Drusus laughed, pulling Cornelia over him. But she thought about Piso on the way home, as the hired bearers trudged back toward the house. That seemed to be where he seeped into her mind, almost unobtrusively.

Eight months dead. If Otho’s coup had failed, Galba might have died naturally by now and Piso would be Emperor. Emperor Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, attending the Senate, hailing the crowds. Certainly never making love to his wife in the middle of the day; it wasn’t seemly and anyway there would never be time. Frowning if he saw his wife with her hair disheveled, but a Caesar’s wife would never have disheveled hair anyway. She would be Empress of Rome, riding jeweled and applauded through the streets rather than furtively sneaking through back alleys, never thinking of the sturdy centurion at her back as anything but a bodyguard.

I’m sorry, Cornelia thought toward her husband, I’m sorry—but she hardly knew what she was sorry for. He’d been gone so much longer than eight months, surely. She could still call his dark handsome face perfectly to mind, his lean body that looked so well in the pleats and folds of a toga, his beautifully kept hands and his half-smile. He’d be shocked to see me now. His cool immaculate wife who had always modestly pulled the sheet over herself after making love, eternally calm, eternally in order; now rushing off like a madwoman at all hours of the day into the arms of the man who had once been his bodyguard, lying naked and sweating and unashamed afterward in a narrow little bed that smelled of mold.

Piso wouldn’t approve of me now, Cornelia thought with a twist. He’d think I was behaving like Lollia, like a light woman.

But Piso would have been even more shocked at the events of this year, had he lived to see them. Emperor succeeding emperor succeeding emperor, every patrician family in Rome running madly to keep up and keep in favor, men of ancient lineage and unstained service like Senator Marcus Norbanus thrown in prison to rot while swaggering jumped-up plebs like Fabius Valens preened like princes. That would have shocked Piso profoundly. So maybe, with the whole world going mad, he would have forgiven his wife. Even if he were shocked, maybe he would be glad to see me happy.

September, now. Marcella reported that the Moesian legions had declared for Vespasian; that Vitellius would have no choice but to fight. Vitellius still caroused in the Domus Aurea every night and insisted he could lick Vespasian in one battle, but Rome worried—Rome worried a great deal as Fabius Valens began to assemble an army. Everyone worried except Cornelia . . . and one other person, she realized one sweltering afternoon.