by Kate Quinn
“Oh, darling. Fabius doesn’t hint. He just gives orders.” Lollia waved away the flagon of barley water before it could be set down. “Wine instead, Phoebe. We’re going to need it.” She poured a cup as soon as the flagon arrived and pushed it into Cornelia’s hand without even bothering to water it down. “Drink up. Fabius, well, he wants you for one of his friends, I’m not even sure which. He’s handing out rewards to all of them. Money, estates, wives—”
“He has no legal authority over me!”
“Things have changed, Cornelia. This isn’t Rome anymore, not the Rome we know. The kingmakers rule this Rome. Fabius laughs every time his friends grope me at their parties, and he helps himself to any little knickknack from Grandfather’s house that takes his fancy, and he likes me to walk around the bedroom dressed in nothing but jewels . . .” Lollia massaged her head under her hair, dislodging reddish curls. “He makes me tired.”
“I will not be given away to some victorious soldier like a sack of loot!”
“Now you know how I feel, don’t you?” said Lollia. “One gets used to it.”
“. . . How?” Cornelia whispered.
“One husband at a time.”
They were both silent for a while at that. Cornelia thought of Fabius’s smug smile and smugger voice: A young widow like you, surely you’re wet for a new husband. She shivered.
Lollia had turned her face away, talking in a brittle voice of something else. Diana. Of course, everyone talked about Diana these days. With an enormous effort, Cornelia forced herself to hear what Lollia was saying. “—hear the new epigram about her from Martial? ‘The huntress in her chaste flight, bagged at last by Imperial might.’ ”
“Surely Diana wouldn’t . . .” Cornelia couldn’t help but make a face, thinking of the Emperor of Rome’s red face and food-swollen body. “Not with Vitellius?”
“Oh, I doubt it. You know Diana—she’d tell an emperor no if she felt like it. And she isn’t really mistress material, is she?” Lollia dandled her fingers in the spray of a silver wall fountain beside the couch. “If any man took her to bed, she’d lie there looking up at him with those gorgeous eyes until he was finished, and then she’d ask him what he thought of the Reds’ chances at Saturnalia. Bit of a flattener.”
Cornelia thought of the Imperial banquet after the races last week, where she’d watched her youngest cousin sit cross-legged on a dining couch beside Vitellius, waving a goose leg and arguing race tactics with him until dawn. He seemed to find his new little pet very amusing, and now the rest of his entourage did too; a trickle of courtiers soon followed Diana wherever she went, murmuring about the word or two she might drop in the Emperor’s ear on their behalf. “Unless it’s to do with horses,” Cornelia heard Diana say bluntly to these requests, “go away.”
“You know, I used to worry about Diana’s reputation,” Cornelia said. “But now I think she’s too odd to be wanton. It would be too commonplace for her, somehow. Of course Tullia goes on and on about Diana being the Emperor’s whore—”
“Tullia’s the whore,” Lollia snorted, pouring herself a goblet of wine and taking a generous gulp. “Not that she’d ever break her vows, oh no. But she’d shove any one of us into the Emperor’s bed if it would benefit her. Is she carping at Diana to get Gaius made a legate yet?”
“A governor.”
“See?” Lollia gave a disgusted shrug. “I may like a tumble with my body slave, but I’m better than Tullia. At least I’m no hypocrite.”
Cornelia surprised herself with a laugh. “No, you aren’t.”
Little Flavia and Paulinus ran in then, and Lollia promptly swept them both into her lap and blew loud kisses everywhere. Cornelia watched wistfully as Flavia giggled and Paulinus yelled objections.
“Flavia, your aunt Cornelia needs cheering up,” Lollia consulted her daughter gravely. “What do you say? Shall we all dress up and take ourselves out somewhere fancy? To the theatre, perhaps, or the Campus Martius?”
“Circus,” Paulinus said at once.
“Uncle Paris,” Flavia said.
“I wouldn’t call Uncle Paris fancy, exactly—”
“Uncle Paris, ’cause he said he’d make me a little statue of a dog!”
“Well, that settles it.”
“Why does she get to decide?” Paulinus scowled.
“Because she’s a girl, and girls always get their way. Your future wife will thank me, Paulinus, if I pound that into you young. Uncle Paris’s house it is.”
Cornelia watched in some surprise as Lollia swept off to dress Flavia herself rather than calling the nursemaid, tethering Paulinus capably with her other hand. “—yes, we’ll call for Aunt Marcella too,” Lollia was promising her daughter as they returned ten minutes later in matching rose-colored gowns. “It will be just like old times.”
“Don’t bother stopping for Marcella,” Cornelia advised. “She’ll be too busy scribbling in her tablinum to make time for us.”
“Scribbling about what?”
“Who knows?”
Trying to find words for this new Rome, perhaps? Cornelia certainly found it a stranger place every time she went outside. Rome in summer was usually such a sleepy place; slaves moving languidly through their errands, oxen and mules dozing somnolent under a brass coin of a sun, plebs sweltering in hot stinking rooms. Everyone who could escaped to their summer villas in Baiae or Brundisium or Tivoli, sitting on sea terraces eating grapes and being cooled by ocean breezes, not returning to the city until Volturnalia at the earliest. But now . . .
Cornelia climbed into the litter, tugging Paulinus into her lap, and the city pressed in on them through the rose silk curtains as the bearers began their trot toward Uncle Paris’s small house on the farthest slope of the Palatine Hill. Rome was full—that was one disquieting thing. None of the patricians left that summer for their summer villas. First everyone was too petrified by news of Otho’s defeat to move, lest it be construed as flight. And when Vitellius arrived in the city he stayed despite the heat, consolidating his position, and everyone stayed with him. So the summer games that saw the arena seats only half full in normal years were packed to the sky, the Circus Maximus was filled to bursting for every race, and the Domus Aurea spilled over every night with parties. Not Galba’s dour dinners with their sour wine and droning discussions of Rome’s economy; not Otho’s elegant gatherings of beautiful people saying witty things. Parties where common soldiers drank side by side with senators and the senators strove to drink like common soldiers; where an Emperor boasted that he wasn’t too proud to curry horses for the Blues; where a common legionary commander like Lollia’s husband had become a kingmaker. It was summer, it sweltered and burned, and the world was upside-down. A new Rome, just as Lollia had said . . . and Cornelia didn’t like it at all.
“Juno’s mercy—” She gazed in disapproval at the entry hall as they all came into Uncle Paris’s house. Scraps of marble and chisels lying everywhere, dust on everything else, and the slaves idling in corners chattering to each other and not even pretending to look busy. “Uncle Paris,” Cornelia scolded as Lollia threw open the door of his studio. “Doesn’t Diana do anything to keep the house in order?”
“She’s busy,” Uncle Paris said absently, working at a scrap of marble with a polishing cloth, white-blond hair falling in his eyes. Faces surrounded him, faces in marble and stone and clay; everyone from slaves to senators to family members. “Some savage from Britannia is teaching her to drive a chariot. I saw him once; wonderful face. I’ve got to carve it.”
Lollia giggled, but Cornelia sighed. “Uncle Paris, you should stop her.”
He blinked. “Who stops Diana doing anything?”
“But she could be doing something very unwise. I doubt it’s just driving a chariot.”
“So do I,” Lollia laughed. “I just hope it’s fun too.”
“Little ones,” Uncle Paris regarded Flavia and Paulinus, who both stood gazing up with round eyes. “Who do you belong to? Never mind, just keep your hands off m
y mallets. Didn’t I promise one of you a carved dog? Let me see . . .”
Cornelia wandered the shelves, crammed with carvings old and new: rough studies of nymphs and veiled maidens, Vitellius’s hearty double-chinned face, what looked like a carving of Lollia’s Gaul with the arrows and quiver of Apollo . . . “These four here on the table, Uncle Paris—did you carve us again?”
“Yes, as various goddesses.” Diana’s father wandered over to the worktable littered with marble chips and stone dust, where four busts stood in a row. “Took some thinking, really, to find the right one for each of you.”
“Of course Diana is Diana the Huntress.” Lollia smiled at their youngest cousin as the virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt, her exquisite cheekbones chiseled in fine white marble, her eyes sleepy and proud, a crescent moon crowning her disheveled hair. “What about me?”
“Ceres. Goddess of the earth and the harvest.” Lollia’s carved face had a lush mouth carved in a gentle smile, and tiny ears of corn woven into her marble curls.
“Not Venus?” Cornelia smiled. “Surely Lollia is goddess of love.”
“Oh, no,” said Uncle Paris. “Goddesses of love are jealous fickle things. Our Lollia’s as warm as the earth. And like Ceres, she has a daughter she loves above anything.”
“Mama, Mama, you’re blushing!”
“I am not.” Lollia tucked Flavia closer against her side. “I couldn’t be Venus anyway, with my fat chin. What about Cornelia? I suppose she’s Juno?”
Cornelia looked at her marble-carved self and frowned. No Imperial crown on her marble hair; just a simple veil surrounding her face.
“Vesta,” said Uncle Paris. “Goddess of hearth and home. Since you won’t ever be Empress, now.”
“Uncle, really—” Lollia began.
“No, he’s right.” Cornelia gave a bitter little one-sided smile.
“Is this Marcella?” Lollia looked quizzical, gazing at the last bust. The carved eyes were blank and ferocious, and instead of hair she had a writhing nest of snakes.
“That’s Marcella,” Cornelia said slowly. “But as . . . what?”
“Eris,” said Uncle Paris.
The goddess of discord and chaos, causing trouble wherever she went? Cornelia cocked her head, puzzled, but Uncle Paris just wandered off again.
“Goodness,” Lollia whispered. “He’s mad, sometimes.”
Cornelia busied herself wrapping up the bust of Lollia as Ceres and had a slave lug it out to the litter. She didn’t want to think about the statue of herself as Vesta. Goddess of hearth and home. What good is that, with no husband, no hearth, and no home?
LOLLIA heard a sharp cracking noise as she reentered the house that might as well have been her own prison. Flavia dozed on her hip, and Lollia wished she could sleep so easily. A nice tense evening was doubtless awaiting her tonight, what with Fabius glaring murder over catching her in bed with Thrax. “Down you go, Flavia, let’s tuck you into bed for a nap if you’re sleepy—”
Another crack. Lollia looked around, but nothing had fallen off its pedestal or gone crashing to the floor. She summoned a slave, ordering the marble bust to be brought in and placed in a spare niche in the entrance hall. Perhaps it would make the house feel more like home . . .
The sharp crack came again, and what sounded like a muffled cry. “What’s that?” Lollia asked. The slave girl looked at the floor. “Tell me!”
“It’s Dominus,” she mumbled.
Suddenly Lollia felt cold. “Fabius? Where is he? What is he doing?”
“In the atrium—please, Domina, we couldn’t—”
Another crack. This time Lollia heard a scream. She picked up her skirt and ran, Flavia trotting at her heels. No, no, it can’t be—but it was.
It was Thrax.
He stood naked against a pillar in the atrium, his arms jerked up high and lashed around the column. For a moment Lollia thought he was wearing a red cloak, but of course he wasn’t. His back was in ribbons, crossed by lashes, streaming blood in a dozen places. Blood runneled down his legs, dripping on his feet. As she stopped, appalled, Fabius brought the whip down across his back again.
Thrax gave a muffled cry through clenched teeth, and it loosened Lollia’s feet. She flew across the atrium, seizing Fabius’s arm as he drew the whip back again. “No, no, what are you doing, you can’t—”
Fabius sent her spinning with a shove. She crashed into an ornamental stone bench and fell to her knees. He snarled, teeth bared, but he was smiling too and it filled her bones with horror. “No one beds my wife but me,” he said, and he turned and brought the whip down across Thrax’s shoulders.
Thrax screamed. Lollia struggled to her feet, grabbing for the whip as Fabius drew back again. He hit her in the throat, hard and accurately, and she collapsed, gagging. Fabius seized her hair and hauled her back up, his eyes blazing a bare inch away.
“I catch you in another man’s bed again,” he whispered, “and it’ll be you under the lash. You understand me?”
“Yes,” Lollia whimpered. She could hear Thrax gulping in long breaths that sounded like sobs. “Yes, I understand.”
“Good.” He studied her another long moment, hand still wrapped in her hair, and then he staggered. Flavia had thrown herself against his side, pounding with her little fists as high as she could reach. He knocked her aside with one slap, and she crashed into a stone urn of lilies.
“Flavia!” Lollia lunged for her daughter, but the hand in her hair snapped her up short. Fabius held her a moment longer, the whip still dangling from his hand, and then he threw her away. Lollia crashed to her knees on the tiles and crawled to her child, who lay huddled and quietly crying.
Fabius threw the whip aside with a soft rattle. Dimly Lollia saw him surveying Thrax, a bloody mess against the column. “Get rid of this filth,” he ordered, and then she heard boots retreating down the long pillared hall.
She scrambled to her feet as soon as he fell out of earshot, still holding Flavia. “I need to put you down, my honey, let me go a moment.” But her daughter clung even harder, limpetlike, and Lollia had to undo Thrax’s knotted cords one-handed. She could hear the other slaves rustling behind her, but none came forward to help—of course they wouldn’t; Fabius Valens was their master and his will was law now. The knots took a long time, and Thrax dragged his forehead off the column and stared at her in mute gratitude. His gaze stabbed like a knife. If I hadn’t kept him with me—if I hadn’t just assumed Fabius wouldn’t care enough to touch him . . .
“Someday you’ll realize what a slut you are,” Lollia remembered Cornelia telling her once during a snarling fight.
Now she knew.
The last knot came loose under her shaking fingers, and Thrax collapsed. It wasn’t just his back that was in ribbons—both eyes were puffed and black, and his nose was smashed. All his golden beauty was in ruins, but Lollia had no time to grieve for it. “Thrax—Thrax, please, you have to get up. Can you walk a few steps? Just a few.”
He took her hand, slowly staggering upright. “Domina,” he mumbled. One bloody hand brushed her throat, where Fabius’s fist had already left a bruise. “Sorry—Domina—”
“Sshh. Come with me.” Still holding Flavia on her hip, Lollia led Thrax by the hand through the pillared hall. She felt the slaves staring from behind the corners, but Fabius’s ferocity had scared them all into silence. Thrax left bloody footprints on the beautiful mosaics, and the busts of the house’s previous owners stared down in blind accusation. If I live here a hundred years, this place will never be my home.
She summoned the litter, easing Thrax into it face down. His back was still bleeding freely, and she threw her fine rose wool palla over it, settling the cloth with gentle pats to absorb the blood. Not enough, but it would have to do for the moment. Flavia whimpered as her arms were detached, but Lollia pried her away ruthlessly and settled her in the corner of the litter. “Don’t cry, my honey,” Lollia said, crying. “And don’t jostle Thrax. He’s sick.”
/> “Where to, Domina?” the litter-bearer asked.
“My grandfather’s house,” Lollia choked. “Tell him the slave needs a doctor, the best there is. Tell him I’ll be sending Flavia’s nurse and her things.”
“How long will they be staying, Domina?”
“For good.” Lollia turned away, wiping her eyes. “I won’t have either of them in this cursed house.”
She wore her emeralds to the Domus Aurea that night, because the necklace covered the blue bruise on her throat. She walked into the vast triclinium on her husband’s arm, smile stretched wide for a hundred guests as the Emperor shouted a greeting and gestured them in with the crispy-feathered neck of a flamingo. She lay on the dining couch beside Fabius, laughed at his jokes, ate peacock breast and drank wine. Lollia did her duty.
For now, she thought, watching her husband over the rim of her goblet. Just you wait.
Fourteen
TELL him I’m out,” Cornelia pleaded. “Tell him I’m sick.”
“Nonsense.” Tullia dismissed that with a flick. “Perhaps you should change. The blue dress? No, there isn’t time. Pin that black thing in front with a brooch; show a little breast. Your new husband will want to see what he’s buying.”
“I can’t go down, I can’t—”
“Don’t be absurd. You’re lucky to be getting such a chance. It’s a great thing for our family.” After yanking Cornelia’s neckline downward, Tullia rummaged in the jewel chest for a pair of gold-and-ebony earrings, and twisted them into Cornelia’s ears. Piso gave me those earrings , she thought with a wrench in her stomach, and now they’re making me pretty for a new husband.
“Gaius is waiting to give his official consent, so just give the slave a signal,” Tullia ordered. “I imagine there will be a betrothal feast for you and your husband—”
Cornelia felt her head whirling. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can.” Tullia’s little varnished fingernails dug painfully as she seized Cornelia’s arm. “It’s your duty. You will not disappoint me. Living in my house, eating my food—”