Julia seemed uninterested in Regina’s brief account of her life since the night her father had died. To Julia, it seemed, Britain was a cold and dismal place far away and best forgotten. Or perhaps there was some morsel of guilt, Regina thought, even now uncomfortably lodged in her heart, trivial but irritating, like a seed between her teeth.

Julia was scarcely more animated as she quietly told her own story. “I came to Rome to be with my sister. Your aunt—”

Regina rummaged in her memory. “Helena.”

“Helena, yes . . .” Helena, some ten years older than Julia herself, was, it turned out, still alive—one of the few seventy-year-olds in all of Rome. “But then,” Julia said dryly, “we have always been a long-lived family.”

Julia had needed help from her sister. Contrary to what Regina had always believed, Julia had left Britain with little in the way of the family fortune. Before his death Marcus—always nervous, always overcautious—had taken to burying his money in hoards, in and around the villa. “And there, so far as I know, the family’s money lies still, rotting in the earth. Unless it has been purloined by Saxons, bacaudae, or other undesirables.” She seemed not to care very much.

Sister Helena, it turned out, had maneuvered herself into a very influential position in Rome, for she had been one of the chief attendants to the Vestal Virgins.

The Virgins were a relic of Rome’s earliest days. It was said the order had been founded by Numa Pompilius, the first king to follow Romulus himself, who had designated acolytes to attend to the sacred flame of Vesta, goddess of hearth and fireside. Novices were handed over between the ages of six and ten to the Pontifex Maximus, Rome’s chief priest, and were required to remain pure for thirty years. The order had become central to the purity and strength of Rome, and the sacred fire had not been extinguished for centuries.

“But the flame burns no more,” murmured Julia. “When Constantine began to build his Christian churches, everything changed.”

There were many who believed that the extinguishing of the flame symbolized the decline of Rome itself, for the city had been sacked just sixteen years later. But some of the Virgins and their attendants, including a younger Helena, had not been without worldly wisdom as well as divine. Plenty of money had been salted away for just such a catastrophe.

“A faction of the Virgins found a way to survive,” Julia said. “We still serve a god, still dedicate the purity of our young to her service. But she is a different god. We call ourselves the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. And we still report to the Pontifex Maximus—but now he is the pope of the Christians.”

Regina gaped. “Mary—the mother of the Christ? Mother, have you become a Christian?”