Virgin Territory

XXII

The problem of her virginity was one which had occupied Acte’s mind for most of her adult life, but now, she thought, closing the orchard gate behind her, the matter was finally settled. And while the prospect of marriage at any age is exciting, a proposal at her age-coming out of the blue-made it ten times more thrilling.

She paused at the clipshed, deserted this time of year apart from its recent occupation by the fortune teller and her brother, but resisted the temptation to slip inside. Oughtn’t she to distance herself from the house? Find space to think? To make sense of this enormous change in her circumstances?

In a matter of days she, like Miss Sabina, would be able to wear the bridal veil, the betrothal ring, the saffron-coloured sandals, the Knot of Hercules. Her heart skipped a beat. Except she would be free to discard hers afterwards, and wear two bands in her hair instead of one.

Pinching her nose against the sulphurous fumes as she hurried past the bleaching yard, resembling a giant beehive with its circular frames over which the whitened wool had been stretched, Acte thought that virginity was probably the only thing she’d had in common with Miss Sabina. Especially since Miss Sabina remained a virgin through service to Vesta, whereas Acte’s circumstances were pretty well unique in the whole of the Roman Empire. Women, even slaves, were seldom allowed to remain single, the marriage laws being what they were. It was only through the Master’s intervention, his rigid enforcement of the Chattel Rule (which said a man’s slaves were his possessions, he could do what he liked with them), that she wasn’t foisted off on some uncouth lout as breeding stock.

Giving the dyeshed as wide a berth as possible, Acte turned her eyes to the ground. She’d left the Master having a massage with Diomedes, so the small amount of time she had to spare was precious. She couldn’t afford to waste it on chitchat if the inevitable happened. Which it did.

‘Got a minute, Acte?’

The voice of Nikias, the foreman, carried across the yard and she felt bad about pretending she hadn’t heard him. He was a nice man, Nikias-a widower, solid and dependable-and she supposed she could have married him, had she wanted. There was nothing to stop her from choosing a husband of her own, only-

From the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth twist in disappointment. Too bad. Today his arms were black to the elbow from the privet dye, last week they had been yellow from the rowan bark. Sure, Nikias was nice. But who wants a man with multi-coloured arms in their bed at night?

Acte’s first choice today would have been Pharos Point, but since it took a full half-hour to reach the lighthouse she turned left instead. To every other slave, going to the birch grove was tantamount to visiting a leper colony, a place to be avoided at all costs on account of how it was haunted. Acte despised them for their narrowmindedness, but chose never to disabuse their talk of ghostly apparitions walking and moaning and generally doing their damnedest to spook people. It guaranteed her privacy there-and privacy, for a slave, came second only to freedom.

The climb was energetic, the heat intolerable, and by the time she reached the grove her tunic was sticking to her skin. The clouds were low, trapping the heavy, humid, sultry air. She could barely breathe. The leaves, thin and papery and yellow, hung limp. Mostly the grove comprised silver birch, graceful and airy, but theirs was not an exclusive colony. Cobnuts, for instance, had fallen around the smooth brown bole of the hazel, red shiny fruits hung on the haw. Spotty red toadstools fed off the roots of the birch. Acte settled herself against the grey, scaly bark of the solitary charcoal-oak, its evergreen canopy incongruous among the falling leaves of its fellows. A blackbird flew in and began systematically to strip the berries off a rowan.

In the middle of the copse, the flat white rocks of this limestone outcrop lay like so many fissured tables waiting to be set for a picnic. Acte used her fingertips to pull her damp tunic away from her body and began to flap it like a fan. Fancy thinking this place was haunted! True, a man, a Collatinus slave, had been killed here some years ago. Stabbed in the back by his jealous lover, a girl from Sullium, freeborn and with the finances to buy him his own freedom, and Acte spared little sympathy for the man who had squandered everything for a roll in the hay with a kitchen maid. Except…well, maybe it said something for his qualities as a lover, and since she had no experience on that score, perhaps she oughtn’t to judge him so harshly?

Occasionally (but only occasionally) she’d been tempted herself to indulge in a quick fling with one of the men-and weren’t there some handsome devils about? — in order to learn what it was the other women enjoyed so vocally and she was missing out on. Except too much was at stake. Suppose she got pregnant? The Master demanded total commitment, and Acte would not put her job at risk, although often over the years she had regretted not forming a romantic attachment. It was an unfortunate by-product of the education the Master had given her that she saw the workers for what they were-coarse, ill-mannered, uneducated bumpkins. Fifteen years ago they might have been for her, but not any more.

Thus the conundrum persisted, and long nights passed dreaming of a man to hold, this terrible ache for the touch of a hand, the brush of a kiss, the whispers, the glances, the ecstasy. Well, the problem was solved now. Maybe not the way she’d hoped for and certainly not the way she’d expected, but solved it was. And what a thrill! What a change!

Her ears picked up a rustle on the autumn floor and she peered round the trunk of the oak.

‘Hello?’

The blackbird, fully gorged on rowan berries, flew past her and Acte smiled. Fancy a bird making you edgy! She was getting tense, the very thing a bride shouldn’t do. She’d have to snap out of it before she faced the Master, because she intended to stay calm and collected when she told him about her decision. Heaven knows, it wouldn’t be easy!

Sixteen years ago, when she arrived, she’d been terrified of him. Daily his leonine roars threatened to shake the very foundations of the villa and she, little more than a child, had been forced to cope alone. Matidia, just turned forty and no less vapid than she was now, was clueless when it came to handling a situation whereby the Master was still master of everything except his body and Aulus was no help to anyone. He made it clear from the outset that as far as he was concerned, it was a disaster the old man hadn’t been killed by the horse that threw him. His only consolation lay in the hope that his father’s days might be numbered in single figures.

All this Acte had picked up within her first few weeks before she gradually realized the Master’s bellows were born not of temper, but of frustration. This still-handsome and vigorous man had, by one cruel stroke of the gods, been reduced to the level of a turtle locked inside an immobile shell, and she began to recognise that his insults and his rantings were simply rage against himself.

Imperceptibly, the roles began to change until it reached the stage where Acte supervised his diet, his medicine and his rest periods with unprecedented strictness, while spending every waking moment as his companion, his eyes and ears to the outside world. In return Eugenius taught her to read and to write, to discuss philosophy and politics, to appreciate art and music and poetry and literature.

He had, in his way, set her free.

Not, she reflected wryly, that it was all plain sailing. All too often he’d pinch her bottom, tweak her nipples, slide his hand up her skirt, and because she was a slave and therefore unable either to refuse or to retaliate, she found recourse in pretending not to learn the lessons he so painstakingly taught her. Of the two, his sexual frustrations proved less important than his intellectual frustrations, and so Eugenius Collatinus made his choice and the pornographic friezes on his wall became his compromise. Here he could indulge his passion for past appetites, his imagination doing the work his poor manhood could not.

When, later, the groping began again, Acte had frustrations of her own and the next time he cupped his hand round her breast, they both knew her protests were more for propriety than for anything else. Lying alone at night, desperate to feel the pulsations of love inside her, she wondered how it was that this old man, with his crinkled face and papery hands, could bring her to the brink of heaven just by fondling her breasts and kissing her nipples?

Not that it went further than that. She made it clear, when he first tried parting her thighs, that he could touch her only through her tunic, she wouldn’t let him play with her as he wanted. At the time she didn’t quite understand why (it certainly wasn’t from a moral standpoint, there were times she’d have given her right arm for gratification!), but her instinct had guided her well. Had she given in, she’d have had nothing left to bargain with and above all Eugenius Collatinus was a businessman. Negotiation was a currency he understood.

A crackle of twigs on the far side of the rocks interrupted her thoughts. It was probably a snake, sluggish and sleepy, heading back to its hole, but-

‘Hello? Who’s there?’

Not even a leaf rustled in the heat and the stillness, and Acte’s ears strained for sounds.

‘Hello?’

It’s all that talk of ghosts and haunting. And the thought of facing the Master. She sighed. Diomedes would have finished the massage, the Master would be asking for her.

Yes, the Master had done much for her over the years, far more than just teaching her the arts and fine manners, and Acte’s obligations rested lightly on her. Until the Master’s eyesight had began to fail. She never let on, but from time to time slipped into Diomedes’s room to syphon off small quantities of drops without the doctor being any the wiser. Neither was the family. With her help and connivance, Eugenius pretended to read the letters and study the reckonings, and to compensate for his shortcomings he’d make unannounced spot checks, to keep them on their toes.

Then when those other pains began, the pains that doubled him up and which he likened to a red-hot claw tearing out his liver, her loyalty was pushed to its limit. The Master had made her promise not to tell a soul, not even Diomedes-and that was the hardest promise she’d ever had to make. It was Acte who had talked the Master into hiring a proper physician, which was well overdue, but in spite of Diomedes’s skill in massage and so on, the Master still wouldn’t allow him to know about the pains. It wrenched her apart to watch him writhing in agony, knowing she was helpless. But the Master was adamant. He wanted to retain all his faculties, he said. Didn’t want to be drugged to the eyeballs, wanted to be in charge and coherent right to the end.

Which they both knew would not be that far away. The Master would not see the spring.

Acte wiped a tear from her eye. She loved the Master. With all her heart she loved him, and when, this morning, he told her it was time he took care of her, she had no inkling of what he meant.

‘I’m talking about marriage, Acte. You and me.’

The suddenness of it all, the sheer unexpectedness, had taken her breath away. She’d had to sit down.

‘You won’t get much money,’ he said, ‘and the business will pass to my son, but it’ll give you a decent status after I’ve gone. You’ll nab a good husband as my widow.’

‘I–I can’t!’ she had stammered, but he was adamant.

‘I’m not asking, I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘And anyway…he slid his hand up the inside of her thigh and tickled his finger between her legs, ‘I want to do what I can while I can,’ he’d added with a chuckle.

Acte Collatinus! Matidia’s…oh dear, Matidia’s mother-in-law!

Acte Collatinus, virgin no more. Eugenius (she’d have to learn to call him Eugenius now!), he couldn’t make love to her as a proper man could, but he’d promised her all manner of delights. And the end to her virginity was one of them.

The snap of a branch made her spin round. This was no mouse, no reptile. She saw a flutter of leaves as they fell to the ground. Saw a flash of white. Acte felt her mouth go dry. It was true then, the stories. The haunting. A band tightened round her chest. Trembling, she climbed to her feet. A man she could fight. But a ghost? Her throat was gripped in ice. Then…

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said.

Her knees went weak with relief and she leaned her hand against the broad span of the charcoal-oak to let her legs regain their strength. She felt silly. Ghosts, indeed! When all the time, it was only-

She didn’t see the blade until it was too late.

There was no pain. No time to cry out. No chance to struggle. In an instant she’d lost control. Could feel nothing. Could move nothing.

She knew from the angle of the trees that she’d been caught as she fell. Knew she was laid on a limestone slab. She saw him toss her tunic aside. Then her breast band. Then her thong.

She knew, because his mouth was moving, that he was shouting at her, calling her names. Filthy names. Undeserved names. But she couldn’t hear him. Her ears were filled with a fearful hammering.

The sheer helplessness of it overwhelmed her. Never again would she feel the warmth of the sunshine, the bite of the frost-the softness of the babies she would undoubtedly have birthed from a second marriage.

Panic cut in. She was dying. She was being murdered. There was nothing she could do. Couldn’t fight, couldn’t scream, couldn’t leave clues. He was killing her, and he was getting away with it.

She tried to pray, but couldn’t.

She knew, from the way he was pounding, pumping, ramming, that he was inside her. That at last, and in the most foul manner imaginable, she was losing her precious virginity.

She saw him laughing.

But it was the last thing Acte did see, before a red mist flooded her eyes.

She heard a roar, an explosion.

Before the silence.