And it had been many months since I had heard from his wife, Helena.
“Remember, until we know the situation you are to let me do the talking—” Cunoarda glanced nervously back down the street. Save for a slave who was sweeping the horse-droppings from in front of his master’s door it was empty. It was always possible that someone in the Emperor’s service was having Cunoarda followed, but we had seen no signs of it during the long days on the road.
I pulled my veil down to hide my features. “I understand.”
The house of Lena’s parents was in a quiet street near the outskirts of Treveri, lined by well-kept houses, though the area where we stood had not been swept recently, and there was a chip in the plaster of the wall near the door. It seemed a long time before our knocking was answered, and the door was opened by a girl with her hair tied up in a rag as if she had been cleaning.
Cunoarda and I traded looks. We had been admitted by a doorkeeper when we were here before. But from somewhere deeper in the house I could hear the happy laughter of a child.
“Is your master or your mistress at home?”
“Caecilia Justa is lying down. She has been ill.”
“Or the Lady Helena—is she here?”
The girl looked at us with sudden suspicion, and then, evidently deciding that Cunoarda had an honest face, nodded. “She is in the atrium, with the child.”
As we passed through the hallway I glimpsed the altar to the ancestral lares with an oil lamp burning before it, and realized that like many in the old aristocracy, the family held to the traditional religion. Though they had clearly fallen on hard times, the household was trying to maintain decent standards. The worn flagstones that paved the atrium were clean, the flowers in the earthenware pots had been watered and pruned.
On the other side of the fountain a small girl was playing, her fair hair flashing from gold to ash as she skipped in and out of the sunlight. By now she must be almost four years old. This, I thought, was a true child of Constantius’s line. What would her future be when Fausta’s black-browed offspring came to power?
I wanted to scoop her into my arms, but I remained hidden behind my veil. “I am dead, I told myself, I have no right to her now.
As we entered, the woman who had been watching her turned on her bench to greet us. Crispus’s wife was even thinner than she had been when I saw her before, but she was still beautiful. Her shadowed gaze fixed on Cunoarda.
“I remember you. You came here with the Empress.”
Cunoarda nodded uncomfortably. “My mistress charged me to fulfil certain commissions she did not wish recorded publically in her will. I have brought you a draft for a banker here in Treveri to provide for the little girl.”
Lena’s eyes rilled with tears. “Blessed be her memory! I am sorry now that I did not reply to her last letter, but I was afraid. Crispus is avenged, but that woman won. Everyone knows that we are in disgrace, and we have been ostracized. My father died last autumn, and we have had to learn to scrape by.”
“Then I am glad to bring you the Empress’s legacy,” said Cunoarda. We sat down on the other bench, and the maidservant brought a tray of preserved fruit and a pitcher of barley-water, very welcome on so warm a day. Though Lena might be thin, she no longer seemed so fragile, as if adversity had brought out a strength she had never needed before.
“I wish money was my only concern,” said Lena. “With my father dead, my mother is under the authority of my uncle. He is willing to take her in, but Crispa and I are a liability which even a legacy cannot negate. I fear it will only make me more attractive to one of the farmers to whom he has offered me… I no longer care what happens to me,” she added bitterly, “but what about my little girl, when her only choices are safety as a farmer’s drudge or death if she tries to claim her heritage in Rome?”