In the morning Regina and her mother helped Brica prepare for the wedding ceremony. Brica’s hair was dressed in an old Roman way, with six strands separated by a bent iron spear tip. She wore a simple tuniclike dress without a hem, tied around the waist by a woolen girdle. Over her dress she wore a cloak colored a gentle saffron, and on her head she donned an orange veil. Briefly she recaptured the brightness and beauty of the girl of the British forests, and Regina’s tough old heart ached at what she had had to do to her daughter.

The morning was still young when the groom and his family arrived.

Castor had been born a slave, the son of slaves. It had only been recently that he himself had been freed, and with his earnings had been able to purchase the manumission of his mother and father. But both parents still wore around their necks the tags of beaten tin that had once marked out their servitude, evidently an act of perverse pride. They kept themselves to themselves, saying little to Regina, or the other elders of the community.

The ceremony itself was conducted immediately. Helena, Regina’s aunt, acted as the matron of honor. She took the couple’s right hands in her own frail fingers. There was a sacrifice—the killing of a small piglet, carried out in the peristylium—and then came the signing and sealing of contracts, which cemented the transfer of the dowry. All this was witnessed by as many of the community’s students as could cram into the atrium. Some as young as five, they were a giggling, breathless mass of curiosity and eagerness, and Regina thought they loaned the ceremony happiness and light, like bright flowers.

Little Aemilia’s birth ceremony was simple and traditional. It was the eighth day after her birth, so the baby was formally given her names: Aemilia as her family name, and the second taken from the name of her mother. The formal registration of the baby at the Temple of Saturn was to take place the next day.

The father, a stolid man involved in money lending, held the little bundle in his arms and raised her in the air. It was a vital moment for the child, Regina had learned. In Rome, despite its centuries of prosperity, fathers retained the right to reject their children, and the exposure of babies, especially in times of turmoil like the present, was not uncommon.