Caracalla smiled thinly, and Geta sniggered, and Julia Domna called for some slaves to take us to our rooms so we could rest. I walked away, feeling Caracalla watching us the whole way.
As soon as we were alone in our apartments, my father sat down by the window and stared out at the palace gardens.
“A good philosopher must treat good news and bad news exactly the same,” he said. I knew he wanted to be cheerful for us, but his voice sounded empty and my heart ached for him. “What a blessing philosophy is.”
We waited, not daring to say anything in case we upset him even more. After a few long moments, he pulled himself upright and gave us a smile.
“Britain won’t be for long,” he said firmly. “And as we will be on a battlefield, I may even get a dead barbarian to dissect – think of that! The law against dissecting humans has held medicine back for so long.”
“Cutting up a dead person, against all the gods – to think I should live to see the day!” As if my father putting a brave face on it had given her a licence to show her feelings again, my mother threw her veil over her face and rocked back and forth.
“Well, dear, you won’t see it. It will be best if you remain in Rome to support Camilla in her new marriage,” my father replied. “You will need to see no dead barbarians at all.”
So, I was going to be married. In the next few weeks, if I understood rightly. I realised I was shaking. I picked up a shawl and wrapped it tightly around me so that no one would see how frightened I was. I was absolutely terrified. I clutched the amulet Nurse had given me. I wished she were there; I would have forgiven her everything.
9.
The Ghost of a Marriage
I was to meet Publius the very next day, at his family’s house. Before we left, my mother had the slaves spend hours on my hair and arranging my dress. They were palace slaves, so they had high standards. Ropes of amber and gold were wrapped around my throat. Whitening lead make-up was rubbed over my face, and ochre was daubed on my lips and cheeks to make them look red. My hair was waved like the Empress’s, which meant tucking wads of hair that used to belong to some unfortunate slave girl under my own hair to give it volume. By the end of it my neck was stiff with being held upright and my eyes ached from looking in the mirror. I no longer even looked like myself.
Then my father came in in a rage and made me wash it all off.
“Absolute nonsense,” he told my mother. “That white lead that rich women smear on their faces is bad for the health. It can poison, even as far as death if it is used too much. That was written in the Alexipharmaca of Nicander, the great Greek physician. No daughter of mine is using it.”
“But everyone uses it,” my mother protested. “Even the Empress!”
“Not my daughter,” my father repeated firmly. “It’s bad for the health.”
My mother shrugged. “Oh well,” she said with a sigh, “perhaps it is for the best. It may be fashionable, but it made you look too grown-up. He is marrying a girl, after all, not an adult woman on her second husband.”
So, in the end, I went to meet Publius wearing a fashionable hairstyle, gold earrings and necklace, perfume, but no make-up. I didn’t care. I felt sick with nerves and I just wanted to get the meeting over with.
The house itself was a villa in the heart of the city’s finest district. Slaves unbarred the door for us and we went in over the mosaic floor, into the wide, pleasant courtyard filled with the scent of blossom and grapes dangling overhead. Publius’s mother, a plump, giggly woman with house keys jingling at her waist, came out to meet us, and embraced my mother – the two had been friends before I was born.
“You have such a cute accent!” she exclaimed, pinching my cheeks in a way I hated. “Just like the Emperor himself, may he live forever! I couldn’t understand a word the man was saying when I first met him. I suppose everyone sounds like that in the provinces.”
I hardly heard her. I was looking around trying to guess which of the young men I saw might be Publius. His mother led me over to him. I recognised his long-lashed eyes and his shy expression. The knobbly elbows were gone, however, and I wished Livia were there, because I could have told her: he was handsome.
“Mother!” You look at me, shocked. I have to laugh.
“What? There are other handsome men in the world than your father, you know,” I tease. “Anyway, he wasn’t just handsome. He was. . .” I search for the right word. Gentle, modest. . . and yet those weren’t the things that made me feel at ease with him. “Kind.”
Our mothers sat a polite distance away from us, while Publius and I walked awkwardly together around the large pool in the courtyard. He was twenty, slim and quiet with dark curly hair, and not much suited to the senatorial toga he wore. I expected the purple stripe to be on fat, old men with bald heads and wrinkles. He seemed rather embarrassed by his, instead of honoured.
“I don’t usually wear this at home,” he told me in a low voice. “After all, it’s my father who is the senator – not me.”
I said very little at first, suddenly feeling too shy and awkward to talk. It was not as if I had never met any men before. I was used to my father’s friends, who enjoyed loud philosophical discussions over plenty of wine and a good meal, but that was different; I
