‘You are tired of me,’ the woman says, ending a silence. Her voice is low, amused. The careful movements of her arms, attending to her hair, do not cease. ‘Alas, the day has come.’
‘That day will never come,’ the man says calmly, also amused. This is a game they play, from within the entirely improbable certainty of their relationship. He does not turn from watching the doorway now, however.
‘I will be on the street again, at the mercy of the factions. A toy for the wildest partisans with their barbarian ways. A cast-aside actress, disgraced and abandoned, past my best years.’
She was twenty in the year when the Emperor Apius died. The man has seen thirty-one summers; not young, but it was said of him-before and after that year-that he was one of those who had never been young.
‘I’d give it two days,’ he murmurs, ‘before some infatuated scion of the Names, or a rising merchant in silk or Ispahani spice won your fickle heart with jewellery and a private bathhouse.’
‘A private bathhouse,’ she agrees, ‘would be a considerable lure.’
He glances over, smiling. She’d known he would, and has managed, not at all by chance, to be posed in profile, both arms uplifted in her hair, her head turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment, then laughs.
The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. ‘Our beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril, and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.’
‘May I come and do it some more?’ she asks.
She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her, in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning.
But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.
The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago. She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body-a kind of defending in the bed linen before saying to his now-intent profile, from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, What is he wearing?’
He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so surprised by the question and what she-very deliberately-revealed with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts that drew Saran-tines to the theatre every night she performed, alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and applause.
He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world, on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.
Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees that she’s covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of her fear.
‘You knew?’ he asks quietly.
‘You were extremely specific about this apartment,’ she murmurs, ‘the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues’ banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial maneuverings as much as the palaces or the barracks are. What is he wearing, Petrus?’