Allyn Allyn: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

“Vesta?” I asked, for I had never seen an image of our holiest goddess except as her embodiment in sacred fire.

She nodded. “It’s for your aunt Statilia. She is very fond of you, AElia, and will no doubt make you her heir someday.”

In those days I cared little about legacies. Of more interest was the beautiful pendant. It hung on a slender gold chain and I slipped it around my neck. Marilla held up a hand mirror that I might admire myself. With reluctance, I handed it back to Prisca, who said, “Your mother told me that you love pearls as much as her sister.”

I was surprised that my mother had taken note of my preference on the rare occasions when she let me play with her jewelry. “They are my favorite,” I said. “She had a ring with a pearl that glowed like the moon, but she seldom wore it. When I am married, I shall wear it every day.”

Prisca gave one of those tolerant smiles that adults usually gave whenever I said something like that and murmured that perhaps I would find such a ring cumbersome when I had babies to tend. That ring is on my finger even as I write these words. In all the years since it became mine, only once has it been removed against my will, and he paid with his life for the insult.

But that is a later story for another time.

Now, she fastened the pendant to a fragrant wreath of cedar and tied the wreath with colorful ribbons. A servant hung it among the others that decorated the tablinum wall next to the atrium. Everything looked festive, and appetizing odors drifted in from the kitchen for the feasting to come.

The natural order of society is reversed during Saturnalia. The low are set high, the high are brought low. Servants are the masters, and masters are the servants. Wine is drunk by all, and everyone feasts every night. Servants are even allowed to play knucklebones and to gamble openly, something forbidden them the rest of the year (although many there are that flout that law!). At night, bands of raucous and sometimes naked revelers roam the streets to sing hymns before the houses, and the days are passed in games and visits and exchanges of presents. All businesses are closed and no work is done except what is needful for the celebration itself. Small wonder that the household was in a ferment of excitement.

Shortly after darkness fell, I retired to my room in the hope that sleep would make the night pass more quickly. Marilla and my maidservants were soon in the arms of Morpheus, but he eluded my entreaties. Memories of past Saturnalias haunted my thoughts — my father’s measured dignity when he and my brother each wore the pointed red wool pileus on their heads and served our servants at their annual feast, my mother’s attention to every detail as she and I poured wine for them. I wondered if she had found peace in the underworld or if it was her restlessness there that made me restless now. After tossing and turning until all the household noises died away, I rose and wrapped a shawl around my shoulders. The floor was icy, but I could not find my house slippers in the darkness and I tiptoed from the room in bare feet, intending to visit the latrine.

The moon lit my way across the peristyle, and as I passed Marcus Porcius’s room, I heard low murmurs and his deep voice mingled with a woman’s soft laughter. Candlelight glowed through a small slit at the top of the heavy curtain drawn across his doorway. So! In addition to a man’s voice and a man’s beard, he partook of a man’s pleasures as well? I remembered similar murmurs from my brother’s room before he left to join his legion, and the servant who slept outside his door was no more wakeful then than the servant snoring on his pallet in front of Marcus’s room now.

I had not taken much notice of Prisca’s servants and could not call to mind the face of any who might have caught his eye, but surely Marilla would know.

When I was finished in the latrine, I peeked into the kitchen, which was next-door. The room was hot and brightly lit by both the flames on the open hearth and a candle on the work table. The cook, a portly man of middle age, gave me a friendly smile as he turned a goose on the spit and basted it with a long-handled brush. “You cannot sleep, young mistress?”

“I keep thinking about tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t see how anyone can sleep.”

I perched upon a low stool at the table and tucked my cold feet under me to watch him work.

“Have you been with the household long?” I asked.

“I was born into this family,” he said proudly. “The old master wished to free me before he died, but I begged him not to. Better a slave with a full belly in the house of Cassius than a freedman who slaves to earn his daily ration of bread.”

He placed a freshly baked honeycake before me, and as I nibbled it, he spoke of the long and noble line that my sons would continue when they were born, the gods willing. By the time I finished the honeycake, the warm room and the drone of his voice had me yawning, and I started back to bed.

A candle still burned in Marcus’s room, but except for a soft snore beneath the heavier ones of the sleeping manservant, there was no sound from within when I passed. As I crossed the peristyle, I thought I saw a movement in the tablinum where Quintus Porcius held morning receptions. The screens had been pulled aside in readiness for tomorrow’s festivities and I could see into the atrium where the moon shone through the compluvium that opened in the ceiling. Moonbeams sparkled on the fountain below. I strained my eyes and whispered, “Who goes there?”

No answer.

I crept closer to the tablinum, so close that I could smell the cedar and yew wreaths that decorated the walls. In the deepest shadows at the end of the long vestibule beyond the atrium, I discerned the dark shape of the doorkeeper asleep on his pallet.

Emboldened that someone was close enough to hear me should I call for help, I went into the tablinum and looked around. There was barely enough moonlight to make out my aunt’s pendant. I wanted to reach up and touch the pearl’s cool silky surface, but even standing on tiptoe, I was not quite tall enough. Earlier in the day, I had thought it more oval than round, but here in the dimness, it looked like a full moon, a moon obscured by thin clouds. If my aunt did make me her heir, as Prisca predicted, then this pearl, too, might be mine someday.

I was not a timorous child, but the ancestral busts and masks seemed to glare at me in silent disapproval of my greedy thoughts, and my chilled feet soon persuaded me that I had seen nothing more than moonbeams on the dancing jets of water. I retreated to my room. Moments later, I was snuggled deep inside my warm covers and knew nothing more until Marilla pulled my toes and said, “Io, Saturnalia, sleepyhead!”

One maid held a basin of water to wash my face and the other arranged my hair after I dressed. From the bottom of my clothespress, Marilla drew forth a pair of beautiful shoes made of soft blue leather and stitched with tiny pearls. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Your mother bade me give you these on this day.”

Choking back my own tears, I took from a locked chest the new tunics Mother had provided for Marilla and my two servants.

The other Saturnalia gifts — small pouches of coins — I would distribute over the next few days.

“I love Saturnalia!” I said. “It’s my favorite festival and I hope it will last a thousand years.”

Marilla laughed. “And why should it not last forever, little goose?”

We hurried out to the atrium where everyone was gathering to leave for the temple of Saturn. All were dressed in new clothes and Prisca’s hair was elaborately styled with ringlets that framed her face and were held in place by golden hairpins set with colored jewels.