Diana
was eternally grateful to the whims of fate for placing her in the household of
the Lady Lucilla. Somehow, though she had loathed being reduced from the rank
of a patrician's treasured daughter to the level of a servant, she soon came to
feel as though it were she being cared for by the Princess, and not vice
versa.
Lucilla was unlike any royal lady
Diana had met in her pampered life. Her purpose in life seemed more than to set
an example for her inferiors, but to see to their welfare personally. She had
been a legendarily good mother to Lucius, and as a result, the complete lack of
petulance in the boy had at one time been the talk of the land. When someone
she loved or felt responsible for – this included her ladies in waiting – was
hurt, physically or emotionally, she felt their pain with them, and did
everything she humanly could to relieve it.
Her own life had rarely been
comfortable and had never been easy, but the optimism and consolation Lucilla
brought to those around her made her the most beloved woman in the whole of the
Empire, and the one who would never be forgotten. Instead she would be
canonised, along with General Maximus, in the imaginations of the people of
Rome for many generations to come.
Quintus, therefore, was not the only
person to feel the loss of the Princess so keenly. He was, however, the only
man as yet to form a design on that which she had supposedly left behind.
* * *
The people of Rome, as they went about their early-morning business, were kind to the lone young woman and her child as she trod the crowded streets, following detailed directions given by the kind driver of the cart who had made the journey with them. These parts of the city were not so squalid or uncivilised as she had once been led to believe. Raising her head to see above the heads of the figures all around her, she saw the grey-bricked building the driver had told her to seek out. As if to give her approval, Julia gurgled, reclining in her arms.
Diana smiled down at the baby and
quickened her pace, desperate to be indoors where she could gather her thoughts
and decide what to do next. True to her unspoken word, Lucilla had cared for
her "chosen one" to the end: Diana had, sewn into the lining of her heavy
tunica, more money than she had ever guessed existed – an unsolicited gift from
her mistress. She and Julia should have been made more than comfortable, but
the former handmaiden, educated thoroughly by the Princess of Rome, was thrifty
for the moment.
The apartment she shortly found
herself in would serve for the time being: a single room, furnished modestly,
with a low but sturdy bed for Diana and a cradle for Julia. Supplies would be
needed, and many of them. Diana was scared by the thought, though definitely
not for want of finances. She had never bought anything for herself or anyone
else in her life. The choice of a communal dwelling rather than an isolated
house had not, consequently, been accidental. Her planned tactic for survival
was to observe others, discreetly, and then to imitate them.
This was where fate had brought her.
Her third life in twenty-one years, yet this latest would be infinitely more
complicated and trying than that of a political pawn or a servant had been.
Julia took to her new home much more
quickly than her new mother did.
In
her cradle, cosseted in the small selection of makeshift coverings Diana had
thought to bring with her, the normally jittery child made short work of
falling asleep.
Diana removed her clothes, which by
now were sticking to her skin with nervous sweat. She did not even notice how
hungry she was, so familiar had the feeling become in recent days. After giving
Julia her milk and seeing to the baby's every comfort, she often and easily
forgot her own needs. She lay down on the bed, finally resting and luxuriating
in silence and comfort.
Hours
passed as she attempted to relax fully, her mind blank, only slightly cheered
by the quiet noises Julia made in her untroubled slumber. The air cooled, and
Diana slid beneath a thin, scratchy blanket, tempted to cover up her head, but
thinking the better of it in case Julia should cry.
Sleep came eventually, just as soon as her nerves –
left on edge by the baby's constant demands – saw fit to calm. In the morning,
the last thing Diana would remember seeing in her prolonged wakefulness was the
dark azure blue spilling in from the perfect Roman night outside, embracing and
beautifying her meagre surroundings like a welcome home gift.
In
her blurry dreams, she thought she saw Lucilla, and her heart soared with pleasure.
The room around her was suddenly not a paltry rented apartment, but the lady's
magnificent chamber of state, rich and golden like a shrine to her great
goodness and beauty. Diana strained to see the figure walking towards her from
across the grandly elongated room, wanting fiercely to see the fallen lady one
more time.
But no. The woman was too short and
sturdy, her step too languid and her complexion much too dark to be that of
Lucilla. Diana felt a great part of herself, momentarily revived by thoughts of
her mistress, lying dormant once more.
"Diana, you shame us," said the
woman sternly, still walking.
The voice was like a dagger to her,
and she could barely fathom why, until she recognised her mother's face. Thin,
drawn and constantly frowning grimly, making her children feel guilty was the
only way she had known how to control them.
Slowly, Diana's gaze fell to the other woman's
stomach as they both stood still, which was full and round. Her mother was
pregnant, quite heavily so.
"Mother…" she began.
Then, the overwhelming, sickening
stench of blood came to her nostrils suddenly as torrents of gore began to pour
from beneath her mother's skirts. Her belly was deflating, and as it did, she
looked down at the shocking spectacle with a look of pure…surprise.
"Oh, Diana," said the vision
unhurriedly, standing sedately in a pool of her own life force. "What have you
done to us now?"
Diana merely gaped, moaning in
horror, and then screamed. Or thought she did. Her instinct was to run away,
but she seemed paralysed, staring at the blood and perversely fascinated. She
waited to see the dead baby float out from beneath its mother, but it did not.
Some repressed memory had been triggered, something frightening and repugnant
to her, which for the moment was lost.
When she woke, seconds later, her
pillow was soaked with tears. Despite the terror of her nightmare, however, she
felt oddly rested and comfortable. Turning over automatically to check on
Julia, she breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the baby, still bound up in her
blankets and sleeping.
"That's the quietest the little
monster's ever been in her life," she said to herself, absently.
Then it came to her.
The games – the stuff of her teenage
nightmares. Emperor Commodus, whom she had thankfully directly encountered only
once or twice during his reign, parading those people out to kill one another
for sport. Most of her contemporaries had thought it good, even necessary for
national unity, to display and observe such things.
She had thought it barbaric. Death,
the sound of metal crashing upon metal, cries of pain, the roar of the
unscrupulous crowd's cheers. The blood. It was a mystery to her, even now, what
putrid recesses of human nature would dream up, let alone implement, such
horrid concepts. It was just one of the reasons she had despised her family so
much.
There were, however, other reasons
for her hatred. Other memories, buried like the dead, such as those which
caused her, at this moment, to try and forget the image of her mother that she
had just revisited.
In all her life to come, Diana knew that rose petals
would disgust her, and all because of the part they had played in that
horrifying final display.
Rubbing
her eyes, and rising sluggishly from her bed, Diana walked the short distance
to Julia's cradle, gathering up the resting girl in her arms and rocking her
gently, scrutinising her face and the wispy thatch of corn-coloured hair on her
tiny head.
In that second, the first traces of gratitude for
Lucilla's beautiful legacy manifested themselves. Lying back down, Diana placed
Julia next to her and held her close, breathing in her sweet smell, trying to
detect the Princess of Rome somewhere in her daughter's aroma.
The link her subconscious had tried
to make between childbirth and tragedy seemed obvious to Diana, even in her
drowsy mental state. Julia's face beside her own, she was gradually overcome by
some oppressed maternal love for the child in Lucilla's eternal absence.
"You," she whispered, "were probably
the only good thing, besides your mother, ever to come out of that travesty of
a royal bloodline. I wish you could stay tiny forever so that I might never
cease talking to you this way."
Diana's attention was caught at that
moment by such close inspection of her charge. In all the time that had passed
since Lucilla's death, barely a moment had been spared for Diana to give her
attention exclusively to Julia. She narrowed her eyes, staring into the tiny
sleeping face again, fundamental questions forming in her mind. Golden hair and
heartrending smile from her mother. Eyes, not Lucilla's – presumably Julia's
anonymous father. Who could he have been?
"I never asked her," Diana thought,
eyes filling with tears again, clouding the semi-darkness around her.
* * *
Then, however, there were those people whose whole livelihoods depended upon every movement in the high places of the Empire. When these people were not desperately working to improve their own position in this great and complex hierarchy, in which family and birthright meant everything, they were usually frustrated and malevolently disdainful towards those who were handed their power on a plate by their affluent fathers.
One such creature was Quintus. The
mere second son of an equite – a man of property, slightly less powerful
than a patrician – he had lived for seventeen excruciatingly uncertain years in
the shadow of his brother Marcellus. Marcellus was the unquestioned favourite,
having inherited their mother's fine bone structure and full, handsome face,
along with their father's prodigious intelligence and ruthlessness in a
political world which, were in not for his tireless efforts, may well have
refused to ever accept them.
Their family were not one of the ancient bloodlines
that had dominated the social and political elites for centuries, but their
attempts to join this upper crust soon became legendary. As a child, always
pushed into dark corners while Marcellus was praised for his fledgling
achievements in their father's footsteps, Quintus had practically been
relegated to the status of a daughter. Yet at the same time, he was denied even
the status of his four younger sisters, who (all but one) were married before
they turned fourteen to three brothers, all sons of a hideously wealthy
patrician.
The company of his one maiden sister, aged ten, was
both a blessing and a curse to Quintus in his despair. She had been brain
damaged at birth, and her brother spent the whole of her short life trying
half-heartedly to make stimulating conversation with her, to engage what
intellect she had, just to form the basis of some meaningful companionship
between them. He never achieved his goal. No number of expensive physicians
could do anything to help young Maria, and she died before her eleventh
birthday a few months later.
The power of Quintus's grief surprised him, and then
disgusted him. His pride would not allow him to admit that in his whole life,
the only friendship he had even come close to having had been with a mentally
handicapped girl. It was terrible of him to think such things of his poor
sister, his mother had yelled, tears streaming down her face, while beating him
for his insolence. Maria had been the one of her babies she thought she would
never have to give up. Now, it seemed, she was stranded in their great estates
with only Quintus, who enraged her.
Marcellus, meanwhile, married a woman of direct
royal descent, practically a cousin of Marcus Aurelius. Then, just before
Quintus turned eighteen with still no career prospects of his own beside army
duty, his brother was hit by a stray arrow on a hunting expedition at which his
father and two of his uncles were present. He was killed outright, aged twenty,
with a glittering and hard-earned future in politics wasted and a young bride
set to inherit almost everything he left behind.
If Marcellus had not married, all of his property
would have gone straight to Quintus. All that was now left to be passed down
was their father's ambition for one of his sons, just one, to succeed in Roman
politics.
It was all of these things which had formed the
basis of Quintus's contempt for the opposite sex: jealously of three of his
sisters, more successful than he; irrational anger at Maria for dying and
leaving him in such grotesque loneliness; hatred of his mother for hating him;
and rage at his sister-in-law for marrying Marcellus and becoming his heir.
Thus, he could never look at a woman without a
combination of scorn and condescension to her undoubtedly high rank. High-ranking,
ridiculously empowered women were virtually the only kind he had met in his
recent life.
Until Lucilla. Now, with her death and the news of
the possible existence of an unclaimed child, he was finally faced with a real
opportunity to redeem his father's position and render unjust all the man's
lowest opinions of his youngest son. The thought made him boil with long-held
anger, and then a rare glimmer of happiness with this new possibility.
Lucilla was splendid, but the infant, being hers,
was not enough. Her son Lucius remained in Rome, his guardians consolidating
his claim to power. Having located it, for the child to be valuable to
revolutionaries in Rome, Quintus would have to find evidence that it was also
the offspring of the General Maximus.
