Mark Paren

Robert Frost was a New England boy much like Jack. "Good fences make good neighbors" is a classic saying from that region. I imagine Jack would’ve appreciated a neighbor helping him rebuild the wall on his father‘s farm.

They rode out from camp two mornings after the horse lines, before most of the fires had been stirred back to life, and for the first hour neither of them spoke. It was not the silence of nothing to say. Marcus had come to know that kind well enough, in Rome, in council rooms, in the careful spaces between people who wanted the conversation over. This was the other kind, the kind that came from having already said the parts that mattered, in low voices, over several nights, in fragments nei

I’m not sure about Jack, but the devil behaves like a sleazy attorney. Thanks for commenting.

Stingy Jack’s LAST Trick. You never know. Thanks for commenting.

Thanks. I don’t mind crediting those genus’s.

Jack has lived a tragic life. Perhaps death will suit him better. Thanks for commenting.

Thank you. I appreciate your support.

Many have been there in spirit, though few for 150 years. Thanks for the comment.

Thanks. It’s inspired by the prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde.

There is a particular quality to grief unwitnessed, I have come to learn in the long telling of this tale, that grief which is offered no eye to receive it, no ear to mark its passing; it does not spend itself as other griefs do, in the ordinary commerce of a house, a word of comfort given and a word of comfort received, but is left instead to circle upon itself, again and again, in a man's own breast, until he can no longer rightly say where the wound ends and where he himself begins. I bore su

Good insight. Marcus and Ingomar still have challenges ahead of them. Ingomar is linked to Arminius and his position is tenuous. The Roman nobility looked upon returning participants in the massacre suspiciously. Marcus may also be compromised.

I realize I was unclear with the redheaded boy line. Titus was referring to himself and Marcus saw Berulf it in the bonfire scene.

Now that Titus is safe, I can confess that he is based on my younger brother when he was in middle school, and I was in high school. He never called me “master” though.

Thanks. Only three more chapters to go.

Marcus woke to smoke and did not, for a long moment, know why he was still alive. The tent above him was unfamiliar. Hide stretched over bent wood, not canvas. The light through its seams was grey, early, uncommitted to being morning yet. His skull throbbed in one clean line from crown to jaw, and when he lifted a hand to it he found blood matted into his hair, dry and dark, though not yet fully a day old by the feel of it. He remembered the column breaking apart around him. He remembe