“Flavia, your aunt Cornelia needs cheering up,” Lollia consulted her daughter gravely. “What do you say? Shall we all dress up and take ourselves out somewhere fancy? To the theatre, perhaps, or the Campus Martius?”

“Circus,” Paulinus said at once.

“Uncle Paris,” Flavia said.

“I wouldn’t call Uncle Paris fancy, exactly—”

“Uncle Paris, ’cause he said he’d make me a little statue of a dog!”

“Well, that settles it.”

“Why does she get to decide?” Paulinus scowled.

“Because she’s a girl, and girls always get their way. Your future wife will thank me, Paulinus, if I pound that into you young. Uncle Paris’s house it is.”

Cornelia watched in some surprise as Lollia swept off to dress Flavia herself rather than calling the nursemaid, tethering Paulinus capably with her other hand. “—yes, we’ll call for Aunt Marcella too,” Lollia was promising her daughter as they returned ten minutes later in matching rose-colored gowns. “It will be just like old times.”

“Don’t bother stopping for Marcella,” Cornelia advised. “She’ll be too busy scribbling in her tablinum to make time for us.”

“Scribbling about what?”

“Who knows?”

Trying to find words for this new Rome, perhaps? Cornelia certainly found it a stranger place every time she went outside. Rome in summer was usually such a sleepy place; slaves moving languidly through their errands, oxen and mules dozing somnolent under a brass coin of a sun, plebs sweltering in hot stinking rooms. Everyone who could escaped to their summer villas in Baiae or Brundisium or Tivoli, sitting on sea terraces eating grapes and being cooled by ocean breezes, not returning to the city until Volturnalia at the earliest. But now . . .