The Forest House (Avalon Book 2) by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Author:Marion Zimmer Bradley [Bradley, Marion Zimmer]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1995-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

The duties of an officer attached to the Procurator’s staff turned out to include a number of tasks which would probably have been easy for Valerius, but which for Gaius, whose tutor had been pensioned off several years ago, were as stressful to the mind as his first weeks in the army had been for his body. Fortunately these tasks were often interrupted by assignment to escort duty for visiting dignitaries.

He was not much used to cities, but he soon learned to find his way around well enough. Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Governor, had instituted a program of building of which Londinium had been the first beneficiary. The Britons had been a pastoral people, whereas Roman life centered around the city, with its shops and baths, its games and theaters. A bridge linked Londinium with the south and other roads stretched away to the north and westward. Along these arteries came trade from every corner of the province, and the ships that anchored at the wharves carried goods from all over the Empire.

Shepherding the strangers gave him an excuse to explore, and expose him to visitors of high station. When Gaius got up the nerve to ask him, Licinius said that he had planned it that way.

“For of course, if this marriage is successful—” he said, and broke off without finishing the sentence. “You know, I have no sons, no child at all but Julia, and if things went as they should, she should be allowed to succeed me, and perhaps even attain to senator. But of course a woman, no matter how capable, can only bestow her rank on her husband. That is why it pleases me so much that she should marry the son of my oldest friend.”

Only then did Gaius really understand Macellius’s plan. Married to Julia, Gaius could legitimately aspire to the position for which his father’s injudicious marriage had disqualified him. He would not have been human—nor Macellius’s son—if he had been indifferent to the possibilities. Living in Londinium had already altered his perspective, and he was beginning to understand what he would have been giving up if he had run away with Eilan. Had she been ill used? He could only hope she knew that nothing on earth—short of his father’s will or the threat to Eilan herself—could have made him abandon her.

He had not realized that Julia was aware of his troubles until she brought up the subject herself.

“Father told me,” she said after the evening meal when they were sitting on the terrace together watching the late summer sunset gild the basilica’s dome, “that you were sent here because you had formed some sort of alliance with a native woman, the daughter of a proscribed man. Tell me something about her. How old was she?”

Gaius felt his face flame and coughed to cover his confusion. It had never occurred to him that her father would have told her; but perhaps it was just as well to get things clear between them.

“A few years older than you are, I think.

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