Horatia narrowed her eyes. “I suppose I can’t blame you for being jealous.”
Crispina bit her lip on another sharp remark. She didn’t want to quarrel with her best friend, especially not days after Horatia had given birth. Her problems weren’t Horatia’s fault, so she forced a neutral expression and changed the subject to ask about the arrangements for the baby’s naming ceremony.
Chapter 10
That evening, Crispina sat and brushed out her hair at the dressing table in their bedroom. At home, a slave would do this for her, but she’d been trying to minimize her requests to Aelius’s slaves since her marriage, and she hadn’t brought any from her parents’ house. Had Gaia once brushed out her mistress’s hair?
The thought made her uncomfortable, but before she could dwell on it, Aelius entered. He hadn’t been home for dinner, so Crispina guessed he’d been with Catullus or another friend.
He sat and unlaced his sandals. “Good evening. How was your day?”
He always insisted on making conversation during their evenings in the bedroom together. Crispina wanted to tell him not to bother with the effort, but it did make the nights less awkward. “Fine,” she said. “I visited Horatia and her new baby.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
He kicked his sandals off. “Do you find it uncomfortable to be around babies?”
Her hand stilled, the brush pausing halfway through her length of hair. The directness of the question surprised her. She thought they had a tacit agreement not to discuss anything so…fraught.
She resumed brushing. She could ignore the question. But as she considered it, the weight of her feelings pressed heavy on her chest. Usually Horatia was the one she confided things she couldn’t tell anyone else. But she couldn’t talk to Horatia about this.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “I felt jealous, certainly, that she can do something I can’t. The same way I imagine you felt jealous of those who won the election that you lost.”
His face contracted in a momentary expression that almost looked like pain.Interesting. His former loss pained him. She expected any man would be galled or embarrassed at a public defeat, but Aelius seemed to feel it more deeply. Which explained why he was willing to go to such great lengths to avoid another loss.
“But I’m not certain I would actually enjoy having children,” she continued. “They are loud, dirty, and demanding.” Even her students exhausted her as much as she enjoyed them. “Maybe it’s not just a physical ability I lack. The deficiency seems to extend to my nature as well. I just wasn’t meant to be a mother.”
“Perhaps it’s your mind’s way of reckoning with whatever has prevented you from conceiving,” Aelius said quietly. “I wonder, if you were presented with a child somehow, you might feel differently.”
“Well, I won’t be, so it doesn’t signify.” She set her brush down, eager to change the subject. “How was your day?”
He rose and went to the basin to splash water on his face. “Catullus is helping me to ferret out the names of men who might be running in the tribune election. It’s many months off, but the sooner I figure out who my opponents are, the sooner I can determine their weaknesses and how to defeat them.”
“Such ruthlessness.” She tried to imbue her voice with a dry apathy, but something in his drive for success appealed to her. Her father had inherited his membership in the senatorial class, and Memmius had been born into enough money and privilege he’d never had to strive for anything. “Am I to have another Sulla on my hands?”
A grin lightened his face. “Perhaps Sulla just needed a wife to keep him in line. I bet a woman with a good head on her shoulders could have kept him from marching on Rome.”
“Well, he had four, so they evidently didn’t do a good job.” The famous dictator had even divorced his third wife for infertility. At least Crispina knew she was not the only woman to be humiliated like that.
“Four wives?” Aelius let out a long breath. “I’ve got some catching up to do.”
Crispina rolled her eyes and got into bed. Aelius blew out the lamps and joined her a moment later, keeping carefully to his side of the bed. He had a peculiar way of plumping his pillow that had at first irked her, but now, after a week of marriage, the sequence ofthump-thumpswere becoming more familiar than annoying. She could almost predict their rhythm, like anticipating the next verse of a song.
Don’t get too comfortable.This marriage would end, and she’d have to get used to sleeping alone once more.
Crispina woke in darkness with a growling stomach. She sighed, willing herself to go back to sleep, but her stomach wouldn’t stop whining. At this rate, she’d wake Aelius.
She gritted her teeth and swung her legs out of the cozy bed, wincing as her feet landed on the chill stone floor. She eased the door open and tiptoed out of the room. One good thing about this house being so small was that she had less distance to travel to the kitchen.
She passed through the narrow hallway that opened onto the peristyle, the small private garden at the back of the house. At this hour, it was lit only by moonlight. As she crossed through the garden, a noise made her stop short. At first she thought it was just a slave snoring, as the slaves slept wherever they could find space to lay a blanket, but it was an irregular sniffling noise, not the rhythmic sound of snoring.
A tiny sob sounded, coming from the corner of the garden. Crispina debated pretending not to have heard it. She was not skilled at comforting people, and certainly had no experience comforting slaves.
But Aelius treated his people well, and she sensed he would want to know if one of them was unhappy.
Crispina cleared her throat. “I can hear you.” Her voice echoed in the darkness.
