Doctor Who_ The Romans - Donald Cotton [13]
DOCUMENT XI
First Extract from the Commonplace Book of Poppea Sabina
Do I really like being Empress of Rome, I wonder? Of course, it does make me the richest and most influential woman in the whole known world, and that is something, I suppose. But we have to set against it the fact that the one essential qualification for the job is that I be married to the Emperor – and Nero is zero, in every sense of the word!
Oh, what a fool I was to allow myself to be wooed and won by all that romantic nonsense he gave me about having just poisoned his mother! Because he didn’t even do that himself – no, he left the whole business to Locusta as usual – and even then it seems that the old battle-axe had to be finished off with blunt instruments after she swam ashore from the funeral barge!
Just big talk, that’s all it was – lover’s lies to turn a young girl’s head; but innocent as I am, I trusted him, and now there’s no way out but the vein in the bath or the asp in the bosom, and I don’t fancy that, thank you!
Unless... unless I get him first, of course... But, heigh-ho, these are only idle dreams, for I am but a poor weak woman with only one pair of hands, and must leave all that kind of rough stuff to some disaffected officer or other.
How fortunate that most of the Household Cavalry are my lovers, and prepared to do anything for me, on the usual terms.
Well, we shall just have to see how my whimsy wafts me
- but a regular old butcher’s shop of an assassination, like when Uncle Caligula got his... That would be fun now, wouldn’t it?
But I mustn’t ramble artlessly on like this, because there is a more immediate problem which distracts me. For some time I have been aware that Nero has been recruiting into my personal retinue of hand-maidens, slaves of a more than usual comeliness, and I suspect his motives. Can he be planning to deceive me with one, or all of them? Would he dare? And has he the strength?
Another one arrived this morning, introduced into my quarters by the cretinous and altogether loathsome Tavius, the palace staff-gatherer; a man whose very presence fills me with the sort of nausea I normally reserve for my husband. The girl was obviously so overjoyed to be released from the clutches of this unpleasant excrescence that she appeared to accept the conditions of service -
namely, death on departure, and no nonsense about days off - without demur, and only the smallest, barely perceptible shudder. But I wonder... There is a look about her of suppressed resentment, which might well mature to mutiny, given half a chance. And her name, which is Barbara, has - well - Barbarian overtones, so to speak.
I was mulling over these and related matters, whilst simultaneously instructing her in her duties, when Nero entered the room on the pretext of wishing to speak to me.
But as usual he had nothing to say, and merely sat there, idly flicking a frenetic plectrum across his lyre with such petulance as to snap the G-string.
In itself this might have been nothing. However, since the catastrophe occurred as he was regarding Barbara with a look of licentious lasciviousness on his fat features I could only suppose the incidents to be somehow related.
My suspicions were almost immediately confirmed, when on my sending the girl from the room with a tray of tea-things, he made some spurious excuse about feeling a poem coming on, and followed her into the corridor. Only seconds later my ears were pierced by the crashing of smashed crockery and a semi-stifled scream. I glanced rapidly after them to find the girl had disappeared about her business, leaving my husband ankle-deep in fragments of priceless Etruscan cups; which, on becoming conscious of my presence, he tried vainly to conceal beneath the hem of his toga. In one hand he held a dented tray, and in the other a bent buttered scone; and, alas, ‘twas with the latter that he attempted to blow me an ingratiating kiss, to the ludicrous detriment of that gesture.
But in any case, I am no longer to be disarmed by such elephantine gallantry.
Was ever an Empress so wronged