Towards the end of that year news came that Agricola was dead as well.
“As Tacitus is fond of saying,” wrote Licinius Corax, ” ‘It is a principle of human nature to hate those whom we have injured.’ But even our Divine Emperor could find little in Agricola to justify his anger, and so our friend escaped official disfavor. Indeed, the Emperor was remarkably solicitous throughout Agricola’s illness, and though there are those who whisper that the General was taken off by poison; for myself, I think the cause was a heart broken by witnessing Rome’s dishonor. It may be that he is well out of it, and it is we who will soon wish that we had gone on before. Be glad that you are safely out of sight in Britannia . . .”
In the following year Licinius retired and came to make his home with them, and so they added another wing to the Villa Severina, and the final year of Gaius’s service as Procurator for supplies began. He had hoped that when he completed his term of office Senator Malleus would be able to arrange to have him appointed to a higher position, but that year brought disturbing news. The Emperor was growing ever more autocratic and suspicious. As a military leader he had been reasonably successful, but he seemed to take his successes as proof of divine favor, and was doing his best, wrote Licinius’s cousin Corax, to destroy what power remained to the patrician class.
Gaius wondered if this would be the spark that set the embers of rebellion aflame, but the next thing they heard was that Herennius Senecio and several others had been executed for treason.
Gaius understood that his career was likely to be on hold for some time. His patron Senator Malleus, while not accused, had found it prudent to retire to his estates in Campania. And so, when Gaius completed his term as Procurator, he put off the visit to Rome with which he had planned to follow it and, like his patron, decided to devote himself for a time to developing the productivity of his lands.
Now he began at last to establish a stronger friendship with his remaining daughters, but Julia remained depressed and sickly. Though they still shared a bed, it was becoming ever clearer that she was unlikely to give him a son.
By now Eilan’s child would be ten years old. Even a father who was not precisely in the Emperor’s favor could guarantee the child a better future than a British priestess who must hide the very fact of his existence, and surely Julia would rather raise a son of his than a stranger’s child – although he could never be quite sure what Julia would feel. But after all, Gaius could assure her – and it would be the truth – that the boy had been fathered before he ever set eyes on her.
The Forest House was scarcely an afternoon’s ride away. His son could be living just over the next hill, reflected Gaius, gazing southward through the trees. But he found himself oddly afraid to face Eilan again. Did she hate Rome? Did she hate him? The girl he had loved when he was a boy was gone, transformed into the terrible priestess of Vernemeton. Sometimes it seemed to him that the woman he had married was gone too, all the playfulness that had attracted him dead with her son.
Gaius had been reasonably successful in his career, though he had hardly fulfilled his father’s dreams. But it occurred to him that he had little to love. In his life he had often been lonely, but his father’s discipline, or that of the army, had kept him too busy to worry about it. But as the year wore on Gaius found that though managing the estate exercised his body it left his mind free to roam, and he was haunted by dreams of his childhood.
Perhaps it was all the time he was putting in on the land that was stimulating his memories from that age when all the world was wonderful and new. He had not allowed himself to think about his mother when he was a child, but he dreamed of her now. He felt her holding him, heard her sweet lullabies and woke in tears, calling to her not to leave him alone.