The Grass Crown (19 page)

“I’ll admit anything you want me to admit,” said Marius, and began to laugh. “All the same, Julia, it is Aurelia!”

“I am going home,” said Julia, rising to her feet.

“I thought you wanted to go to Egypt?”

“I am going home,” Julia repeated. “I don’t care where you go, Gaius Marius, though I would prefer it be the Land of the Hyperboreans. I am going home.”

Livia Drusa

I’m going to Smyrna to bring back my fortune,” said Quintus Servilius Caepio to his brother-in-law, Marcus Livius Drusus, as they walked home from the Forum Romanum.

Drusus stopped, one pointed black eyebrow flying upward. “Oh! Do you think that’s wise?” he asked, then could have bitten off his tactless tongue.

“What do you mean, wise?” Caepio asked, looking pugnacious.

Out went Drusus’s hand to grip Caepio’s right arm. “Just what I said, Quintus. I am not implying that your fortune in Smyrna is the Gold of Tolosa—nor for that matter that your father stole the Gold of Tolosa! But the fact remains that almost all of Rome does believe your father guilty, and also believes that the fortune in your name in Smyrna is really the Gold of Tolosa. In the old days, to have brought it back might have earned you nothing more harmful than black looks and a degree of odium you would have found a nuisance in your public career. But nowadays there is a lex Servilia Glaucia de repetundis on the tablets, don’t forget. Gone is the time when a governor could peculate or extort and see his loot safe because he put it in someone else’s name. Glaucia’s law specifically provides for the recovery of illegally acquired monies from their ultimate recipients as well as from the guilty party. Using Uncle Lucius Tiddlypuss doesn’t work anymore.”

“I remind you that Glaucia’s law is not retroactive,” said Caepio stiffly.

“All it will take is one tribune of the plebs in a mood of vengeance, a quick appeal to the Plebeian Assembly to invalidate that particular loophole, and you’ll find the lex Servilia Glaucia is retroactive,” said Drusus firmly. “Truly, brother Quintus, think about it! I don’t want to see my sister and her children deprived of both paterfamilias and fortune, nor do I want to see you sitting out the years as an exile in Smyrna.”

“Why did it have to be my father they picked on?” demanded Caepio angrily. “Look at Metellus Numidicus! Home again just covered in glory, while my poor father died in permanent exile!”

“We both know why,” said Drusus patiently, wishing for the thousandth time at least that Caepio was brighter.

“The men who run the Plebeian Assembly can forgive a high nobleman anything—especially after a little time goes by. But the Gold of Tolosa was unique. And it disappeared while in your father’s custody. More gold than Rome has in her Treasury! Once people here made up their minds your father took it, they conceived a hatred for him that has nothing to do with right, justice, or patriotism.” He started walking again, and Caepio followed. “Think it out properly, Quintus, please! If the sums you bring home total anything like ten percent of the value of the Gold of Tolosa, you’ll have the whole of Rome saying your father did take it, and you inherited it.”

Caepio began to laugh. “They won’t,” he said positively. “I have already thought everything out properly, Marcus. It’s taken me all these years to solve the problem, but solve it, I have. Truly!”

“How?” asked Drusus skeptically.

“First of all, none except you will know where I’ve really gone and what I’m really doing. As far as Rome will know—as Livia Drusa and Servilia Caepionis will know—I’m in Italian Gaul-across-the-Padus, looking into property. I’ve been talking about doing so for months; no one will be surprised or bother to query it. Why should they, when I’ve deliberately harangued people with my plans to set up whole towns full of foundries geared to make anything from ploughshares to chain mail? And as it’s the property side of the project I’m interested in, no one can criticize my senatorial integrity. Let others run the foundries—I’m happy to own the towns!”

Caepio sounded so eager that Drusus (who had hardly heard his brother-in-law on the subject because he had hardly listened) stared at him now in surprise.

“You sound as if you mean to do it,” Drusus said.

“Oh, I do. The foundry towns represent just one of many things in which I intend to invest my money from Smyrna. As I’m going to keep my investments in Roman territories rather than in Rome herself, there will be no new amounts of my money coming into city financial institutions. Nor do I think the Treasury will be clever enough—or have time enough—to look into who, what, and how much I am investing in business enterprises far from the city of Rome,” said Caepio.

Drusus’s expression had changed to amazement. “Quintus Servilius, I am staggered! I didn’t think you had so much guile in you,” he said.

“I thought you might be staggered,” said Caepio smugly, then spoiled the effect by adding, “though I must admit I had a letter from my father not long before he died, telling me what I must do. There’s an enormous amount of money in Smyrna.”

“Yes, I imagine there is,” said Drusus dryly.

“No, it is not the Gold of Tolosa!” cried Caepio, throwing his hands out. “There’s my mother’s fortune as well as my father’s! He was clever enough to move his money before he was prosecuted, in spite of that conceited cunnus Norbanus’s measures to prevent his doing so, like throwing, my father in prison between trial and exile. Some of the money has been gradually returned to Rome over the years, but not sufficient to draw attention. Which is why—as you yourself have cause to know!—I still live modestly.”

“I do certainly have cause to know,” said Drusus, who had been housing his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s family since the elder Caepio had been convicted. “One thing does puzzle me, however. Why not just leave your fortune in Smyrna?”

“Can’t,” said Caepio quickly. “My father said it wouldn’t be safe forever in Smyrna—or any other city in Asia Province with the right banking facilities, like Cos—or even Rhodes, he said. He said Asia Province will revolt against Rome. He said that the tax-farmers there have made everyone hate Rome. He said sooner or later the whole province will rise up.”

“If it did, we’d soon get it back,” said Drusus.

“Yes, I know that! But in the meantime, do you think all the gold and silver and coins and treasures on deposit in Asia Province would just sit there safe and sound? My father said the first thing the revolutionaries would do would be to pillage the temples and the banks,” said Caepio.

Drusus nodded. “He’s probably right. So you’re going to move your money. But to Italian Gaul?”

“Only some, only some. Some of it will go to Campania. And some to Umbria. And some to Etruria. Then there are places like Massilia, Utica, and Gades—some will go to them. All up the western end of the Middle Sea.”

“Why don’t you admit the truth, Quintus—at least to me, your brother-in-law twice over?” asked Drusus a little wearily. “Your sister is my wife, and my sister is your wife. We are so tied together we can never be free of each other. So admit it, at least to me! It is the Gold of Tolosa.”

“It is not the Gold of Tolosa,” said Quintus Servilius Caepio stubbornly.

Thick, thought Marcus Livius Drusus, leading the way into the peristyle-garden of his house, the finest mansion in Rome; he is as thick as porridge which has boiled too long. And yet… There he is, sitting on fifteen thousand talents of gold his father smuggled from Spain to Smyrna eight years ago, after pretending it was stolen en route from Tolosa to Narbo. A cohort of good Roman troops perished guarding that wagon train of gold, but does he care? Did his father—who must have organized their massacre—care? Of course not! All they care about is their precious gold. They’re Servilii Caepiones, the Midases of Rome, can’t be jolted out of their intellectually moribund state unless someone whispers the word “Gold!”

It was January of the year Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus were consuls, and the lotus trees in the Livius Drusus garden were bare, though the magnificent pool and its statues and fountains by Myron still played, thanks to piped warm water. The paintings by Apelles, Zeuxis, Timanthes, and others had been removed from the back walls of the colonnade and put into storage earlier in the year, after Caepio’s two daughters had been caught daubing them with pigments taken from two artists who were restoring the atrium frescoes at the time. Both little girls had been beaten thoroughly, but Drusus had judged it prudent to remove temptation; as the daubs were still fresh, they were able to be removed, yet—who was to say it wouldn’t happen all over again when his own small boy grew a little larger, and more mischievous? Priceless collections of art were best not displayed in houses containing children. He didn’t think Servilia and Servililla would do anything like it again, but there were bound to be more offspring.

His own family was finally started, though not in the way he had hoped for; somehow he and Servilia Caepionis couldn’t seem to make babies. Two years ago they had adopted the youngest son of Tiberius Claudius Nero, a man as impoverished as most of the Claudii of all branches, and delighted to hand over his new child to become heir to the Livius Drusus wealth. It was more usual to adopt the eldest boy of a family, so that the family adopting might be sure the child they took on was sane, healthy, nice-natured and reasonably intelligent; but Servilia Caepionis, starved for a baby, had insisted upon adopting a baby. And Marcus Livius Drusus—who had learned to love his wife dearly, though he had loved her not at all when they married—allowed her to have her way. His own misgivings he placated by making a generous offering to Mater Matuta, enlisting the goddess’s support to ensure that the baby would prove satisfactory when he grew into his wits.

The women were together in Servilia Caepionis’s sitting room just next door to the nursery, and came to greet their men with every evidence of pleasure. Though they were only sisters-in-law, they looked more like real sisters, for both were short, very dark of hair and eye, and owned small, regular features. Livia Drusa—who was Caepio’s wife—was the prettier of the two, as she had escaped the family affliction of stumpy legs, and had the better figure; into the bargain, she fulfilled the criteria of beauty in a woman, for her eyes were very large, well spaced and well opened, and her mouth was tiny, folded like a flower. The nose in between was a little too small to please the connoisseurs, but it escaped the additional disadvantage of straightness by ending in a little knob. Her skin was thick and creamy, her waist was trim, her breasts and hips well curved and ample. Servilia Caepionis—who was Drusus’s wife—was a thinner version of the same; however, her skin had a tendency to produce pimples around chin and nose and her legs were too short for her trunk, her neck too short as well.

Yet it was Marcus Livius Drusus who loved his less pretty wife, Quintus Servilius Caepio who did not love the beautiful one. At the time of their joint marriage eight years earlier, it had been the other way around. Though neither man realized it, the difference lay in the two women; Livia Drusa had loathed Caepio and had been forced to marry him, whereas Servilia Caepionis had been in love with Drusus since childhood. Members of Rome’s highest nobility, both women were model wives of the old kind—obedient, subservient, even-tempered, unfailingly respectful. Then as the years went by and a certain degree of knowledge and familiarity crept into each marriage, Marcus Livius Drusus’s indifference melted in the steady glow of his wife’s affection, an increasing ardor she displayed in their bed, a shared grief because there were no children; whereas Quintus Servilius Caepio’s inarticulate adoration was suffocated by his wife’s unspoken dislike, an increasing coolness she displayed in their bed, a resentment because their children were both girls and none had followed.

A visit to the nursery was mandatory, of course. Drusus made much of his chubby, dark-visaged little boy, who was known as Drusus Nero, and was now almost two years old. Caepio merely nodded to his daughters, who flattened themselves in awe against the wall and said nothing. They were miniature copies of their mother—as dark, as big-eyed, as bud-mouthed—and had all the charm of little girls, had their father only bothered to look. Servilia was almost seven years old, and had learned a great deal from her beating after she decided to improve Apelles’s horse and Zeuxis’s bunch of grapes. She had never been beaten before, and had found the experience more humiliating than painful, more galling than instructive. Lilla on the other hand was an uncomplicated bundle of mischief—irrepressible, strong-willed, aggressive and direct. The beating she had received was promptly forgotten, save that it served to endow her with a healthy respect for her father.

The four adults repaired to the triclinium, there to dine.

“Is Quintus Poppaedius not joining us, Cratippus?” asked Drusus of his steward.

“I have had no word that he isn’t, domine.”

“In which case, we’ll wait,” said Drusus, deliberately ignoring the hostile look he got from Caepio.

Caepio, however, was not about to be ignored. “Why do you put up with that frightful fellow, Marcus Livius?” he asked.

The eyes Drusus turned upon his brother-in-law were stony. “There are some, Quintus Servilius, who ask me that question of you,” he said levelly.

Livia Drusa gasped, choked back a nervous giggle; but, as Drusus expected, the criticism went over Caepio’s head.

“Well, isn’t that what I said?” asked Caepio. “Why do you put up with him?”

“Because he’s my friend.”

“Your leech, more like!” snorted Caepio. “Truly, Marcus Livius, he battens on you. Always arriving without any notice, always with favors to ask, always complaining about us Romans. Who does he think he is?”

“He thinks he’s an Italian of the Marsi,” said a cheerful voice. “Sorry I’m late, Marcus Livius, but you should start your meal without me, as I’ve said before. My excuse for tardiness is impeccable—I’ve been standing very still while Catulus Caesar subjected me to a long lecture on the perfidies of Italians.”

Silo sat on the back edge of the couch upon which Drusus reclined and allowed a slave to remove his boots and wash his feet, then cover them with a pair of socks. When he twisted lightly and lithely onto the couch, he occupied the locus consularis, the place of honor to Drusus’s left; Caepio was reclining upon the couch at right angles to Drusus’s, a less honored position because he was part of the family rather than Drusus’s guest.