“Yes, soldier”—the innkeeper had observed immediately that his guest was wearing a Roman military uniform—“he can bed down comfortably there. And for you and your wife”—he paused, questioning, and Longinus nodded—“one of the larger chambers, yes, and for the maid a smaller one, adjoining yours, perhaps?”
“It will not be necessary that it adjoin ours; wherever you can conveniently place her will be satisfactory.”
So a small room down the narrow hallway from theirs had been assigned to Tullia, and now the maid had retired to it, and the manservant to a mat at the stable. Claudia and Longinus had supper and, fatigued from the journey down from Machaerus to the Jericho plain, they retired to their chamber.
Longinus, seated on a low stool, was unbuckling his sandals. “I do hope a caravan for Caesarea comes along soon,” he said. “I’m anxious to get there; I’m almost tempted to venture the journey on our own. But with so many of those zealots in the hills....”
“Then you have tired of me this quickly, you can’t wait to return me to the Procurator?” she asked innocently.
“I’m getting tired of returning you to the Procurator,” he said.
“And after every time with you I’m more loath to go back to him myself.” The mask of innocence was gone; she was entirely serious now. “Longinus, isn’t there something we can do, some solution? We simply can’t go on like this indefinitely.” She had finished undressing; walking over to the bed, she pulled down the cover, slid beneath it, and pulled it up to her chin. “By all the gods, Longinus, there must be a better fate for us. Surely the granddaughter of an Emperor, the stepdaughter of another Emperor....”
“But that’s exactly why there is a problem,” he interrupted. “If you were just a Roman equestrian, you wouldn’t have been forced to marry Pilate in the first place.” He kicked off one of his sandals and twisted about to face her. “Claudia, you could slip away from him and we could go away somewhere, but that would hardly be a solution, though for me certainly it would be a permanent one.” He smiled vapidly. “Also you could ask Tiberius—and that means, of course, Sejanus, too—to permit you to divorce him; I hardly think, however, that they would allow you to do it, and then the situation would be worse than it is now; they would watch us all the more and doubtless send us to separate far distance provinces, the gods only know where.” He considered a moment. “There’s the possibility, though—probability, I hope—that Pilate will soon do something that will so infuriate Sejanus that he will depose him as Procurator and perhaps banish him to another remote province. Then they might allow you to divorce him and marry me, provided we went off to Gaul or”—he shrugged—“Britannia or Hispania or some other faraway place. But I’m not sure of that.” He removed the other sandal and placed it beside the first one. “That is probably our best chance, Claudia, maybe our only one as long as Tiberius and Sejanus stay in power. But even then I can’t proceed too fast against Pilate, because then Sejanus would surely suspect that you and I....”
“But doesn’t he think already that you want to marry me?”
“At first he did, I suspect. But now I think he’s convinced that our interest in each other is ... well, a purely physical one. And Antipas, I’m sure, has the same notion.”