The Uncertain Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

day’s unpleasant necessities, yet so serenely composed, with one hand on her hip like a waitress at a roadside tavern, was dazzling. He found himself staring at her in mute perplexity and desire.
    “What is it you wanted to tell me, Titus?”
    “I … nothing. I … it’s difficult.”
    She cocked her head to one side, like a songbird, and smiled sympathetically, her eyes half-closed as if she would fall asleep right there on the path.
    “I know it is,” she said gently. “But you must bear up. It’s almost over now.”
    Petronius watched her turn and disappear into the bathhouse. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, the only person he had ever wanted, and he had lost her as casually as one loses a ring removed before a swim and thoughtlessly knocked away. The important question was not why she had returned at the final hour to allow him one last chance to redeem himself, but why, after a week in her company, he had failed to do so. It was unlike her to allow him to idle in error for so long. What was she thinking?
    He shook himself like a wet dog. He was thoroughly fed up with all this emotional turbulence and determined to be businesslike and efficient with the rest of his time until dinner, of which there was precious little left. True, it was not what he would have wished—dignity, pride, and Socratic condescension were more in order for a day like this—but it was what he was stuck with until he could find his balance and equanimity. Perhaps he would feel more himself when the guests arrived—after all, had he not been reared from birth and lived his entire life as a public man, a leader of men and patrician exemplar? Was it not natural for men like him to feel out of sorts in their own company? It was all the solitude of the past two years, all the introspection and writing, that had softened him.
    He stretched his legs and strode purposefully into the house—through the library and the front atrium, past the interior fountain and pool, the mural of the seafront on the Bay of Naples, and down a long, narrow hallway to the service wing. He ducked his head to clear the low lintel of the main kitchen, and the dozen or so slaves ceased their chatter and stood to attention. Only Vellia, cracking urchins in a basket, saw fit to ignore him.
    The vast oak table that occupied the center of the room was laden with goods recently arrived from the market—in fact, a cart was being unloaded just now in the rear courtyard—and Petronius contented himself with a stroll around its periphery while he waited for his housekeeper to finish her task. With a lazy flick of his hand, he ordered the slaves back to their work, which they resumed in silence, heads bowed.
    On the near end of the table stood an assortment of large red earthenware bowls, filled with shellfish on ice—Lucrine oysters, mussels, cockles, Misenum urchins. They smelled strongly of the sea, whence they had been plucked only that morning, and when later they were opened and eaten, with perhaps just a dash of vinegar and olive oil, no more mystical communion could be hoped for with the depths and its creatures and the invisible roads that bind the empire to its own heart. The largest of the bowls, the size of a cartwheel, was filled with brine and held an enormous mottled lamprey, still very much alive. Beside it, a glistening sturgeon lay on a rush mat, its eye glassy and unclouded, alongside a smaller red mullet and a basketful of prawns. There were a number of open jars containing pickled Picene olives, olive relish dappled with coriander seeds, Sicilian honeycomb, Pontic pine kernels toasted oily and tan, Judaean pistachios shelled and roasted and pink as babies’ toes. Beyond these, another mat was spread with a selection of the finest Italian cheeses. Among them, Petronius recognized a finely aged Luna from Etruria, stamped with a crescent moon; an oil-soaked Ves-tine from the Sabine hill country, wrapped in grape leaves yet still reeking of