“Well, Marcus!” I mused. “Celebrating your feast day five hundred miles from home: gritty fish stew, filthy Gallic wine, a pain in your side, a callous client…” As I rambled on amiably, Helena Justina finally smiled at me.

“Stop grumbling. It’s your own fault. If I’d known it was your birthday I’d have bought you a tipsy cake. How old now?”

“Thirty. Downhill to the dark boat across the Styx. Probably be sick over the side in Charon’s ferry too…So how old are you?” This was daring, but she sounded almost sorry to have missed the tipsy cake.

“Oh…Twenty-three.”

I laughed. “Time yet to rope in a new husband…” Then I ventured in a casual voice, “My ladies usually like to tell me about their divorces.”

“It’s your feast day,” Helena Justina snorted.

“So treat me…Where did you go wrong?”

“Fornication at the horse barracks.”

“Liar!” I didn’t like her, but that had to be untrue. She was strict as a brick. That was probably the reason why I thought I didn’t like her. “His fault then. What did he do? Too mean with the opal earrings or too free with the Syrian flute girls?”

She just said, “No.”

“Beat you?” I risked. By now I was insatiably curious.

“No. If you really need to know,” Helena declared, with an effort, “he was not sufficiently interested in anything about me to bother. We were married for four years. We had no children. Neither of us was unfaithful—” She paused. Probably knew, you can never be sure. “I enjoyed running my own household but what was it for? So I divorced him.”

She was a secretive person; I felt sorry I asked. Usually around this point they cry; not her.

“Want to talk about it? Did you quarrel?”

“Once.”

“What about?”

“Oh…Politics.”

It was the last thing I expected, yet utterly typical. I burst out laughing. “Look, I’m sorry! But you can’t stop there—do tell.”

I was glimpsing now what all the matter was. Helena Justina was brave enough not only to have brought her restlessness upon herself, but also to see how badly her present sense of despair affected her soul. Quite possibly the better life she was striving for did not even exist.

I wanted to reach out to squeeze her hand, but she was not that sort of woman. Perhaps that was how her husband had felt about her too.

She decided to tell me. I waited to be startled, for nothing she ever said was conventional. She began to speak, in a cautious tone; I listened gravely. Helena explained what had led to her divorce.

And as she told me, my mind returned in stunned disbelief to the silver pigs.

XXXIV