The Uncertain Hour (6 page)

“I’ll tell you why I’m irritated, Titus, and then have done with it.”

“Tell me, boy.”

“You can’t possibly be as calm and philosophical as you pretend. I hate it that you feel the need to act for my benefit. I can’t bear it”—Martialis’s voice cracked, and he coughed into his tunic for a moment or two before recovering—“I can’t bear it that you are going to die and that I am never going to see you again and that this is how I must remember you.”

“You’ve seen me drunk, Marcus. You’ve seen me naked. You’ve seen me beat my slaves. You’ve seen me put on a donkey’s head and act out Apicius. Why must you remember me this way?”

“Because this is how you want me to remember you. Because, if they ever come, it is to me that the historians will come to find out how you died.”

“I’m not acting, Marcus, if that makes you feel any better. I’ve had my moments today, it’s true, but I’ve found myself again. I can promise you, however, that if I were acting, or if I should start to weaken later, it would be for my own benefit, not yours. After all, I still have to see in All Fools’ Day.”

Petronius and Martialis climbed a flight of shallow stairs and stood at the broad threshold of the reception room, its glass doors thrown open to the breeze. They paused there to allow their eyes to adjust to the bright light reflected from a hundred lamps off the gleaming floor of white marble.

“Stay close,” Petronius said. “You’ll see how they are with me. No wailing or gnashing of teeth from this lot.”

Petronius was pleased to note that none of his guests had come in formal wear. Toward the center of the room, Melissa stood chatting in casual intimacy with Anicius, Lucilius, and Cornelia, goblets in hand. The slaves Nereus and Persis waited off to the side with a pitcher of mixed wine and a platter of pickled olives and smelts. Petronius had taught them to wait until summoned, contrary to modern custom, beyond earshot of his guests’ conversations—so that, in this one house, at least, in all of Italy, they should not feel spied upon—and he was gratified to see that they had not forgotten their duty, even on this evening when they would be itching to prepare for the night’s festivities.

In the far corner, their backs to the room, Caeso Fabius Arv-ina and his wife, Pollia, were admiring the bronze Diana, their shoulders bowed as if in supplication. It was the young couple’s first time in Petronius’s house, and Fabius had spoken more than once of his reverence for the Rhodian masters.

“Where’s your friend Castricus, Marcus?” Petronius asked Martialis.

“I don’t know. He knew we were invited tonight. I combed the streets for him, but he seems to have vanished into thin air. He doesn’t like to miss a free meal any more than I do—he’ll be here.”

“Perhaps.”

They entered the room, and Martialis immediately headed for the wine bowl, where he was intercepted by Nereus as he attempted to help himself to a ladleful of undiluted Surrentine. Nodding to Lucilius as he passed, Petronius joined Fabius and Pollia. As he approached, he saw that they were whispering to each other furiously, evidently in passionate confabulation over the bronze. The name Praxiteles was being bandied about.

“Do you approve, Fabius?” Petronius asked, interposing himself between man and wife.

“It’s magnificent,” Fabius said in sublime awe. Pollia merely nodded. “Is it really Hagesander, do you think, Petronius?”

“I believe it is. I found it abandoned, so we can never be certain.”

“Mightn’t it be a Praxiteles?” Pollia ventured shyly, blushing and ducking her head.

“I don’t think so, my dear. Note the hairstyle, for one. No one wore their hair like that in Athens four hundred years ago. And then, see the patina? Smell it. Go ahead, put your nose right up to it. Very distinctive smell, that Rhodian bronze.”

“What do you mean, you found it?”

“Found it. A few years ago, Melissa and I took a pleasure cruise up the coast. When we stopped at Spelunca for lunch, we asked the innkeeper if anyone knew where Tiberius’s villa had stood. Turned out everyone in the village knew, and for a few bronze coins his sons took us on a guided tour of the ruins. It was all there on the shore, in plain sight. The villagers had stripped the whole place of every inch of lead piping, precious fittings, gold leaf, everything of value but the artwork. They had no use for statues. I recognized this masterpiece immediately—Hagesander, maybe Athenodorus. Those ropey muscles, just like the Laocoön. For a few more coins, we hired some men to carry it down to the boat for us, just like that.”

“Did you really see the Laocoön?”

“Yes, it’s still there, a little damaged but essentially intact. A little big to cart away, though. Someone resourceful will get their hands on it one day, I’m sure.”

Pollia sighed. “How I should like to see that. Perhaps you can take us with you on your next trip, Petronius?”

Petronius smiled ruefully down at her. “I should like nothing better, my dear, but I believe that was my last cruise to Spelunca.”

“Oh, Petronius!” Simultaneously, like actors in a stage comedy, Fabius and Pollia raised their hands to cover their mouths, while all the color drained from their faces. Pollia looked as if she were about to be sick, and she turned her face to the wall in shame. Fabius made as if to get down on his knees.

“No, Fabius, no.”

“Petronius, I’m so sorry.”

“Stop now. Listen to me, Fabius. And you too, Pollia.” He pulled them into a tight circle about him, his arms draped across their backs, hands clasped to the napes of their necks so that they might not attempt to pull away. He spoke in a low, calm whisper. “There is to be none of that here tonight. Tonight we are here to celebrate, do you hear me? There are to be no tears, no speeches, no farewells. We are here to eat, to laugh, to joke, to hear poetry if necessary. It is what I wish, and you must respect my wishes. And we have my young Spaniard tonight; he is your age, Fabius. Let us please show him what a Roman can do when he puts his mind to it. Set an example, yes? Fabius? Pollia?”

They both nodded submissively, abashed, eyes to the floor. The back of Pollia’s neck was hot, and Petronius could feel it prickling with a sudden nervous sweat. It excited him momentarily, as if she were making a coded assignation with him, but the feeling evaporated as soon as it announced itself. He’d been strongly attracted to her when they’d first met, not long before, at an entertainment put on by Lucilius, but it had come to nothing when she’d rebuffed him with exquisite subtlety and courtesy. She was far more interesting and thoughtful than her rather conventional husband, but she was properly demure with her elders, giving a false first impression of mousiness that would certainly confound many a blustering senator when he tried to bed her in the coming years. Petronius was certain that she would scorn the louts and—when marital fidelity had exhausted its first blush of sanctity and sanctimony—give herself only to men like himself, men of the mind and the deed, if only he were there to enjoy her. He gave her neck a quick squeeze, and that of Fabius as well for good measure.

“Now tell me, young ones, do you know everyone here?”

“We know no one,” Fabius said forlornly.

“You will find it very useful in your career to know a man before you meet him. You see that chubby, jolly old man with the gray hair and pigeon toes? That is the senator Decimus Anicius Pulcher, a very dear friend of my father’s youth. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he is one of the bravest and most honest men in Rome. During the persecutions under Tiberius, my father fell afoul of Sejanus and it was only a matter of time before his troubles caught up with him. In the midst of all this, Anicius gets up in the senate—he was lean and athletic in those days, with a booming voice—and defends my father at great peril to his own career and health. He saved my father’s life, no doubt about it, and if Sejanus hadn’t been brought down himself shortly afterward, there’d have been hell to pay for both of them. My father died young, of fever, and Anicius took me under his wing, protected me, taught me everything I know about being a man. He’s rather given himself over to the pleasures of the flesh these days—he has a particular weakness for young boys—but I suppose he’s earned it. Melissa worships him.

“The gaunt, ramrod fellow with the cropped hair is Gaius Lucilius Junior, the great Neapolitan lawyer. He came to Rome as a boy; that’s where we met. We were inseparable, even as children. Studied Greek, rhetoric, and arms together, assumed the toga together, had our first whore together. He was the emperor’s procurator in Sicily, and if you ask him very humbly he may read to you from the poem he’s writing on the origins of volcanic activity. He’s quiet, but don’t let that fool you. Quite incredibly wealthy now, thanks to his marriage to Cornelia Felicia. That’s her with the dyed hair and the bangles. Society lady, a little frivolous, no intellectual, but generous and compassionate and absolutely devoted to Lucilius.

“The other fellow, that scruffy boy with his face in the wine bowl, that’s my client Marcus Valerius Martialis, a poet. Spanish.”

Petronius, Fabius, and Pollia crossed the room. Melissa, Ani-cius, Lucilius, and Cornelia were laughing gaily over something as he approached. Cornelia was in blue with gold trimmings. She was dripping with pink sapphires and heliodor, and had dyed her hair mulberry red; it gleamed like unction in the lamplight. Martialis was with them, and joined in their laughter, but even from halfway across the room Petronius could see that his was forced, uneasy, as if he were trying to follow a joke in a foreign language. Petronius dearly hoped that poor Marcus would find his way into the spirit of things over the course of the evening, as it would be very tiresome if he were to require continuous cajoling. Petronius thought that Marcus, notwithstanding his provincial upbringing, had it in him to rise above his own emotional failings, but he couldn’t be certain. After all, he hadn’t even been certain of himself until an hour ago, so how could he possibly trust Marcus to behave?

At the same time, Marcus had been right about one thing: with all his literary connections, it was surely to him that the historians would come for a firsthand account of the death of Petronius. What if Marcus should speak out in anger and resentment? Although Petronius was confident of Marcus’s love and loyalty, in one of his hot-blooded snits the boy was perfectly capable of doing lasting, even permanent damage to Petronius’s reputation with a skewed account of the evening. A man’s reputation is a delicate vase, vulnerable in equal measure to the malice of enemies, the prurience of strangers, and the clumsiness of friends. Petronius would be very sorry indeed if, for the sake of a well-turned phrase, Marcus in a fit of pique should throw a memorable epithet at him and it stuck, the way Tubero the Stoic had ensured that the courageous, honorable, and self-effacing Lucul-lus would be forever remembered as “Xerxes in a toga.”

“There you are, Petronius,” Lucilius said warmly, drawing him in with an arm about his shoulders. “We’ve just been laughing at you behind your back.”

“Have you really? What have I done this time?”

“It’s not you, actually,” said Cornelia. “It’s this funny little village you live in.”

“What’s wrong with Cumae?”

“It’s so … Greek.”

“Ah, you mean Greek like Homer and Plato? Or Greek like Euripides and Epicurus?”

“No, I mean the horrid sort of Greek. Greek fishermen. Greek vendettas. Do you know, as we were coming up from Bauli today, we ran into a nasty crowd on the main street. There was a poor woman on a mule, and they were taunting and tormenting her as they drove her through the village. They were all screaming at her.”

“
Onobatis
.”

“Precisely—’donkey-mounted.’ We were told she’d been taken in adultery. It was savage, backwards. You know, passing through those myrtle groves and sulfur pools from Baiae, it’s as if one were stepping into another century. It’s as if the Etruscans were never defeated.”

“Vatia lived here quite happily. So did Cicero.”

“Cicero hated it here, and you know it,” Martialis said testily.

“In any case, Cornelia, if all those red-necked, Greek-speaking fishermen keep you vulgar rich out of Cumae, I’m all for them. The last thing I want to see is Cumae become another Baiae.”

“No fear of that. There isn’t even a decent dressmaker here.”

“What’s in the basket, Cornelia?”

“Oh, I’d quite forgotten. I’ve brought you some candles and figurines for the holiday.”

“How thoughtful. I’ll have Persis distribute them to the slaves.” Petronius held the basket out at arm’s length, and a slave stepped up from behind to seize and spirit it away.

With a sweep of his arm, Petronius gathered Fabius and Pollia into the circle. “Have you all met Fabius Arvina and Julia Pollia?”

“My congratulations on your election,” Lucilius said, bowing. “We hear promising things of you in the courts, sir.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Petronius made the introductions. Martialis circled the group and surreptitiously sniffed at Pollia’s hair behind her back. Petronius threw him a fierce, fleeting scowl, which Martialis returned with a cross-eyed grimace.

“Senator.”

“Quaestor.”

Commagenus appeared silently at Petronius’s side.

“Vellia wishes to inform you that supper is served,” he whispered. Petronius nodded.

“Have they all buggered off for the holiday?” Cornelia inquired. Petronius looked at her in alarm. It was dangerous enough that her husband had been a close friend of Seneca’s; far riskier, however, that she should still be affecting the coarse mannerisms of the emperor’s late wife, Poppaea Sabina, almost two years after her death. In this day and age, such insensitivity to the shifting nuances of court fashion was more than enough to destroy a career, or worse. Petronius made a mental note to raise the issue with Lu-cilius before the evening was out.

“Yes,” he said, touching her lightly below the elbow to turn and guide her toward the door. “They’ve buggered off for the revels and left us to fend for ourselves. I do hope you won’t mind carving the boar.”

“I’d gut him with my bare teeth for a taste of Lucullo’s sow’s vulva.”