The Blessing Stone (30 page)

The closing words were spoken by an elderly man among them whom they addressed as Peter, which sounded strange to Amelia, for they were speaking Latin and therefore calling him Rock. She had never heard a man called Rock before. When asked why he had such a strange name, Rachel replied, “Because he is Simon the Rock, which refers to his steadfastness and loyalty. He was our Lord’s first disciple.”

Peter did not resemble his namesake. Small and old and frail, he had to be helped to the couch where he began to speak in a voice as soft as feathers. He first praised God and then spoke on the holiness of life. Much of it held little meaning for Lady Amelia, who listened politely to such exhortations as: “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. Once you were not a people but now you are the people of God,” and “The end of all things is near, therefore live your lives as strangers here in fear.”

Finally there was a collection of money, some of which would be shared among the poor of Rome, the rest to be sent to needy Christian communities in the empire. When everyone was preparing to leave, Rachel asked Amelia to stay, for she was anxious to hear her friend’s thoughts. But Amelia had to confess that she did not understand this new belief, nor could she accept that the world was about to end. “Thank you, my dear friend, for including me today. But this is not for me. I have not the faith that you require among your members. Nor do I feel that your redeemer would interest himself in me.” She stopped suddenly.

The frail old apostle named Peter was preparing to lead the group in a final prayer, and before Amelia’s astonished eyes he rose to his feet, held out his arms and began to recite, “Blessed Father in Heaven…”

She stared in shock at the outstretched arms and remembered the prophecy of the Bird Reader. Was
this
the man foretold?

The heat of summer was upon them and so Rachel was preparing the peristyle garden for the Sabbath meeting. The group had grown in numbers and she could no longer keep the feast to three sets of three couches. Now the guests sat on the ground or on benches and ate from bread trenchers that she passed around. Since they had no formal place of worship, no temple or synagogue, but met in private homes, they called their group an
ecclesia,
a Greek word that meant “summoned to assembly” and that future generations would call a church. Rachel’s house was now a house-church, as was Chloe’s home in Corinth, Nympha’s in Laodicea, and so forth. And all the scattered house-churches together were starting to be called the Universal Church.

The Christian faith was growing so rapidly that Rachel was now almost daily performing baptisms in the fountain in her peristyle garden with its little statue of Bacchus on top spouting water upon the Christian converts. She carried out the ritual the way her cousin Chloe had taught her, who had learned it from the missionary Paul, who had learned it from Peter in Jerusalem. There was comfort in the ritual and in the unbroken chain, for Jesus himself had been thus baptized in the Jordan River, and now, nearly forty years later, his followers were doing the same. Rachel had yet, however, to baptize her best friend.

She looked over at Amelia, whose contribution to the communal meal was small loaves, baked with her own hands and stamped with the cross of Hermes.

Amelia had no idea how hard Rachel prayed for her. And it was no longer just to bring her friend into the joyous fold of Jesus the Christ, but a more urgent reason fueled Rachel’s prayers: literally the saving of Amelia’s immortal soul. Rachel’s own conversion had occurred back in January, on a rainy day that she would never forget, when she had heard the glorious message from Palestine—that the long awaited savior of the Jews had come at last, and that when he came again, people were going to be reunited with the deceased, for as Paul promised, death was only sleep, a “night between two days,” and that those baptized in the Lord’s name would live again. Peter had laid his knobby old hands on Rachel’s head and she had felt an instant lifting of her grief. She wished the same joy for Amelia.

When Solomon died, it was Amelia who had been Rachel’s mainstay and empathizer, coming to the house in all weathers, with words or silence, depending upon Rachel’s mood at the time, but always there, sharing the grief and the burden of being suddenly alone in the world. Many times in those dark days Rachel had wondered if she would have even gotten through it all without Amelia.

And then the tables had turned. “I feel as though I am losing my soul,” Amelia had confessed one evening as dusk crept softly into the private garden. “Cornelius is draining me, Rachel, and I haven’t the strength to fight him.”

Rachel wished she could pull that necklace from Amelia’s neck and grind the poisonous blue crystal beneath her heel. But Cornelius made sure his wife wore it every day; worse, Amelia believed she deserved it. “I did commit adultery,” she said unhappily.

“Amelia, listen to me. One day the Lord came upon a group of people about to stone a woman caught in adultery. He stopped them and offered the first stone to anyone in the mob who had not themselves committed a sin. And Amelia, no one took the stone! Is Cornelius without sin?”

“It is different for him. It is different for men.”

Rachel could not argue with that, for the inequality between men and women was the same in both Roman and Jewish traditions, which placed the father or husband above the women in the house. But Jesus had preached of equality between men and women, and wasn’t Rachel herself proof? In the synagogue she must sit in a balcony, hidden behind a screen, and not take active part in the service, whereas at the Sabbath feasts in her home, celebrating the life and death and resurrection of the Lord, she was the deaconess, the one who presided over the service, the prayers, and the breaking of the communal bread. And when Jesus returned and the new kingdom of God commenced, it was going to be a new age for women as well as for men.

Rachel was not going to give up on her friend. When Jesus returned, only those who were baptized would be admitted to the new kingdom. And he was going to return soon, for Peter said the Lord had promised to come back in the lifetime of his disciples. Jesus had died over thirty years ago, those of his followers still alive were of extreme age, like Peter, who was so frail that it looked as if each breath might be his last. As Rachel tasted the stew that had been simmering since the beginning of Sabbath the night before, with morsels of lamb so tender they melted on the tongue, she vowed that no matter what it took, whatever strength she had and purpose of mind, she was going to save her friend’s soul.

Amelia hummed as she arranged the small loaves of bread on platters. Such little tasks made her feel useful. In her own home, she was no longer needed. Cornelius was spending more and more time at the imperial palace as he had become a member of Nero’s inner circle, and although Amelia had five children, one son-in-law, two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren, her house on the Aventine Hill was a strangely silent and deserted place. There was just the two boys left, Gaius, who was to receive his toga of manhood in two years and no longer a little boy and who spent most of his time with his schoolmates or his tutors and had no time for his mother; and little Lucius, who wasn’t really her son, who had his nanny and tutors and the attention of Cornelius when he was home. Amelia would roam the rooms and colonnades and gardens of their hilltop villa as if searching for something. Rachel told her that it was faith she sought but Amelia was not so sure. If it were faith she was seeking, then would she not have found it by now in this hotbed of zeal and religious fervor? At some meetings, people fell to the ground in religious fits of ecstasy, speaking gibberish or prophesying the end of days. The group prayed and sang and baptized new converts, they witnessed the Lord as their savior and pledged their souls to God. But so far none of this had touched Amelia.

She turned her attention to preparing special food for poor Japheth who, having no tongue, had difficulty eating. His tongue had been cut out by a sadistic master and he had joined Rachel’s house-church because the God of the Jews listened to silent prayer. A priest at the temple of Jupiter had demanded a fee for reciting Japheth’s prayer out loud to the god, saying, “How do you expect the god to hear you if you can’t talk?”

When Amelia handed a plate of bread to Cleander, a young slave with a clubfoot whom Rachel had recently freed, she could not help but think of her lost baby, wondering again if it had survived the rubbish heap or if she was already in the afterlife waiting to be reunited with her mother, as Jesus had promised. If only she could believe! Amelia had not joined Rachel’s group out of faith but for the friendship. She felt needed again, and part of a family: Gaspar, the freed slave with only one arm; Japheth, the tongueless mute; Chloe, the evangelist from Corinth; Phoebe, an elderly deaconess who lived here in Rome. It didn’t matter to Amelia that Jesus was many things to many people—wise man, rebel, teacher, healer, redeemer, son of God—for had not Jesus himself spoken in parables that each might interpret his message according to his own belief? Amelia saw Jesus as a teacher of a moral life. She saw no divinity in him, no miraculous powers, with perhaps one exception: his message had brought happiness back into her life.
That
was a miracle.

She wondered if Cornelius had noticed the change in her. And if he thought about her at all, what did he suppose she was up to? Did he picture her and Rachel sitting like two contented hens comparing grandchildren and complaining about current hairstyles? He could not possibly imagine the weekly assemblage Amelia found herself in, especially the social mixture. She shuddered at the thought of his reaction to his wife sharing bread with men and women of low birth, or to learn that she had given up a bracelet that had been his wedding gift to her twenty-seven years ago to help bail a Jew from Tarsus out of prison.

Cornelius. After all these years, she still did not understand him. Why, for example, after six years, was he stepping up his punishment of her, taking every opportunity to humiliate her, when surely it was time to let the matter fade from memory? But then she had started seeing the sideways looks in her direction and hearing the whispers behind her back. After being back in Rome for only a few days, the rumor finally reached her: Cornelius had taken the beautiful widow Lucilla to Egypt with him. Amelia felt sick. The blue-crystal necklace was a means to keep her past sin in the forefront of everyone’s mind while he quietly got away with his own.

Upon their return from the country, she and Cornelius had plunged back into the social whirl of nightly dinners and holiday galas, Roman high society having little else to do. Cornelius always insisted Amelia wear the Egyptian necklace, and though she concealed it beneath her dress, he made her bring it out to show others while he told the legend of the adulterous queen. Nero’s wife, Empress Poppaea, had lifted the heavy gold pendant in her hand, narrowed her eyes at the blue crystal, and said with delicious glee, “Scandalous!”

Nightmares plagued Amelia, and during the day, whether gardening, weaving, or inspecting the house, she felt the dark shadow of the Egyptian queen at her heels, a malevolent phantom to remind her of her sin. But when she came to these joyous Sabbath feasts at Rachel’s house, where the guests were noisy and pious and followed the laws of their god, Amelia felt light of heart. She wished she could say to Rachel, “I am a believer.” But how did it happen, this miracle of faith? What was it that worked through people who experienced sudden epiphanies, right here in Rachel’s garden, causing them to fall to their knees and speak in an incomprehensible tongue? And why did the mysterious power work in some but not in others? Every week, congregants sang and clapped their hands and shouted “Hallelujah!” and worked themselves into a frenzy, they grew fevered with devotion and many fell into fits of religious ecstasy and hysteria, while others simply looked on in bafflement.

They were all so convinced that the world was coming to an end—not just Rachel’s group, but visitors from house-churches all over the empire—that many had given away all their possessions. Even Rachel’s house was changing: she had freed her slaves, much of her expensive furniture was gone, and her silk dresses had been replaced by ones made of homespun cloth. She was constantly collecting money to send to their poorer brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, and her exquisite collection of silver necklaces had been sacrificed to finance evangelical missions to Spain and Germany.

But Amelia had discovered that the lack of a unified belief among the Christians was growing. More gentiles were joining, people from all walks of life and bringing with them their own beliefs, so that when Rachel finished leading them in the “Hear O Israel” prayer, several crossed themselves, or made the sacred sign of Osiris. Occasionally special visitors came to speak to the assembly, some who had even known Jesus, but these were very old men who spoke in croaking voices, their Greek so colloquial that they needed translators even in a group that spoke Greek! To Amelia’s puzzlement, even these men could not agree on what happened in Galilee over thirty years ago. There were the followers of a man named Paul, who had never met Jesus in person but who was popular because people took his preaching to mean that, once they had embraced the Christian gospel, they could live as they liked (Paul kept writing letters to set people straight on this issue, but they seemed to keep misunderstanding him). Another group, made up mostly of Greeks, interpreted the Christian message in accordance with Greek philosophy. The followers of Peter, the man most popular in the Christian movement, believed in strict observance of Jewish law and that gentiles must convert to Judaism before becoming Christians. And then there were the mystics, people who had come from mystery religions, who claimed that the new sect should not develop around ordinary men but through mystical union with Christ only. Each group believed itself to be more correct and superior to the others.

Individual beliefs varied as well: although all believed in Jesus’s imminent return, some said he would arrive in a chariot made of gold, others said he would come humbly on a donkey; some argued he must come to Rome, others said he would appear first in Jerusalem. On the Kingdom of God, they differed as to its nature, where it was and when it would be established. Some regarded Jesus as a prince of peace, others as a prophet of war.