veil and the amaracus wreath. I was such a romantic. My parents were dead, and he was estranged from his. A clue which I completely ignored.”
“What was his name?”
“I won’t speak it. Soon after we were married, it became clear his love for me paled beside his passion for gambling. He was obsessed by the chariot races; whenever the cheers from the Circus Maximus echoed through the city, he would disappear, probably with those same men who had followed us to our threshold. I didn’t notice the losses at first; he didn’t confide in me. And honestly, I was so wrapped up in my daughter, I wasn’t paying attention. I had never been so happy.” I nodded. “I suppose that’s why two years ago when I came back from the market and he gave me the news, I fainted. See this scar?” She leaned toward me; I saw a thin white ripple just below the hairline near her left temple. “I fell and cracked my head. When I got up a few moments later, blood was seeping between my fingers; he steadied me and put me in a chair. I brushed him away and made him speak again so I would know I had not misheard him. He spoke slowly, defeat and regret coating every word. To pay his debts, he said, he had been forced to sell our daughter. I looked around frantically, realizing we were alone. I screamed at him, ‘Where is she?!’ but she was already gone.”
“I cannot bear this,” I said.
“I would have killed him then, had I been able. His gladius was in the corner and I ran for it, but blood was getting in my eye and I tripped.”
“Please, Sabina, let’s go inside.”
“Some head wounds look far worse than they are,” she continued. Her eyes were focused on a sight I could not behold, on the memory being reborn as she spoke it. “If only I could have killed him,” she said wistfully, “none of this would have happened.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That man tried to bandage me, but I preferred to bleed rather than have him touch me. He boasted he had gone to the forum to find the most reputable of merchants. It was Boaz. By the darkest sorcery, Livia, my flesh and my heart, had been transformed into a lifeless pile of cold, worthless coins. He tried to explain how well off we were; showed me the money that would be left after he paid off his creditors. Even tried to put the coins in my hand – the equivalent of 4,000 sesterces in forty small gold aureii. 12,000 sesterces for my daughter to pay 8,000 in debts. He gambled away almost nine years’ wages. The sorry bastard I married had only served for ten.”
“How could he get so much money on a soldier’s wage?”
“Where do you think? Over half of it was mine; money I’d saved working as a healer. Foolishly I thought my girlish love would pave the road to infinite trust. I gave him the money to manage. The rest he must have borrowed. A clever snail, he was, I’ll give him that. He put a false bottom in the small money chest that held our savings. When he needed to take out more than the 925 sesterces he was putting in each month, he’d raise the floor to make the level of coins look unchanged. That’s how he stole from us.
“He actually thought he was being noble, giving me charge of all that gold. But he left me with but a third of what I would need to buy Livia back, and that was only if Boaz would make the exchange profitless. I took the coins, cupped them in my hands and spit on them. Then I flung them in his face as hard as I could. I cut him, and hit him in one eye, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing will ever be enough. Within the hour he had left to rejoin his legion. I never saw him again.
“That night I awoke with a start and lit a candle. I crawled on the floor till I had collected every aureus. I put them in our water bucket and the next day bought another one slightly smaller. I broke the staves and set them aside, muffled the coins with a rag, pressed them into the false bottom and calked it.”
“Your husband’s trick in reverse. Ingenious.”
“Then I put it under the basin stand and prayed to our house god to