“God will forgive you.” With a reproachful look at me, Bishop Ossius stepped past and set his hand on the Emperor’s head. “But you must repent and make restitution.”
“If it is Fausta who persuaded you to this deed then you must punish her,” I echoed. “Do it, or Crispus will forever haunt you, and so will I!”
“God, have you forsaken me?” whispered Constantine. “Father, forgive me for my most grievous sin…”
“Leave us,” whispered the Bishop, pointing towards the door. “I will deal with him now.”
I nodded, for I was sick and shaking, and had no desire to watch as the master of the Roman world grovelled before his god.
For the rest of that day I lay in a darkened room, refusing food. Cunoarda thought I was ill, but if so, it was a sickness of the soul. I was waiting, though until I heard the shouting late that afternoon I did not know what I had been waiting for.
I was already sitting up when Cunoarda hurried into my chamber.
“Lady! The Empress Fausta is dead!”
“How did it happen?” I snapped back. “Was it an execution?” I had demanded Fausta’s punishment, but I had not expected Constantine to compound one crime by committing another, scarcely less terrible.
“No one seems to know,” Cunoarda replied. “She had gone to the new baths, and guards came to take her to the Emperor, but before they could arrest her they heard screaming. Someone had raised a sluice to let in the scalding water, and Fausta was caught in it, boiled to death in her bath! They are bringing the body back now. They say it is horrible to see.” Her voice shook with an awful suppressed glee.
“Crispus, you are avenged!” I sank back upon the bed, wondering why the knowledge only increased my desolation.
My son had become a monster, at the mercy of his fears. But was I any better, who had urged him to an equal crime?
Of course there was an investigation, but no one ever learned how the accident had been arranged. In truth, although the Emperor meant to punish her, I am not certain that the manner of Fausta’s death was ordered by Constantine. Crispus had been very popular in this city where he had governed for so long, and it is possible that some servant at the baths, hearing that the Empress was condemned, had taken advantage of the opportunity to give her a foretaste of the hell she so richly deserved.
* * *
CHAPTER NINETEEN
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AD 327-8
“I think you should see him,” said Bishop Sylvester. “I believe the Emperor to be sincerely repentent, but he is still troubled in mind. They say he has caused a sculptor to make a golden image of his son which he has placed in a kind of oratory. He stands before it, lamenting. Perhaps you can give him ease…”
I stared at him in amazement. Surely I was the last person to offer Constantine comfort now.
“I know that you are still grieving, and perhaps you blame the Emperor for what happened, but if Christ could forgive His murderers as He hung on the Cross, can we do less?”
I might have found it easier, I thought grimly, if my son had sinned against me. I had spent the eight months since the death of Fausta in Rome, but neither in the new chapel that had been made from one of the rooms of my palace nor in the church of Marcellinus and Petrus, had I attended any service of the Christian faith. Nor had I entered any temple of the old religion. I was bereft of both Goddess and God. Indeed, since returning, I had hardly stirred beyond my own doors.
They say that the old dwell much on the past, as if reliving their lives backwards towards the beginning. Certainly I preferred to remember the days when Constantius and I had been young together, and more and more often, the dreams that filled my nights were of Avalon. I knew that my servants feared I was dying, and with good reason, for I was now in my seventy-seventh year, and life held nothing that I still desired.