Valerian I Antoninianus: Portrait, History and Stories

The scribe had written only three words when Aelia reached across the table and stopped his hand.

“Don’t say we are well.”

Her father looked at her as if she had spoken during a prayer. They were sitting beneath a shop awning in Rome, with a basket between their feet and a letter to send east. Aelia had brought the basket because her father had said the errand would take a moment. It held the things she was carrying to her husband’s house that afternoon.

“I am dictating,” Publius said.

“I heard.”

The scribe lifted his pen. “Shall I keep the greeting?”

“Keep the greeting,” Publius said. “We are well, and hope—”

“Father.”

The scribe waited. A cartwheel struck a loose stone in the street. Aelia’s father turned toward the noise with the relief of a man offered a different grievance.

“Your brother needn’t hear every inconvenience.”

“He needs to hear that Mother died.”

“I was coming to that.”

Aelia had spent the morning undoing her mother’s knots. The old woman had tied everything: bundles of cloth, cupboard handles, the string round the good lamp. Aelia could still feel a tight little knot beneath her thumbnail. Her father had sat in the doorway telling her which things to leave.

The scribe set his pen down. He was younger than her brother, with a scar along the side of his thumb. “I can begin again.”

“No,” Publius said. “We are well. Your mother has left us.”

Aelia looked at him.

“Those are decent words,” he said.

“They sound as though she has gone to Aunt Livia.”

He moved his stool back. For a moment she thought he would leave. Then he brought it forward again, scraping the same patch of ground.

“Your mother died,” he said. “Write that.”

The pen moved. Publius watched it with his lips pressed together. Aelia wished she had let him keep his decent words. She wished her brother had been there to fight about them instead.

They had last heard from him in the winter. He was serving with soldiers in the east, and his letter had described a pair of boots and a man who snored. Their father had been disappointed by the boots. He wanted accounts of Valerian’s army, places whose names he could repeat to the neighbors. Aelia had read the letter twice for the snoring man. Her brother was still himself somewhere.

“Tell him the burial was properly attended to,” Publius said.

The scribe wrote.

“Tell him there is no need to send money.”

Aelia gripped the basket handle. She had paid the last of what they owed yesterday. Her husband had offered the money without reproach, which made it harder to take. She had told him she would be home before supper.

“There isn’t,” she said. “But tell him where to send his next letter.”

“Here.”

“Where is here?”

“The house.”

The scribe glanced at his writing, then at the basket. Aelia hated that he understood before her father would admit anything.

“I won’t be at the house,” she said.

“I can receive a letter.”

“You can receive it. Who will read it to you?”

“There are people.”

“The neighbor asked you for payment last time.”

“I paid him.”

“Then you came to me because he had left out half of it.”

Publius bent to move the basket out of his way. A corner of folded cloth caught on the wicker. Aelia reached down too, and their hands met. He let go first.

Inside was the cushion her mother had used when her hips hurt. Aelia had meant to carry it away without asking. Her father looked into the basket, then sat upright.

“I use that,” he said.

“Since when?”

“Since the stool began hurting me.”

She took the cushion out and gave it to him. He did not put it beneath himself. He held it on his knees.

The scribe turned his pen between finger and thumb. “You can name a place for the reply without naming a place for the man to live.”

“I know that,” Publius said.

“Of course.”

Aelia heard the care in the young man’s voice and felt ashamed of the sharpness in her own. But care had kept her at the house for eleven days after the burial. Care could keep her there until winter if she let every small task become a reason.

“My husband is expecting me,” she said.

“Your husband can spare you an afternoon.”

“He has spared me many.”

Publius stared at the cushion. Aelia waited for him to say something about duty. He had used the word often enough while her mother was alive. Instead he said, “I don’t know what to put after the burial.”

She looked at the letter. There was a great deal of empty space.

“Tell him about the roof,” she said.

“He’ll worry.”

“Not the leak. Tell him you finally caught the man throwing stones at the pigeons.”

Publius considered this. “He was a grown man.”

“I know.”

“With a basket of his own.”

The scribe picked up his pen. Publius began describing the pursuit along the street. He corrected himself twice. The grown man became younger in the telling, then older again when Aelia raised her eyebrow. By the time he reached the confrontation, he had put the cushion behind his back.

“And your sister has gone to her husband’s house,” he dictated. “Send your letters there. She knows how to find me.”

Aelia gave the address. The scribe read the whole letter aloud, including the greeting. This time neither of them stopped him.

Publius placed a coin on the table, Valerian’s little pointed crown turned upward. The scribe looked it over and gathered his writing materials. Aelia lifted the basket. It was lighter by one cushion, scarcely enough to notice.

Her father rose slowly. “Will he think I drove you away?”

“He’ll think I went home.”

Publius folded the letter with more care than the cloth in the basket. “Come on the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Not tomorrow. I have things to do.”

Aelia moved aside for him, and for once let him carry what he was carrying.

When Lucilla spread the wedding cloak across her counter, the blue border stopped a finger’s breadth short of the corner. The bride’s mother noticed before Lucilla could shift the lamp.

“You sold me a whole border.”

“I sold you a cloak.”

“With a whole border.”

Outside, a porter was shouting for somebody to move a sleeping dog. Inside, Lucilla’s apprentice pressed himself against the shelves, trying to become part of the wall. It was his first week with the shears. The blue wool, folded separately for the wedding, had become six handsome, insufficient strips.

Lucilla could have blamed him. Sabina had arrived angry, and an apprentice made a convenient place to put anger. But Lucilla had told him to cut while she went to collect a debt. She had not measured what remained.

“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll finish it.”

“The wedding is tomorrow.”

“Then come back this afternoon.”

Sabina set three coins on the counter. On one, the little points around Valerian’s head were still sharp. “These stay with me until the cloak is right.” She swept them up. Lucilla watched the bright edges disappear into her fist.

After she left, the apprentice began explaining.

“I matched the width. You said the width mattered.”

“I said several things, Dama.”

“You said not to waste the blue.”

That she had said. Blue that matched this blue would cost more than she could recover from the wedding. Her supplier had gone away to visit a sick sister; his assistant would sell whatever stood nearest the door and insist it was the same.

Lucilla put the cloak over her arm. “Sweep up every cutting. Every one. Don’t improve anything while I’m gone.”

The assistant at the wool shop held her strip beneath an open shutter. His blue leaned green. Hers leaned toward dusk.

“People won’t see them together,” he said.

“They will be sewn together.”

He shrugged, which was cheaper than being useful.

She tried another shop. Then a third. At the third she found the right color and the wrong price. The merchant examined the coin she offered him, turning the emperor’s face toward the light, but would not let the color go for less. She had enough money to buy the wool or to pay Dama at the end of his first week. Not both.

Lucilla returned with empty hands. Dama had swept the shop, laid the cuttings in a neat row, and poured himself water in the little cup she kept for customers. He stood up when he saw her.

“Sit,” she said. “The cup isn’t a throne.”

She measured the strips again. If she joined every scrap, the corners would look patched. If she made the border narrower, there would be enough for the whole cloak. The work would take hours, and Sabina had approved the width. Lucilla remembered exactly how her finger had pressed the sample flat.

Dama watched her measuring. “My mother folds a worn edge inside.”

“This edge isn’t worn.”

“She folds it even when it is.”

Lucilla looked at the strip. Then she folded it along its length and laid it on the cloak. A narrow blue line followed the pale wool. She turned the raw edge underneath. No join showed.

“It’ll look small,” Dama said.

“It’ll look deliberate.”

“You’ll have to tell her.”

Lucilla gave him a look that made him discover something important near his sandal.

They worked until the porter outside had stopped shouting and begun bargaining. Lucilla kept the corners for herself. Dama stitched the straight stretches, slowly enough to make her teeth ache. Twice she took the needle from him. Twice she gave it back. He was not going to learn with his hands empty.

Sabina arrived with the bride before they had finished the last corner. The young woman was taller than Lucilla had expected. She held herself as though somebody had recently told her to stop stooping.

“The border is narrower,” Sabina said.

“Yes.”

“That is not what I bought.”

“No. We cut the blue badly. This is the repair I can make today. Try it before you decide.”

Sabina’s mouth tightened at the word repair. Her daughter took the cloak anyway. Lucilla fastened it and stepped back. The thin border moved when the bride turned, a clean line along the fall of the wool.

“Oh,” the bride said.

Sabina looked at her. “You liked the wide one.”

“I liked the drawing.”

“The wide one cost more.”

Lucilla could feel Dama holding his breath behind her. She could also hear the third merchant explaining that a wedding cloak was the last thing on which one should economize.

“This will cost less,” she said.

“How much less?”

“One of the three coins.”

That was Dama’s pay gone. She would have to take the unfinished tunics home tonight and work after supper. Her shoulders already hurt at the thought.

Sabina rubbed the corner between finger and thumb. “And you call this finished?”

“One corner remains. You can watch me sew it.”

The bride sat on a stool. Her mother remained standing. Dama fetched the customer’s cup, remembered that he had used it, and carried it away again with an expression of such concentrated guilt that the bride began to laugh.

By the time Lucilla tied off the last stitch, Sabina had sat down too. She paid two coins and made Lucilla write a receipt. She read it twice. The bride folded the cloak herself, carefully, with the blue line outside.

After they left, Lucilla put one coin in Dama’s hand.

“You earned this slowly,” she said.

“I can go faster.”

“Next week you can measure first.”

He closed his fingers over Valerian’s face, then opened them to look. “Shall I sweep?”

Lucilla handed him the shears. “Cut nothing. There’s bread in the cupboard. Bring me the other cup.”