Page 3 of The Tribune Temptation (Roman Heirs #1)

S unlight filtered into Crispina’s bedroom from the open door, which let in light from the atrium. Crispina leaned against the doorframe, taking advantage of the light to glance over the letter that had just come for her. Life had been markedly boring since returning to her parents’ house, and while the letter wasn’t exactly welcome, at least it was interesting.

Aelius Herminius to Crispina:

Please accept this humble apology for my behavior at your family’s dinner party last week. I hope you will take it as a compliment if I say, with all sincerity, that you made me nervous. I regret that you mistook my ineloquent words for a joke or prank. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was heartfelt in my proposal, even if it was ill-timed and poorly delivered. You likely think I’m mad, but if you would allow me to see you once more to explain more fully, I’m certain you will understand.

Crispina read the letter twice. Her eyes lingered on you made me nervous . She’d never imagined a man might admit a mere woman had unsettled him. It was at odds with her impression of Aelius as brash and arrogant.

And it seemed he really did want to marry her. That was the most intriguing part. She almost wanted to hear him out just to find out why. He was handsome enough—more than handsome enough, if she was honest with herself—and he likely would have no shortage of willing brides. She allowed herself to remember how he’d looked standing in the atrium last night, lamplight flickering on his coppery skin.

So why her?

Whatever motive he had, it could be nothing good, but she still wanted to find out. Curiosity had always been her weakness. She would consider a reply later, but for now, she had more important matters to attend to.

She slid the letter into the back of a drawer in her cosmetics table, then pinned her palla to her hair and fetched her basket from its hiding place under her bed. She covered it with a cloth to hide the contents from view. Moving on light feet, she left her bedroom and crossed the atrium. If she could just make it to the front door without being noticed…

Her mother emerged from one of the rooms off the atrium. “Where are you going?”

Crispina froze and turned to face her mother. “To Horatia’s,” she lied. She hadn’t loved her ex-husband, but marriage had brought with it a degree of freedom. She’d been accountable to no one but her husband, who rarely cared what she did or where she went. Now, after returning to her parents’ house, she was caged.

Mother approached. “What’s in your basket?”

Crispina suppressed a sigh. “I sewed some items for Horatia’s child.” Her best friend’s second child was due in about a month.

“Can’t you have a slave bring them?”

“I want to see her. She’s too pregnant to go anywhere.”

“Very well, but take the litter. I can’t have you traipsing about the streets like a plebeian.” She snapped her fingers. Immediately, a slave appeared. “Have the litter prepared for Crispina.”

The slave rushed off. Crispina’s fingers curled in frustration. There was no way she could get where she wanted to go now, not under the supervision of a squadron of litter-bearers. They might obey her, but they’d tell her mother, and then she’d be barred from leaving the house for good.

But a visit to Horatia might do her good. Crispina had barely left the house since her divorce last month, and she missed Horatia. She would only have to reckon with the jealousy that would choke her at the sight of her pregnant friend.

Crispina allowed herself to be helped into a litter, and it lurched into motion. The litter’s curtains blocked her view of the streets, but she knew each house they passed belonged to a senator or magistrate or former consul. The families who ran Rome lived clustered in this neighborhood, insulated from the noise and crowds of the rest of the city by vigilant guards who shooed away any unfortunates who dared loiter near their estates.

After a short ride, she was entering Horatia’s townhouse. A slave escorted her to the sunlit sitting room off the atrium where Horatia reclined on a couch.

Horatia glanced up with a smile at Crispina’s entrance. “My dear! What a surprise.” She started to struggle to her feet, but Crispina waved a hand.

“Don’t rise on my account. You look ready to burst.” Crispina took a seat in a chair opposite.

Horatia ran a loving hand over her protuberant stomach. “Only a month to go. Decius won’t stop hovering.” She smiled.

Crispina forced a smile. She would have given anything to have a kind, gentle man like Decius for a husband, not to mention one son already born and another child on the way.

It wasn’t that she was desperate to be a mother. She enjoyed children, but they were quite loud and messy. Horatia’s five-year-old son, while amiable most of the time, could screech loud enough to make the roof tiles shudder.

But it had been made clear to her that her inability to conceive a child was a failure, and Crispina did not like failing.

“And you, my friend? How have you been?” Horatia’s gaze grew sympathetic.

Crispina heaved a sigh. “Trapped. Bored. I was trying to get to the Aventine Hill today, but Mother caught me.” She showed Horatia her basket, which contained a stack of wax tablets and a pile of writing styluses. “The children will be wondering where I’ve got to these past few weeks.”

“I can’t believe how long you’ve kept that up.” Horatia smoothed a hand over her stomach. “It started when we were girls, didn’t it?”

Ironically, Horatia’s loathsome older brother had been the catalyst for Crispina’s love of teaching. He had been the sort of young man who believed women were innately less intelligent than males. As a girl of fifteen, Crispina took pleasure in proving him wrong by challenging him to things like reciting lines from Homer or listing the years in which each of Rome’s seven kings ruled. Crispina invariably won all of these little contests.

Horatia’s brother also believed that slaves, even those who hadn’t been born into servitude, had less capacity for intellect than citizens. Thus, according to him, female slaves were the lowest of the low in terms of intelligence. Crispina, wanting to prove him wrong once and for all, challenged him to a bet of one hundred sestertii that she could teach a female slave child to read and write at same level as a citizen male child within three months.

By the time she succeeded, using the seven-year-old daughter of one of her parents’ slaves as her student, she barely cared about the bet. She had discovered teaching lit a fire within her, giving her a sense of purpose and satisfaction she had never felt before. She split her winnings with the little girl, whose dedication and enthusiasm were essential to Crispina’s victory, and immediately wanted to do it again.

But that was right before her marriage to Memmius, and his household hadn’t contained any children. So, exploiting her newfound freedom as a married woman, she had taken her enterprise one step further. She found a group of poor plebeians on the Aventine Hill who, with some subtle bribery, allowed her to teach their children for an hour or so each week. The children lived in squalor, but Crispina was convinced that if they could attain an education, they could create a better life for themselves and their families. She’d visited them every week without fail until her divorce. Horatia had even accompanied her at the start, though she didn’t fully share Crispina’s enthusiasm, and her interest had faded after her first pregnancy.

“It’s important to me. I have little enough else to look forward to.” When Crispina had been disappointed month after month by her lack of conception, her students had been her solace, her fulfillment. Without them, her life felt useless.

“Come now, I’m sure some suitor will materialize before long,” Horatia said. “There are plenty of widowers who already have heirs.”

“I don’t want to be some old man’s third wife,” Crispina muttered. But marrying again might be the only way to regain a degree of autonomy and return to her students on the Aventine. Better to be a wife with her own household than a daughter perpetually under her parents’ thumbs.

Her mind went to Aelius, his proposal, and his letter. She cleared her throat. “I did have an interesting conversation at my parents’ dinner party last week. There was a man in attendance. Aelius Herminius. Do you know him?”

Horatia shook her head. “Don’t think so. What about him?”

Horatia knew everyone in their circle, so her unfamiliarity with Aelius was both concerning and intriguing. “He tried to propose. Of course I assumed it was a prank.”

“Did you tell him off?” Horatia asked.

“I splashed him,” Crispina admitted. “In the atrium pool.”

Horatia covered her mouth amid a peal of laughter. “I wish I could have seen that!”

“But he sent an apology today and asked me to hear him out.”

“Interesting. What’s he like?”

Crispina shrugged. “I don’t really know. He was there with Catullus, the poet. He’s not bad-looking.” An understatement, but Horatia didn’t need to know that. “He’s young. Younger than Memmius, at least.” Aelius looked to be in his early thirties, so he was still more than a decade older than her, but her former husband had been in his forties when they wed. “There must be something wrong with him if he wants to marry me.”

“Hear him out,” Horatia suggested. “Marriage isn’t perfect, but at least you won’t be trapped in your parents’ house for years on end.”

“Indeed.” An idea struck her. No doubt Catullus knew what Aelius was about with his marriage scheme. The poet lived close by, so she could pay him a visit on her way back from Horatia’s. She wanted to gather as much information as possible before deciding whether to reply to Aelius’s letter.

Light footsteps pattered into the room. Horatia’s five-year-old son, Paullus, trotted in. He tried to climb up onto the couch with Horatia, but she gently spun him around toward Crispina. “Go sit with Crispina, dear. Mother is simply too big right now.”

Without hesitation, the boy climbed up into Crispina’s lap. She patted his head. “Hello, Paullus.” He could be a terror, but when he was in a gentle mood, his sweetness never failed to tug at her heart.

A moment later, Horatia’s husband, Decius, entered the room, looking frazzled. “Paullus, don’t disturb your mother. She’s in a very delicate state!” His gaze landed on the boy, securely nestled in Crispina’s lap. “Oh, hello, Crispina.”

Crispina smiled. “Hello, Decius. Congratulations on your imminent new arrival. Are you praying for another boy?”

“I wouldn’t mind a girl, to be honest,” Decius said. He crossed to Horatia’s couch and glanced anxiously down at her. “How are you feeling, my darling? Are you hungry? Shall I call for some lunch?”

“Thank you, my dear, but I’m quite all right. Crispina is looking after us.”

He bent to kiss her forehead. “All right.” He nodded to Crispina. “Good day, Crispina. Give my regards to your hus—I mean, your parents.” Flushing, he left the room.

Horatia’s mouth twisted into a rueful smile. “Sometimes he speaks before he thinks.”

“It’s all right.” Crispina gazed at the doorway where Decius had vanished. A surge of jealousy rose in her chest, but she was well-practiced at tamping it down.

Horatia turned the subject to the latest trend in wall paintings, and the rest of the visit passed pleasantly. Paullus fell asleep in her lap like a kitten. When it came time to leave, she gently shifted the boy onto the couch with his mother. She whispered a goodbye to Horatia, then left.

Outside, her litter carriers were waiting for her. “To home, lady?” one of them asked as he helped her into the litter.

“Not yet. Take me to the home of Gaius Valerius Catullus. I believe it’s two streets south of here.” They’d met often enough at parties to claim a basic acquaintance, so it was not completely improper for her to visit him unannounced. The litter bearers would no doubt tell her parents she visited the poet, but she’d keep the visit short enough to avoid scandal and could claim an interest in his poetry.

A few minutes later, she entered Catullus’s home. She lingered in the atrium for a moment while one of his slaves went to fetch him.

The lanky poet emerged from a room off the atrium, presumably his study, and bowed to her. Ink stained his fingertips, and his hair was rumpled. He eyed her with curiosity. “Good afternoon, Crispina. I hope I wasn’t expecting you?”

“No, I apologize for the interruption. I was in the area and thought I would drop in. I had a few questions for you.”

His eyes narrowed. “Haven’t come to quiz me on my Sappho, have you?”

“You’re still miffed about that?”

“Only a little. But please, tell me what I can do for you today.”

“It’s about your friend, Aelius Herminius.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I gathered the two of you did not have the smoothest introduction the other night.”

“So you know he tried to propose.”

Catullus nodded. “And made an ass of himself. Will you give him a second chance as he’s requested?”

“You know about the apology letter too?”

“I helped write it,” Catullus said, looking smug. “Did it work?”

“I would have preferred more groveling.”

“He must have cut a few lines. I wrote in plenty of groveling.” He waved a hand. “In any case, I’m guessing the fact you’re here asking about him means you’re considering it.”

“I only want to find out why he wants to marry me.”

Something shifted in Catullus’s gaze, growing cautious, and Crispina had a feeling that whatever he was about to say wouldn’t be the whole truth.

“Aelius is running for tribune of the plebs,” Catullus said. “Running again, rather. He lost the last election. He’s decided he needs to foster powerful connections to gain the votes he needs, and marriage is the best way to do that. Which was my idea, of course.”

“So he’s a plebeian.” That wasn’t entirely a surprise. Neither she nor Horatia had recognized his name, which indicated he wasn’t part of the exclusive patrician set they’d been born into. “And a politician.” He certainly had the brash confidence for it, not to mention the voice. Even when delivering an ill-timed and idiotic proposal, his voice had been smooth and rich, and she imagined it would sound quite pleasant booming over a crowd in the Forum.

She had never considered marrying outside her class, but even a plebeian husband could give her the freedom she longed for.

Catullus nodded slowly. Again, he seemed to be thinking something he wouldn’t say out loud.

Crispina pressed further. “But the tribune position is reserved for plebeians, so presumably none of them are well-connected among the patricians. Why is he different from any other plebeian candidate?”

Catullus opened his mouth, considered for a moment, then closed it.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Yes, there is,” he admitted. “But it’s not my place to tell you, so you’ll just have to agree to meet Aelius one more time if you want to get the whole story.”

Crispina huffed. “Fine. I’ll bother you no longer.”

“One more thing,” he said as she turned to leave. “I realize this must all seem very strange, but I know Aelius well. He’s ambitious and determined to make a success of himself. Any woman would be lucky to have him as her husband.”

She didn’t entirely trust the poet, but his words rang with sincerity. “I appreciate the endorsement,” Crispina said, then bid him goodbye and left.

Perhaps it was just the stifling boredom of life after a humiliating divorce, but Aelius Herminius, plebeian politician who made impulsive proposals of marriage and had a mysterious secret, was becoming very intriguing indeed.