The Saint's Mistress (3 page)

must blossom in the cool courtyards where he lounged in front of fountains all day, reading

books or whatever men of his social class did whenever they weren’t stealing fruit and harassing

peasant girls. I pressed my lips together and took shallow breaths, leaning away from him.

“You don’t like this?” his mother insisted, and when he didn’t reply, she nodded to me.

“Bring us a few more, please.”

I poked my head into the back room and whispered to Miriam before fetching more bolts of

cloth. “A lady I’ve never seen before,” I reported. “She seems important.”

Miriam peeked into the sales room. “That’s Monnica, widow of the deucile Patricius,” she

said. “No, she’s not anyone that highly placed. She’s a Christian,” she added. “Do you need

me?”

“No. I just thought she seemed important.”

“Every sale is important. Call me if you need me. Try to sell the one with the red silk in it.”

I scurried back out to the sales room, toting the bolt of dark blue patterned with red triangles.

Monnica gasped. “Oh, this one is lovely! Aurelius, look!”

I noticed his eyes light up. It was one of our nicest cloths, and one of our most expensive

because of the silk.

“I had heard your mistress was a Christian,” Monnica said, fixing me with a severe look, as if

she could already tell I was not and the fact was not to my credit. “Look…” she pointed out to

her son. “Triangles. Symbols of the Holy Trinity.”

“Very nice,” he agreed, finally gathering his courage and looking me in the eye. It angered me

that his look seemed to cut right into me. I felt like he was remembering what my sister’s bare

breasts looked like. I flushed.

“We can get Verturius to line it in red, to pick up the red in the cloth,” his mother said. “This

would make a beautiful cloak for you. This is the one you want?”

“Yes. Fine,” he agreed, still looking at me and examining the cloth with his big-knuckled

fingers. I itched to smack his hand away.

“Hold this for us,” Monnica ordered. “Our tailor will pick it up when he’s ready to make the

cloak, and he’ll pay you.” She didn’t even ask me the cost. I wondered what it would be like to

have no need to know the price of the things you wanted. “Come, Aurelius, we have other

errands,” she continued. “Good day to you.” She nodded at me without smiling.

I didn’t suppress my smirk as Aurelius followed his mother out the door like her meek slave.

Despite myself, I rushed to the window to watch them climb into their sedan chair. Aurelius

looked up and saw me at the window, and it was his turn to smirk, and to tap his forehead in a

subtle salute.

I wasn’t surprised when he was waiting for me after work, but I felt obligated to feign anger.

“What are you waiting for? “ I sneered. “Hoping to get another free peep show?”

“No, I was just hoping to walk a ways with you.”

“I didn’t think boys of your class walked anywhere. You had four slaves carrying you earlier

today.”

I noticed that he carried a rolled scroll, flimsy-looking in his large hands. I had always been

curious about what was in the books fine people read, but I was too proud to ask him.

Instead I asked, “Why did you steal those pears? You’re rich. You can eat pears any time you

want.”

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“We’re not so rich.”

“You could have a pear any time you wanted.”

He shrugged.

“So why?” I persisted.

“It was just something to do. My friends were doing it.”

“So if your friend had gone ahead and raped me and my sister, you would have done that,

too?”

“No! I saved you.”

“That was your friend.”

“And me.”

“Oh, maybe a little,” I conceded.

We had turned off the dirt side street and the stones of the Cardius Maximus felt warm and

rough under my feet. I easily matched his long-legged pace. I walked fast for a small woman. I

knew he was looking at me, too, and I enjoyed knowing he thought I was pretty, even this boy

who I didn’t like.

I decided to start another argument. “What does your holy-holy Christian mother think about

you running around with a bunch of hooligans who molest helpless peasant girls?”

“I don’t tell her everything.”

“I’ll bet you don’t.”

We passed the fountain in the town square, where a statue of a smiling maiden let water

trickle from her pitcher. A mother fetched her filthy child from the fountain’s bowl and gave him

a hard slap.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

“No.” I paused, but curiosity got the better of me. “Are you?”

“No,” he said low, looking around him as though his mother could hear him even here in the

square. “No, my mother has enrolled me as a catechumen, but I’ve never accepted baptism yet. I

don’t know. It’s almost like believing in magic, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I mean that a man could rise again after death. It sounds like a trick.”

I felt compelled to disagree with him. “They don’t think he’s a man. They think he’s god, and

lots of gods rise from the dead. Are you saying gods can’t rise from the dead?”

“I wonder sometimes if there are any gods at all. Maybe it’s just us. Maybe we’re in charge of

our own fates.” He fidgeted with the scroll in his hands, looking around again, as if afraid of

being overheard.

I had often thought this myself, but I didn’t feel like agreeing with him. “How can there be no

gods?” I argued. “Who made the world then?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I’m hoping to find out by studying philosophy.”

“Is there anything in your philosophy about stealing, or about attacking innocent peasant girls

on their way home from work?” I asked.

He stopped walking and took me by the shoulders. I shook him off.

“I told you I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope you can forgive me. We were wrong to steal the pears

and wrong to assault you and your sister. And I’ve been thinking: you’re right. I was wrong not

to stand against my friends and defend you from the first. I was a coward and I am sorry.”

He looked sorry, and my heart moved uneasily. “There’s my sister,” I said. “I have to go.”

And I ran.

10

“Your boyfriend’s waiting for you,” Miriam teased.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I shot back on my way out the door.

Aurelius was indeed waiting in the alley and began walking with me, as naturally as if we

were brother and sister, as he had for the last three days.

“My cloak is started,” he said. He was carrying a bag of dates.

“I know. Your tailor came and picked up the cloth first thing this morning. It must be very

nice to be able to afford something so beautiful.”

“My family isn’t rich, you know.” He popped a date into his mouth and offered the bag to me.

I shook my head, although I wanted one badly.

“Could have fooled me, with your slaves and your silk-threaded cloak.”

“Really, we’re not. My father was only a deucile, which involves a lot of responsibility, you

know. They have to collect taxes, and they have to contribute to public projects from their own

funds. New aqueduct or baths: he has to kick in money. More legionnaires to defend the border:

he has to help support the legion. It’s not the greatest job.”

“And someday it will be yours.”

He sighed. “If I became a priest, I’d be excused. But then my younger brother would have to

do it; that is, if I didn’t take my land with me into the Church.”

“Oh, the problems you rich people have. Anyway, I thought you didn’t believe in any gods.”

Changing my mind, I reached over and plucked a date from his paper cone. He had plenty, after

all.

“I wish we could be friends.”

“You have other friends. Not such nice guys. They seem like your type.”

“I’d rather have friends who would help me be good.” We walked along without speaking for

a few minutes, until he sighed again and said, “What I really want is to be a teacher. I was at

school in Madaura for a time, but I had to come home when my father died, and now we don’t

have the money for more education. We’re hoping Urbanus will finance me.”

I stopped walking. “Urbanus? The same Urbanus whose orchard you robbed?”

“He was my father’s patron.” Aurelius shrugged, as though it should be obvious to me that

Urbanus owed him assistance in spite of his behavior. All Romanized aristocrats patronized

families below them in the Empire’s hierarchy, and were patronized by at least one man higher

than them. Your patron represented your interests to the government, and got you out of trouble

or provided you with financial help if you needed it. Nobody above the peasant class could

survive without a patron. Even I knew this.

I shook my head, and we started walking again. “Nice way to pay him back.”

Aurelius ignored me. “He’ll probably pay for me to go to school in Carthage if I promise to

come back and open a school in Thagaste. Urbanus has big plans for Thagaste. He wants us to be

a center of learning and entertainment. We might even be getting a circus.”

A circus would be exciting: chariot races and animal shows, a place to see and be seen.

“Can you read?” he asked me abruptly.

“Only a little,” I admitted. I could sign my name, and read a little bit of Latin and Berber,

enough to get by in the shop. I burned with curiosity about what was in the books rich people

read. The books seemed to set them apart from my own people even more than the luxuries they

11

owned. The silk cloaks and the carriages and the bags of dates were just things. The words in the

books seemed to carry the secrets behind those fine things.

“How about if I teach you to read?”

“I can already read enough to do my job.” I tossed my head, trying to ignore my jumping

heart.

“You’re smart for a woman. I can see that. You could read Cicero and Ovid.”

I had been intrigued from the start, and now I was flattered, too. Still, I felt obliged to keep

arguing. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I told you. I want to be a teacher. I can practice on you. It’s free.”

“It had better be free. I don’t have any money.”

“You have a job.”

I gave him a sour look. The boy knew nothing that wasn’t written down in a book. “I hand my

wages over to my father.”

“Oh. Will you do it? Will you be my first pupil?”

I really didn’t like this boy, I told myself, but this might be the only chance I would ever have

to learn to read, and the idea began to take hold of me. “Oh, all right,” I said.

And so it began.

I lied to Numa. I told her I was staying late in the shop, learning weaving from Miriam. It was

the first lie ever between me and my sister. I knew she’d be enraged at the idea of my spending

time with one of the boys from the pear orchard, and I suspected she would agree with Father

that reading was a waste of time for a woman. Numa wanted nothing more than a husband and

babies and a few goats of her own. She started walking home with a hunch-backed village girl

whose family sent her into town to beg every day. After our reading lessons, Aurelius walked me

as close to my village as we dared, and I ran by myself the rest of the way.

One evening three weeks into our lessons, Aurelius and I sat in the courtyard of Urbanus’

house, just off the forum. There was a bench under two orange trees that we used as our school,

marble carved with acanthus leaves. I hadn’t yet met Urbanus. He often had business in the ports

of Carthage or Hippo. I wasn’t in any hurry to meet the great man. It was enough for me to sit in

his magnificent garden, with its orange and fig trees and its serenely flowing fountains.

Everywhere in this garden, water flowed. Fish spewed it, mischievous cherubs poured it, a

perfectly formed young man pissed it. I could hardly concentrate on the lesson the first time, so

dazzled was I by the lavish use of water.

Aurelius had decided we would start with Cicero, his current idol. He couldn’t stop talking

about Cicero.

“Now try to read this to me,” he urged me now. “Remember the sound each letter makes

when you come to an unfamiliar word and try to sound it out.”

“Is ….”

“No, no,
are
. Go on.”

“Are the pleasures of the body to be sought, which…”

“Plato. A great Greek philosopher.”

“Are the pleasures of the body to be sought, which Plato describes, in all seriousness, as

‘snares and the source of all ills’? The promptings of sensuality are the most strong of all and the

most hostile to… to… I don’t know this word.”

“Philosophy. You’re doing excellently.”

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I knew I was, and I was elated. I felt a sense of power in being both pretty and smart, and in

sitting in the garden of the great landowner who held power even over my tyrannical father,

hearing secret wisdom that my father had never heard. In my hidden heart, I was also glad to be

pleasing to my teacher.

“Keep going,” he prompted me.

The book was written on a scroll, the old-fashioned way, on vellum still creamy from the calf,

feeling warm and almost alive in my hands. I rolled up a few more lines and continued, “What