“Oh yes, my lady, my father often spoke of you,” said Corinthius the Younger. Crooked teeth showed as he grinned. “He used to say that you were brighter than any boy he ever taught, especially when I had not done well at my lessons.”
I could not help smiling in answer. “He was a good teacher. I wish I could have studied with him longer, but I was lucky my father believed a girl-child should be educated at all.” I did not tell him that my studies with the old Greek had been followed by a much more extensive education at Avalon.
“Oh indeed,” Corinthius nodded. “I am so sorry sometimes, when I see my lads with their sisters, that I am not able to teach the girls as well. I think that some of their parents would be willing, but they do not like to send their girls to a male teacher, and of course there are not so many educated women here as in Rome or Alexandria…” He poured more wine.
“Do you know,” I said eventually. “I have always wished that I had a daughter, to whom I could pass on some of the things I know. You might suggest to the mothers of some of these hoys who have sisters that they pay a call on me. My husband left me with enough to live on, but I find myself a little lonely, and would welcome a… circle… of friends.”
“You will be like Sappho in the meadows of Lesbos,” exclaimed Corinthius, “beloved of the gods!”
“Perhaps not quite like Sappho,” I replied, smiling, for when we lived in Drepanum I had read some of her poems that my tutor had never shown me. “But tell the women, and we shall see.”
Corinthius kept his word, and by the time the carving of the matronae was finished and installed in a shrine, a group of mothers and daughters were coining to my home at the new moon and the full, and if what I taught them owed more to Avalon than it did to Athens, it was no one’s business but our own. But not even to these, the first sisters in spirit I had had since I left the Holy Isle, did I confide whose wife I had been.
The third meeting took place at the baths, where one was assured of eventually meeting everyone in the city, during the hours reserved for women. Seen through clouds of billowing steam, everyone looks mysterious, but it seemed to me that the voice that was so loudly complaining about the price of wheat was familiar, and the long-boned, dark face as well.
“Vitellia, is it you?” I asked when she drew breath at last. Through the steam I could see that the golden fish still hung from its chain about her neck.
“By Heaven’s blessings, it is Helena! When I heard about—the marriage—I wondered—”
“Hush!” I held up one hand, “I do not speak of that here. I was well provided for, and people think me a rich widow with a son serving abroad.”
“Well then, let us be widows together! Come, let us eat a bite, and you shall tell me all that has happened since your son was born!”
We dried and dressed ourselves and went out through the marble portico. As we passed the statue of Venus I saw Vitellia glance at it nervously, but there was nothing there to account for the disgust with which she hurried past, only a garland of flowers that someone had draped across the pedestal.
“I am sure that people would not do that if they knew how difficult it is for us,” she muttered as we passed out into the road. “I know that you are not of the true faith, but in the days when our husbands were serving together, all the officers paid honour to the Highest God, so perhaps you can understand. We are commanded to avoid idolatry, you see, and yet we are surrounded by graven images and sacrifices.”
She gestured down the street, and I saw, as I had seen a hundred times without thinking anything of it, that we were surrounded by gods. An image of Neptune rose from a fountain, nymphs and fauns grinned from the corbels of houses, and the crossroads was marked by a shrine to some local spirit who had recently received a plateful of food and a bunch of flowers as an offering. I remembered being struck by the lavish display when first I came from Avalon, where we knew that all the earth was holy, but saw no reason to emphasize the point with all these decorations, but I had become accustomed to it, after more than twenty years.