Marilyn Todd - Virgin Territory

Pinching her nose against the sulphurous fumes as she hurried past the bleaching yard, resembling a giant beehive with its circular frames over which the whitened wool had been stretched, Acte thought that virginity was probably the only thing she’d had in common with Miss Sabina. Especially since Miss Sabina remained a virgin through service to Vesta, whereas Acte’s circumstances were pretty well unique in the whole of the Roman Empire. Women, even slaves, were seldom allowed to remain single, the marriage laws being what they were. It was only through the Master’s intervention, his rigid enforcement of the Chattel Rule (which said a man’s slaves were his possessions, he could do what he liked with them), that she wasn’t foisted off on some uncouth lout as breeding stock.

Giving the dyeshed as wide a berth as possible, Acte turned her eyes to the ground. She’d left the Master having a massage with Diomedes, so the small amount of time she had to spare was precious. She couldn’t afford to waste it on chitchat if the inevitable happened. Which it did.

‘Got a minute, Acte?’

The voice of Nikias, the foreman, carried across the yard and she felt bad about pretending she hadn’t heard him. He was a nice man, Nikias-a widower, solid and dependable-and she supposed she could have married him, had she wanted. There was nothing to stop her from choosing a husband of her own, only-

From the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth twist in disappointment. Too bad. Today his arms were black to the elbow from the privet dye, last week they had been yellow from the rowan bark. Sure, Nikias was nice. But who wants a man with multi-coloured arms in their bed at night?

Acte’s first choice today would have been Pharos Point, but since it took a full half-hour to reach the lighthouse she turned left instead. To every other slave, going to the birch grove was tantamount to visiting a leper colony, a place to be avoided at all costs on account of how it was haunted. Acte despised them for their narrowmindedness, but chose never to disabuse their talk of ghostly apparitions walking and moaning and generally doing their damnedest to spook people. It guaranteed her privacy there-and privacy, for a slave, came second only to freedom.

The climb was energetic, the heat intolerable, and by the time she reached the grove her tunic was sticking to her skin. The clouds were low, trapping the heavy, humid, sultry air. She could barely breathe. The leaves, thin and papery and yellow, hung limp. Mostly the grove comprised silver birch, graceful and airy, but theirs was not an exclusive colony. Cobnuts, for instance, had fallen around the smooth brown bole of the hazel, red shiny fruits hung on the haw. Spotty red toadstools fed off the roots of the birch. Acte settled herself against the grey, scaly bark of the solitary charcoal-oak, its evergreen canopy incongruous among the falling leaves of its fellows. A blackbird flew in and began systematically to strip the berries off a rowan.

In the middle of the copse, the flat white rocks of this limestone outcrop lay like so many fissured tables waiting to be set for a picnic. Acte used her fingertips to pull her damp tunic away from her body and began to flap it like a fan. Fancy thinking this place was haunted! True, a man, a Collatinus slave, had been killed here some years ago. Stabbed in the back by his jealous lover, a girl from Sullium, freeborn and with the finances to buy him his own freedom, and Acte spared little sympathy for the man who had squandered everything for a roll in the hay with a kitchen maid. Except…well, maybe it said something for his qualities as a lover, and since she had no experience on that score, perhaps she oughtn’t to judge him so harshly?

Occasionally (but only occasionally) she’d been tempted herself to indulge in a quick fling with one of the men-and weren’t there some handsome devils about? — in order to learn what it was the other women enjoyed so vocally and she was missing out on. Except too much was at stake. Suppose she got pregnant? The Master demanded total commitment, and Acte would not put her job at risk, although often over the years she had regretted not forming a romantic attachment. It was an unfortunate by-product of the education the Master had given her that she saw the workers for what they were-coarse, ill-mannered, uneducated bumpkins. Fifteen years ago they might have been for her, but not any more.

Thus the conundrum persisted, and long nights passed dreaming of a man to hold, this terrible ache for the touch of a hand, the brush of a kiss, the whispers, the glances, the ecstasy. Well, the problem was solved now. Maybe not the way she’d hoped for and certainly not the way she’d expected, but solved it was. And what a thrill! What a change!

Her ears picked up a rustle on the autumn floor and she peered round the trunk of the oak.

‘Hello?’

The blackbird, fully gorged on rowan berries, flew past her and Acte smiled. Fancy a bird making you edgy! She was getting tense, the very thing a bride shouldn’t do. She’d have to snap out of it before she faced the Master, because she intended to stay calm and collected when she told him about her decision. Heaven knows, it wouldn’t be easy!

Sixteen years ago, when she arrived, she’d been terrified of him. Daily his leonine roars threatened to shake the very foundations of the villa and she, little more than a child, had been forced to cope alone. Matidia, just turned forty and no less vapid than she was now, was clueless when it came to handling a situation whereby the Master was still master of everything except his body and Aulus was no help to anyone. He made it clear from the outset that as far as he was concerned, it was a disaster the old man hadn’t been killed by the horse that threw him. His only consolation lay in the hope that his father’s days might be numbered in single figures.

All this Acte had picked up within her first few weeks before she gradually realized the Master’s bellows were born not of temper, but of frustration. This still-handsome and vigorous man had, by one cruel stroke of the gods, been reduced to the level of a turtle locked inside an immobile shell, and she began to recognise that his insults and his rantings were simply rage against himself.

Imperceptibly, the roles began to change until it reached the stage where Acte supervised his diet, his medicine and his rest periods with unprecedented strictness, while spending every waking moment as his companion, his eyes and ears to the outside world. In return Eugenius taught her to read and to write, to discuss philosophy and politics, to appreciate art and music and poetry and literature.

He had, in his way, set her free.

Not, she reflected wryly, that it was all plain sailing. All too often he’d pinch her bottom, tweak her nipples, slide his hand up her skirt, and because she was a slave and therefore unable either to refuse or to retaliate, she found recourse in pretending not to learn the lessons he so painstakingly taught her. Of the two, his sexual frustrations proved less important than his intellectual frustrations, and so Eugenius Collatinus made his choice and the pornographic friezes on his wall became his compromise. Here he could indulge his passion for past appetites, his imagination doing the work his poor manhood could not.

When, later, the groping began again, Acte had frustrations of her own and the next time he cupped his hand round her breast, they both knew her protests were more for propriety than for anything else. Lying alone at night, desperate to feel the pulsations of love inside her, she wondered how it was that this old man, with his crinkled face and papery hands, could bring her to the brink of heaven just by fondling her breasts and kissing her nipples?

Not that it went further than that. She made it clear, when he first tried parting her thighs, that he could touch her only through her tunic, she wouldn’t let him play with her as he wanted. At the time she didn’t quite understand why (it certainly wasn’t from a moral standpoint, there were times she’d have given her right arm for gratification!), but her instinct had guided her well. Had she given in, she’d have had nothing left to bargain with and above all Eugenius Collatinus was a businessman. Negotiation was a currency he understood.