The Lion and the Lark Read Free Page A

wondered what she would think of his single state.  Every wellborn Roman matron’s primary obligation was to guide her eldest son into an advantageous marriage and provide heirs for her husband’s line.
         So far, Claudius was the last of the Leonati.  He had failed miserably in his duty to enrich with children the noble house of his forefathers.  Not that he lacked for offers: he was handsome and wealthy, a celebrated veteran of the foreign wars which made heroes of victorious returning soldiers.  Just about every Senator and General and other prominent Roman had put forward a daughter for his consideration, a daughter happy to share her bed with a comely descendant of the Gracchi and her life with the inheritor of the Leonatus estate.  But somehow Claudius always balked, questioned and negotiated and delayed long enough to be sent off to Iberia or Sicily or Crete.  When he came back, the girl was usually married to somebody else.  Roman fathers were notoriously eager to make matches for their daughters before the bloom was off the rose; the average age for first motherhood was seventeen.  But in truth none of his prospective brides had stirred his blood the way Vespasia had when he first saw her. 
         And he was young yet, in no hurry.  It would happen.
         But in the meantime, he was alone.
         Claudius held the polished silver goblet up to the light, gazing at his distorted image on its surface.  The thick, wavy black hair curling back from his forehead now showed a few traces of gray; he would be white by fifty like his father, if he lived that long.  The strong nose, olive complexion, and full carved lips completed the picture, a picture which fully exemplified the standards of the day.  His look was as much Greek as Italian, a gift from distant maternal ancestors who had traveled to the mainland from Sardinia.  And he was tall for a Roman, an attribute which served an officer well, since he stood a head above the men he commanded and was easily spotted in the field.
         Unfortunately, this made him a target for the enemy too, and his many scars bore silent witness to the injuries he had sustained.
         “ Cena , master,” Pollux said, entering the room with a tray inlaid with Nubian ebony.
         Claudius nodded and watched without interest as the servant set the meal on his desk.  There were slices of cold boar with apple and pear sauce, turbot and lampreys with pepper relish, salted herring with garum   and a carafe of alicant wine.  When Pollux had left Claudius sat in the carved chair his father had brought back from his Persian campaign, its brocaded back worked with golden thread in a complicated design of intertwined leaves and trailing vines.  Claudius selected a delicate piece of fish and looked around the room.
         Its many treasures offered a chronicle of his father’s travels with the Roman army.  Greek tapestries depicting mythical Theseus in a series of scenes with nymphs and shepherds, Parthian rugs, flowered Phoenician vases, painted urns from Numidia standing as high as a man’s waist, gilded candelabra wrought by the famous metalworkers of Thrace and Thessaly, all decorated the study.  Even the tiled floor had been assembled piece by piece into a costly mosaic portraying Romulus and Remus being nursed by the she-wolf.  The rest of the house was the same, all its appointments the best that money could buy, the spoils a ranking Roman officer commanded during a thirty year career which ended in Gaul.  The senior Leonatus had finally died of a wound sustained there seasons earlier, a lung puncture which made his breathing more and more difficult until it ceased entirely.  And now a lifetime of accumulated booty sat in his fine house, faithfully dusted by a team of servants, no comfort to the dead man who had carefully selected each piece.
         Claudius dropped the herring back onto his plate.  The prospect of leaving Rome again