The Forest House (44 page)

Next time,
she swore,
I will build a temple to Juno in Deva if I have to—but next time it will be a boy!

Yet, as the children grew, Julia became accustomed to living most of the time among the gentle hills south of Deva and staying in her father's house in Londinium only during the wintertime. Licinius loved the children, and was already looking around for families with whom to ally them in marriage.

Gaius was a somewhat indifferent father, but she had expected no more. She knew that when she was unwell he sometimes slept with one of the slave girls, but so long as he did his duty in her bed as well she could hardly object to it. She had married to gain the status of a matron and to give her father an heir. Her relationship with Gaius was one of mutual respect and affection; for a Roman girl of good family anything else would have been unseemly.

Observing the scandals and divorces that occurred even in the pale imitation of Roman society that was Londinium, it seemed to her that she and Gaius were one of the few couples who had managed to preserve the old Roman values. Her marriage was a good one, and there were even times, seeing her daughters playing together in the garden of the villa, their bright tunics like flowers against the greenery, when Julia felt that perhaps she had not done so badly as a mother.

And soon after the twins celebrated their second birthday, she was pregnant once more.

 

After a long rainy spell, when the children chafed and whined at being kept inside, the weather had turned warm at last. Julia sat on the veranda they had built along the front of the house when they added the wings to either side. Ostensibly she was going over the household accounts, but actually she was dozing in the sunshine. Her hands rested lightly on the round of her belly, where she could sense the movements of the child within, surely a son. He had not moved much lately and she supposed that the warm weather had made the baby as torpid as she was.

Julia lay still, eyes half-closed against the sunshine, listening to the singing of the birds and the voices of the household slaves as they busied themselves about the tasks of the farm. Gaius used to say that Julia's household always ran with the efficiency of a Legion making camp. She knew without checking where each of her servants would be and what he or she would be doing at each hour of the day.

“…playing in the garden.” That was the voice of the strapping Gaulish girl whose job it was to keep track of the children.

“That they are not!” Old Lydia, who ran the nursery, replied. “The twins are eating their noon meal, and Cella is helping the cook make pies. But Secunda is just at that age when if they are unwatched they will go exploring—”

“She was in the garden…” the girl said weakly.

“And where were you? Flirting with the master's groom again?” Lydia replied. “Well, she can't have gone far. You get out there and find her, and I will call some of the men to help you. But I promise to personally see you whipped if any harm has come to the child! What were you thinking of? You know the mistress must not be worried with her time so near!”

Julia frowned, debating whether to get up and speak to them. But this pregnancy had sapped her energy and her will, and surely Secunda would turn up soon.

In the distance she heard more voices, and Gaius's deep tones questioning.
Good,
she thought then,
they have got him out looking. It is high time he bestirred himself more on the children's behalf.

She lay back again, knowing that she ought to relax for the sake of her unborn child, but as the moments wore on, she found tension bringing her upright again. She could hardly hear the calling now. How far had Secunda gone?

The shadow on the sundial had moved almost to the next hour when she heard muted voices and footsteps crunching on the gravel of the path. They had found her then—but why were they so silent? Secunda ought to have been wailing if her father had paddled her as she deserved. A chill swept through Julia's body. She hauled herself upright, clinging to the pillar, as the little procession emerged from among the trees.

She saw Gaius's dark head and tried to call out to him, but words would not come. Then the gardener moved aside and she saw that he was holding Secunda in his arms. But even asleep she had never seen her little girl lie so still.

“Why isn't she moving?”
Her lips twitched soundlessly.

Gaius came forward, his face working, already blotched with tears. More water dripped from Secunda's pink gown, and her black curls were plastered tight to her skull. Julia stared, shock sending ice through her veins.

“She was in the stream,” he said hoarsely, “at the edge of the field. I tried to breathe life back into her. I tried…” He swallowed, looking down at the small closed face, pale as marble now.

No, thought Julia numbly, Secunda would never breathe again. She blinked, wondering why the world had gone so dim around her. Then she felt a wrenching pain in her belly.

The next few hours were a confusion of grief and pain. She remembered hearing Gaius swear he would have the Gaulish girl flayed, and Licinius trying to calm him. Something was wrong with Secunda…She tried to get up and go to her, but her women kept pushing her back down. And then the ache in her belly would begin again. In her more lucid moments Julia knew this was wrong. She was familiar with the pangs of labor, but she was barely six months along.
Gods, if you have any mercy, make it stop. You took my daughter—don't let me lose my son!

It was nearly dawn when she convulsed and felt a last hot gush of blood between her thighs. Lydia bent over her, swearing softly. Julia felt the pressure as the woman jammed more cloths between her legs to stop the bleeding. But for a moment she had glimpsed something else, something small and purplish that did not move.

“My son.” Her whisper was a thread of sound. “Let me hold him, please!”

Weeping, Lydia brought something wrapped in a bloody cloth and laid it in the curve of her arm. The face had been wiped clean, and she could see the tiny, perfect features, like the petals of a blighted rose.

She was still holding him when they finally let Gaius in to see her.

“The gods hate me,” she whispered, tears sliding from her eyes.

He knelt beside the bed, lifted the damp hair from her brow and kissed her with more tenderness than she expected. For a moment he looked down at the stillborn child, and then, gently, he drew a fold of cloth across its face and lifted it. She made a convulsive movement to stop him, but she could barely move. For a moment he stood with the child in his arms, like any father about to acknowledge his new-born son, then handed the still form to Lydia to take away.

Julia turned her face into the pillow, sobbing. “Let me die! I have failed, let me die!”

“That's not true, my poor darling. You still have three little girls who need you. You must not weep so.”

“My baby, my little boy is dead!”

“Hush, my love.” Gaius tried to soothe her, looking at his father-in-law, who had come into the room behind him, in appeal. “We are not yet old, my dear. If the gods will it, we may yet have many children—”

Licinius bent down to kiss her as well. “And if you have no son, my dear child, what of that? You have been a better child to me than many sons, that I vow to you.”

“You must think of our living children now,” said Gaius.

Julia felt despair well up in her. “You never paid any attention to Secunda. Why should you care about the others now? You only care that I have lost your son.”

“No,” Gaius said very quietly, “I do not need you to give me a son. You must sleep now.” He got to his feet, looking down at her. “Sleep heals many griefs, and in the morning you will feel differently.”

But Julia, remembering the delicately carved features of her little boy, did not really hear.

 

As the slow weeks of Julia's recovery wore on, Gaius found that he was saddened more by her grief than any feelings of his own. He had been away from home when Secunda was born, and had no great attachment to her. Nor could he bring himself to grieve overmuch for one of four girls.

Yet when he thought of the son they had lost, he could not help thinking about his son by Eilan. In Roman society, adoption of a healthy boy from another family was a traditional solution. If Julia had no male children, and after a consultation with the physician that began to seem improbable, she was less likely to object if he claimed Eilan's son. And he was fond of his daughters, although he felt no such bond as he had to his first-born boy.

But there was time and enough for that once Julia had her health again. Hoping it would at least distract her from her grief, he agreed to take Julia on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Mother Goddess near Venta, but the journey did little to help her recover her health and spirits, and when he offered to move the family back to Londinium, she did not want to go.

“It is here that our children are buried,” she told him. “I will not leave them here.”

Gaius privately considered this unreasonable. Despite native beliefs that the land of the Silures held the entrance to the Otherworld, it seemed to him that no earthly place could be nearer or further off than any other to the Land of the Dead, but he gave way to Julia's whim and they remained.

Towards the end of that year news came that Agricola was dead as well.

“As Tacitus is fond of saying,”
wrote Licinius Corax,
“‘It is a principle of human nature to hate those whom we have injured.' But even our Divine Emperor could find little in Agricola to justify his anger, and so our friend escaped official disfavor. Indeed, the Emperor was remarkably solicitous throughout Agricola's illness, and though there are those who whisper that the General was taken off by poison, for myself, I think the cause was a heart broken by witnessing Rome's dishonor. It may be that he is well out of it, and it is we who will soon wish that we had gone on before. Be glad that you are safely out of sight in Britannia…”

In the following year Licinius retired and came to make his home with them, and so they added another wing to the Villa Severina, and the final year of Gaius's service as Procurator for supplies began. He had hoped that when he completed his term of office Senator Malleus would be able to arrange to have him appointed to a higher position, but that year brought disturbing news. The Emperor was growing ever more autocratic and suspicious. As a military leader he had been reasonably successful, but he seemed to take his successes as proof of divine favor, and was doing his best, wrote Licinius's cousin Corax, to destroy what power remained to the patrician class.

Gaius wondered if this would be the spark that set the embers of rebellion aflame, but the next thing they heard was that Herennius Senecio and several others had been executed for treason.

Gaius understood that his career was likely to be on hold for some time. His patron Senator Malleus, while not accused, had found it prudent to retire to his estates in Campania. And so, when Gaius completed his term as Procurator, he put off the visit to Rome with which he had planned to follow it and, like his patron, decided to devote himself for a time to developing the productivity of his lands.

Now he began at last to establish a stronger friendship with his remaining daughters, but Julia remained depressed and sickly. Though they still shared a bed, it was becoming ever clearer that she was unlikely to give him a son.

By now Eilan's child would be ten years old. Even a father who was not precisely in the Emperor's favor could guarantee the child a better future than a British priestess who must hide the very fact of his existence, and surely Julia would rather raise a son of his than a stranger's child—although he could never be quite sure what Julia would feel. But after all, Gaius could assure her—and it would be the truth—that the boy had been fathered before he ever set eyes on her.

The Forest House was scarcely an afternoon's ride away. His son could be living just over the next hill, reflected Gaius, gazing southward through the trees. But he found himself oddly afraid to face Eilan again. Did she hate Rome? Did she hate him? The girl he had loved when he was a boy was gone, transformed into the terrible Priestess of Vernemeton. Sometimes it seemed to him that the woman he had married was gone too, all the playfulness that had attracted him dead with her son.

Gaius had been reasonably successful in his career, though he had hardly fufilled his father's dreams. But it occurred to him that he had little to love. In his life he had often been lonely, but his father's discipline, or that of the army, had kept him too busy to worry about it. But as the year wore on Gaius found that though managing the estate exercised his body it left his mind free to roam, and he was haunted by dreams of his childhood.

Perhaps it was all the time he was putting in on the land that was stimulating his memories from that age when all the world was wonderful and new. He had not allowed himself to think about his mother when he was a child, but he dreamed of her now. He felt her holding him, heard her sweet lullabies and woke in tears, calling to her not to leave him alone.