The Saint's Mistress (32 page)

days, and after Lucy woke and picked at breakfast, I thought it a good idea to walk to town with

Miriam and Lucy to allow them to bathe thoroughly after their long journey.

“Our Thagaste baths are nothing like Carthage,” I apologized.

Miriam snorted and her mouth twisted into a half-smile. “Oh, Leona, what a rich city girl

you’ve become. When do you think was the last time I even saw a bath? It will seem like Nero’s

palace to me, I promise you, and Lucy – well, she’s hasn’t seen a bath house since she was 4

years old.”

We undressed in the apoedyterion, and Miriam and I rubbed each other with oil, but Lucy

cowered in a corner, hugging her arms across her chest, and we decided to leave her alone for

now.

As I rubbed Miriam with oil, I felt a swelling at the side of her left breast. “Miriam, does this

hurt?”

She winced when I touched it, but said, “Oh, only a little every now and then. It’s nothing.

I’m old now; we get these aches and pains.”

“We have a sister who makes poultices. I’ll have her make you one when we get back,” I said.

When we finished oiling and scraping ourselves, we headed into the tepidarium.

Miriam sat back in the pool and closed her eyes in bliss.

“May I wash your hair, Lucy?”I asked.

Lucy neither answered nor looked at me, still hunched and hugging herself, so I gently guided

her by the elbow into the hot pool.

Lucy’s long hair had clumped into bad-smelling snakes that writhed down her neck to her

shoulders. Chaste we may be, and vanity is surely a sin, but it seemed to me that I would be

performing a kindness for Lucy and for everyone who had to be near her, to clean her stinking

hair.

I had brought olive oil, a lemon, and a small scrap of soap, and borrowed one of the cracked

pitchers lined up near the pool.

“Lean back,” I instructed, gently pressing on her forehead, and I began to pour the water from

the pitcher over her hair. It took many passes with the pitcher before her greasy hair was

drenched enough that I could begin working in the soap. I worked slowly, taking pleasure in the

feel of the creamy soap in my hands as I worked up lather in the girl’s hair. With the work-

hardened balls of my fingertips, I scrubbed at her scalp, feeling her skin shift over her skull, the

feeling of her hair under my callused fingertips pleasing somehow, like scratching an itch. I

scratched at her scalp more vigorously, and the soap foam bubbled like a stew.

“Feel good?” I asked, but Lucy didn’t respond.

Humming, I rinsed with the pitcher until no soap remained and then repeated the lathering

process and rinsed again. When the last of the soap had been rinsed out, Lucy’s dull, greasy

snakes of hair had been transformed into a tangle of wet, glistening strands. I squeezed the juice

of the lemon over her hair and massage it into the strands with my palms, to counteract the

alkalinity of the soap. Her hair would be beautiful, I saw, now that it was clean: thick and coarse

and wavy, like my own Adeo’s. Clean now, the strands were like tangled skeins of linen.

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I rubbed a little of the olive oil into my palms, and then rubbed that into Lucy’s hair. I had to

repeat this process twice more to cover every strand with a light coating of olive oil that would

make the tangles easier to comb out.

“You have beautiful hair,” I told her. “I’m just going to comb out the snarls now. I promise to

be gentle.”

I picked up a bone comb that I had brought with me from my old life of luxury with Aurelius,

and started at the bottom, combing gently. Lucy’s hair exuded the combined tart and oily smells

of lemons and olives. As I worked, I hummed a tune from a play that Aurelius and I had seen

many years ago in Carthage.

Thirty minutes of combing and humming, and finally Lucy’s hair was combed smooth and

glossy.

Miriam joined us, fresh from her own bathing in the hot and then the tepid pool. Thagaste had

no multi-chambered bath complex with elaborate mosaics, like what I had known in Carthage

and Italy, just this one room with two pools, and yet Miriam sighed with delight. “I had forgotten

the pleasures of the baths,” she said. “Oh, Lucy, how beautiful your hair looks, honey.”

“I knew your hair would be beautiful once we got it clean and combed,” I added. “Doesn’t

this feel a whole lot better?” I stretched my neck to look at the girl’s face. It was then that I saw

tears running down her cheeks.

I straightened and resumed my combing, following each stroke of the comb with a smoothing

with my palm, and returned to my humming, a softer tune this time, the one I used to sing to

Adeo at bedtime long ago. I kept combing, while Lucy’s shoulders heaved, and after a while her

dark hair was as smooth and gleaming as a nighttime pool and she spoke the first words I had

heard from her. “Thank you, aunty,” she said softly.

“No, thank you,” I replied. “You and your mother coming has brought light back to me.” I

hadn’t known it was true until I said it. I still felt myself in a dark cave of sorrow, but a faint light

now wavered in the gloom.

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I thought to teach Lucy the art of bookbinding. She was illiterate, of course, a girl who grew

up in the savage borderlands, but I thought there was no reason why she couldn’t learn to bind

vellum between leather.

Lucy herself had other ideas. She was tall and sturdy, and seemed meant for the outdoor life

that she had known as a girl. She lasted only a few days fumbling with an awl and linen thread,

before pleading to be allowed to work in the fields with the other strong young women. She

swung her scythe through the dusty golden fields with almost the strength of a man and raised

her alto voice in the work songs that the girls sang as they harvested. She could carry on her one

shoulder a bundle of harvested wheat that would have been heavy to two of the other girls. Lucy

took joy in physical labor, as if it were a gift from God and not at all a punishment for our

ancestors’ sin in the Garden, and gradually the fearful, haunted look left her eyes. I smiled to see

her white teeth gleaming against her bronze skin as she teased the other girls about their

weakness. They were a pretty sight, I thought, in their light tunics and bare, tanned legs, their

hair bound in scarves, swinging their scythes and singing in the dusty sunshine.

I turned to Miriam. “The sisters like Lucy. She’s a hard worker, and her jokes and teasing

keep them laughing during their work.”

“She was always that way,” Miriam said. “Made friends with everyone. Those days that we

walked, and our first days here, when she never spoke and her eyes looked so dead, I thought my

happy girl was lost to me. It’s a miracle that we found you and you brought her back to life.”

“A miracle for me, too.”

Miriam looked out the window and shook her head. “I can’t believe you do this all yourself, a

bunch of women.”

“This is just our own little field, and, between the fields and the goats and the vegetable

garden, we’re can feed ourselves and still spare labor for the Church’s lands,” I told her. “Now

that we have the acres from my son’s grandmother, we’ll be able to feed more of the poor after

our first harvest.” Since Miriam’s and Lucy’s coming, the dark weight on my heart had lightened

some, and I took new interest in my work, but I felt distant from it, as if all that happened in the

women’s house were something happening to someone else, and the only thing that had ever

happened to me was to mother and then lose Adeo. My prayers, too, had become rote and

perfunctory.

“As soon as I’m feeling better, I want to help,” Miriam said.

“Just rest and get better,” I replied.

Miriam had not been well. The swelling in her breast had grown sorer and redder each day,

and she could no longer lift her right arm. She had trouble keeping food down and the lack of

nourishment weakened her. I kept her in the dining hall, and gave her easy work to do when she

felt up to it.

We had caught up on many things in the weeks since she and Lucy had been restored to me.

Miriam had known great sorrow since our parting. Her first husband’s family had left Thagaste

long ago, with her son Peter, and she had no knowledge of where he was or how he fared. She

had borne three children to her second husband, but they and her husband all had died in a fever

that had swept through their border village. Her balm for these losses had come from her

daughter, her loom and her Christian faith. I described my sinful life with Aurelius, my travels to

Italy, my acceptance of the One True God in Milan, and finally of the death of my only child.

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I worked in silence for a while, threading my needle with linen thread to start binding a book.

I looked up when I felt Miriam’s eyes on me.

She looked at me thoughtfully. “I think of my little grandbaby, Lucy’s baby, all the time,” she

said.

“Of course you do.” My heart softened to her sorrow.

“I think of little things that he did. Even as little as he was, he already had ways of his own.

You know? If he thought we weren’t paying enough attention to him, he’d call out to us, some

little nonsense sound. And then when we looked over at him, he would laugh at how clever he

was at getting our attention. I like to remember how his fat little belly shook when he laughed,

and his eyes scrunched up like little raisins.” She glanced at me, then turned back to the bowl of

dried peas that she was shelling.

I felt tears sting my eyes. “I know. Adeo did the same thing. I remember exactly how he

looked. I know exactly what you mean.”

“I wish I could have known him. What was he like as a child?”

“Oh, Miriam, he was so smart. We were vain about him, Aurelius and I, and eager to see what

he would accomplish as a man. But when I think of him now, I think of little moments like the

one you described about your grandson. I think about the things that he loved, how he was

obsessed with elephants as a little boy, how much he worshipped his father, how he loved

books.” I smiled. “He was like his father. He could never be still. He’d sit reading a book and his

fingers would be drumming on the table, or his foot would be tapping up and down. I think about

those little things, how he looked and how he smelled. I make myself remember what his voice

sounded like. I’m afraid I’ll forget.”

“You were blessed to have him.”

I made no reply at first, intent on pressing my needle through the awl holes in the vellum

folios. But I found that my hands were unsteady and needle dull. Finally, I slammed the folio on

the table before me and cried, “But, why was he taken from me, then? I compound sin upon sin,

because I can’t accept God’s will on this. I’m so full of rage and bitterness.” I lowered my voice.

“I curse God sometimes. He said He punishes the children for the sins of the parents, to the third

and fourth generation, but I want to know why. I want to know how a good God could do that.”

Miriam looked at me steadily.

I went on. “I missed his last years. I left him in Italy and came back to Africa because I

couldn’t trust myself not to sin with Aurelius, and because his father and grandmother convinced

me that his prospects were better without me. And
then
God punished me – not when I was

sinning, but when I tried to do right! And I want to know why. And I want to know why it was

Adeo who was punished, not me. Why wasn’t it my life that was taken?”

Miriam shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“He was so good. His heart was so big. Everyone who met him loved him. You think this is

just his mother talking, but it was true. One of the last things he did…” I felt tears welling and

swallowed before I could go on. “The night before he took sick, I argued with his father about

the land that his grandmother left to the Church. I wanted it used to help feed the poor in our own

community, and I knew Quintus would just use it to add to the Church’s wealth and his own

power. Aurelius saw both sides of the argument, as usual. It was Adeo, eighteen years old –

eighteen years old! – who convinced him to do what was right.”

“I thought you didn’t care so much about the land.” Miriam rose and emptied the bowl of pea

husks out the window for our goats to chew on.

“I don’t care about anything anymore.”

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My friend sat back down next to me, the bowl of shelled peas in her lap, leaning towards me.

“But it seems like these acres were your son’s last gift to you.”

“Miriam, I know what you’re doing and stop it. You’re trying to give me a reason to go on.

It’s not that simple.” I picked up the folio and began jabbing my needle through it again.

“No, of course not,” Miriam agreed.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scold. You’ve suffered far more than I.”

“And our God brought us back together to comfort each other.”