“And you are?” enquired Helena, rather sternly.
“I am Meldina.” Very nice. I managed to hold back the comment that she had a pretty name. It always sounds like a trite old pickup line, however genuinely meant. I was in a difficult enough situation, trying to hold on to a skillfully wriggling dog who had hopes of a country romance.
From then on, I let Helena take on the questioning while I just controlled Nux and watched admiringly. (I mean-of course-only that I was admiring the skill of my dear girl’s questioning.) “How long has Laelius Scaurus lived out here?”
“About three years.”
“As long as that! And have you lived here all the time?”
“Mostly.” Meldina gave us an especially big smile. “It’s very nice out here.”
We all looked around. It was a picture of country perfection. If you were talking in terms of perspective, the foreground was particularly fine, due to the presence in it of Meldina’s large-scale charms.
“Let me guess,” Helena said gently, in a tone that was unlikely to give offense. “You would have been a Laelius family freedwoman?”
“Oh no!” Meldina sounded horrified. “I had nothing to do with that lot. My mother was a freedwoman of his aunt’s,” she corrected. This rather complicated definition implied that there had been no pressure on her to move here with Scaurus; freeborn herself, she had come of her own choice. Nonetheless, I wondered whether the aunt had encouraged her; such an attractive girl might have been too much of a favorite with Auntie’s husband, maybe.
“Did you know Scaurus before he moved out to the country?” Helena was seeking to discover whether it was his friendship with Meldina that had caused Scaurus’ estrangement from his wife.
“No, afterwards. Still,” said the smiling girl (who never really stopped smiling), “we are pretty settled now.”
“No chance of him divorcing his wife, presumably?”
“Never. His father has forbidden it.” As we thought.
“Excuse me asking all these questions,” Helena said.
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll talk to anyone.” What a refreshing attitude. I wondered how far Meldina’s accessibility went. It seemed unlikely that she stinted much. Helena was giving me a stern look, for some reason. “What did you want to see Scaurus about?” Meldina asked, also throwing a look my way. I was a man of the world; I could handle that. On the other hand, I might not be able to handle Helena after this incident.
“We wanted a word about his young daughter-little Gaia. We had an encounter with her that left us feeling concerned.”
“Funny little tot,” said Meldina, with a delicious frown. “I’ve met her a few times. His aunt brings her out here to see him.”
The aunt had featured sufficiently for Helena now to fix on her. “ When you say his aunt, that wouldn’t be Terentia Paulla, I suppose?” I was surprised by this, until reminded of a conversation at Helena’s parents’ house about this woman; she had been the sister of the late Flaminica: “My grandmother knew her from the Bona Dea Festival,” Helena explained. “Terentia is a Vestal Virgin, isn’t she?”
“That’s the right aunt. But she’s not a Virgin anymore!” Meldina was giggling. “Didn’t you know? She retired at the end of her thirty years-then upset everyone by marrying!”
Retired Vestal Virgins could do that, in theory. It rarely happened since it was thought unlucky for a man to marry an ex-Virgin. Since she would probably be past childbearing age, a bridegroom would have to place a higher than usual premium on virginity to think it worthwhile. Any quick thrill from bedding a Vestal would be outweighed by then gaining a tyrant who came with thirty years’ experience of ruling the roost.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Helena, with spirit. “Grandmother never told me that!”
“You are shielded from anything scandalous,” I intervened.
“Oh, he can speak!” trilled Meldina.
“Far too much,” said Helena, sneering. “I only bring him out with me to carry the lapdog. Well, retired Vestals are allowed to take husbands, but people do always look askance… I cannot say Grandmama liked Terentia much,” she tried.
“Oh, didn’t she?” The girl continued to look bright and helpful, though she was definitely deflecting the question this time. She was being loyal. To whom? I wondered.
Helena let it go and changed her approach. “Meldina, did you know there is a plan for young Gaia Laelia to follow Terentia and become a Vestal too?”
“Yes, Scaurus said his wife came up with that.”
“He has given his consent?”
“I suppose so.”
“I just wondered if that was why he went to Rome today?”
“Oh no. His aunt wants him. He said it was to help with her affairs.”
Helena paused. “I’m sorry; I must have misunderstood something. I thought you said Laelius Scaurus went to Rome after receiving a letter from his wife, not his aunt?”
Meldina’s smile became broader than ever. “Well, that’s his lot all over, isn’t it? His auntie wants him, but his wife wrote and told him that his father had decided Scaurus was not to know anything about it.” She grinned. “Scaurus has gone to Rome to kick up a right stink!”
XXI
WE STAYED OVERNIGHT with my relatives. The beauteous Meldina had promised that if Scaurus returned, she would send him to talk to us. She said this with a frightening air of certainty. I was used to being won over with much subtler maneuvering but I could see that a man brought up in an atmosphere of repression might welcome a girl who was so firm. The poor wimp would feel secure.
Ma and Great-Auntie Phoebe were vying with each other in exclaiming dolefully that this might be the last time they ever saw one another. According to these two tough old birds, feeding a bone to Charon’s dog in the Underworld was just a day away for each of them. Myself I gave them both another decade. For one thing, neither could bear to depart life while Fabius and Junius were still providing them with disasters to deplore.
Fabius, the present homeboy, had been told about my new position as Procurator of the Sacred Poultry. “Oh, you must come and see what I am doing with our chickens, Marcus. This will interest you-”
My heart sank. While my great-uncle Scaro lived here, he too was full of crazy schemes and inventions, but Scaro had the knack of convincing you that when he showed you some weird piece of carved bone that looked like a potbellied pigeon, he had discovered the secret of flight. Any prototype produced by Fabius or Junius was bound to be of a more meager dimension and their mode of expressing enthusiasm had all the vigor of a very old rag rug. Whichever one backed you up against a manger for a lecture, the result was torture.
My grandfather and Great-Uncle Scaro (both long passed away) had built the original hen yard, a large enclosure which they had covered with nets and lined with coops, and where in good times they had nurtured upwards of two hundred birds. A woman and a boy lived alongside in a hut, but my uncles were the world’s worst managers of staff (either seducing them, feuding with them, or totally neglecting them), and so the birds were badly managed too. Reduced to forty or fifty in total during the recent reign of Uncle Junius, the flock had lived pleasantly, hardly ever troubled by having eggs removed or birds killed for the family pot. Now that Junius had run off somewhere, Fabius had plans to change all that.
“I am fattening them for sale scientifically. We are going to be thoroughly organized.” Nothing about my uncle was scientific or organized, except when he went fishing. His note-tablets of tedious data on fishes caught, location and weather, variety, length, healthiness, and bait used took up a whole shelf in the kitchen food cupboard, forcing Phoebe to keep her pickles at the back of the bucket store. Otherwise, Fabius could hardly put on a pair of boots by himself; he would get stuck after the first one and worry what to do next.
Fabius now had a large clutch of hens in a dark building where they were individually confined, some in cribs along one wall, some in special wicker containers with a hole fore and aft for the head and the tail. They were lying on soft hay, but packed so that they could not turn around and use up energy. Here the hapless fowl were
