Agrippa's Daughter Read Free Page B

another—Berenice walked past the two fat priests, her back to the king for a moment, smiling at them scornfully, or, rather, grimacing at them the way a sixteen-year-old girl can grimace, and then turned to face her father. The king was further mollified by the fact that his son had acted as his taster. He looked with some pleasure now upon his two beautiful children, and, returning his look, Berenice said to herself,
    “One day, my dear father, those fine green cat’s eyes of yours will be dead, seeing nothing—but my own cat’s eyes will be alive. Was it our dubious ancestor, King Solomon, who said that a live cat can look at a dead king—or was it a live dog?”
    But her smile directed at her father was so sweet and gentle that he was moved to say, “Your thoughts, my dear daughter?”
    “Love and admiration are easy in thought—harder in speech.”
    “You’ve changed. Your months in Chalcis have improved you.”
    “Yes.”
    “A certain sweetness.”
    “I feel it too,” she simpered.
    “My brother’s influence.”
    “But surely,” she agreed.
    “You see how wise I was, foolish child.”
    “So wise, yes,” and she added silently, “I wish you were dead, damn you forever.”
    And he was before the day was over, causing Berenice to remember this incident and these thoughts; but in all truth causing her no more than a minimum of guilt.
    “I have a remarkable memory,” she told her brother then. “I remember things very clearly.”
    Until her first betrothal, Berenice paid little attention to her father, and he in turn took even less note of her. It might be said that he was absorbed. A young, handsome prince of the Herodian line, he was without realm except in a token sense, a tiny province of Galilee to substantiate his claims, but funds without limit. There were the endless attractions of Alexandria, Athens, and Rome for him to explore, and even simple, uninspired vice requires deadly concentration. That of course was before he became a saint. In his years of goodness—four of them, he had—he observed one day that Berenice, the child, had become a woman, that remarkable change that happens to young ladies at the age of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, or even twelve. She was between fourteen and fifteen when King Agrippa made his observation, finding her tall, full-breasted, wide-hipped, and even attractive in a strange, outlandish way, with her freckled face, her coppery skin, her red hair, and her gleaming green eyes.
    “Time for her to be married,” Agrippa told his wife, Cypros.
    “Time for her to have a little peace and pleasure first. She’s only a child,” Cypros retorted.
    In his saintly stage at the time, Agrippa took a dim view of pleasure—which recalled his own past and the uneasiness that went with such recollection—and felt that Berenice was an object for his convenience and by no means for her own. However, when it came to the fact of marriage, it was not easy for Agrippa to make a choice. His one yardstick had become saintliness, and while there were good men in plenty in the ranks of Israel, he soon found that few of them were wellborn and even fewer were rich. If Agrippa was indifferent to the needs or desires of Berenice, he was by no means indifferent to her bloodlines; she could claim not only the Herodian and Hasmonean ancestry, but also the bloodline of King David and a trace of the Roman Julian Gens. There was the highest blood in Israel. Who could marry it?
    His decision, finally, was for a weak and ailing boy of sixteen called Marcus Lysimachus. He was the youngest son of Alexander Lysimachus, alabarch of Alexandria. Outside of Palestine, in what was known as the Diaspora, the largest and wealthiest community of Jews was in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Here the Jews were a power unto themselves, inhabiting half the city, their houses the finest, their streets the broadest and grandest; and here, too, were their schools, colleges, their libraries, their