“—and you have duties to your family at functions like this.” Tullia shed her palla into the hands of a hovering slave, ordered the lamps lit, and frowned at Gaius for calling for wine, all without interrupting her flow of complaints. “There are a great many important people at such parties, people who could benefit your brother’s career and you owe it to him—Gaius, no more wine!—to advance him at every opportunity. Not to mention your own husband. He may be in Judaea, but you can still work on his behalf. Perhaps host a party in his name. Lollia’s grandfather hosts Piso’s parties often enough in return for a little consideration on trade laws in the Senate—”

“In return for which you all look down on him,” Marcella said. “How genteel of you.”

“Now, now—” Gaius began, but he never got to finish a sentence since marrying Tullia.

“Don’t be pert, Marcella.” Tullia’s sandals clicked across the mosaics. “I have only the family’s best interests at heart.”

“You’ve only been a member of the family for ten months,” Marcella pointed out. “Of course it feels like ten years. Or ten centuries—”

She drifted out before her odious sister-in-law could think of an answer.

The Cornelii family home: dim, gracious, considerably improved in the past few years by the flow of money from Lollia’s grandfather. Though most of the family manages to ignore that fact. A beautiful house, its every vase and ornament whispering of gracious years passing and the many Cornelii who had passed serenely through these same halls. Tullia had managed to ruin the gardens by planting rigid clumps of delphiniums in loud primary colors, and she insisted on putting insipid nymph statues everywhere, but it was still a lovely house.

But it’s not my house. Not anymore, anyway. Married or not, Marcella had never had a household of her own. “I’m hardly in Rome four months of the year,” her husband Lucius Aelius Lamia had shrugged when they first married. “Why keep the expense of a household? We’ll just stay with your family for the time being, until I get a proper post in the city.” But somehow, in four years of marriage, the post in the city had not materialized, and Marcella had never left the house where she grew up.

Not that it had mattered, back in the days when her father had still been alive. He’d been too busy marching his legions around Gaul to take an interest in her life, and Gaius had been too busy trying to live up to his example, so Marcella had ordered the household to suit herself. But then Nero had disposed of her father, and the family fortunes had plunged for a while—until Gaius, now paterfamilias of the Cornelii in his own right, had married the rich and well-connected Tullia. And after that . . .