The Grass Crown (88 page)

“No, it must be tomorrow,” said Metellus Pius strongly. “You don’t know Lucius Cornelius the way I do. No man lives whom I esteem and respect more. But you do not gainsay him, Mamercus! If we agree they can marry, then it’s tomorrow.”

“I’ve just remembered something, Quintus Caecilius. The last time I saw Dalmatica—it would be two or three market intervals ago—she asked after Lucius Cornelius. But she’s never asked after any other person, even you, her closest relative.”

“Well, she was in love with him when she was nineteen. Maybe she’s still in love with him. Women are peculiar, they do things like that,” said the Piglet in tones of great experience.

When the two men arrived at Marcus Aemilius Scaurus’s house and confronted Caecilia Metella Dalmatica, Metellus Pius saw what Mamercus had meant when he described her as timid. A mouse, was his verdict. A very attractive mouse, however, and sweet-natured. It did not occur to him to wonder how he might have felt had he been given in marriage at the age of seventeen to a woman almost sixty; women did as they were told, and a male sexagenarian had more to offer in every way than any female over forty-five. He launched into speech, as it had been decided that he—her closest relative—was technically in the position of paterfamilias.

“Dalmatica, today we have received an offer of marriage on your behalf. We strongly recommend that you accept, though we do feel you should have the right to decline should you wish,” said Metellus Pius very formally. “You are the widow of the Princeps Senatus and the mother of his children. However, we think no better offer of marriage is likely to come your way.”

“Who has offered for me, Quintus Caecilius?” Dalmatica asked, voice very small.

“The consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla.”

An expression of incredulous joy suffused her face, the grey of her eyes shone silver; two rather ungainly hands came out, almost met in a clap.

“I accept!” she gasped.

Both men blinked, having expected to do some persuasive talking before Dalmatica could be made to agree.

“He wants to marry you tomorrow,” said Mamercus.

“Today, if he wants!”

What could they say? What did one say?

Mamercus tried. “You are a very wealthy woman, Dalmatica. We have had no discussions with Lucius Cornelius regarding settlements and a dowry. In his mind, I think they are secondary considerations in that he knows you’re rich, and isn’t bothered beyond knowing you’re rich. He said he had divorced his wife for barrenness and didn’t want to marry a young girl, but rather a woman of sense still able to have children—and preferably a woman who already has children to establish her fertility.”

This ponderous explanation drove some of the light out of her face, but she nodded as if she understood, though she said nothing.

Mamercus plodded on into the mire of financial matters. “You will not be able to continue living here, of course. This house is now the property of your young son and must remain in my custody. I suggest you ask your chaperones if they would mind continuing to live here until your son is of an age to assume responsibility. Those slaves you do not wish to take with you to your new establishment can remain here with the caretakers. However, the house of Lucius Cornelius is a very small one compared to this house. I think you would find it claustra.”

“I find this one claustra,” said Dalmatica with a flicker of—irony? Truly?

“A new beginning should mean a new house,” said Metellus Pius, taking over when Mamercus bogged down. “If Lucius Cornelius agrees, the settlement could be a domus of this size in a location fitting for people of your status. Your dowry consists of the money left to you by your father, my uncle Dalmaticus. You also have a large sum left to you by Marcus Aemilius that cannot properly constitute a part of your dowry. However, for your own safety Mamercus and I will make sure that it is tied up in such a way that it remains yours. I do not think it wise to let Lucius Cornelius have access to your money.”

“Anything you like,” said Dalmatica.

“Then provided Lucius Cornelius agrees to these terms, the marriage can take place here tomorrow at the sixth hour of daylight. Until we can find a new house, you will live with Lucius Cornelius in his house,” said Mamercus.

Since Lucius Cornelius agreed expressionlessly to every condition, he and Caecilia Metella Dalmatica were married at the sixth hour of the following day, with Metellus Pius officiating and Mamercus acting as witness. The usual trappings had been dispensed with; after the brief ceremony—not confarreatio—was over, the bride and groom walked to Sulla’s house in the company of the bride’s two children, Metellus Pius, Mamercus, and three slaves the bride had requested she take with her.

When Sulla picked her up to carry her over his threshold she stiffened in shock, so easily and competently was it done. Mamercus and Metellus Pius came in to drink a cup of wine, but left so quickly that the new steward, Chrysogonus, was still absent showing the children and their tutor where their new quarters were, and the two other slaves were still standing looking utterly lost in a corner of the peristyle-garden.

The bride and groom were alone in the atrium. “Well, wife,” said Sulla flatly, “you’ve married another old man, and no doubt you’ll be widowed a second time.” That seemed such an outrageous statement to Dalmatica that she gaped at him, had to search for words. “You’re not old, Lucius Cornelius!”

“Fifty-two. that’s not young compared to almost thirty.”

“Compared to Marcus Aemilius, you’re a youth!” Sulla threw back his head and laughed. “There’s only one place where that remark can be proven,” he said, and picked her up again. “No dinner for you today, wife! It’s bedtime.”

“But the children! A new home for them—!”

“I bought a new steward yesterday after I divorced Aelia, and he’s a very efficient sort of fellow. Name’s Chrysogonus. An oily Greek of the worst kind. They make the best stewards once they’re aware that the master is awake to every trick and quite capable of crucifying them.” Sulla lifted his lip. “Your children will be looked after magnificently. Chrysogonus needs to ingratiate himself.”

The kind of marriage Dalmatica had experienced with Scaurus became far more obvious when Sulla put his new wife down on his bed, for she scuttled off it, opened the chest sent on ahead to Sulla’s house, and from it plucked a primly neat linen nightgown. While Sulla watched, fascinated, she turned her back to him, loosened her pretty cream wool dress but held it under her arms firmly, and managed thus to get the nightgown over her head and modestly hanging before she abandoned her clothes; one moment she was clad for day, the next moment she was clad for night. And never a glimpse of flesh!

“Take that wretched thing off,” said Sulla from behind her.

She turned round quickly and felt the breath leave her body. Sulla was naked, skin whiter than snow, the curling hair of chest and groin reflecting the mop on his head, a man without a sag to his midriff, without the crepey folds of true old age, a man compact and muscular.

It had taken Scaurus what had seemed hours of fumbling beneath her robe, pinching at her nipples and feeling between her legs, before anything happened to his penis—the only male member she had known, though she had never actually seen it. Scaurus had been an old-fashioned Roman, kept his sexual activities as modest as he felt his wife should be. That when availing himself of a less modest female than his wife, his sexual activity was very different, his wife could not know.

Yet there was Sulla, as noble and aristocratic as her dead husband, shamelessly exhibiting himself to her, his penis seeming as huge and erect as the one Priapus displayed upon his bronze statue in Scaurus’s study. She was not unfamiliar with the sexual anatomy of male and female, for both were everywhere in every house; the genitalia upon the herms, the lamps, the pedestals of tables, even some of the paintings on the walls. None of which had ever seemed remotely related to married life. They were simply a part of the furniture. Married life had been a husband who had never shown himself to her—who, despite the production of two children, as far as she knew could have been quite differently constructed from Priapus or the furniture and decorations.

When she had first met Sulla at that dinner party so many years ago, he had dazzled her. She had never seen a man so beautiful, so hard and strong yet so—so—womanish? What she had felt for him then (and during the time when she had spied on him as he went about Rome canvassing for the praetorian elections) was not consciously of the flesh, for she was a married woman with experience of the flesh, and dismissed it as the most unimportant and least appealing aspect of love. Her passion for Sulla was literally a schoolgirl crush—something of air and wind, not fire and fluid. From behind pillars and awnings she had feasted on him with her eyes, dreamed of his kisses rather than his penis, yearned for him in the most lavishly romantic way. What she wanted was a conquest, his enslavement, her own sweet victory as he knelt at her feet and wept for love of her.

Her husband had confronted her in the end, and everything to do with her life changed. But not her love for Sulla.

“You have made yourself ridiculous, Caecilia Metella Dalmatica,” Scaurus had said to her evenly and coldly. “But—and this is far worse—you have made me ridiculous. The whole of the city is laughing at me, the First Man in Rome. And that must stop. You have mooned and sighed and gushed in the stupidest way over a man who has not noticed you or encouraged you, who does not want your attentions, and whom I have been obliged to punish in order to preserve my own reputation. Had you not embarrassed him and me, he would be a praetor—as he deserves to be. You have therefore spoiled the lives of two men—one your husband, the other impeccably blameless. That I do not call myself blameless is due to my weakness in allowing this mortifying business to continue so long. But I had hoped that you would see the error of your ways for yourself, and thus prove to Rome that you are, after all, a worthy wife for the Princeps Senatus. However, time has proven you a worthless idiot. And there is only one way to deal with a worthless idiot. You will never leave this house again for any purpose whatsoever. Not for funerals or for weddings, for lady-friends or shopping. Nor may you have lady-friends visit you here, as I cannot trust your prudence. I must tell you that you are a silly and empty vessel, an unsuitable wife for a man of my auctoritas and dignitas. Now go.”

Of course this monumental disapproval did not prevent Scaurus’s seeking his wife’s body, but he was old and growing older, and these occasions grew further and further apart. When she produced his son she regained some slight measure of his approval, but Scaurus refused to relax the terms of her imprisonment. And in her dreams, in her isolation when time hung like a lead sow around her neck, still she thought of Sulla, still she loved him. Immaturely, from out of an adolescent heart.

Looking on the naked Sulla now provoked no sexual desire in her, just a winded amazement at his beauty and virility and a winded realization that the difference between Sulla and Scaurus was minimal after all. Beauty. Virility. They were the real differences. Sulla wasn’t going to kneel at her feet and weep for love of her! She had not conquered him! He was going to conquer her. With his ram battering down her gates.

“Take that thing off, Dalmatica,” he said.

She took her nightgown off with the alacrity of a child caught out in some sin, while he smiled and nodded.

“You’re lovely,” he said, a purr in his voice, stepped up to her, slid his erection between her legs, and gathered her close. Then he kissed her, and Dalmatica found herself in the midst of more sensations than she had ever known existed—the feel of his skin, his lips, his penis, his hands—the smell of him clean and sweet, like her children after their baths.

And so, waking up, growing up, she discovered dimensions which had nothing to do with dreams or fantasies and everything to do with living, conjoined bodies. And from love she fell into adoration, physical enslavement.

To Sulla she manifested the bewitchment he had first known with Julilla, yet magically mixed with echoes of Metrobius; he soared into an ecstatic delirium he hadn’t experienced in almost twenty years. I am starved too, he thought in wonder, and I didn’t even know it! This is so important, so vital to me! And I had lost all sight of it.

Little wonder then that nothing from that first incredible day of marriage to Dalmatica had the power to wound him deeply—not the boos and hisses he still experienced from those in the Forum who deplored his treatment of Aelia, not the malicious innuendo of men like Philippus who only saw Dalmatica’s money, not the crippled form of Gaius Marius leaning on his boy, not the nudges and winks of Lucius Decumius nor the sniggers of those who deemed Sulla a satyr and Scaurus’s widow an innocent, not even the bitter little note of congratulations Metrobius sent round with a bouquet of pansies.

Less than two weeks after the marriage they moved into a huge mansion on the Palatine overlooking the Circus Maximus and not far from the temple of Magna Mater. It had frescoes better than those in the house of Marcus Livius Drusus, pillars of solid marble, the best mosaic floors in Rome, and furniture of an opulence more suited to an eastern king than a Roman senator. Sulla and Dalmatica even boasted a citrus-wood table, its priceless peacock-grained surface supported by a gold-inlaid ivory pedestal in the form of interlocked dolphins; a wedding gift from Metellus Pius the Piglet.

Leaving the house in which he had lived for twenty-five years was another much-needed emancipation. Gone the memories of awful old Clitumna and her even more awful nephew, Stichus; gone the memories of Nicopolis, Julilla, Marcia, Aelia. And if the memories of his son were not gone, he had at least removed himself from the pain of seeing and feeling things his son had seen and felt, could no longer look in through the vacant nursery door and have an image of a laughing, naked little boy leap at him from nowhere. With Dalmatica he would start anew.

It was Rome’s good fortune that Sulla lingered in the city far longer than he would have did Dalmatica not exist; he was there to supervise his program of debt relief and think of ways to put money in the Treasury. Shifting mightily and snatching income at every conceivable opportunity, he managed to pay the legions (Pompey Strabo kept his word and sent in a very light wages bill) and even a little of the debt to Italian Gaul, and saw with satisfaction that business in the city seemed on the verge of a slight recovery.