Agrippa's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

me to. Because they loved me and wanted me to stay.”
    “Loved you? They never saw you before and they loved you? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I say you’re a liar!”
    “Agrippa,” his wife begged him, “leave the child alone.”
    “I say she’s a liar!” The king stormed, turning on his wife and demanding, “Is she or is she not a liar? Tell me that! Has she ever spoken the truth—since she was an infant? Ever?”
    “Leave her be.”
    “Yes? Three weeks in the alabarch’s house, and she never thought to ask him of the money?”
    “No!” Berenice cried suddenly. “I do not think of money! I do not speak of money! I am a Hasmonean princess!”
    “Oh!” cried Agrippa. “You tell that to me, your king, your father! I did not know you were a princess—a Hasmonean princess! Is that what they taught you in Alexandria?”
    Berenice stared at him.
    “And Herod’s blood? Did you sell it to the alabarch?”
    “I threw it to the swine,” Berenice said deliberately—and then her father struck her, with all his strength across her face, so that she was flung back onto the floor, where she lay for a moment, bleeding from the nose. Then she pulled herself to her feet, turned her back on her mother and father, and left the room. She made no attempt to stanch the flow of blood from her nostrils, nor did she whimper or cry out.
    “You shouldn’t have done that,” Cypros told her husband. “There was no need for it—no reason.”
    “You know,” he said thoughtfully, his tension broken, his frustration released, “it occurs to me that the alabarch does not expect the money to have been returned. He must have taken a fancy to our Berenice. She won’t be easily matched, now that she’s a virgin no longer.”
    “How do you know?” his wife protested.
    “How do I know? Don’t be a fool. I’m a man. The alabarch is a man. He takes my daughter into his house. He has given me a fortune. I keep the fortune. He seeks for the fountain of youth where all old lechers seek it—in a woman’s crotch. You know, my dear—I’d like to have the alabarch ask for his money. Damn me if I wouldn’t, and I would teach him something about respect for a royal virgin. But I don’t suppose anyone has to teach him anything. He knows that when you ride a new mare, you buy a saddle.”
    The alabarch never asked for the money to be returned, and Agrippa became increasingly convinced that his analysis was correct. While the money tempered his anger toward Berenice, he regarded her as a particular and puzzling problem, and of this she became increasingly aware; for regardless of the size of a palace, it holds no secrets, from those who inhabit it. She would turn and see Agrippa staring at her, a brooding, faraway look in his eyes; and during those days, her brother said to her,
    “So help me, Berenice, I do believe that he harbors lecherous designs toward you.”
    “Since he’s your father,” Berenice replied, “nothing he harbored would surprise me.”
    But she did not agree. He was in his saintly phase, and the years were catching up with him, and the look was not a look of lust. Berenice knew that. Love of money was crowding the love of women out of Agrippa’s personality—the former not only less physically demanding upon a middle-aged man, but far more acceptable in the eyes of the country’s population. Even a saint can be parsimonious, obeying King Solomon’s injunction to heed the ways of the ant; but promiscuity stands in poorly with holiness.
    One day, outside the door of their chamber, Berenice overheard her mother and father talking. Her father was in the process of complaining,
    “No—I can’t take the chance. Marry her off and then find out that she’s been deflowered? And then have her flung back into my face, with all the world to know that she’s a whore!”
    “But you condemn her first,” Cypros protested.
    “What else? Have I no eyes? Am I a fool?”
    His voice