She smiled again, and his eyes swept over her in pleasant appreciation. Marcella was glad she’d worn her pale-pink stola, fluted in dozens of intricate folds like the pillars of a temple. No jewelry—Lucius had sold her last string of pearls to bribe the governor of Lower Germania last year—but Marcella knew she didn’t need jewelry to be noticed. Who cared if her olive skin wasn’t much next to Lollia’s vivid complexion, if her hair was dead-leaf brown to Cornelia’s rich dark coils, and if her features didn’t have nearly the beauty and delicacy of Diana’s? Marcella counted herself the proud owner of the best breasts in the entire family. “Possibly all Rome,” Lollia often sighed, enviously. “What I’d give for a figure like yours!” Even a scholarly man like Marcus Norbanus, Marcella was glad to see, wasn’t above a glance of appreciation.

“I was sorry to hear about your recent misfortunes, Senator.” Marcus’s descent from Emperor Augustus had clearly made Galba nervous, because one of his first actions after taking the purple had been to strip Marcus of most of his lands and estates. “I think it very unfair.”

“Emperors have disliked me before,” Marcus said dryly. “I expect I’ll survive.”

“On the other hand, you’ve had some good fortune as well.”

“Such as?” He raised graying brows—he was only thirty-five or so, but he’d already begun to gray rather devastatingly around the edges.

“On getting rid of Tullia, of course.” Marcella lowered her voice. “That certainly deserves congratulations.”

He smiled—too polite, of course, to disparage a woman. Even a woman who richly deserved it. Why did the nicest men always end up with the nastiest wives?

At least Tullia and Marcus’s three-year-old son took after his father. Little Paulinus stood round-eyed and well behaved at Marcus’s side, ignored by his mother, and when Marcus unpacked the paperwork he usually took to the races, Marcella bent down and whispered into the little ear. Paulinus nodded happily, trotting off, and five minutes later there was a shriek as Tullia discovered a beetle in her wine goblet.

“Marcella, can you find Diana for me? She’s already disappeared into the stables.” Cornelia cast her eyes to the heavens. She might not be a mother yet, Marcella thought, but she has the exasperated sigh down to perfection. “And of course Lollia’s flirting with my new centurion. I swear, if I didn’t have you, the other two would drive me stark raving mad!”

“Then be glad you have me.”