Curses and Smoke A Novel of Pompeii by Vicky Alvear Shecter

Author:Vicky Alvear Shecter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780545509947
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Daughter? May I come in?”

She looked up from her bed in surprise. Her father was here? To see her? “Yes, of course.”

“What are you doing?” Lucius Titurius asked as he entered her small cubiculum.

She held up a needle and thread and the hem of one of her tunicas. “Just some mending.” He did not need to know that she was fixing a tunica she’d torn in one of her many jaunts to the woods.

He nodded. “Good, good. But wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the atrium?”

She pointed with her chin at her foot, which was propped up on several pillows on her sleeping couch. “Remember, I’m supposed to keep my ankle elevated.”

He looked around her tiny room and cleared his throat several times. She tried to remember the last time he had come to visit her like this. She couldn’t.

“I have been in communication with your betrothed,” he began.

She groaned inwardly.

“He is aware you are frightened and uncertain, and he has given me his word that he will be kind and patient with you. He recommends that you begin sorting through your girlish things to select which toys you will sacrifice to Diana on the day of your wedding. We leave for Rome soon, as you know.”

Lucia nodded. With a pang, she realized that the toy sacrifice was something that girls always did with their mothers.

He cleared his throat again and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “You know, your mother was terrified of marrying me too, when our union was arranged.”

“She was?”

“I too was quite a bit older than she was —”

“Not forty-something years,” she mumbled, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

“But we grew to love each other very much. Or, at least, I grew to love her greatly, and I think she returned the feeling.”

How could he think that after taking her babies?

“I know it seems as if I am being cruel, but you must understand that I am trying to give you a safe and secure future, Lucia. I would not want any harm to come to you.”

She kept her eyes on her fingers in her lap, thinking all the while that if she’d been born after her brother had died, he probably would have thrown her on the rubbish heap too.

“May I sit?” he asked after a long silence.

She nodded.

He sat at the edge of the bed and patted her injured foot. “Do you remember how we used to play Hercules and the kerkopes?” he asked, smiling. “You would come upon me when I napped and try to steal something.”

Despite herself, she smiled. “Try? I always succeeded.”

“Once you set off with your prize, I would wake up and roar like Hercules, and stomp through the house in search of you.”

“I liked to hide under Mater’s blankets in her room,” she added, recalling the sensation of being wrapped in her mother’s fringed coverlets scented with rose oil.

“Yes, I always knew that’s where you went, but I made a big show of upending furniture and being unable to find you.

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