Suddenly, he tore the snake box from me and threw it at his mother. It hit her in the chest and she screamed. Sotas pulled her head back farther.
“I am exercising my rights as the paterfamilias, Mother,” Apicius said. “With your actions you have destroyed your worth. You are my property and I do with you what I will.”
“No!” Her howl was piercing and I resisted covering my ears.
Apicius looked at Sotas. Like he had with Pallas, Sotas drew the blood-stained knife across Popilla’s throat.
I turned away before she hit the floor.
? ? ?
That night, Apicius had Pallas’s and Popilla’s bodies weighted with rocks and taken out to sea. Vatia died within the hour. While the other slaves made preparations for her cremation, I took the scroll my master had asked me to destroy and set it on fire without opening it. I feared the evil Popilla had captured within its folds.
A heaviness overtook the villa. Rúan wandered around directionless, inconsolable. Aelia took Apicata and visited friends in Pompeii for weeks. The slaves spoke little and obeyed without question. It was not unheard of for a patrician to exercise his rights as paterfamilias against a family member but it was far from common. Usually when a patrician had a family member killed for his or her actions it was a sibling or a spouse, not an elderly matron. It made us wonder, if Apicius was angry enough that he would kill his mother, what would happen to the rest of us?
I dealt with their deaths in a different way. I became jumpy. I think that I thought the ghost of Popilla was still among us. Balsamea noticed and she spoke to me one day when we were preparing the evening meal.
“You need to let go,” she said in a soft voice. “She is in the Underworld.”
Confused, I put down my knife and looked into her dark eyes, almost hidden by the folds of her skin.
“Let go of your fear, Thrasius. No one will try to kill you now,” she said.
I smiled despite myself. She was right. Since Popilla’s death I had become even more nervous—about snakes, about my food being poisoned, about whether someone might jump out from a hidden corner. I even threw out the knife box and kept my knives visible and within reach.
“I know, I know. But once burned by the fire, won’t you go out of your way to make sure you are never burned again?”
She smiled. “Yes, but how can you be burned if there is no fire?”
I didn’t respond. I picked up the knife and a partially chopped head of lettuce and with careful precision slipped the blade through the leaves.
A crow cawed at the window as the lettuce fell in half. In that small, seemingly unimportant moment, I thought I caught a faint smell of smoke.
PART III
3 C.E.
BEETS
Chop leeks, coriander, (mix with) cumin, raisins, and flour. Put the mixture in the middle (of the beet leaves); tie up and (boil). Serve in a sauce of liquamen, oil, and vinegar.
—Book 3.11, Vegetable Dishes
On Cookery, Apicius
CHAPTER 7
My relationship with Passia bloomed slowly over many months of comfortable conversation and subtle flirting. I thought often back to that evening when she touched me in my cubiculum, and longed to have a moment like that again. But despite my desire, I did not push her. She was a strong woman, with many ideas and opinions, but there was a part of her that was distrustful.
One unusually hot night in early June, after I had dismissed the kitchen slaves, I invited her to join me in a little library in the back of the house. “I want to show you something,” I told her.
The library shelves were empty but the floor was haphazardly covered with baskets full of scrolls and parchment. Apicius had finally decided it was time to move the family from Baiae to Rome and the domus was in disarray from the packing.
On the empty desk I rolled out the scroll that I had been working on for weeks.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Look and tell me what you think it is.” I had been teaching her to read, and while I was excited about my project, I didn’t want to ruin a perfect teaching moment.
“Sss . . . auce for cr, cr, craane, duck, or chick, chicken.”
I was proud of her progress. At the last Saturnalia, after we listened to Apicata read to us about the great goddess Diana, Passia asked me to teach her. “I’m sad,” she said, “that a child can read such beautiful words and I cannot.” From that night on we practiced every evening after the slaves had finished the cena and Apicata was asleep.
“Keep going, you are doing well.”
“Pepper, dr, dri, dried onion, cumin, love, love, love . . .” She fought to say the word lovage.
In our practice, I would have helped her finish the word, but at that moment, hearing her say what I was feeling was almost too much for me to bear.
“Lovage!” She smiled at me, her eyes glittering in the lamplight.
My heart filled to bursting. “Yes,” I managed, not trusting myself to say more. I wanted desperately to take her in my arms then and pull her to me.
“It’s a recipe.” She unrolled the scroll further. “Oh, Thrasius, are these all recipes?”
I took a breath. “Yes. I thought that I would make a book of them. So many of Apicius’s clients keep asking for recipes for their own cooks.”
“What a wonderful idea. Dominus Apicius will be very pleased.”
“I hope that is so.” I looked down at the scroll, which contained many hours of hard work. I had been testing and perfecting the recipes over the past year, painstakingly writing down the results and making changes here and there until I was sure of each dish. While it was true that Apicius’s clients wanted the recipes, I thought of this book as my own true legacy. When I died, my food would live on. I savored the idea of someone making my recipes hundreds of years later.
“Would you take a walk on the beach with me? It will be our last chance.”
By the gods! I warmed with the thought of walking next to her on the shore. We had walked the beach many times, but never by moonlight. And she was right. There were no beaches in Rome. I would miss the sea and the sand.
“I would like that very much.” I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart hammering against my ribs.
The marble stairs to the beach were well lit by the bright light of the full moon. At the bottom we stopped to remove our sandals, leaving them on the platform that led back up to the domus. The sand felt good beneath my toes.
In my mind I said a prayer of thanks to Venus, my hope rising.
We reached the shore and together walked south, toward the great pier on the farthest end of the beach, brightly lit by dozens of torches. The salt water licked our toes with each long reach up the sand. In the distance, closer to town, several fires had been lit; the beach was a favorite place for parties after tourists had spent their day soaking and gossiping in the famous Baiae mineral baths.
“When will you show your recipe book to Dominus?”