“One husband at a time.”

They were both silent for a while at that. Cornelia thought of Fabius’s smug smile and smugger voice: A young widow like you, surely you’re wet for a new husband. She shivered.

Lollia had turned her face away, talking in a brittle voice of something else. Diana. Of course, everyone talked about Diana these days. With an enormous effort, Cornelia forced herself to hear what Lollia was saying. “—hear the new epigram about her from Martial? ‘The huntress in her chaste flight, bagged at last by Imperial might.’ ”

“Surely Diana wouldn’t . . .” Cornelia couldn’t help but make a face, thinking of the Emperor of Rome’s red face and food-swollen body. “Not with Vitellius?”

“Oh, I doubt it. You know Diana—she’d tell an emperor no if she felt like it. And she isn’t really mistress material, is she?” Lollia dandled her fingers in the spray of a silver wall fountain beside the couch. “If any man took her to bed, she’d lie there looking up at him with those gorgeous eyes until he was finished, and then she’d ask him what he thought of the Reds’ chances at Saturnalia. Bit of a flattener.”

Cornelia thought of the Imperial banquet after the races last week, where she’d watched her youngest cousin sit cross-legged on a dining couch beside Vitellius, waving a goose leg and arguing race tactics with him until dawn. He seemed to find his new little pet very amusing, and now the rest of his entourage did too; a trickle of courtiers soon followed Diana wherever she went, murmuring about the word or two she might drop in the Emperor’s ear on their behalf. “Unless it’s to do with horses,” Cornelia heard Diana say bluntly to these requests, “go away.”

“You know, I used to worry about Diana’s reputation,” Cornelia said. “But now I think she’s too odd to be wanton. It would be too commonplace for her, somehow. Of course Tullia goes on and on about Diana being the Emperor’s whore—”

“Tullia’s the whore,” Lollia snorted, pouring herself a goblet of wine and taking a generous gulp. “Not that she’d ever break her vows, oh no. But she’d shove any one of us into the Emperor’s bed if it would benefit her. Is she carping at Diana to get Gaius made a legate yet?”

“A governor.”

“See?” Lollia gave a disgusted shrug. “I may like a tumble with my body slave, but I’m better than Tullia. At least I’m no hypocrite.”

Cornelia surprised herself with a laugh. “No, you aren’t.”

Little Flavia and Paulinus ran in then, and Lollia promptly swept them both into her lap and blew loud kisses everywhere. Cornelia watched wistfully as Flavia giggled and Paulinus yelled objections.