do it cleanly, in the proper form. He will not raise his voice. And at the end he will find the thing that hurts most, and do that.

The doors of the library opened.

…

He came in with twelve men at his back.

They were Praetorians, the picked guard of the Dux, tall hard silent veterans in black-plumed helmets, and they ranged themselves along the walls of the library without a word, each with a hand on his sword-hilt and his eyes fixed on a point just above her head. Cassian walked to the middle of the floor and stopped. He was dressed in the plain red tunic of a soldier, with a bronze cuirass and a heavy dark cloak, and he wore no wreath and no ornament. His face was quite calm. She noticed that he had grown thinner, in the months since the triumph, and that the lines about the mouth had deepened, so that he seemed older than his years. He looked, she thought, exactly like his father in the arena. He had the same stillness, the same terrible controlled patience of a man who has put all that he feels into a closed box and sat on the lid.

"My lady Claudia," he said.

She inclined her head. "Dux. You do me honour."

"I have come to inform you of a decree." He drew a roll of vellum from his belt, unrolled it, and read aloud in a clear level voice, without inflection, the nine paragraphs she had known would be there. She listened with her hands folded. She heard the phrases go by. Whereas the office of Emperor is vacant. Whereas the regency of the Lady Claudia Marcellina, exercised in the name of the late Augustus, lapses upon his decease. Whereas it is judged by the Senate and People of Rome that the safety of the Republic is best secured by the concentration of the imperium in a single competent hand. He read steadily to the end, and rolled the vellum, and tucked it back into his belt.

"The regency is ended," he said. "Your seal is void. You will surrender the keys of the archive, the treasury and the correspondence of state to the officer I have appointed, who is waiting in the hall. Your household guard is dismissed. Your servants will be paid and released."

"That is a very thorough document," said Claudia.

"It was drafted with care."

"By Pomponius? He is the best of them." She smiled slightly. "I should have liked to know. I have a few suggestions about the third paragraph. You have left a clause open that a clever senator could use against you in a year or two."

"I will bear it in mind."

"Do. A little patience at the beginning saves a great deal of blood at the end." She laid her hands flat on the desk. "I assume that the Senate has been told to expect a quiet transition? That Lucius and Marcus have been assured of their seats? That you have, shall we say, made your arrangements with the Gracchan faction in the north?"

His eyes flickered, only a little.

"You see," said Claudia gently, "I taught you how to do this."

"You taught me a great deal."

"I did not teach you to do it for the reason you are doing it." The voice that had gone so even and smooth in the council chamber was suddenly quite soft, and she did not seem able to alter it. "That is something I should like to say. If you would permit me. Not to excuse myself. I do not ask you to forgive me. But I should like you to understand that what you are about to do, you are doing as I would have done. Out of grief. Out of a wish to shut a door that cannot be shut. And it will not work, Cassian. I know. I have tried it for twenty years."

"I know you have."

"Then—"

"I do not need your advice." It came out quiet, almost courteous. "I have learned a great deal from you. I do not think I need to learn anything more."

The men along the walls did not move. Outside in the garden the gardener's rake had stopped. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed, a small bright foolish sound, and fell silent.

"I understand," she said.

…

They took her through the house.

It was done correctly. There was no rope, no chain, no hand laid on her arm. The captain of the Praetorians, a grey, scarred man named Brutus who had served under Cassian in the north, walked a pace behind her and a pace to the left, as an escort walks behind a lady of rank, and she moved ahead of him with her head up and her hands at her sides. They went down the long gallery, past the busts of the ancestors in their niches, and the tall windows hung with old tapestries. They went across the atrium, where the fountain splashed in its basin of white marble and the sunlight lay in a bright square on the mosaic of the Judgement of Paris. Servants had gathered in the doorways to watch, in their coarse tunics, with their hands over their mouths; a very old cook was weeping openly; a little girl had been held up on her mother's hip. She nodded to them as she passed. She had known most of them for twenty years. She wished suddenly that she had learned their names.

Livia was standing at the foot of the stair.

She wore a white gown, and her hair was loose. She had clearly just risen from her bed, or had never been in it. Her face was bloodless, her blue eyes enormous. She stood quite still with one hand on the banister and the other pressed against her side, and she looked at Claudia as they came across the hall, and her lips parted, and for a moment nothing came out of them.

"Mother," she said.

It was a thin, shaking whisper. She said it again, louder, running forward, and a Praetorian put out an arm, and she stopped. "Mother, what are they doing? Where are they taking you?"

"It is all right, my dear."

"It is not all right! They have swords, they—" She whirled on the captain. "Let her go! In the name of the gods, let her go, she has done nothing, she is my mother, she—"

"Livia."

It was Cassian's voice. He had come out of the library behind them, and stood in the shadow of the gallery with his hands at his sides. He said her name quietly, and she turned, and her face as she looked at him was the most terrible thing that Claudia had ever seen. It was not hatred. It was something much worse. It was the look of a child who has reached up in the dark for a hand that was always there, and found nothing.

"Please," said Livia. "Whatever it is. Whatever she has done. Please do not do this."

"Go to your room."

"I will not—"

"Go to your room, Livia." His voice did not change. "It is not your affair."

For a long moment the girl stood there. Then something went out of her shoulders, a slackening, an unstringing, and she let her hand fall. She did not weep. She turned her head and looked at Claudia, and Claudia looked back, and in that brief grey instant she saw all the years go by: the cradle in the nursery with the golden curl on the pillow, the small hand in hers on the garden path, the little girl who had said Why do I not look like anyone? and had been told a story. She wanted with her whole heart to speak. She wanted to say: I am not your mother. Your mother is an old Greek woman asleep on a farm at Veii, and she loved you more than I did, and you have been the best thing in this house. But she said nothing, because the words could not be said in that hall, before those men, and because Cassian was watching, and because it was too late.

"Be good to him," she said instead. "He will need you."

Livia put her hands to her face.

…

It was the captain who asked where she was to be taken.

They had come out into the small cloistered court behind the kitchens, where a few lemon-trees stood in tubs, and an old stone well, and a low door under an arch. It was a place she had walked past every day for twenty years. Brutus stopped and looked back over his shoulder, and Cassian, who had come down the steps behind them, came up and stood at her side.

"There is a cellar," he said. "Under the east wing. It was used by the old Senator."

"I know it, sir," said Brutus, in a puzzled voice. "It's been shut since he died. The gate is rusted, and the cells are full of rats—"

"Have it cleaned."

"Sir?"

"Have the floor swept and a lamp lit. A bed of straw. A blanket. Water twice a day, and bread, and whatever she asks for in the way of books." He did not look at Claudia as he spoke. His eyes were on the low door, with its heavy bar and its green stain of old damp. "She is to want for nothing. She is to see no one. No letters, no visitors. The key is to be kept by me."

Brutus hesitated. "The wife of the Dux, sir? The lady Livia? She'll—"

"By me," said Cassian.

The captain saluted, and went.

She stood in the court with the sun on her face. A lemon-blossom had fallen on her sleeve, and she looked at it, pale and waxy and sweet, and thought, quite clearly: He knows. He had known when he gave the order. He had known which cellar it was. She had told him, in the tent, with her own mouth, sitting in the lamplight with her hands knotted in her lap: in a cellar under the house of my husband. She had described the ledge. She had described the chain. And he had listened, and said nothing, and gone out; and she had never once thought, in all the long cold months of waiting, that he would remember. She had thought: He will send me to a convent. He will send me to an island. He will have me exiled, or poisoned, or strangled, quietly, in the night. She had prepared for each of these things. She had never prepared for this.

"Of course," she said softly. "Of course."

He turned his head.

She could not read his face. It was perfectly smooth, perfectly composed. But she saw that his hand, hanging at his side, had closed round something at his belt, and that the knuckles were white. She looked at it. And with a small, cold, vertiginous shock, she saw what it was: not a weapon, but a loop of faded blue ribbon, with a key on the end of it, an old iron key, rusted at the bow, that had hung for twenty years in a jewel-box in her chamber.

"You took it," she said.

"I have had it since the night of the triumph." His voice was quite flat. "I thought I might have need of it."

"You were very sure of yourself."

"No." He looked at the key in his palm. "I wasn't. I thought of using it a hundred times. I thought, I'll go down there myself, and I took it out and looked at it. But I could not. I could not bring myself to see the place." He raised his eyes to hers at last, and she saw that they were quite dry, and quite terrible, and that behind them, a very long way back, like a figure at the bottom of a well, something small and wounded and furious was still looking out. "He sat there for ten weeks. Didn't he? On that stone. While you stood over him with a whip."

"Yes."

"I should like to see what he saw."

"Cassian—"

"You will want to say that you did it all for me." His mouth twisted. "You may say it in the dark. You will have a great deal of time."

He turned from her and went to the door. Brutus's men had already drawn the bar. It swung inward, with a long low groan, on a darkness that smelled of wet stone and old iron and the faint sweet ghost of rotting straw. A breath of cold air came out and touched her face. It stirred the hem of her gown. She stood in the sunlight of the little court with the lemon-blossom on her sleeve, and looked down the narrow stair into the dark, and a drop of water fell somewhere far below her, slow and even and endless, and she did not need to count.

It has been twenty years, she thought.

She put her foot on the first step.