up, I haven’t the talent. It would take a master to capture your beauty and I, alas, am only an amateur.”
“Let me see it.”
The slanting rays of the afternoon sun sifted through the branches of the plane tree in the garden of Agathon’s town house. Water plashed softly in the fountain, somewhere a bird sang. He turned the drawing board toward her and she saw herself staring back, as though she were looking at her reflection in a pool—the large eyes, the strong nose (too big! she always thought), the wide mouth and rounded chin. The long neck.
“You have more skill than you give yourself credit for. If someone were to recognize me in this…You won’t show it to anyone will you?”
“I promise. Only I will gaze at it when you’re away from me. I love you.”
“Liar.” But she was smiling. This handsome boy did love her and the knowledge of it excited her more than she wanted to admit.
“And I will call it ‘A Portrait of Callirhoe’.” This was his love name for her. “You deserve a name of your own,” he had said on the second day they spent together. “A name that means something. What does Calpurnia mean except that you belong to your father’s clan.” Callirhoe—beautifully flowing. It was the name of the heroine in a romantic novel that everyone was talking about that summer. He had given her a copy, which she was working at in spare moments, though the Greek was hard.
“Say my name again,” she said.
“Callirhoe.” It did flow beautifully.
“Drink some more wine.” He filled her cup.
“You’ll make me drunk. I never get pissed at home.” She used the low, slang word.
He laughed. “Your Greek’s improving.”
“Thanks to you, my dear, I can curse like a sailor. I said something to my tutor the other day, I thought the poor man would have apoplexy.”
“You want to be careful about that. Sour old men like him carry tales.”
“Oh, I told him I’d learned it from Ione.”
“Ione! What a treasure she is! How would we manage without her?”
And this was true. Ione went everywhere with them, at a discreet distance, scouting to see if the coast was clear, inventing alibis to tell the other slaves, who anyway were convinced that all Roman women paraded wantonly around town whenever it pleased them. He had taken her to the Odeon to hear music, to the theater, to the race course; even for a picnic up in the wooded hills from where they saw the whole city spread out beneath them.
She loved the woods. They reminded her of her home in the foothills of the Alps, where she used to walk and climb as a girl among rocky precipices and rushing streams and ice cold lakes and pine trees that reached up to the sky. They had spent the day sketching, talking of this and that, walking under the brow of a mountain ridge that was said to resemble a woman’s profile—he said it looked like her, she said it looked like a cow’s hind end.
Of course, he knew by now who she was, who her husband was. She had feared he might run away when she told him, but he didn’t. Too cocksure of himself to be frightened. He was full of questions about Rome—the great amphitheater, the baths, the palaces and gardens. How many villas did her husband own, how many slaves? How did she spend her time at home? Was it true that Roman women dined in mixed company and went wherever they pleased? All of which she was happy to answer until his questions veered too close to her personal life, her marriage. Then she would change the subject. She was determined not to betray any confidences.
Wherever she went with him she wore Greek clothing and a blonde wig that she never wore at home. Still, there had been a terrifying moment at the theater. They were finding their seats when Atilia and Faustilla passed right by her in the aisle, close enough to touch. Her heart stopped. What could she have said if they’d recognized her? When the play was over she had told Agathon that it was finished. What was she thinking? She must be out of her mind. She couldn’t go on like this—glancing around to see who might be looking at them, pricking up her ears at the sound of every footstep, hearing suspicion in every voice. For two days she refused to see him. But then she thought she was