“Now that you're married, her place is with you.”
“Are you saying we're not welcome here any longer?”
“No, no. Not at all.” Gregory looked off in the distance, watching a bird circle overhead. When it landed at the top of a tufa cone, he spoke again. “It's just that Livia's been alone too much of her life. She needs family.”
“She has you. You're family.”
Gregory turned toward Jacob again. “You're her family now,” he said softly.
Jacob met his gaze, and if he hadn't already been sitting, the impact would have brought him to his knees. “Are you that sick, Gregory?”
“Promise me you'll take her to Ephesus. Promise me.”
“I won't promise any such thing. Not unless you answer my question.”
Gregory's look pleaded as eloquently as his voice. “Livia has already lost too many people in her life; I don't want her to watch me die. Please, Jacob.”
“And because she's lost so many people, she would never agree to leave here without youâand I wouldn't either.” Jacob put a hand on Gregory's shoulder and swallowed hard before continuing. “So if you're not well enough to make the journey with us, then this discussion is over.”
Gregory blinked and couldn't seem to find his voice for a moment.
“If you'll promise to take Livia to your family, then I'll
get
well enough to travel.”
Jacob nodded soberly, realizing that his plan to go home to Ephesus would be suspended indefinitely, and accepting it without question. “You have to promise
me
something, though,” he said.
Gregory hesitated again. “What is that?”
“Promise that you'll get well enough to do the cooking.”
Antony yawned and rubbed his eyes. He couldn't go to sleep yet. It was the first chance he'd had all week to write a letter to Rebecca. But every time he looked down at the parchment, his eyes blurred and the words he'd scrawled swam together. Fatigue swept over him, and he fought the urge to lay his head on the writing desk. If he did that, he'd be there come morning.
The lamp flickered and sputtered, and Antony suddenly remembered he had no more oil in his room. He rose, took the lamp to the kitchen, and replenished the oil. He also filled another lamp and brought it back with him, just in case. Polycarp's house was completely quiet, a testament to the lateness of the hour. During the day, the place was a beehive of activity.
When he returned to his bedroom, Antony opened the window. He had shuttered it earlier to keep out the noise of the revelers. Nature worshipers welcoming the summer solstice, he imagined. Hard to believe he had been in Smyrna almost three months, and in all that time he had only squeezed in one visit home. He had been inundated with work and so gripped by the urgency of some of the cases that it had been impossible to tear himself away again.
He could not have borne the separation from Rebecca if it hadn't been for their frequent correspondence. Peter had arranged for a courier to travel from Ephesus to Smyrna each week, carrying their letters back and forth. The courier also brought a stipend from Peter to cover all of Antony's expenses. He had never asked Peter for help, but was grateful for his friend's generosity. The income allowed Antony to reimburse Polycarp for his room and board and to have the finances necessary to carry out investigations and legal research.
From daybreak until early evening, Antony met with clients, interviewed witnesses, and made court appearances. A few times he'd been able to sit in on a class Polycarp held for his disciples. Antony had been enthralled by the bishop's teaching and wished he could spend more time in the classroom. But he was learning quite a bit about the faith just from staying in Polycarp's home.
For a few minutes Antony stood in front of the window, letting the cool summer breeze relieve the worst of his fatigue. The revelers had all gone home; the only noise drifting in now was the monotonous drone of insects. Before the sound could lull him to sleep, Antony went back to his desk and sat down.
He picked up Rebecca's last letter and reread it. It was an interesting epistle, full of news about Victor, who would be a year old in only six weeks, and reports on Priscilla and Helena, who could read and write reasonably well but was not the kind to sit still long enough to pen a letter of her own. Rebecca, however, was quite articulate, and her long letters more than made up for the lack of communication from his mother.
His fiancée went on to describe the progress of their new house and how thrilled she was with it. Peter had hired someone to oversee the construction and usually sent a short weekly report to Antony as well.
Rebecca had also written about Quintus and Agatha, the shipping business, the church, and the relief work. But one paragraph in particular held Antony's attention tonight:
In all these months, seven of them now, we have had no word from Jacob. I grieve for him, Antony. What has happened to my brother? Where could he be? Why hasn't he returned? I cannot believe he would turn his back on his family forever. Some evil has befallen him, I fear, and I have no way of knowing. I'm sure if Polycarp had received any word of Jacob, you would have told me.
Antony was equally worried that some unspeakable evil had befallen Jacob, especially in light of what he had learned just yesterday from Plautius and Sergius.
The brothers had relayed two bits of news when Antony had met with them. The first was the fact Tullia was gleefully announcing to anyone who would listen that she was carrying a child.
“Actually, she doesn't even have to say anything,” Plautius had said. “It's quite obvious that she's expecting.”
Sergius snorted his disapproval. “Doesn't have the decency to stay at home but parades around in public, proudly patting her swollen belly. I tell you, it's scandalous.” He paused for a moment and stroked his chin. “Maybe she's wearing a pillow under her tunic; you suppose she's delusional?”
“We'll know in two months,” Plautius had remarked calmly. “That's when she says she's due.”
Antony wasn't sure why Tullia's being pregnant should worry him, but it did. Perhaps it was just the fact that Tullia worried him in general. He was certain that she had either bribed or blackmailed the public official who had denied business permits for the brothers' blacksmith shop and several other Christian businesses, but he couldn't prove it. Corruption was a serious offense, and under the
Lex Calpurnia,
a magistrate could be heavily fined and prohibited from ever holding public office if the crime were proved. Antony had been able to get the permits reinstated for his clients but had not brought charges against the official in question. Not yet, anyway.
Every time Antony interviewed a witness, he had the feeling that Tullia had been there ahead of him. Some of them refused to talk at all. A couple of them had made veiled references to a witch's curse if they spoke to him, confirming Antony's suspicions.
As he listened to the drone of insects outside his window, Antony wondered if Tullia's pregnancy had any implications for his clients. He doubted it. But the other news Plautius and Sergius had delivered was replete with significance for Antony personally: Damian had returned to Smyrna.
“He's been back for a couple of months,” Plautius had said. “Long enough, anyway, that our cousin banned him from the tavern several weeks ago.”
“Evidently Damian spends all his time drinking and brawling,” Sergius added. “Guess that's why we haven't seen him before now.”
Antony rolled up Rebecca's letter and set it aside, then picked up his pen. A moment later he put it back down. There was no way he could write a letter to her now, not with all this weighing so heavily on his mind.
Damian was back. Jacob wasn't.
And any inference Antony could draw from the juxtaposition of those two facts was ominous.
July, A.D. 97
“WHAT DO WE REALLY HAVE to keep us here?” Gregory asked. “A piece of rock?” He gestured toward the house tucked into the tufa.
Livia drew herself up to her full height and looked down at her uncle, hands defiantly on her hips. “I helped carve this âpiece of rock,' I'll have you know.”
“And you feel pride of ownership. I do too. But when you get right down to it, it's still just a hunk of rock.
Home,”
he said, “will be wherever we make it.”
Livia changed tactics. “It's not fair, you and Jacob ganging up on me like this. It's all so sudden.” Yesterday was the first time her husband had mentioned the possibility of moving to Ephesus, but she quickly pried out of him the fact that he had already discussed it with Gregory, who had agreed to the plan. But leaving everything she'd ever known did not sound like a good idea to Livia.
“The idea may seem sudden, but the move would not be.” Gregory sat down on the garden bench. “We wouldn't leave until fall. No one in their right mind would travel in this blasted heat.” He removed the damp towel draped around his neck and wiped his forehead.
He looked tired, Livia thought. At least he'd gotten stronger the last couple of months. The winter had been hard on Gregory, and all during the spring he hadn't quite been himself. He seemed much better now, in spite of the heat, and she was glad.
“Besides, I wouldn't want to leave until I've harvested all my herbs and dried them for the winter.”
Livia dropped to the ground with a sigh and leaned back against the bench where her uncle sat. The thought of traveling excited her, yet the thought of leaving home scared her, and she couldn't exactly put into words why. She'd never lived anywhere except Caesarea or its outskirts. And while she loved the house she and Gregory had carved out of the tufa, it was just a house, as he'd said; she refused to think of it as a “piece of rock,” however.
There was also her workshop, which she loved; but tools and equipment could be picked up and moved. Jacob had promised to build her another workshop, with more windows and more light, in Ephesus. If Gregory went with them, there truly would be nothing to keep her here. Her parents had been dead for eight years now, and Livia had no other relatives. Perhaps that's what made her reluctant to consider cutting all ties to her place of birth.
She spoke her thought aloud. “It would be like leaving them behind.”
“Who?”
“My mother and father.”
Gregory reached over and stroked her hair. “But that's just it, Livia. They're gone. Now you have a new family, Jacob's family, and they're in Ephesus.”
“But I don't even know them.” She couldn't help sounding petulant.
“You won't ever know them if you don't go to meet them. And if we travel all that distance, we might as well stay.” He reached down and turned her face up toward his. “It's where Jacob's roots are, child. Where you can put down roots with him.”
“I'll think about it,” she said grudgingly.
Someone handed Antony a blanket and he went to work with the others, beating out the flying sparks the moment they touched the ground. He looked up briefly, watching helplessly as brilliant flames danced across the roof of the blacksmith shop and leaped into the night, then he resumed the watch for falling embers.
The building was engulfed now; all they could do was try to keep the fire from spreading. More volunteers kept arriving to combat the blaze. They soaked the ground around the building with as much water as they could haul, and they beat the ground with their blankets. Fortunately, the shop was detached from the brothers' two houses, which were set back a good sixty paces, and there was no wind to drive the flames. The homes where Plautius and Sergius lived would probably be spared. That was Antony's prayer, anyway.
The older of the two brothers, ordinarily so placid, was distraught. “It's gone! We've lost it all,” Plautius cried. Two horses, a new wagon, all their tools and equipmentâtheir entire livelihood.
Twin flames of fatigue and fury ignited the acid in Antony's stomach until he thought he would be sick. He had solved the brothers' legal problems, but he couldn't save their business. His anger stoking his energy, Antony stomped sparks and flailed his blanket against the flying embers.
The volunteers, a few neighbors and a good number of fellow Christians, toiled through the night. At dawn, plumes of black smoke still poured from the building, but the fire had been contained. When he finally deemed it safe to stop working, exhaustion melted Antony's bones and he sank to the ground. The smoke had burned his eyes so bad, they kept tearing up. Rivulets of sweat streaked down his face, and he wiped them away with a grimy hand.
Sergius, his face black with soot, walked over to where Antony was sitting and dropped down beside him. “This one wasn't an accident,” the blacksmith said.
In spite of the intense heat that still radiated from the smoldering structure, Antony felt a chill at Sergius's pronouncement. But the lawyer was too tired to question the statement; besides, he was as skeptical as Sergius. Antony had had the same suspicion.
Sergius was the second client to lose his business to a fire this month, and Antony didn't think it was a coincidence. And if it wasn't a coincidence, then somehow Tullia was behind this. Tullia, and perhaps Damian.
In a moment Sergius began to elaborate on his allegation of arson. “The bakery fire might have been an accident, although I doubt it. But I know for a fact this fire was deliberately started.”
The owner of the bakery was another church member for whom Antony had gotten a business permit reinstated. Speculation was that a cooking fire had not been extinguished properly and something had fallen into the oven, causing a blaze. The owner vehemently denied it, but he had no other explanation for the fire.
“How do you know it was deliberate?” Antony asked.
“Because I saw someone throw a torch into the building.”