He smiled. Cornelia squeezed his hand as he lighted her to the courtyard, and they passed under the guttering torches. In most houses the slaves would have all been dozing against the walls, but Cornelia’s slaves were alert and waiting, whisking the cloaks away and bringing drinks of warmed wine. Torchlight flickered on the long line of ancestral busts lining the hall in niches; Piso’s taking one wall, stretching back to Pompey Magnus and Marcus Crassus; Cornelia’s taking the other wall, starting with the first of the Cornelii who had come from the Etruscans. The last of the busts was Piso’s own aquiline face, carved by Diana’s odd sculptor father and presented on their wedding day. He made the mouth too pinched, Cornelia thought.

“Lollia is one of the new model of wives,” Piso repeated, putting an arm about her waist now that the slaves had retreated from their bedchamber. “I am pleased to have my Cornelia.”

Cornelia smiled a little, feebly. So Lollia was a fickle wife, vain and giggly and frivolous. She’d still been rewarded with a child: Little Flavia Domitilla, three years old and pretty as a sunbeam, whom Cornelia had carried upstairs to her bedchamber in the middle of the wedding banquet when she fell fast asleep in the middle of all the excitement.

And her cousin hadn’t even wanted Flavia. “I was so careful,” Lollia had complained when she found herself pregnant. “How in the name of all gods did this happen? Who even knows if she’s Titus’s or not. I hope she looks like him . . .” Cornelia had had to bite her tongue savagely at that.

Many years ago, another Cornelia of their family had famously been asked why she wore no jewels, and she had gathered her children about her to say that her sons were her jewels.

I’m modest enough about jewels. Cornelia unfastened the wreath of topazes from her throat as she began undressing for bed. So why do I have no sons?

MARCELLA,” her sister-in-law, Tullia, snapped as they entered the house. “You really must not daydream at parties. Senator Lentulus’s wife had to address you three times before you noticed her—”

“Senator Lentulus is very useful to me,” Marcella’s brother, Gaius, interjected, reproving. “He supports my proposal about the new aqueduct—”