“No, he hates the idea of being married to anyone other than his dead wife.” I sat down on the chaise near the window and asked one of the slaves to pour us wine.
She sat across from me on the edge of the chair, poised as though she might run away at any moment. “Tell me, was he very much in love with her?”
I thought back to all the times when Apicius had neglected Aelia and been unkind. Then I remembered all the gifts he bought her in every port we visited, and how when we would return from a trip he always made sure to seek her out the moment he set foot inside the villa. “He was. And when she passed, I think he realized how much.”
She nodded, her green eyes dark with uncertainty. “What happens now?”
I took a long sip of my wine. “He wishes that I send you to his villa in Cumae.”
Flora shook her head. “I am to be exiled from him?”
“No, think not like that. You will have all the luxury you can imagine in Cumae. You’ll have a monthly stipend. If you are shrewd, you can make even more money from the villa’s fleet of fishing boats and its farms in the countryside. I’ll send a secretary with you to advise you on such matters. It will be unlikely that you will ever see Apicius again.”
She picked up the goblet of wine in front of her and drank a healthy dose not becoming of a young woman. I said nothing. I could not blame her.
“So I am to be alone all my life.”
“Only if you choose to be.”
She cocked her head at me, confused.
“Be discreet. Abort any children you find yourself with. What Apicius does not hear about does not concern him.”
She sighed with relief.
? ? ?
“We have more pressing things to worry about,” Rúan reassured me a few days after Flora had left. “She wouldn’t have been happy with Apicius.” While it was true that Apicius never again laid eyes on Flora, I saw her occasionally in the years afterward when she came to Rome to visit her family, and I would hear from her from time to time when she needed something. For the most part she was a successful manager of the household in Cumae, upholding Apicius’s reputation in the way I had hoped. I knew from a few of my trusted staff members there that she had taken on lovers, but she never allowed her position to be compromised.
As for the law requiring Apicius to be married, I’m sure if Augustus had been alive he would not have condoned Flora being sent away—it defeated the purpose of the law, which was to turn around the Roman decline in population. Sejanus, thankfully, had better things to concern himself with. As long as Apicius satisfied the general marriage requirement, he didn’t seem to care, which was fortunate.
? ? ?
Over the following months it became apparent that Sejanus had big plans. He was growing in power, and often when you heard his name, the word tyrant would follow. He began to enact all sorts of laws on behalf of Caesar that were very much to his advantage.
We were in the kitchen at the Imperial villa preparing for a banquet Sejanus was hosting that evening. Tiberius would likely not be in attendance; we rarely saw Caesar anymore. Not since his adopted son, Germanicus, had died six years before from poison at the hands of the former governor of Syria. All of Rome mourned, but no one more than his father, and he retreated in sorrow to a villa in Campania. He avoided Rome and appeared for only the most important state functions.
Rúan handed me the bowl of sardines I pointed toward. “I forgot to mention, Apicata came to see you today. She said she hopes you will come by soon.”
I was sad I had missed seeing Apicata. Sejanus didn’t let her leave home often but sometimes Livia would invite her to the Imperial villa and she would sneak by the kitchen in the hope she might see me.
I poured a flask of oil over the tiny fish. “Did she have the children with her?” Her brood was growing fast, with Strabo at age nine, Capito at age seven, and four-year-old Junilla.
Rúan shook his head. “No, but she did say Tiberius questioned her at length.”
That caught my attention. I set down the oil flask. “What do you mean? Why would Tiberius question her?”
“It was about the old astrologer Apicius used to have.”
“Glycon?”
“Yes. He asked her about Glycon and all of the predictions he correctly made. She said he was very insistent on knowing how accurately he read the stars.”
I scattered a handful of herbs over the sardines. “Curious. I wonder why.”
Rúan shrugged and tossed the last of the parsnips he’d been chopping into a pot. “Apicata said she couldn’t figure it out either.”
Glycon had given us too many true predictions. He had known of my son’s birth, of Apicius’s appointment to Caesar’s staff, and, worst of all, he had known about Aelia’s death. I tried not to think of what he had said that hadn’t yet come true—about not seeing the stars of Apicata’s children in the later years of their life.
? ? ?
It turned out Tiberius was equally nervous about predictions he could not understand. The following day he released an edict outlawing foreign rites of any kind, including those of the Egyptian cults and also the Jews. All adherents of what he called “superstitions” were to burn their religious clothing and items or they would be expelled from the city or sold into slavery.
Apicius and I learned of the edict at the baths, surrounded by gossiping patricians and senators. Tycho and Sotas had already helped us bathe and their practiced hands were massaging our tired necks and backs.
Trio had joined us as well. “I don’t understand how he’s going to enforce it.” A young slave boy rubbed his back, pounding and pinching the skin. “Does he mean to include the cult of Isis?”
“No, no,” one of the elderly senators responded. “Isis is a Roman cult now, not Egyptian. Very different from the cults of Horus and Bast. Dreadful gods those are.”
“What about all the Jews in the army? By Jove, he’s even got a few Jews as captains. He can’t possibly want to reduce the size of his army more than he has to, not with the barbarians in the north still unsettled,” said Apicius.
“He plans to send them to Germania!” The same senator chuckled. “Or to other, less desirable regions, if there is such a thing. Why should the Jews be stationed in the best lands?”
“What I don’t understand is why he cast out the astrologers,” said another man across the room, hidden by the steam.
“Ahh, interesting,” I muttered, suddenly realizing why Tiberius had questioned Apicata about Glycon. I was filled with bitter happiness at the thought that Glycon would be forced to flee Rome.
I noticed that Sotas, who had been massaging Apicius’s back, also paused at the words. Apicius shrugged for him to continue.
The old senator had the answer once again. “All of them except his shadow, Thrasyllus. He trusts him implicitly. It’s all the other astrologers whom he fears. What if one of them predicted his death? Or a revolt in Rome? And it came true? Ironic, isn’t it?”
“How so?” asked Apicius.