Nero Read online

  I wondered if it was too late to go to the party after all.

  'Titus, I asked you a question.'

  'Fourteen. She was the daughter of my father's bailiff. Now honestly, I'd rather not discuss the matter.'

  'And did your mother choose her for you?'

  Despite myself I laughed. 'She thought I was off fishing, darling. Which I was, in a way.'

  'There you are, then.'

  'There I am what?'

  'Titus, don't be obtuse! Lucius's was an arranged marriage, and from all accounts he can't stand the girl.'

  I saw, finally, what she was driving at.

  'So you're saying all our emperor needs to boost his self-esteem is a roll on the potting-shed floor with the girl of his dreams? Silia, don't be ridiculous!'

  She sniffed. 'Why should it be ridiculous? What the poor boy needs is a nice girl of his own choosing who honestly thinks he's marvellous and who'll give him a bit of confidence.'

  'Any girl who thought Lucius was marvellous would be certifiable.'

  'Nonsense. He's a charming boy, underneath his spots. And I know just the girl. Woman, rather.'

  'If you know her already how can she be of his own choosing?'

  'Don't quibble, dear, it's vulgar.'

  'Silia, listen to me!' I was becoming seriously alarmed. 'You cannot mess with the imperial family.'

  'Who,' she snapped back, 'is messing?'

  'You are, darling. Or you would be. Besides, it really is none of your business.'

  She sighed. 'Titus, you're being terribly tiresome. Of course it isn't my business. But someone has to do something. If that dreadful woman isn't stopped soon poor Junia and several other friends of mine will almost certainly end up dead or exiled. That I will not have.'

  'I'm sure Seneca and Burrus are perfectly capable of...'

  She placed a finger over my lips. It smelled of perfume.

  'Seneca and Burrus are men. The poor lambs haven't a hope of stopping her. And you haven't met Acte.' Her lips brushed my forehead and I felt the Setinian stirring. 'Now go to sleep, dear. I'm tired.'

  She lay down and turned her back towards me. The owl hooted again, mournfully. Probably a male locked out of his nest for the night, stewed on Setinian.

  Bugger. I went to sleep. Eventually.

  7.

  Future historians will no doubt describe Acte as a beautiful young siren, common as muck but with the face and figure of a goddess, sitting on her rock and tempting Lucius down from the Palatine not with her song but by the shimmer of her glorious upturned rosy-nippled breasts and peerless thighs; a nymph of the Aventine with long, unbound hair spilling over her bare shoulders and reaching past her narrow waist to her generous hips and silky purse.

  Wrong, my dears. Wrong, wrong, wrong. She wasn't like that at all. If she had been, Lucius – at this stage of his career, at least – would have run a mile.

  Silia introduced us in the tiny room three floors above an Egyptian glassware shop near Pompey's Theatre, where the woman had her theatrical costumes business.

  'Claudia Acte,' she said. 'Acte, this is my friend Petronius Niger.'

  We shook hands (her idea, not mine, and she almost broke my fingers). I wasn't bowled over, to put it mildly. She was Asiatic Greek, thirty if a day, dumpy as a sack of flour, with thick black eyebrows like mating earwigs, coarse-grained skin and a face that wouldn't've launched a rowing boat on the Tiber, let alone started the Trojan War. She even, I noticed with distaste, had a wart. The world to choose from, I thought, and Lucius is expected to fancy this?

  None the less, I was polite. It wasn't her fault she was ugly, poor soul.

  'Claudia Acte?' I said. 'You're an imperial freedwoman?'

  'That's right.' Her voice was pleasant, at least: honey-rich and dark. 'I bought my freedom from the Divine Claudius three years ago. He set me up here.'

  I was looking round as she spoke. The flat was hardly what I'd been expecting either, although I suppose one could say any attempt at decoration in a tenement shows eccentricity. The window shutters were brightly painted with flowers and trailing plants, with real plants in earthenware pots and fish-pickle jars full of flowering weeds resting on the sill. Theatrical masks hung from nails on the bare brick walls. I assumed these were part of Acte's stock, but curiously every one was cracked or split, so perhaps they were supposed to be decorative. If so then they were remarkably effective, forming a sort of three-dimensional mural. The room itself, of course, was tiny. Most of the floor space was taken up by a work-bench covered with bits of cloth, coloured threads and pots of glass jewels. On top of all the rest lay a woman's dark blue cloak; obviously part of the costume that Acte had been working on when we arrived. I picked it up and examined it. The material was cheap and very plain, but from a distance it would look quite impressive. Unusually for a stage costume, it was well cut and the stitches were small.

  'Electra?' I asked.

  She shook her head. 'Phaedra.'

  'Really?' I raised my eyebrows. In the Greek myth Phaedra's passion for her stepson had brought the young man to his death. 'Hardly flashy enough for a seductress, I'd've thought.'

  'Phaedra was no seductress. She was only a woman who couldn't help herself. That's what makes her tragic.'

  My eyebrows went up another notch: one doesn't expect literary criticism from a seamstress.

  'It's very well made,' I said. 'Too well made for a play.'

  'Actors act better in a real costume. Or one that feels real. Ask anyone in the business and they'll tell you the same.'

  'Acte comes from a theatrical family, Titus.' I was probably looking as bemused as I felt, because Silia was smiling.

  I laid the cloak back down. 'Your father was on the stage?'

  'Sure.' Acte's plump face broke into a not-unattractive grin; her teeth were healthy, white and even. 'Both grandfathers, and their fathers as well. We go all the way back to Thespis, Dad used to say. And Ma played the double-flute.'

  'In Rome?'

  'Miletus, although we travelled around. My parents sold me to a Syrian merchant. He brought me to Rome.'

  'How old were you?'

  'Seven or eight. They'd had three bad seasons in a row, so they were cleaned out.' Her voice was matter-of-fact. 'A few years later I got left to the emperor as part of a job lot in the man's will, and that was that.'

  'Talk to him about Nero, dear.' Silia was trying on a wire tiara crusted with glass emeralds and examining herself in a small bronze mirror.

  Acte picked up the cloak I'd been looking at and rubbed the material gently between thumb and forefinger. Despite their strength her fingers looked surprisingly delicate. 'Lucius? Lucius is a lovely boy. He'd make a good actor if they'd just leave him alone. Maybe even a great one.'

  I laughed, then wished I hadn't because she turned on me with eyes sharp as a pair of dressmaker's pins.

  'I mean it,' she said. 'And I know, believe me. I've seen the best. We used to talk a lot, before I bought myself out, when his mother wasn't around.' She laid the cloak back down on the workbench. 'Talk theatre. Proper Old Greek theatre, not this modern tat. Euripides. Sophocles. Even Aeschylus. That boy's got the heart for a play, and heart's rare. Everything else comes with practice, but never heart, you've either got it or you haven't. You know he had me crying once?'

  'Really?' I was genuinely surprised. The woman looked nail-hard; she would have to be, after the life she'd led.

  'Yeah, really. We were talking about Hecuba – Euripides's Hecuba – when he suddenly starts giving me the old woman's first speech. You know it?'

  '"Levin of Zeus!"' I quoted. '"Black Night! What fears and phantoms have roused me from my sleep?"'

  She nodded. 'That's it. When it's done well it sends the ice up my spine, has done ever since I was a kid and heard my father speak it in the Samos Theatre. I knew then he was good, really good, even if he didn't have the voice. That comes with training, but like I said the heart you're born with, and you can't fake it or hide it.' She face
d me, her eyes level. 'That boy's a natural actor, Petronius. As an emperor he's wasted.'

  This time I didn't laugh. I didn't dare.

  Silia had been listening closely. Now she put down the tiara.

  'How would you like to work at the palace, Acte?' she said.

  The woman frowned and turned towards her. 'Doing what, for example?'

  'Does it matter?'

  'Sure it matters. I've done my time as a slave. This place may not look much, but it's mine. I'm my own mistress, I can pay the rent and still eat regular. What more would I want?'

  'To help Lucius, perhaps.'

  The frown deepened. 'He's the emperor. He doesn't need help from me.'

  'Doesn't he?' Silia sat down on the bench. 'Tell me one thing, dear. Do you think he'll make a good job of it?'

  'No chance.' Acte shook her head. 'With his temperament he hasn't got a hope.' First theatrical criticism, now a political assessment. Delivered with equal aplomb. Not your average freedwoman, this. I raised my eyebrows again, but Silia didn't seem surprised, either at the answer or at the tone.

  'Oh, don't get me wrong. He'll mean well,' Acte went on. 'Like I say, the kid's got a lovely nature. But he's desperate to be liked and he's terrified of making mistakes. He'll do what other people tell him to do just because they are other people and he thinks they know better than he does. Especially older women.'

  'People like his mother?' Silia said.

  'You said it, lady, not me.' Acte turned away from her, picked up the tiara from the work-bench and began methodically to twist it out of shape. 'I don't name names behind people's backs.'

  'But that's who you meant, isn't it?'

  Acte's head came up. 'Look!' she said sharply. 'Stop cross-examining me, right? I don't know politics. I don't know anything but theatre and stitching costumes together. Yes, I'm fond of Lucius. I'm sorry for him and I don't like his mother. But that's where it stops. If the people at the top think she's good for Rome then I'd be a fool to say any different.'

  'But they don't,' I said. 'Quite the reverse.'

  Silia shot me a warning glance. 'No one's trying to put words in your mouth, Acte.'

  'Okay. That's fine by me.' The strong slim fingers tugged at the wire. 'So let's keep it that way.'

  'You can help Lucius, if you really want to. In fact, dear, you're the only one who can.'

  Acte laughed. 'Oh, yeah. Sure. So Afranius Burrus keeps telling me when we split a bowl of porridge together.'

  'That's not what I meant at all. Of course not. Lucius doesn't need anyone else telling him what to do. He does need a friend. Someone he can talk to.'

  'I told you.' Acte set the tiara down, or what was left of it. 'The boy's an emperor now. Emperors don't ask ex-slaves for advice.'

  'Stuff and nonsense!' Silia snapped. 'Your former master Claudius did it all the time!'

  'I'm no bum-licker like Narcissus. I fry my own fish in my own pan, lady. And I don't need any favours.'

  Silia was becoming seriously annoyed. I knew the signs – the spreading flush, the tight lips, the slight tapping of the left foot. 'I said a friend, dear, not a hanger-on. The poor boy will have enough of Narcissus's sort.'

  Acte was quiet for a long time. She picked up the tiara and pulled it carefully back into shape while Silia glared at her. Then, suddenly, she stood up.

  'Okay,' she said. 'Okay, but no promises. You say I can help. Tell me how.'

  Silia told her. In the end she took surprisingly little persuading: Jupiter knows what the woman saw in him, but as you've probably realised yourself reading between the lines Acte was seriously smitten even then with young Lucius. Silia had a word with Crispinilla the imperial wardrobe mistress (they used the same perfumier), poor ugly Acte was duly drafted onto the palace's domestic staff, and we sat back to await results.

  The effect was even better than we'd hoped for. By the end of the month Lucius was head over heels in love...

  Oh dear, oh dear! This is beginning to sound dreadfully unconvincing, like one of those gushy, ghastly Alexandrian novelettes where clean-limbed young strangers (who turn out to be princes in disguise) sweep dewy-eyed heroines off their feet and carry them away on their Arab chargers to an eternity of expurgated wedded bliss. Don't blame me, please; it's honestly not my fault. That's how things went, even although the heroine was rather a sight and the princely hero had spots and bad breath. Human nature is a curious beast, and there is no accounting for taste. I use the word loosely, of course.

  The dewy-eyed part, however, was literally true. When Acte came round to Silia's to report just after the Kalends she was sickeningly primaveral. Even her wart glowed.

  'He's marvellous,' she told us. 'Just as nice as I remembered him. Kind and considerate and sensitive and...'

  'Have a grape.' I held out the bowl.

  Silia looked daggers at me. 'Stop it, Titus,' she said. 'I think it's lovely. So terribly romantic. Do go on, dear.'

  '...and he wants me to marry him.'

  'Serapis!' I almost dropped the dish. 'You're not serious!'

  Acte looked at me. Her eyes were like deep pools in which reflected starlight lurked (they were! I swear they were!).

  'Why not?' she snapped. 'Why shouldn't he?'

  'For one thing, darling, he's already married to Octavia.'

  'But he doesn't like the little wimp. He's never even slept with her.'

  'There, Titus!' Silia gave a smug, self-satisfied smile. 'I knew he was a virgin.'

  'Does Agrippina know about this?' I was, I admit it, in shock. Self-confidence was one thing. Divorcing an imperial wife, however wimpish, to marry an ex-slave who made theatrical costumes for a living was not the behaviour one expected of an emperor.

  'Of course she doesn't! Agrippina doesn't even know we're...seeing each other.' Acte blushed; she actually blushed!

  'This is your fault, Silia.' I rounded on her. 'I warned you about interfering. You've created a monster.'

  Silia gently removed the fruit bowl from my nerveless fingers and replaced it on the table. 'Don't talk nonsense, dear,' she said.

  'It isn't nonsense! The Senate'll never stand for it for a start!' I turned back to Acte. 'And what about Burrus and Seneca? What do they have to say about these impending nuptials of yours?'

  'They don't know either. It's our secret. They just think Lucius and I are' – she paused and lowered her eyes modestly – 'cohabiting.'

  This was too much. 'Cohabiting? You're cohabiting crazy, both of you!' I glared at Silia. 'All three of you!'

  'Titus, dear, you're being a bore.'

  'You think this isn't serious? What happens when Agrippina finds out?'

  'Oh, we've talked about that.' Acte was calm. 'Lucius says he's the emperor, not her, and if she makes trouble he'll tell her where she gets off.'

  Oh, Serapis! I goggled at her, beyond speech.

  'I really don't see why you're making all this fuss, darling.' Silia smoothed out a non-existent crease in her mantle. 'We wanted the boy to have more self-confidence. Now he does, thanks to Acte here. And I'm sure Seneca and Burrus are simply thrilled that he's facing up to that terrible woman at last. They are, aren't they, dear?'

  'Sure.' Acte glowed. 'They're doing handstands.'

  'You see, Titus?' Silia turned back to me smugly. 'Everything is going just splendidly. I told you it'd work, didn't I? Now stop scowling and don't be such a sourpuss.'

  And if this had indeed been a gushy, ghastly Alexandrian novelette we'd leave it there, with young love and virtue triumphant, evil vanquished and sourpusses censured; but life, I'm afraid, isn't like that. Life, sadly, is a bowl, not of cherries, but of pickles.

  Let's hear it for the sourpusses.

  8.

  Sourpusses, however, were not much in evidence at first. When I next stumbled into Persicus down at our mutual baths he was ecstatic over the new regime; in fact, he hailed me from the other side of the cold plunge.

  'Hey, Petronius! You know any good poets?'

  I
went over. The sulky slave with the chicken-baster's hands wasn't in evidence; traded in, no doubt, for a later model.

  'No, but if you're really interested I do a nice line in dirty drinking songs,' I said.

  'Then widen your field, boy!' A grin. 'Start writing encomiums.'

  'I didn't know you even knew the word, darling.' Bitchy, but I'd had a hard night. Never have bear meat on top of ostrich-brain fricassee.

  He laughed. 'Yeah? Well, we've got ourselves an emperor for a change.'

  'So I've noticed. Mind you there's already been Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula...'

  'Stuff it.' He threw his towel at me. 'You know what I mean. The lad's doing well. They're saying down at the Senate House that he's old Augustus born again only without the starch.'

  'They would say anything.'

  He shook his head decisively. 'Not in private. They mean it, Titus. That's some commendation, even if they do know Burrus and Seneca are pulling the strings. The kid's got to listen to somebody, and at least now it's not Agrippina. She is out – but I mean seriously!'

  'And how is our dowager empress taking it?' We sat down with our backs against a pillar.

  'How do you think? Like a rhino with migraine.' He frowned. 'Hey, you know this Acte woman?'

  'No.' I wasn't going to let Persicus in on that little secret, oh no. Good at his job he might be and a splendid young man all round, but he was also the loosest mouth in Rome. 'No, I've never even seen her.'

  'Me neither. I don't move in these circles, and he keeps her well under wraps. But she must be something really special the way she's hooked the boy away from Mummy.'

  'They say she was Mithridates's mistress.' I put in my two-pennyworth of false gossip: Mithridates was one of the leading eastern client-kings and randy as a drunken camel. 'They also say she wore him out in a month.'

  Persicus whistled. 'No kidding? Jupiter's balls! That makes sense, because when the Bitch caught them together she went up the wall.'

  'Agrippina caught them?' My stomach turned over. 'You mean, she's found out?' It'd been inevitable from the start, of course, but even so...

  Persicus grinned. 'She walked in on them this morning, in Nero's bedroom. The kid just lay there petrified like he'd been caught with his hand in the honey jar, but Acte told her to piss off.'