Crispina froze and turned to face her mother. “To Horatia’s,” she lied. She hadn’t loved her ex-husband, but marriage had brought with it a degree of freedom. She’d been accountable to no one but her husband, who rarely cared what she did or where she went. Now, after returning to her parents’ house, she was caged.
Mother approached. “What’s in your basket?”
Crispina suppressed a sigh. “I sewed some items for Horatia’s child.” Her best friend’s second child was due in about a month.
“Can’t you have a slave bring them?”
“I want to see her. She’s too pregnant to go anywhere.”
“Very well, but take the litter. I can’t have you traipsing about the streets like a plebeian.” She snapped her fingers. Immediately, a slave appeared. “Have the litter prepared for Crispina.”
The slave rushed off. Crispina’s fingers curled in frustration. There was no way she could get where she wanted to go now, not under the supervision of a squadron of litter-bearers. They might obey her, but they’d tell her mother, and then she’d be barred from leaving the house for good.
But a visit to Horatia might do her good. Crispina had barely left the house since her divorce last month, and she missed Horatia. She would only have to reckon with the jealousy that would choke her at the sight of her pregnant friend.
Crispina allowed herself to be helped into a litter, and it lurched into motion. The litter’s curtains blocked her view of the streets, but she knew each house they passed belonged to a senator or magistrate or former consul. The families who ran Rome lived clustered in this neighborhood, insulated from the noise and crowds of the rest of the city by vigilant guards who shooed away any unfortunates who dared loiter near their estates.
After a short ride, she was entering Horatia’s townhouse. A slave escorted her to the sunlit sitting room off the atrium where Horatia reclined on a couch.
Horatia glanced up with a smile at Crispina’s entrance. “My dear! What a surprise.” She started to struggle to her feet, but Crispina waved a hand.
“Don’t rise on my account. You look ready to burst.” Crispina took a seat in a chair opposite.
Horatia ran a loving hand over her protuberant stomach. “Only a month to go. Decius won’t stop hovering.” She smiled.
Crispina forced a smile. She would have given anything to have a kind, gentle man like Decius for a husband, not to mention one son already born and another child on the way.
It wasn’t that she was desperate to be a mother. She enjoyed children, but they were quite loud and messy. Horatia’s five-year-old son, while amiable most of the time, could screech loud enough to make the roof tiles shudder.
But it had been made clear to her that her inability to conceive a child was a failure, and Crispina did not like failing.
“And you, my friend? How have you been?” Horatia’s gaze grew sympathetic.
Crispina heaved a sigh. “Trapped. Bored. I was trying to get to the Aventine Hill today, but Mother caught me.” She showed Horatia her basket, which contained a stack of wax tablets and a pile of writing styluses. “The children will be wondering where I’ve got to these past few weeks.”
“I can’t believe how long you’ve kept that up.” Horatia smoothed a hand over her stomach. “It started when we were girls, didn’t it?”
Ironically, Horatia’s loathsome older brother had been the catalyst for Crispina’s love of teaching. He had been the sort of young man who believed women were innately less intelligent than males. As a girl of fifteen, Crispina took pleasure in proving him wrong by challenging him to things like reciting lines from Homer or listing the years in which each of Rome’s seven kings ruled. Crispina invariably won all of these little contests.
Horatia’s brother also believed that slaves, even those who hadn’t been born into servitude, had less capacity for intellect than citizens. Thus, according to him, female slaves were the lowest of the low in terms of intelligence. Crispina, wanting to prove him wrong once and for all, challenged him to a bet of one hundred sestertii that she could teach a female slave child to read and write at same level as a citizen male child within three months.
By the time she succeeded, using the seven-year-old daughter of one of her parents’ slaves as her student, she barely cared about the bet. She had discovered teaching lit a fire within her, giving her a sense of purpose and satisfaction she had never felt before. She split her winnings with the little girl, whose dedication and enthusiasm were essential to Crispina’s victory, and immediately wanted to do it again.
But that was right before her marriage to Memmius, and his household hadn’t contained any children. So, exploiting her newfound freedom as a married woman, she had taken her enterprise one step further. She found a group of poor plebeians on the Aventine Hill who, with some subtle bribery, allowed her to teach their children for an hour or so each week. The children lived in squalor, but Crispina was convinced that if they could attain an education, they could create a better life for themselves and their families. She’d visited them every week without fail until her divorce. Horatia had even accompanied her at the start, though she didn’t fully share Crispina’s enthusiasm, and her interest had faded after her first pregnancy.
“It’s important to me. I have little enough else to look forward to.” When Crispina had been disappointed month after month by her lack of conception, her students had been her solace, her fulfillment. Without them, her life felt useless.
“Come now, I’m sure some suitor will materialize before long,” Horatia said. “There are plenty of widowers who already have heirs.”
“I don’t want to be some old man’s third wife,” Crispina muttered. But marrying again might be the only way to regain a degree of autonomy and return to her students on the Aventine. Better to be a wife with her own household than a daughter perpetually under her parents’ thumbs.
Her mind went to Aelius, his proposal, and his letter. She cleared her throat. “I did have an interesting conversation at my parents’ dinner party last week. There was a man in attendance. Aelius Herminius. Do you know him?”
Horatia shook her head. “Don’t think so. What about him?”
Horatia knew everyone in their circle, so her unfamiliarity with Aelius was both concerning and intriguing. “He tried to propose. Of course I assumed it was a prank.”
“Did you tell him off?” Horatia asked.
