Of course his urbane, affluent father, rather than his Jewish-influenced friend the centurion and the Galilean mystic, was right. Even without using a stylus and tablet one can prove that a slave is the cheapest of the several things involved in the making of fine glassware; his father’s statement to that effect was quickly demonstrable. And yet....
Longinus shrugged and put away the letter. The ship, he discovered some moments later, would be at the Caesarea port only long enough to load supplies and freight; it would sail for Tyre within four or five hours.
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.
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.