“Fortuna bless you, Verginia! I shall be very quick, I promise.” Casting a final glance at their mothers, who had ambled further ahead, she vanished into the crowd.
He had glimpsed her at the same instant she glimpsed him. He was waiting for her just around the corner from where she had seen him, with an anxious grin on his face.
“Icilia!”
“Titus! Oh, Titus!” It was all she could do not to kiss him, right there; but although they were away from the heavy traffic of the market, they were still visible. Eagerly, he took her arm and led her around another corner, into a narrow space between two buildings that was shielded from view by the foliage of a cypress tree.
He held her body against his and kissed her for a long time. Icilia was not shy; the very impossibility of their relationship encouraged her to abandon all restraint during the rare, fleeting moments she was with him. She ran her hands over his strong shoulders, inside the neck of his tunic and onto his chest, which was covered by fine blond hair. Her fingers encountered the talisman he wore. “Fascinus,” he called the curious pendant, saying it was a god that had protected his family for centuries.
Icilia could not help thinking that Fascinus had fallen down on the job in recent generations. It was hard to believe that the Potitii had once been wealthy; even Titus’s best tunics were threadbare. The first time Icilia had seen him, he was wearing the one garment he owned that was not covered with patches, the priestly robe he wore at the Ara Maxima. Watching him officiate at the altar with his father, she had been swept away by his good looks. Afterward, it had taken considerable ingenuity on her part to make his acquaintance. The passion that had stirred between them was so immediate and so overwhelming it must have been the hand of Venus that guided them to one another. Yet, when Icilia mentioned Titus Potitius in a very roundabout way to her father, he had reacted with a vehemence that startled her.
Icilia at first assumed it was Titus’s poverty, or simply his patrician status, that offended her father, and hoped these barriers might be overcome. It was her brother Lucius who had explained to her the reason for the declining fortunes of the Potitii—the fact that Titus’s grandfather had fought alongside Coriolanus. No wonder her father had reacted so violently! The name of Coriolanus was accursed in their house, and so would be the name of any traitor who had been his ally. Never would her father agree to let her marry a Potitius; nor would Titus’s father approve such a match, for it had been an Icilius who engineered the exile of Coriolanus and, by extension, the ruin of Titus’s grandfather.
The situation was impossible. These brief, stolen moments were all she would ever have with Titus, yet her craving for these encounters was almost more than she could bear, and in the days between them she thought of little else. When Titus began to lift the hem of his tunic as well as her own, and to press his hardness between her legs, she offered no resistance. Instead, she clutched him as hard as she could, praying that the gods would stop time and make this moment last forever.
Titus entered her. He moved inside her. His breath was hot in her ear. A fire was ignited at the very core of her being and radiated outward, building toward an ecstatic release. The rapture reached its pinnacle; the pleasure was so intense, so perfect, how she could doubt the rightness of their union? That she should love Titus must be the will of the gods, which superseded the objections of all petty mortals, including her father.
Afterward, as he was gasping for breath, Titus whispered in her ear. “We must try again. We must go to our fathers and beg them to let us marry. There must be a way to convince them.”
“No! My father will never…” Icilia left the sentence unfinished and shook her head. The sensation of ecstasy quickly waned and was replaced by hopelessness and despair. “Even if he did approve, it wouldn’t matter. The new laws…such a terrible rumor…”
“What are you saying?”
“My brother heard it from his tutor. The new laws from the Decemvirs—they want to outlaw marriage between patricians and plebeians. If that happens, there’s no hope at all!”
Titus clenched his jaw. “I’ve heard the rumor, as well. The whole world conspires against us!” He sighed and kissed her lips.
Icilia stiffened. “Titus, I have to go.”
“Now? Are you afraid Verginia will tell on you?”
“No, but our mothers are with us. They’re probably missing me right now. If—”
Titus silenced her by pressing his mouth over hers and drawing her breath away. But when she pushed against him, he released her. She slipped away from him. Her final touch was a fingertip pressed to the talisman at his breast, and then she was gone.
“Go away, you horrible man!”
Back in the market, Verginia found herself accosted, not for the first time, by the wheedling little man who called himself Marcus Claudius. The creature certainly hadn’t been born a Claudius, she thought; he must have been a slave who took his master’s family name when he was manumitted, as was the custom. Marcus Claudius had the cringing, ingratiating manner of a slave, continuously titling his head to one side as if to duck a blow, licking his lips, and giving her a sidelong leer.
“But why won’t you come, dear girl? He merely wishes to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say to Appius Claudius.”
“But there’s so much he wants to say to you.”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“It will take only a moment. He’s just over there.” The man pointed to a building on the far side of the market.
“In the spice shop?”
“He owns it. There’s a cozy little apartment in the upper story. Do you see that window with the shutters ajar? He’s watching you even now.”
Verginia gazed above the awnings of the market, at the building across the way. Bright sunlight made her squint and shield her eyes. Not much of the dark interior of the room could be seen, but she thought she could discern, just barely, a shadowy figure standing at the window.
“Please, go away!” she said. “I shall tell my father—”
“That would be unwise. The Decemvir would not wish it,” said Marcus, emphasizing Appius’s Claudius title. “The Decemvir is a powerful man.”
Verginia was suddenly short of breath. “Do you threaten my father?”
“Not I, young lady, not I! Who is lowly Marcus Claudius, to think he could ever do harm to a great warrior like Verginius? Oh, no, it would take a powerful man to bring about your father’s ruin, a very powerful man, indeed; a Decemvir, perhaps.”
Verginia looked at the window. She could definitely see the shadowy figure of a bearded man.
“Look, do you see?” said Marcus. “He has a gift for you!”
The figure drew closer to the window; its outlines became clearer. The man was holding something. When he extended his hand, a bit of sunlight glittered on the object.
Marcus whispered in her ear. “Do you see it? A pretty gift for a pretty girl—a silver necklace with baubles of lapis lazuli. How pretty those blue jewels would look against your white throat!” The man giggled. “I think he has another gift for you, in his other hand!”
While the figure at the window held up the necklace, his other hand appeared to be pressing and kneading something beneath his tunic, near the middle of his body.
Verginia stifled a cry and tore herself away from Marcus. She ran headlong into Icilia.
“Where have you been?” she cried. “I looked and looked for you, and then that horrible man—”
“Ah, there they are!” Icilia’s mother, standing on tiptoe, called out and waved to them from across the crowd.
“What man?” whispered Icilia.
Verginia looked behind her. Marcus had melted into the crowd. She looked at the window above the spice shop. The shutters were closed.
Then their mothers were upon them, and even if the two girls had wanted to confide in each other, they could not.
A few days later, scrolls containing the first portion of the Twelve Tables were nailed to the posting wall in the Forum.
A great crowd gathered, made up of both patricians and plebeians. A man with good eyes and a clear voice volunteered to read the scrolls aloud so that the rest could hear, including the great majority who could not read. He was frequently interrupted by exclamations and questions, and when he was done, the crowd engaged in a lively discussion in which many voices were raised:
“Clearly, the new laws affirm the traditional rights of the paterfamilias. Very good! For as long as there’s a breath in his body, a man should have control over his wife and his offspring, and over their wives and offspring as well.”
“But what of this right for the head of a household to sell his sons and grandsons into bondage, and later buy them back?”