“I don’t know. But stop it.” Marcus looked at her, and his eyes were cool and measuring. “I’ve always admired you, Marcella—you’re an intelligent woman, after all, and I like intelligent women. But I find I don’t like you anymore, and I don’t precisely know why. Perhaps it’s just my feeling that you’re a schemer.”

Marcella’s lips parted, but for once she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Good day to you.” Marcus rose, holding out a hand, and little Paulinus came running to his side. “Don’t visit.”

Twenty-two

Twenty-two

“THANK the gods the bathhouses are open again,” Lollia said. “I need a really good sweat to wake up my skin. All this emperor-swapping is just terrible for the complexion.”

“Not to mention all your husband-swapping.” Cornelia couldn’t help a laugh as she put her arm through Lollia’s, and Lollia giggled back. They threaded their way across the caldarium, around the splashing fountain in the center, past the busy bathhouse attendants and the clusters of flushed women in towels toward a pair of marble massage slabs. Marcella had gone to the natatio pool in the next chamber for a swim, and Diana had announced her desire for a little exercise and loped lean and naked over to the gymnasium. But Cornelia felt happy and lazy and only wanted a massage.

“Look at all those old cats hissing away.” Lollia stretched her pink naked self in the billows of steam, making a face across the caldarium at a trio of plump avid-eyed matrons whispering behind their hands. “Rumor-mongering bitches.”

“Let them talk.” Cornelia smiled as she stretched out face up on the massage slab, unable to stop her hand from stealing down to caress her waist through the towel. Pregnant. Me, pregnant at last at twenty-five.

“You’re sure?” Drusus had said when she told him, that first long night back in Rome. He’d all but crushed her in his relief when she came tumbling through the narrow door of the whorehouse—though the relief had faded away soon enough to a stricken guilt. “Oh, gods,” he said, appalled. “I’m sorry—I should have taken care, I should have—”

“Sshh.” Cornelia laid a finger over his lips. “I know what to do.”

“You mean—” He looked at her belly. “. . . you’ll wash it out?”

“No.” Not the child she was already envisioning: a sturdy little boy, compact and brave, or a girl with chestnut curls and maybe her mother’s dimples. “I won’t do that.”

“But your family, they’ll—”

“I can handle them. I’ll have to marry, but—” She had to turn her eyes away from the stricken look that reappeared on his face.

“Aye,” Drusus jerked. “I suppose you will.”