He packed quickly and sent his bags to the dock to be put aboard. Then he rushed to the Procurator’s Palace to tell Pilate and his wife good-by. Happily, the Procurator had gone out. But Longinus could have only a few minutes with Claudia.
“I won’t be up in Phoenicia long,” he reassured her. “It shouldn’t take many days before I get the operation of the plant reorganized. And even before I finish the task, if I find it takes longer than I now think it will, I may be able to board a vessel and come down here for a visit. Claudia, why couldn’t you arrange a journey”—his tone was eager—“over to Tiberias for another stay in the Tetrarch’s Palace? That is, if in the meantime”—his grin lightened the tenseness of the moment—“Aretas hasn’t driven him and Herodias away? But if they’re still around, well, then I could just by chance select that same time to visit Cornelius.”
When he could stay with her no longer she summoned the palace sedan-chair bearers and rode with him down to the dock. After he had embarked and the ship was moving across the harbor to gain the open sea beyond the long breakwater, she stepped again into the sedan chair and was borne to the palace.
34
But the biting, sharp winds of spring, sweeping down from the mountains of Judah across the lower Shefelah and the region of the coast, had subsided into the still and enervating heat of summer, and the Centurion Longinus had not yet returned to his post.
Nor had Claudia received any message from him. Sergius Paulus, too, had heard nothing, as she found when on several occasions she had discreetly inquired about the centurion. The Procurator’s wife began to wonder if Longinus had been recalled to Rome and sent away by Sejanus on a mission to some remote province of the Empire, perhaps even as far, the gods forbid, as Brittania.
Then one day in late summer Cornelius appeared at the Procurator’s Palace. Pilate, it happened, had ridden down the coast to Joppa; Claudia and the centurion could talk freely. Hardly were they seated on the terrace overlooking the Great Sea when she confronted him, eyes solemnly inquiring, her forehead wrinkled.
“Cornelius, what can have happened to Longinus? I haven’t had a word from him or concerning him since he left here for the glassworks so many weeks ago. I can’t understand....”
“You’ve no cause to be worried,” he interrupted, laughing. “He is still at the glassworks, or at any rate he was when I was there recently. He’s been working hard. The plant had deteriorated considerably; he said it required more work than he had anticipated to restore its operation to normal. He’s been hoping all along to get back to Caesarea to see you, but he just hasn’t had the opportunity. And he thought it best not to send any written messages; unfortunately, there’s been no one coming this way with whom he dared entrust a spoken one ... except for me, of course. He gave me a message for you, but I’ve been delayed getting here. He thinks you heard from him weeks ago.”
“And what was the message he sent?”