Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

Brutus had been Uncle Mamercus's choice, though in himself Uncle Mamercus was mind and body Sulla's man, and had been in Greece with Sulla at the time it became necessary to find a husband for the eldest of his six wards, Servilia. They were all still living in Rome under the chaperonage of a poor relation, Gnaea, and her mother, Porcia Liciniana a terrifying woman! Any guardian, no matter how geographically removed from his wards he might happen to be, need have no worry about the virtue and moral status of a child living under the thumb of Porcia Liciniana! Even her daughter, Gnaea, just grew plainer and more spinsterish as the years passed. Thus it had been Porcia Liciniana who had received the suitors for Servilia's hand in marriage as her eighteenth birthday approached, and Porcia Liciniana who had transmitted relevant information about the various suitors to Uncle Mamercus in the east. Together with penetrating remarks about virtue, morality, prudence, temperance, and all the other qualities she considered desirable in a husband. And though Porcia Liciniana had never once committed the gross solecism of expressing an outright preference for one suitor above any other, those penetrating remarks of hers did sink into Uncle Mamercus's mind. After all, Servilia had a huge dowry and the felicitude of a splendid old patrician name, and was, Uncle Mamercus had been assured by Porcia Liciniana, not unattractive in her person besides. So Uncle Mamercus took the easy way out; he chose the man Porcia Liciniana had hinted about most heavily. Marcus Junius Brutus. Since he was a senator in his early thirties, he was deemed old enough to be beyond youthful follies and indiscretions; he would be the head of his branch of the family when Old Brutus died (which could not be too far away, said Porcia Liciniana); and he was a wealthy man of impeccable (if plebeian) ancestry. Servilia herself did not know him, and even after Porcia Liciniana informed her of her impending marriage, she was not allowed to meet Brutus until their wedding day arrived. That this antique custom was levied upon her was not due to the daunting Porcia Liciniana; it was rather the direct outcome of a childhood punishment. Because she had served as her estranged father's spy in the household of her Uncle Drusus, her Uncle Drusus had sentenced her to a form of domestic imprisonment: she was never to be allowed to have her own room or any vestige of privacy within his house, and never to be allowed to leave that house unless accompanied by people who would police her smallest step or expression. And all that had been years and years before she reached marriageable age, and every adult in her life at that time mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, stepfather was long dead. But still the rule continued to be enforced. No exaggeration then to say that Servilia was so anxious to marry and be gone from Uncle Drusus's house that she would hardly have cared who her husband was. To her, he had come to represent liberation from a detested regimen. But on learning his name, she had closed her eyes in profound relief. A man of her own class and background rather than the country squire she had expected the country squire her Uncle Drusus during his lifetime had more than once threatened would be her husband when she grew up. Luckily Uncle Mamercus could see no advantage in marrying his niece below her station nor could Porcia Liciniana. Off to the house of Marcus Junius Brutus she went, a new and very thankful bride, and with her went her enormous dowry of two hundred talents five million sesterces. What was more, it would remain hers. Uncle Mamercus had invested it well enough to ensure her a good income of her own, and directed that upon her death it should go to her female children. As her new husband, Brutus, had plenty of money of his own, the arrangement concerning her dowry did not disappoint him. Indeed, it meant that he had acquired a wife of the highest patrician aristocracy who would always be able to pay for her own upkeep be it slaves, wages for slaves, clothing, jewelry, houses, or other expenses she incurred, she would have to pay for them herself. His money was safely his! Aside from freedom to go where she pleased and see whomever she pleased, marriage for Servilia turned out to be a singularly joyless affair. Her husband had been a bachelor too long, no mother or other woman in his house; his ways were set, and did not include a wife. He shared nothing with her even, she felt, his body. If he asked friends to dinner, she was told to absent herself from the dining room; his study was forbidden to her at all times; he never sought her out to discuss anything of any kind with her; he never showed her anything he bought or acquired; he never requested her company when he visited any of his country villas. As for his body well, it was just a thing which from time to time visited her room and excited her not at all. Of privacy, she suddenly found she had far more than the long years without privacy now made comfortable or welcome. As her husband liked to sleep alone, she didn't even have someone else in the cubicle where she slept, and found the silence horrifying. So it was that marriage turned out to be merely a variation on the theme which had dogged her almost from infancy: she was important to no one, she mattered to no one. The only way she had managed to matter was by being nasty, spiteful, vicious, and this side of herself every servant in the house knew to his or her cost. But to her husband she never showed this side of herself, for she knew he did not love her, and that therefore divorce was never far away. To Brutus, she was unfailingly pleasant. To the servants, she was unfailingly hard. Brutus did his duty, however. Two years a wife, Servilia fell pregnant. Like her mother, she was properly formed for bearing children, and suffered not a bit. Even labor was not the nightmare agony she had been led to believe; she brought forth her son within seven hours on an icy March night, and was able to revel in him when he was given to her, washed and sweet. Little wonder then that baby Brutus expanded to fill every vacant corner of his mother's love starved life that she would not let any other woman give him milk, and cared for him entirely herself, and put his crib in her own sleeping cubicle, and from his birth was wrapped in him to the exclusion of all else.

Why then did Servilia bother to listen outside the study on that freezing day late in November of the year Sulla landed in Italy? Certainly not because her husband's political activities interested her for his sake. She listened because he was the father of her beloved son, and she had made a vow that she would safeguard her son's inheritances, reputation, future welfare. It meant she had to keep herself informed about everything. Nothing must escape her! Especially her husband's political activities. Servilia didn't care for Carbo, though she acknowledged that he was no lightweight. But she had correctly assessed him as one who would look after his own interests ahead of Rome's; and she wasn't sure that Brutus was clearheaded enough to see Carbo's deficiencies. The presence of Sulla in Italy worried her deeply, for she was possessed of a genuinely political mind, and could see the pattern of future events more acutely than most men who had spent half a lifetime in the Senate. Of one thing she was sure; that Carbo didn't have sufficient strength in him to hold Rome together in the teeth of a man like Sulla. She took her eye away, presented her ear to the lattice instead, and sank to her knees on the painfully cold terrazzo floor. It was beginning to snow again a boon! The flakes formed a veil between her muffled body and the hive of domestic activity at the far end of the peristyle garden, where the kitchens were, and servants pattered back and forth. Not that fear of detection concerned her; Brutus's household would never have dared question her right to be anywhere she liked in any kind of posture. It was more that she liked to appear to Brutus's household in the light of a superior being, and superior beings did not kneel outside a husband's window to eavesdrop. Suddenly she tensed, pressed her ear closer. Carbo and her husband were talking again! "There are some good men among those eligible to run for praetor," Brutus was saying. "Carrinas and Damasippus are as capable as they are popular." "Huh!" from Carbo. "Like me, they let a hairless youth beat them in battle but unlike me, they at least had been warned that Pompeius is as ruthless as his father, and ten times as crafty. If Pompeius stood for praetor, he'd win more votes than Carrinas and Damasippus put together." "Pompeius's veterans carried the day," said Brutus in a reasonable tone. "Maybe. But if so, then Pompeius let them do their job without interference." Impatient, it seemed, to leap into the future, Carbo now changed the subject. Praetors are not what concern me, Brutus. I'm worried about the consulship thanks to your predictions of gloom! If necessary, I'll stand for consul myself. But whom can I take for a colleague? Who in this wretched city is capable of shoring me up rather than dragging me down? There will be war in the spring, nothing is surer. Sulla's not been well, but my intelligence sources say he'll face the next campaigning season in high fettle." "Illness was not his only reason for hanging back this past year," said Brutus. "We've heard rumors that he's stayed inert to give Rome the chance to capitulate without a war." "Then he stayed inert in vain!" said Carbo savagely. "Oh, enough of these speculations! Whom can I take as my fellow consul?" "Have you no ideas?" asked Brutus. "Not a one. I need someone capable of firing people's spirits someone who will inspire the young men to enlist, and the old men to wish they could enlist. A man like Sertorius. But you say flatly that he won't consent." "What about Marcus Marius Gratidianus, then?" "He's a Marius by adoption, and that's not good enough. I wanted Sertorius because he's a Marius by blood." There was a pause, but not of a helpless kind; hearing an indrawn breath from her husband, the listener outside the window stiffened to absolute stillness, determined not to miss a single word of what was coming. "If it's a Marius you want," said Brutus slowly, "why not Young Marius?" Another pause ensued, of the thunderstruck variety. Then Carbo said, "That's not possible! Edepol, Brutus, he's not much more than twenty years old!" "Twenty six, actually." "He's four years too young for the Senate!" "There's no constitutionally official age, in spite of the lex Villia annalis. Custom rules. So I suggest you have Perperna appoint him to the Senate at once." "He's not his father's bootlace!" cried Carbo. "Does that matter? Does it, Gnaeus Papirius? Really? I admit that in Sertorius you would have found your ideal member of the Marii no one in Rome commands soldiers better, or is more respected by them. But he won't consent. So who else is there except Young Marius?" "They'd certainly flock to enlist," said Carbo softly. "And fight for him like the Spartans for Leonidas." Do you think he could do it?'' "I think he'd like to try." "You mean he's already expressed a wish to be consul?" Brutus laughed, something he was not prone to do. "No, Carbo, of course not! Though he's a conceited sort of fellow, he's not actually very ambitious. I simply mean that I think if you went to him and offered him the chance, he'd jump at it. Nothing so far in his life has presented him with any opportunity to emulate his father. And in one respect at least, this will give him the opportunity to surpass his father. Gaius Marius came late into office. Young Marius will be consul at a younger age even than Scipio Africanus. No matter how he fares, there's fame in that for him." If he fares half as well as Scipio Africanus, Rome stands in no danger from Sulla." "Don't hope for a Scipio Africanus in Young Marius," warned Brutus. "The only way he could prevent Cato the Consul from losing a battle was to stab him in the back." Carbo laughed, something he did often. "Well, that was a bit of luck for Cinna at least! Old Marius paid him a fortune not to press a charge of murder." "Yes," said Brutus, sounding very serious, "but that episode should point out to you some of the difficulties you'll face with Young Marius as your colleague in the consulship." "Don't turn my back?" "Don't turn your best troops over to him. Let him prove he can general troops before you do that." There came the noise of chair legs scraping; Servilia got to her feet and fled to the warmth of her workroom, where the young girl who did the nursery laundry was enjoying a rare chance to cuddle baby Brutus. The flare of scorching jealousy leaped inside Servilia before she could control it; her hand flashed out, cracked so hard against the girl's cheek that she fell from her perch on the crib, and in so doing, dropped the baby. Who didn't reach the floor because his mother swooped to catch him. Then, clasping him fiercely to her breast, Servilia literally kicked the girl from the room. "Tomorrow you'll be sold!" she shrieked down the length of the colonnade enclosing the peristyle garden. Her voice changed, she merely shouted now: "Ditus! Ditus!" The steward, whose flowery name was Epaphroditus but was usually addressed as Ditus, came at the run. "Yes, domina? "That girl the Gaul you gave me to wash Baby's things flog her and sell her as a bad slave." The steward gaped. "But domina, she's excellent! Not only does she wash well, she's absolutely devoted to Baby!" Servilia slapped Epaphroditus quite as hard as she had the girl, then demonstrated that she knew how to use a choice obscenity. Now listen to me, you pampered, over fed Greek fellator! When I give you an order you'll obey it without a word, let alone an argument! I don't care whose property you are, so don't go whining to the master, or you'll rue it! Now fetch the girl to your office and wait for me. You like her, so you won't flog her hard enough unless I'm there to see it." The crimson mark of her hand standing out on his face was complete to its fingers, but it didn't provoke the terror in him that her words did. Epaphroditus bolted. Servilia didn't ask for another maid; instead, she herself wrapped baby Brutus warmly in a fine wool shawl, and carried him down to the steward's office. The girl was tied down and a weeping Epaphroditus forced, under the basilisk glare of his mistress, to flog her until her back turned to bright red jelly and gobbets of her flesh flew everywhere. Incessant screams erupted from the room into the snow muffled air, but the snow could not muffle those screams. Nor did the master appear to demand what was going on, for Brutus had gone with Carbo to see Young Marius, as Servilia had guessed. Finally Servilia nodded. The steward's arm fell. She walked up to inspect his handiwork closely, and looked satisfied. "Yes, good! She'll never grow skin back on that mess again. No point in offering her for sale, she wouldn't fetch a single sestertius. Crucify her. Out there in the peristyle. She'll serve as a warning to the rest of you. And don't break her legs! Let her die slowly." Back to her workroom Servilia marched, there to unwrap her son and change his linen diaper. After which she sat him on her lap and held him out at arm's length to adore him, leaning forward occasionally to kiss him tenderly and talk to him in a soft, slightly growling voice. They made a sufficiently pretty picture, the small dark child upon his small dark mother's knee. She was a beautiful woman, Servilia, endowed with a firmly voluptuous figure and one of those little pointed faces which have an air of many secrets in a stilly folded mouth and thickly lidded, hooded eyes. The child however, owned only his infant's beauty, for in truth he was plain and rather torpid what people called a "good baby" in that he cried hardly at all and made no fusses. And so when he came home from the house of Young Marius did Brutus find them, and listened without comment to the coldly narrated story of the negligent laundress and her punishment. As he would never have dared to interfere with Servilia's smoothly efficient domestic arrangements (his house had never run as well before he married her, so much was sure), he made no alterations to his wife's sentence, and when his steward came to him later at his summons, did not remark upon the snow smothered figure tied lolling to a cross in the garden.