In the first household the mistress whipped her and sold her, because of what the master did. In the second she was so frightened of the overseer that she dropped her work whenever she saw him and couldn’t remember what she’d been told to do for five minutes on end. It was almost a relief to be re-sold to the same dealer, who fed her up and was tolerably gentle to her and even let her play marbles and cat’s cradle with some girls of her own age, and finally sold her into a decent house, where she was to be trained as maid to Flavia, the only daughter of her new master, Flavius Crispus. There was nothing special to be frightened about here over her master; he was oldish and kindly. There was a young master in the house too, but he was apparently not even a Roman. The slaves called him ‘The Briton’ and by and by someone told her that he really did come from an island weeks away in the cold middle of the sea, where his father had been a king.
He was quite well liked. He had asked Persis her name and spoken to her once or twice, but he didn’t do anything to her. After a time she couldn’t help knowing that he was really interested in her young mistress Flavia.
The old slave woman who was training her found her quick and clever at doing hair and pleating and pinning. She thought Flavia was very beautiful with her crisp shining curls and brilliant eyes, and she would have loved her if Flavia had been at all nice to her. However, she was safe here; she could look up and breathe again; she could remember if she chose to. She could look about the new household and wonder if she would make any friends.
It was very puzzling at first, trying to keep it all in her head. There was no regular overseer, but one or two old slaves or freedmen, and the Briton kept a general eye on things. The head cook was an Italian freedman, good at the traditional dishes. There was the usual amount of scolding and threatening, but very little real punishment, and on the whole it was fairly cheerful and the food not bad. There was no one else from as far East as she was—by race at least—but there were several Jews, plenty of Greeks or Sicilians, some Thracians or North Gauls for the heavy work, but no Britons. Perhaps Crispus had thought it wasn’t tactful to have them in the same house as the boy he had brought up. There was nearly as much Greek as Latin spoken in the house; however, Persis had to learn Latin quickly, for Flavia, although she could read and write Greek fluently, was not going to take the trouble to speak it so as to make things easier for the new girl.
There was a boy about the same age as Persis, one of the Greeks; he was a dining-room slave, clever at dancing and miming and all sorts of tricks, and able to get round the old master. He was born in the house; Eunice, his mother, had been in the kitchen for years and, even now she’d been freed, was still in and out quite often. It was she who had spoken in a friendly way to Persis, asking her to come over some evening to her little bakery, which was quite close. Persis hadn’t wanted to at first; she didn’t like Phaon, who was a cheeky, teasing little devil, quite sure he was going to be freed himself soon; and besides, she knew about the house where she was now, the best and the worst of it. She wasn’t going to risk looking outside; there wouldn’t be anything worth looking at. She knew what a slave girl’s life was now; it wasn’t any use doing any silly hoping or picturing.
All the same, fat old Eunice asked her again; she said, rather surprisingly, ‘My boy said you were lonely.’ Persis thought angrily, what right had he to talk about me! And then, but he didn’t look as if he cared. And while she was thinking that, Eunice had taken her by the arm, and then Persis found herself crying and sobbing that she had lost her mother—had lost everything—and Eunice stumped straight off to Flavia’s old slave woman and said she was taking Persis along with her that evening and there was to be no fuss, and before Persis had quite stopped hiccoughing from her burst of tears, she was out in the street, with Eunice patting her and talking to her. Persis hardly listened to the words; it was the kindness behind them that mattered. That was like the rich warm smell of new bread that she breathed in at the bakery, curled up on a rug on the floor at Eunice’s feet. By and by Phaon came tumbling in. Persis made to jump up, but Eunice wouldn’t let her, and Phaon curled up on the rug too. He was much nicer now; he didn’t tease her at all, and perhaps, thought Persis, his teasing me before was just his way of trying to make friends. She stayed there for the best part of the evening, and forgot she was a slave girl who had been bought and sold and forcibly made adult at Delos and other toughening places, and remembered she was fifteen and it was still nice to dig one’s fingers into dough and play silly games with Phaon and his mother.
After that she came fairly often, whenever she could get away for half an hour. Sometimes she would find one or two of the others, Manasses perhaps, or Josias or Argas, another of the Greek boys. But she didn’t pay much attention to them; what she wanted was to be allowed to be clean and a child again. Perhaps, after all, the whole world wasn’t hateful.
Sometimes she and Phaon helped with the baking. Most of it was rye bread or some mixture, but there were always a few white loaves for the better class customers, and often Eunice made them up into fancy twists. Phaon was very good at this; he would give the dough a flip and mould it with his fingers, and it turned into a swan or a rose. ‘Make something else, do!’ said Persis. He laughed and dipped his hands into the flour and began on another lump of dough. In a couple of minutes it had turned into a fish with beautiful fins. His mother looked at it, smiled, and then said, very seriously.
‘I can’t bake that, Phaon.’
‘Why not?’ asked Persis, ‘it’s lovely!’ And then saw that Phaon and his mother were looking at one another with a strange sort of understanding, and suddenly remembered something she had forgotten for more than a year and said breathlessly, ‘Do you mean the fish is—something else?’
‘It’s only a joke,’ said Phaon quickly, and Persis thought, oh no, of course not, that would have been too good to be true, and looked it, for Eunice took her hand and asked,
‘Did you ever hear of a fish that meant something different?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Persis, and knew she was bound to cry in a minute, because remembering that meant remembering everything. In a blur she saw the piles of cut wood and the round oven and the table with the dough on it, and Phaon looking straight at her, catching at her, saying very eagerly,
‘What was your fish, Persis?’
Was it dangerous to say? Hadn’t there been some warning from Evodia?—she musn’t speak unless she was sure. But oh, in this little room she’d had kindness! ‘They were the Name letters,’ she said, and it all came back to her, and she stared at the dough-white flesh and murmured them.
‘Persis, how lovely!’ said Phaon, and kissed her, but not teasingly; no, like a brother.
And, ‘Why didn’t you tell us, dear?’ said Eunice. ‘You could have been coming to the meetings—all this time.’
‘But I didn’t know,’ said Persis. ‘I thought—oh, I thought it was all no use and Jesus had forgotten me.’
‘That doesn’t happen,’ said Eunice. ‘Now tell me: what was your Church and of whom your baptism?’
‘Philippi,’ said Persis, ‘and I was baptised by Epaphroditus—but then, you see, I was sold—’
‘I know, my lamb, my lamb,’ said Eunice, cuddling her, ‘but you’ve come here. Think if you’d been sold, the way my brother was—he was a skilled man, of course, a joiner—right away into Spain, where there’s no Church—unless he was able to make one.’
‘Don’t you know about him, then?’ asked Persis.
‘No, my dear, and it will be seven years, come midsummer. Only I keep on hoping he found what he could make a Church out of, with God’s help.’
‘But what could he make a Church out of?’
‘Why, what I’ve been trying to give you, all this time, not knowing you were one of us: poor folk’s feeling for each other. Kindliness, as you might say, or, it might be, love. Once you’ve got it, and you do