by Kate Quinn
The Emperor blinked at that, his expression neutralizing as if he were deciding whether to be angry or amused. But he settled on amused. “Perhaps I did, you clever girl. Though I am sorry for your sister. I intend to find her a noble husband, to replace the one I cost her.”
Marcella wondered just how well Cornelia would take that idea. At least if she turned down some proposed suitor of Otho’s, Tullia would die in a fit of rage . . .
“Something’s made you smile,” Otho exclaimed. “I do hope it was me. I’m a witty fellow, or so they keep telling me since I became Emperor. You know, I owe you my thanks.”
“For what, Caesar?”
“For offering your sympathy when I lost the position of Imperial heir to your sister’s husband.” A gold bracelet glinted around Otho’s lean brown wrist as he beckoned a slave for more wine. From the merry flush on the slave’s face, some of the Emperor’s wine was finding its way to the back quarters as well. “I’ve wondered how I could repay you, now that I’m in a position to do so.”
Any number of quotes sprang to Marcella’s mind about the two-edged gratitude of powerful men. “I need no repayment, Caesar.”
“But I owe you for more than thanks for your sympathy, little Marcella. You made some joke about bribing a priest to say the omens were bad, so all those superstitious soldiers would intervene in my favor. Shall we say it gave me an idea?”
Marcella’s thoughts froze entirely.
Otho grinned at her expression. “Don’t feel too guilty,” he said, as the room roared laughter at some timid joke from the reading that couldn’t have been very funny. “I probably would have had the idea myself, anyway.”
Marcella brought her wine cup to her lips again, more of a gulp this time than a sip.
“Is it entertaining, my dear, to know that you’ve meddled with the succession of emperors?”
“Yes.” She managed to keep her voice light. “It is rather entertaining.”
“I do like a woman who speaks her mind! And as you see, my dear lady, I do owe you. So what do you wish from me?”
“A post here in the city for my husband, Lucius Aelius Lamia,” Marcella said at once, shaking off her momentary paralysis.
“Is that all?” Otho made a face. “I’d hoped you’d come up with something more interesting. What kind of post?”
“Anything. So long as he has to stay in Rome for a change.”
“You’re so fond of him?” The Emperor raised skeptical brows at Marcella. Meanwhile, the languid actress from the Theatre of Marcellus rose to tell the now-beaming Quintus Numerius that she would declaim the last portion of his marvelous treatise herself.
“I don’t care for my husband in the slightest,” Marcella said frankly. “But I care even less for living with my sister-in-law. Make Lucius the Imperial Manure-Shoveler in your stables if you like—just so long as he has a house of his own and can move me into it before I murder my brother’s wife.”
Otho burst out laughing again, drawing eager glances from his cronies, who were always on the lookout for the Emperor’s new whim. “There are easier ways to escape a meddling sister-in-law. Not to mention a boring husband.”
Marcella looked at him. He leaned negligently in his chair, black curls carelessly tousled, his arm just brushing hers. “Such as?”
“I could find you another husband easily enough.”
“As long as he comes with a household of his own, the one I have suits me well enough.” Lucius at least allowed her to lead her own life—better that than some new man who expected a domestic goddess or tireless hostess.
“Perhaps your husband might be persuaded to share?” Otho drew a finger down Marcella’s cheek to the curve of her neck. “Nero spoke highly of you, and whatever you say of Nero, you can’t say he didn’t have exquisite taste. He fancied my own wife once, and all Rome knows that didn’t end well, but I could hardly blame him for thinking her lovely. You are lovely too, my dear—and I must say, as much as I admire that clever brain, your breasts could bring whole legions to revolt.”
Marcella smiled but moved back. “I’ve already been one emperor’s whim, Caesar. It didn’t suit me.”
The reading was over now, their host standing smug and smiling amid a circle of well-wishers who had not listened to a word he said and were now mostly tipsy.
“Don’t judge by the purple cloak, my dear.” Otho trailed two fingers along her wrist—to the evident fury of Domitian in the seat behind, Marcella noticed. “Judge by the man inside it.”
“One Emperor was enough for me.”
“Perhaps I can change your mind someday.” But the Emperor withdrew his hand from her wrist, rising with a good-natured nod. “Lovely to speak with you this afternoon, Lady Marcella.”
“Is that why you came here, Caesar? I doubt it was the pleasure of the reading.”
“I find my pleasure wherever I can.”
“A pity you had to find it here.” Marcella adopted his light tones. “Since you showed up to applaud this very dull treatise, it’s sure to be a huge success. And Rome has quite enough bad literature already.”
CORNELIA, you must come to dinner.” Tullia’s aggrieved voice came clearly through the door.
“I’m not hungry.” Cornelia huddled deeper into her shawls.
“But Lollia and her husband are coming to visit—”
“I will not speak to that man. And I will never speak to Lollia.”
“Salvius Titianus is the Emperor’s brother! It would be very unwise to keep shunning him now that he’s family—”
Cornelia erupted out of her nest of shawls and cushions, seized a little copper bowl from the dressing table, and flung it across the room at the door. From the other side of the door she heard Tullia’s huff of indignation.
“How is she?” Marcella’s low voice, almost inaudible.
“Impossible, that’s how she is!” Tullia shrilled. “Utterly impossible. She’d do better to let Emperor Otho give her another husband, one of his own supporters, for the family’s sake—”
“I wouldn’t tell her that if I were you.”
“I have only our own best interests at heart.”
“Since when are you one of us, Tullia? You might have run down my fool of a brother in one of his many weak moments, but that does not make you one of the Cornelii. Our family outlasted Nero, and we’ll outlast you too. And given a choice between you and that despotic lunatic, I’m not sure we wouldn’t choose—”
“Gaius!” Offended sandals clicked away.
Cornelia turned over, pulling her shawl close as the voices faded down the hall. She hadn’t left her bed in days. Her own lilac-draped bed in the room she’d had when she was sixteen, before she married. Far too young for her now, with its little silver ornaments and white-on-mauve embroideries. But Tullia still sent me back to it like a little girl, now that I no longer have a husband.
Cornelia stretched out a hand, not opening her eyes, and trailed her fingers over the marble bust beside the bed. The bust of Piso that Uncle Paris had carved for her wedding; the one thing she’d been able to bring from home. Even without looking, her fingers knew the arch of his nose, the curve of his ear, his smiling lips.
She couldn’t imagine her husband smiling now. All she could see was his dull glazed eyes above the hacked stump of his neck, the mouth distorted into a snarl where the Praetorian had hooked a thumb for easy carrying.
It wasn’t him. Surely it wasn’t him. That mouth had never laughed, had never kissed her, had never smiled at a crowd while his name was acclaimed as future Emperor. Impossible.
“I wish I could join you,” she whispered to her husband. But he was cold marble now; he was white ash—and either way, he couldn’t hear.
“At least it’s all been properly taken care of now.” Tullia had been vastly relieved once the funeral rites were over and Piso’s dreadful staring head had been reduced along with the rest of his body to a tidy urn. “I suppose we should thank Diana for that, although I can’t imagine what she was think
ing, tramping through the Praetorian barracks! She couldn’t have just sent a slave, like a normal person?”
“Terrible,” Cornelia had managed to say, right before vomiting all over Tullia’s mosaics. She’d thrown up over and over—into vases, into the lavatorium, into a basin by the bed. She’d felt so ill, she was sure . . . the charm she’d bought from the Temple of Isis was still firmly tied about her wrist, after all. Surely it had worked? Surely if Fortuna took my husband away, she’ll leave me with his child to raise. She had been so certain, lying desperately still with her hands cupped about her belly, imagining a little boy with his father’s name and his father’s dark hair.
But her blood came a week later, not a day late, and Cornelia tore the Egyptian charm off and flung it out the window before crawling back into bed, wanting to die or at least to scream and scream and scream. But the women of the Cornelii did not scream. It was not fitting.
“Talk to me,” Marcella had pleaded. “I’m your sister; let me help you.” But Cornelia slammed the door in her face. What did Marcella know? She didn’t want children; she used pastes and tinctures to keep herself from conceiving on the rare occasions she and Lucius shared a bed—and secretly that had always been a relief to Cornelia, because what would people have whispered if her sister had had a clutch of babies and she’d had none?
Shame on you, Cornelia Prima, she told herself. Marcella was only trying to be kind.
A bright chatter of voices outside. Cornelia heard Tullia’s twittering and Gaius’s rolling tones—he had been practicing his “important” voice in the bathhouse, where it echoed. Lollia’s husky giggle sounded, and Cornelia felt a bright green spurt of hatred. Lollia had been widowed too, though no one would ever think it to look at her. But Lollia was a shallow, brainless little tart who never felt anything deeply in her life. Already remarried, and did she even seem to care?
Cornelia dragged herself off the bed and over to the window that overlooked the atrium. The evening still had a wintry chill, puckering the flesh on her arms, but the sun was radiant over the rooftop and the guests lingered in their pallas to exclaim over Tullia’s delphiniums. Lollia was easy to pick out in her stola of bright-purple silk. Imperial purple. Her new husband stood beside her, tall and handsome, looking very much like his Imperial brother in onyx brooches and a saffron-colored synthesis hardly long enough for decency.
Cornelia’s stomach twisted violently. She swallowed bile, trying not to vomit again, and when the sour taste lingered she knew she couldn’t stay one minute under a roof where any Othonian was visiting.
She grabbed her palla and stumbled out of her bedroom, avoiding the bright laughter from the atrium and leaving through the slave gate. She reached the street corner, blind and stumbling, before she realized she hadn’t even ordered the litter. Does it matter? I have nowhere to go. And besides, who would notice her if she walked? Three weeks ago she had been the future Empress, watched by all, parting crowds with her mere presence. Now she was nothing.
A party of legionaries marched past in smart step, intent on some errand for their centurion. A cluster of girls in ribbons and silk dresses giggled as they sashayed down the other side of the street. Children pounded past in some raucous game, shouting at each other, pursued by scolding nurses. Whores, Cornelia wanted to cry out to them, girls and soldiers and children alike. You’re all whores! A few weeks ago they were Galba’s subjects, Roman citizens. Now they were just Otho’s whores. Otho, who had poured honeyed regrets but been quick to confiscate the house that had been Cornelia’s and Piso’s, so she had nowhere to go but the lilac bedroom of childhood.
One man hadn’t turned traitor—he’d stayed loyal when everything else had crumbled. “Haven’t you paid your thanks yet to Centurion Densus?” Marcella had asked a few days ago. “Diana and I did, and Lollia’s putting him up at her grandfather’s house with the best doctors in Rome. He did save all our lives, you know.”
Yes. Cornelia pulled the palla up over her hair, realizing she’d been tramping through the streets with her head uncovered like a common woman. Yes, Marcella was right. Thanks must be paid to Centurion Drusus Sempronius Densus.
The vast marble mansion of Lollia’s grandfather wasn’t far—Cornelia saw the lights, brilliant against the dusk. No doubt entertaining a slew of Othonians himself. She felt another surge of hatred. After all his fervent support of Galba and Piso, Lollia’s grandfather had certainly wasted no time arranging Lollia’s marriage. Rumor had it too that he’d made himself another fortune selling off the houses emptied by Galba’s auctioneers to Emperor Otho’s newly rich friends. But he’d been born a slave—how could he possibly know anything about loyalty? I should have known that Lollia with her slave blood would be no better.
Still, Cornelia was glad they were playing host to her former bodyguard. She didn’t have to toil up to the Praetorian barracks to pay her thanks—not that she could have set foot there anyway, remembering their betrayal.
“Shall I tell Dominus you’re here, Lady Cornelia?” The steward bowed. “He has guests, but I know he would wish to see you—”
“No, don’t trouble him.” She slipped through the slave gate. “Just take me to the wounded centurion.”
A lavish room, of course, like every room in the whole overdone house. Blue-marbled and sumptuously draped, with an arching western view of the Palatine Hill and the last dusky streaks of the sunset. Centurion Drusus Densus looked uncomfortable in it, and even more uncomfortable when Cornelia was ushered in.
“Lady—” He tried to rise, then looked down at his bare, bandaged chest and froze. The cut beside his eye had been sewn shut, the line of black stitches climbing his face like a millipede.
“Don’t disturb yourself,” Cornelia said as he looked around desperately for his tunic. “The slaves say you’re still weak.”
“I’m recovering, Lady.” He sank back against the mounds of down-stuffed pillows, flushing red.
Cornelia averted her gaze, looking for a seat before deciding to remain standing. No need to stay longer than necessary, after all. She suddenly remembered that her hair was still a tangle down her back, and her old brown wool gown was crumpled from two nights’ restless sleep. “I wish to thank you for your efforts on behalf of my husband’s safety.”
Densus looked down at the blue-embroidered coverlet, which he was slowly twisting between square hands. “I failed, Lady.”
“You did your best.” She meant to say the words brightly, but they came out flat. “You were loyal,” she tried again. “No one else was that day.”
Densus continued twisting the coverlet.
“And you saved my life.” Where, oh where were the gracious words she used to be able to summon to any occasion? Gone with my chance of being Empress, maybe. “My husband would be grateful to you.”
Densus looked through the window, avoiding her eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault your men turned.” Cornelia fiddled with a lock of loose hair, feeling a splinter of ice gouge her throat. “You didn’t know . . .”
She and Piso had been riding in a litter close behind Galba, a little frightened at the crowds of citizens who surged alongside, but calm. Cornelia had been elevated high, looking over the heads of the crowd, but Densus had seen Galba’s killers first. He’d jerked her from the litter so hard her arm bore the mark of his hand for a week, shouting for Piso to get down too. His men had snapped around them with a shouted word, moving out of the Forum before Galba had even been spilled from his chair. They would have gotten away clean if his own men hadn’t lunged at Piso themselves, yelling that Otho would make them rich if they brought him the heir’s head, and then the chase had begun that ended so bloodily on the steps before the Temple of Vesta.
But that part hadn’t been Densus’s fault. Of course not.
“You saved my sister and cousins.” She looked past Densus’s shoulder at the pillow. “My family will see you rewarded for it.”
“I don’t need a reward, Lady.” Mumbling. “You do
n’t become a Praetorian for riches.”
“Most of your friends did,” Cornelia snapped. Densus looked down at the bedclothes again, and she looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, Centurion.” Flatly. “I should not have said that. I’ll go now.”
She turned toward the door, and he looked up at her for the first time. “Lady—”
“You swore they were loyal!” It burst out all on its own, and Cornelia swung around on him. “I knew them all by name, and my husband paid them from his own purse, and you swore to me they were good loyal men!”
“I thought they were—” He was very brown against the bulky white bandages that still swathed his chest, but his eyes were stricken holes looking up from a gray face. “Lady, they were my friends—”
“Then you’re a poor judge of friends.” Cornelia couldn’t stop the words coming around the terrible splinter in her throat. “You told me you’d keep my husband safe—‘My life for his,’ you said—”
“I meant every word—”
“Then why are you alive?” she shrieked. “Why?”
She fell across the room, hammering at him. He caught her by the wrists.
“Why am I alive?” Struggling to hit him. “Why didn’t you let them have me?”
“Lady—” His voice was hoarse, and he still held her fast by the arms. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want your apologies, Centurion!” Cornelia screamed. “I want my husband back!”
She thought she heard him begin to weep as she tore herself out of his hands and rushed out of the room. Her own eyes burned dry as bone.
The time for crying was done.
Seven
A Roman matron should always do her own weaving,” Marcella had often heard her sister say. “It’s a sign of industry and virtue in women. Even the goddesses in the heavens sit at their looms.”
“Even the goddesses of heaven need a way to look busy while they scheme,” Marcella agreed.
“That wasn’t what I meant!”
It wasn’t what Marcella’s suitor meant either, as he sat gazing at her with unabashed admiration. “You don’t see many Roman matrons sitting at their looms anymore.” Governor Vespasian’s younger son, Domitian, fiddled with his wine cup, edging closer to her. “I approve.”