“You haven’t touched the food,” I said. “It is very good, and Drusilla will be upset if you do not appreciate her effort.”
He smiled and speared a piece of leek and sausage, but sat with it uneaten in his hand. “This morning I received a letter.”
Suddenly I felt chilled. “From Rome?” With an effort I kept my voice calm.
“Not exactly. When he wrote it he was in Nicomedia, though he has undoubtedly moved elsewhere by now.”
I looked at him, thinking. No need to ask who he might be. But if the Emperor wanted Constantius’s head, surely he would have sent an officer along with his message to take him into custody.
“It was not, I take it, a warrant for your arrest?”
He shook his head. “Helena, he has offered me a place on his staff! Now I can make a real life for you and our child!”
I stared at him, suppressing my first panicked assumption that he meant to leave me. Constantius had done his best to seem happy, but I knew how much he had missed his military career.
“Can you trust him?”
“I think so,” he said seriously. “Aurelian has always had the reputation of being honest—a little too forthright, in fact. It was because he did not hide his anger that it seemed best for me to go into exile. He is already rid of me—to lure me back just so that he could have me murdered would require uneccessary subtlety.”
Too forthright? I suppressed a smile, understanding why Constantius had been exiled, and why the Emperor might want him back again.
His gaze went inward, calculating, planning, and I realized with a pang that if he was to fulfil the destiny I had foreseen for him, his attention would be inevitably drawn away from me. In that moment I wished passionately that he and I could have been ordinary people, and lived out an ordinary contented life together, here at the edge of the Empire. But even in the fading light there was something luminous about him that drew the eye. If Constantius had been an ordinary man, he would never have come to Avalon.
“With Tetricus still in power in the West, I wouldn’t be able to use the posting relays anyway,” he said at last. “It is just as well, with an entire household to transport. We can do part of the journey by water—make the crossing over the British Sea, and then take a barge up the Rhenus. That will be easier on you…” He looked up at me suddenly. “You will come with me, won’t you?”
One advantage to not being properly married, I reflected wryly, was that Constantius had no legal right to compel me. But the child in my belly bound me to him—the child, and the memory of a prophecy.
Constantius might have been able to leave at a moment’s notice when he was a bachelor, but now there was an entire household to shift, and control of a business to transfer into competent hands. The pewterworks had grown in the year he had been in charge of it. The slaves who did the actual labour were all very skilled, but the volume of production was beyond the capacity of the agent who had handled things before, and it took time to find a suitable manager and break him in.
And in that time, the first case of plague became many. It occurred to me that if the disease had decimated the Emperor’s staff the way it was going through Eburacum, Aurelian’s invitation might be less a mark of magnanimity than of desperation.
The slave boy Philip fell ill, and despite Drusilla’s protests, I nursed him. This disease was characterized by a racking cough and a prolonged high fever. But by wrapping him in cool wet cloths and giving him the infusions of white willow and birch that I had learned to use in Avalon I managed to keep Philip alive until the fever broke at last.
No one else in our household took the illlness, but the long hours of strain had drained my strength. I began to bleed, and after a few hours of wrenching cramps, I miscarried my child.