Diana came halfway through the ceremony, bringing a momentary pang of panic to Cornelia’s throat. Diana had been late to Lollia’s last wedding too, bringing something unspeakable in a sack, something with a terrible distorted grimace—“Aunt Cornelia, you’re squeezing,” little Paulinus protested, and she loosened her death grip around his strong little body as Diana slipped empty-handed into place. “I suppose we should be glad she didn’t bring a severed leg this time,” Tullia tittered.

Diana turned and eyed her. “Could be arranged.”

Lollia and Fabius Valens joined hands; the contracts were signed. A ripple of applause from the Cornelii; an inarticulate roar from Fabius’s Germans. “Now the feast,” Cornelia heard Lollia’s grandfather mutter, twisting at his rings. “Dear gods, my cooks—!” But the massive triclinium was in order when the wedding party returned; the silk couches perfumed and plumped, the slaves smiling and immaculate, the statues garlanded with flowers and the fountain outside flowing Aminean wine in golden streams instead of water. Even the sky above was an immaculate blue, echoing the blue of the marble columns circling the triclinium and the cornflowers strewn on the mosaics underfoot. Did Lollia’s grandfather contract with Apollo for a sunny day? Cornelia wondered, fanning herself with one hand as they entered. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Paulinus was hot and fretful, drooping against her shoulder. “Tullia, Paulinus is tired. He should have a nap.”

“Well, get his nurse!”

“No, I’ll tuck him in—” But the nurse was already descending, bearing Paulinus off with a frown for Cornelia as she tried to take him up herself. Clearly, in the nurse’s view as well as Tullia’s, patrician women should not be allowed to tend their children. Paulinus smiled sleepily as he was carried off, and Cornelia’s heart squeezed. I dreamed of having sons like that. Dreamed and prayed and wept, while Tullia—

But she couldn’t think of old dead dreams like that. She would never have children; she would never marry again. Her life belonged to Piso, and at least she had avenged him. It would have to be enough. When Paulinus was grown, and all her nieces and nephews still unborn, they would whisper about their aunt Cornelia, gray-haired and old, but still in black: “She could have been Empress,” they would whisper, awed by her devotion, “but her husband died and now she dedicates her life to his memory. Fifty years and she still wears his wedding ring . . .”