The Third Rose · Wulfricus Publicius

Romantic Short Fiction

The Third Rose

Wulfricus Publicius

Some love stories are about what two people do to each other. These are about what they carry.

A collection of love stories with nothing in them you could not read aloud at a family table.

Take away everything a romance usually leans on and what is left is the older and stranger material. Restraint. Attention. Everything a person almost says and does not. The small objects people keep for forty years and never once explain.

Each story can be finished in a sitting. Each one turns on a single choice made at a price.

The Third Rose

Rome, in the last spring of the Republic.

A copyist's son is fifteen. The girl he loves lives forty feet down the same street, and he has been named to the last dance at her coming of age. Eighteen roses, eighteen partners, and the eighteenth is as good as an announcement.

Then a sheet of paper turns up in the wrong hands, written in a hand half the street would know, and he is asked a question in front of witnesses that he cannot answer without ruining his father.

He says nothing.

Forty-two years later, on the other side of a sea, his daughter breaks a knife opening a chest she has no business opening, and finds a sealed letter addressed to a woman who is not her mother.

She takes ship for Rome to deliver it. She is about to learn what her father was like at fifteen, and it is not what she has spent her whole life believing.

The lid of my mother's clothes chest had swollen shut in the wet season and I broke a kitchen knife on it before I thought to fetch a chisel. Under her good mantle and two spindles and a comb with three teeth gone, pushed into the corner, was a box of cedar the size of two hands that I had never seen in my life.

A stylus, wooden, worn at the grip until the shaft had gone oval. A strip of papyrus with one line copied on it in a small upright hand I knew as well as I knew my own face. Something dried past knowing, flat and brown, which came apart a little when I moved it.

And a folded sheet, sealed, with a name written on the outside.

The name was not my mother's.

I sat down on the floor of a house that had been shut eleven months and smelled of nothing at all, and I read it four times, in case the light was bad.

Aemilia.

My father had been dead nine years. He kept the accounts for half the wool factors in Corinth, and in fifty years he never once, to my knowledge, finished a sentence he had started. He would begin a thing at dinner and let it go somewhere around the middle, and my mother would pick it up and carry it the rest of the way. I had a whole childhood of half sentences. I had assumed there was nothing behind them.

I did not break the seal. I held the sheet up to the window instead, and I could see through the papyrus that he had written to the very edges. Both sides. No margins at all, which for my father was an obscenity.

Whatever was in there, he had said all of it.

"Burn it," said Nikias, who is a reasonable man and my husband and wrong about almost everything that matters.

"I am not going to burn it."

"Then close the chest. Sabina. Your mother is not a year dead."

"I know exactly how long my mother has been dead."

He did the thing he does with his hands, which means I am declining to say the next part. Our daughter was asleep in the other room. It was late and we were both being careful.

"It is a letter to a woman," he said at last.

"It is a letter from a boy. Look at the hand, the letters still lean." I put it down. "My father wrote three words at a time for fifty years and I have a sheet here covered edge to edge in one breath. I want to know who could get that out of him."

Nikias looked at it for a while.

"You are going to go," he said, not unkindly. "You have already worked out what the passage costs."

I had. I had worked it out standing over the chest with the chisel still in my hand. I keep books for a living. I am the daughter who checks the column twice and is proud of not being sentimental, and I was about to cross a sea on the strength of one word written by a boy dead forty years.

There was one other thing in the box. A split wax tablet with two words on it, scratched twice, the second time neater than the first, the way a boy practises something he intends to say out loud.

Rosaria. Eighteenth.

Neither of us knew what either word meant.

I sailed in the spring. Puteoli, and then the road.

III

Rome was not the city in the letter. Everything was scaffolded and being faced in marble, half the marble still in crates, and men on ropes forty feet up were doing something to a pediment while below them a woman sold fried fish as though the sky were not full of workmen. Nobody I asked had heard of the Vicus Sandaliarius by that name. It took me two wrong directions and most of a morning.

The house was small. I had built something in my head out of eighteen ancestors and a room wide enough to dance in, and found a narrow front on a narrow street with a courtyard behind it the size of a good kitchen.

She was sitting in it with a child on her knee.

Her eyes had gone milky at the edges. When I came through the passage she turned her head to listen rather than to look, the way you do when your ears have taken over the work, and she said, "That is not Sosia."

"No. Forgive me. My name is Sabina."

"Sabina."

"My father was Marcus Sabinius Rufus. He was a copyist's son on this street. He would have been fifteen the year Caesar was killed."

The child went on turning a knucklebone over. Somewhere behind the house a man was calling out about lamp oil, twice, and then a third time further off.

"Sit down," said Aemilia.

She put her hand out, and I gave her mine because it seemed to be what she wanted, and she turned it over and held it in both of hers and went very still, the way people do over a thing they are reading with their fingers.

"You have his hands," she said.

I had the letter inside my mantle. I could have given it to her within a minute of walking into that courtyard, and I did not. I sat down and let her start talking, and told myself it was because she was old and it would be cruel to be quick.

It was not that. I wanted the story first. I wanted to know him before I gave him away.

He read badly, she said, and then stopped telling me about it and gave it to me instead, and I have written it down the way she handed it over.

The colonnade where his father's copies were sold. Autumn, cold enough that the booksellers had braziers out. He stood at the end of the bench with a roll open in both hands, reading aloud to nobody, putting the stops in the wrong places until the sense came out as gibberish.

She got four columns of it before she could stand no more.

"That is not where the line breaks."

"Is it not."

"Give it here." She took it off him and found the place with her thumb. "There. And there. It is a list of ships, not a prayer."

"Ah," said Marcus. "Yes. So it is."

He did that most days for a year and a half, and it took her four months to notice it was on purpose.

There was bread, because there was always bread, and she tore the heel off and put it in his hand without either of them looking at it or mentioning it, the way you pass a thing to somebody you have passed it to two hundred times.

"You will ruin that copy," she said, "handling it with those fingers."

"It is not a good copy. My father did it in a hurry." He turned the roll over. "It is a good hand though. It is the only thing about me that is."

"That is a stupid way to talk."

"My father says a copyist sells sheets. And I say a copyist keeps a thing alive that would otherwise go out of the world entirely, and he says that is why I will die poor, and he is..."

And he stopped. Right there, with his mouth still open.

"He is what?"

"Nothing." He looked at the bread. "He is right about most things."

He did that constantly and it drove her to distraction. He would build a sentence to its last turn and then put it down unfinished, like a man setting a jar on a shelf he has decided is too high.

"A copyist is like a physician," he said after a while, as though the conversation had gone on inside him without her. "He does not ask whether he approves of the patient."

She laughed at him. He did not laugh back, and she remembers being surprised at that.

Then, because the brazier was warm and nobody was near them, she told him a thing she had never told anybody: that she could not begin a roll without unwinding it to the last column to see how it came out, and had done it since she was six, and knew it was a kind of cowardice.

Marcus went red to the ears.

"How long have you been doing that?" she said.

"Since always."

"Say it properly."

"Since always," said Marcus. "I thought it was only me."

That is what they had. A piece of ruined bread and a private crime about scrolls, and both of them keeping it like a fortune.

Her father named the eighteen in the winter.

Her house kept eighteen wax masks of ancestors in cupboards in the atrium, brought out for funerals and worn by men who walked in front of the bier, so that the dead went down the street escorted by their own forebears. When a daughter of the house came of age, all eighteen came out and were set along both walls and lit from below, and the girl was presented to them one at a time, with a partner for each and a rose to lay under each face.

"Eighteen roses," I said. "Eighteen partners."

"Named months out, so that everybody has time to be insulted."

"And the order means something."

"The order means everything." Her hands were flat on the child's back, quite still. "The first three are courtesies. Neighbours, men your father owes, sons who must be kept sweet. Nobody looks at the first three. The eighteenth is the founder's mask, the oldest face in the room, and the last rose of the night."

"And that one means?"

"That one means you will be at his wedding within the year."

Her brother's name was Lucius and he is the only person in this account I am not going to try to be fair to.

Marcus's father took work from a man called Gaius Vibius, who bought copies. Not books: other men's correspondence, which that year had a price. The shop was in debt to its landlord, its paper merchant and two other people, and the father took the work and did not say what it was, and gave some of it to his son at night, because the boy was fast and accurate and had a principle about not reading.

In February a sheet came into Lucius's hands that touched their father's letters. He brought it home and laid it flat on the table in front of everyone.

Half the street could have named that hand. He wrote small and upright with a particular way of finishing the letter G, and he had left copied lines for her in the margins of ruined sheets for a year and a half, and she had kept every one, and now here it was on a sheet about her father.

She went to the fountain in the morning, because he would be there and because there would be people.

"I want that said," she told me. "It is the only decent thing I did in the whole business. I could have gone to the shop and done it behind a door. I made him a place with witnesses in it."

Four or five women were ahead of her with jars. He came round with the shop's bucket and saw her and his whole face opened, because he had no idea, and she has never forgotten that either.

"Is this your hand."

She had it out of her mantle and held it up flat, at the height of his eyes, so he did not have to lean.

The water went on running. One of the women ahead of them said something about the price of something and another one laughed.

"Marcus. Is this your hand."

He did not look at the sheet. He looked at her, and went the colour of the wall behind him, and set the bucket down very carefully, the way you put down something that is full.

And he said nothing.

"I know it is your hand. I am not asking you that. I have three years of your G in a box under my bed."

Nothing.

So she made it smaller.

She did not ask whether he had done it. She asked, "Did somebody make you?"

She built him a door. She put a handle on it and stood there holding it open in front of four women with water jars, and all he had to do was walk through it.

"He shook his head," she said. "Once. Not even a proper no. And then he picked the bucket back up, which I thought at the time was the cruellest thing anybody had ever done to me, and he went up the street."

It is eleven words. I have counted them. My father took the work and I did not know what it was. Every single thing that came after would not have happened, and his father would have been finished by nightfall.

He was fifteen. He made the wrong choice in about two heartbeats, the way you do at fifteen.

Then it was the Ides, and the city came apart in a day.

She told me little about that and I did not press her. Her father stopped going out. There were lists, and everybody had a cousin on one, and nobody could ever produce a list, which made it worse rather than better. In a house like that, in a month like that, a girl's private hurt does not stay private. It is taken up and turned into an explanation. That family. That boy. Well, and did you know.

Lucius did not strike him off the eighteen. You do not strike a neighbour's son off the list in a year like that. It is a public insult and it makes a public enemy, and they could not afford one more. So Lucius did the quiet thing.

A week before the Rosaria a boy came round the block crying the revised order, because the order was always cried in the street.

Marcus heard his own name at three, outside the lamp seller's, on his own street, in front of two women who had known him since he was six.

Something I did not say to her.

While she was telling me about the bucket I was not in Rome. I was at a table in Corinth with a bowl of lentils going cold, watching my father start a sentence about the harbour and stop in the middle of it, and my mother reach over and finish it, and me at nine years old deciding what that meant about him.

What I decided in that courtyard was that he had learned at fifteen what it costs to say a thing quickly, and had never said anything quickly again, and had spent fifty years going quiet in the middle of sentences because quiet was the only safe place he had ever found.

I sat there rather pleased with myself for working it out.

There were roses everywhere, because it was the season and the whole business is named for them. They were in the passage and along the impluvium and crushed underfoot by the time it was over.

The eighteen were out of their cupboards and set along both walls, lit from below with lamps at floor level, which is how it was always done and which I am told is more unsettling than it sounds. Wax does not look like a person from underneath. Ninety guests. A man at the door, because of the times.

The young men stood in a line down the left-hand wall in their order.

He was third, and from where he stood he could see the whole shape of the evening: fifteen of them ahead of him in the wrong direction, and one at the very end.

He had the letter inside his tunic. He had been carrying it nineteen days.

The first mask was somebody's great-grandfather. The pipes started, slow, and the steps were counted, and the boy who went first was visibly frightened of the whole procedure. Aemilia walked the length of the atrium with him and back, laid her rose under the wax face, and came back for the second.

The second was a wool factor's son with a bad neck.

Then the figure turned, and it was his.

She put her hand out and he took it, at the distance, the way it is done: arm's length, fingers only, a full stride apart with the room watching from three sides.

Neither of them said one word.

I should be honest about the seams, because from here I am building. She was counting and remembers nothing between the second mask and the fourth. What I have is a sheet of papyrus, a rose nobody mentioned for forty-two years, and thirty-three years of being his daughter.

Twenty steps. I paced that atrium myself before I left Rome, twice, and I am sure of the number and do not know why it matters to me that I am.

Her hand was cold. Her second rose was still in her other hand, held down at her side, because she had not thought where to put it. Her lips were moving very slightly, and it would have taken him most of the way down the atrium to understand that she was counting, and had been counting all evening, and could not stop.

He had one thing he could have said and nine steps left to say it in.

He got halfway. I am as certain of that as I am of anything in this account, because he got halfway his whole life. He had it built as far as its last turn and then he set it down on a shelf he had decided was too high.

The pipes turned. He let go of her hand and she walked to the third mask and laid the rose under a face he did not know the name of, and came back past him for the fourth boy without looking up, and the line closed, and he stood in it and watched fifteen more.

The eighteenth was Quintus Verginius.

He was not handsome and not a fool and he did not swagger up the atrium. He had a farmer's hands and a good coat that did not fit him. He was so nervous, she told me, that he held her hand as though it were somebody else's property he had been asked to mind, and apologised twice, once for his feet and once for nothing at all, and she found, walking under the oldest face in her house, that she did not mind him.

That is worse.

My father left before the last cup.

Outside on the step he took the letter out of his tunic and started to tear it, and stopped, and folded it back in.

I know he stopped. I have the sheet.

VII

She married Quintus, and she loved him, and I am going to use that word because she used it and because she looked at me very hard when she did, or as hard as she could look at anything by then.

"Forty years," she said. "You will want it to have been a sad marriage. It was not a sad marriage."

My father put his name down for Corinth in the autumn. Caesar had ordered the colony refounded in the last months of his life and they were taking anybody who would go and hold a plot. So he left the city where the man had been killed, to build the city the man had ordered. He was sixteen. He never came back.

He went to say goodbye and could not do it. He got as far as the street and turned round.

What he did instead took him most of a night, because it is a fair copy and there is not a correction on it. He chose one line and wrote it out on the back of a ruined sheet, and went back before dawn and put it under her door, where the girl who swept would find it and not know what it was.

It is the last line of a poem. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why he chose the end.

At the fountain he had decided not to speak, in about two heartbeats. This took him all night, and he chose every word of it, and there was nobody left to hear it. Whatever he worked out in between, that is where he put it.

"That is all there ever was," Aemilia said. "One line at a door. He never wrote to me. Not once in his life, not one word, and I stopped minding a long time ago, but I will not have it made into more than it was."

"And you?" I asked. "Did you go?"

The child had gone in. It was getting dark in the courtyard and neither of us had called for a lamp.

"I went down to the docks. I stood at the corner by the grain office where he could not see me, and I watched them load, and I watched him get on."

"You did not call out."

"No."

"Why not?"

And here she was not sad at all. She was almost impatient with me.

"Because I had already given my word to a man," she said. "And I was not going to stand on a dock at sixteen years old and ruin two lives to make myself feel better about one afternoon at a fountain."

I have to put down the worst thing I did in Rome, because if I leave it out the rest of this is a lie.

I decided not to give it to her.

I sat with the sheet against my ribs and I thought: this woman had forty years with a man she loved, and a house, and children, and that child on her knee. My mother had a man who kept something in a box and never once said what it was. Whatever is on that sheet, it is not hers. It belongs to the woman who lived with the silence, and that woman is dead, so it belongs to me.

I sat with that about as long as it takes to count to fifty. It was a good argument. I have made worse ones and won.

Then I took it out, because I have his hands and I did not want the rest of him too.

VIII

"There is a letter. He wrote it to you. I found it in a box in my mother's house after she died and I have brought it from Corinth."

She did not put her hands out. She sat where she was.

"After," she said. "After the street. He wrote to explain himself."

"I do not think so."

"What else would he have written."

I put it into her hands, and she found the seal with her thumb and stopped, and sat with it a moment. Then she held it back out to me.

"You will have to. I can see a shape and a lamp and that is all I have left."

So I read my father's letter aloud, in my own voice, to a woman of fifty-seven, forty-two years after a boy of fifteen wrote it at night on a sheet stolen from his own father's shop.

Aemilia, daughter of Lucius Aemilius, from Marcus Sabinius Rufus, greetings.

I have begun this four times. My father says a letter should state its business in the first line, so: I am to be your eighteenth, and I have thought about very little else since the winter, and I wanted you to have something in your hand when the roses were finished.

You read the ends of things first. You told me that at the colonnade and made me swear never to repeat it, and I have not, and I will not, though it is the best thing I know about anybody.

You give me the burnt heel of the bread. You have never said why. I have never said thank you. I am saying it here because I am braver on papyrus than I am at a fountain.

There is one thing I cannot tell you, because it is not mine to tell. If it ever comes to you out of somebody else's mouth, I ask you only to remember that I have a father as well, and that he is not a wicked man, only a frightened one.

Be happy. That is the whole of it. I will hold the last rose and give you this, and then I will not trouble you about any of it again.

Written the nineteenth day before the Rosaria.

I got to the end and the courtyard was almost dark.

I understood the fourth part a moment before she did. I had the advantage of the story, and of the road from Puteoli.

Aemilia said, "The nineteenth day."

"Yes."

"Say the date again."

I said it again.

She did not say anything else for a long time, and I let her, because there was nothing in the world I could have added. He had written it while he was still the eighteenth. Before the runner. Before the street. He had sat down at night and written I will hold the last rose and meant it, and nineteen days later he had held nothing at all, and had carried the sheet into her house anyway, and stood in a line, and taken twenty steps with her, and gone home with it.

I was ready for her to weep and she did not.

What she did was worse and better. She got her voice back and used it on me.

"Now. You are going to go home to Corinth and make your mother into a substitute, and I am telling you before you start that you will be wrong."

"I did not say..."

"You did not have to say. I have had children. I know the face." She turned towards me, fierce about it. "He did not stay fifteen. He wrote that and then he lived forty-two more years and not one of them was mine. He crossed the sea. He held a plot. He married a woman and buried himself in her, and had you, and taught you your letters, I expect."

"He did."

"Then he was not carrying me about. A man cannot do all that with one hand." She sat back. "And I would know. If your mother had been second in that house you would have grown up knowing it, and you would not have sailed here about a letter. You would have sailed here about a grievance."

Then she called for Sosia and told her where to look, and it took some time, and neither of us said anything while we waited.

What came back was a rose.

It was dried past knowing, flat and brown, pressed a long time, and it came apart very slightly at the edge when she took it.

"The third one," she said.

I did not follow her. I said something stupid.

"The third rose," she said again, patiently. "I went back for it. When the guests had gone I went round the walls and took it out from under the mask, and I have moved house four times since, and it has come with me every time."

I have not written down what I said next because I do not think I said anything.

I was thinking about a box of cedar the size of two hands, and a thing in it, dried past knowing, flat and brown, that had come apart a little when I moved it.

The last thing she gave me she gave me carelessly, on the way out, holding my arm along the passage because the step is uneven. Somewhere in the afternoon I had told her about the sentences. About a man who never finished one.

"You have decided he was being careful," she said. "I could hear you deciding it."

"He learned it that morning. At the fountain."

"No." She stopped in the passage, found the door frame with her hand, and was almost cross with me. "Child, he was doing that at fourteen. He did it the first week I knew him and I wanted to shake him for it. He would get halfway through a sentence and see the thing from where you were standing, and have to go back and build it again, and he could never do it fast enough to keep up with his own mouth. So he would stop."

"That is not what I..."

"He was not withholding," said Aemilia. "He was too slow. He was always too slow, and he knew it, and it embarrassed him for fifty years, and if you go home believing anything else you will have wasted a sea voyage."

I sailed home in the autumn.

I have written all of this down over the winter, in the evenings, in a small upright hand which is not as good as his. I have put it in the cedar box on top of everything else and I have not sealed the box, because it is not for me.

And when I had finished it I read the last page first, the way she does, the way he did, the way a girl once confessed to a boy at a brazier in a dead Republic, and only then did I go back and start at the beginning.

My daughter is called Thalia. She is named for my mother.

Finis