Agrippa's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

had come to him with their whining complaints of how she had behaved, what she had done, and he swept them away, crying out at them, “I care nothing for your damned spying! Bring the child to me!” So they had brought her to him, and now the Princess Berenice stood before him.
    “My child, my daughter,” he said hoarsely, fighting for control of himself. Still, Berenice did not understand. No one had told her. But she sensed that she had come into Alexandria in the presence of some enormous tragedy—as the alabarch went on, “And beautiful beyond all my imagining. Ah, what might have been.” And as she stared at him, uncomprehendingly, “You see, my child, my son died this morning.”
    Still Berenice stared at him.
    “My son, Marcus, your betrothed—he died.”
    And what was she in terms of all this? She didn’t know. Was she saved? Or had she fought a battle to absolutely no purpose, a battle which she would have to fight again? She didn’t know. And what was expected of her? Should she weep? Her husband to be was dead, but she had never seen him.
    “Do you want to see him?” the alabarch asked gently.
    “What is he asking me?” Berenice thought. “Do I want to see a corpse? Why should I want to see a corpse? I have seen corpses before. Why is this corpse any different?”
    “If you are afraid, my dear?”
    “Afraid?” she thought. “Afraid of what? Of a corpse? My dear man, you evidently have a strange notion of what it means to grow up as a princess of the House of Herod. I have seen men killed in front of my eyes. Yet I might confess that I have no desire to see this particular corpse. Absolutely none.”
    But aloud she said nothing, only stared at the old man’s grief-stricken face, and then finally nodded.
    “Follow me, Berenice, my dear,” he said.
    She followed him through a number of rooms, past clusters of people who watched them in silence, and then into a candlelit bedchamber, where the body was stretched out upon the bed and where a woman in black knelt by the bedside, sobbing, one of the boy’s dead hands pressed against her cheek. Two girls lay crumpled at the foot of the bed, and they too were sobbing, and at least a dozen other people were in the room, priests and physicians and womenservants, but they stood well back from the bed.
    In the course of her life, Berenice would see many dreadful and heartbreaking things—but nothing that touched her so deeply and poignantly as the sight of the boy’s mother with his dead hand pressed to her cheek. Why this was so, she did not know, but suddenly she was filled with nameless, meaningless grief of her own.
    The alabarch led her to the bedside and uncovered his son’s face, and Berenice saw the white, bloodless countenance of what appeared to be no more than a child, a little boy carved in candle-wax—her husband to be, her bridegroom whom she would never address, never speak to, never touch, never kiss.
    Suddenly, she was weeping. The alabarch’s wife rose, went over to Berenice and took her in her arms.
    “No, don’t weep for him, my child,” she whispered.
    But Berenice wept for herself …
    And then, later, months later at Tiberias, Berenice had to repeat it all for her father—who was thinking mainly of one thing, would Alexander want the money back? In his questioning of Berenice, he persisted on the question of the mood and attitude of the alabarch.
    “He loved his son,” Berenice said sullenly. “What shall I tell you about his attitude?”
    “I don’t give two damns about how he felt about his son!” Agrippa snorted. “How did he feel about the money?”
    “I don’t know how he felt about the money. And I don’t care,” Berenice said.
    “Oh? You don’t care! Only enough money to buy a kingdom, but you don’t care! What do you care about? What did you care about during the weeks you stayed there?”
    “Nothing,” Berenice muttered.
    “Then why did you stay?”
    “I told you why I stayed. Because they begged