Drusus would be at the palace today, cooling his heels in a hall full of petitioners as he waited to see if he could possibly be reinstated to the Praetorian Guard. “Don’t know if I want palace duty again,” he’d confided. “But I’d like to train the young soldiers, maybe down in Tarracina at the training camp. Get some loyalty pounded into them young, so they don’t go wrong like this batch did when the bribes and the emperors started flying.” He’d made several inquiries about being reinstated, but heard nothing yet. Surely any commanding officer worth his salt would be proud to have a man like Cornelia’s future husband in his ranks . . . Husband—Juno’s mercy, I love that word . . .

“Well, I hope the baby’s a girl,” Diana was saying around a groan as the strigil scraped over a bruise on her shoulder. “So I can teach her to drive a chariot too, and have someone to race against. Go on, keep scraping—”

“You are not making my daughter into a charioteer!” Cornelia protested. By now everyone in Rome had heard the latest story about Diana: how the Blues faction director had come puffing up to the hillside villa to reclaim the Anemoi, how the tall Briton had wordlessly handed Diana a knife—some said a sword—and how she had run the faction director off at bladepoint . . .

“So let’s have the truth now, Diana.” Lollia rubbed rose oil into her dimpled knees. “You’re madly in love with that imposing Briton, aren’t you!”

“I did wonder for a while,” Diana mused. “But I don’t think so.”

“Admit it, my honey! We’re all scandalous here—I’m bedding my daughter’s body slave, Cornelia’s marrying a pleb—”

“He’s not a pleb!”

“—so the least you can do to keep us company is fall in love with a savage!”

“I don’t think I’m very good at falling in love.” Diana shook her damp hair out of her eyes. “Not with anything that has less than four legs, anyway. Boreas, now—he’s the love of my life.”

They all giggled, and then Cornelia slid off the massage slab and wrapped herself modestly in a towel, and Lollia tipped the bathhouse attendants. They filed through the steam toward the tepidarium, and Cornelia heard smothered whispers as they passed the avid little cluster of gossiping matrons.

“—true she met him in a whorehouse?”

“Oh, he’s not the only lover she met there! Half the Praetorian barracks trooped in and out of her bed—”

“Before her husband was even dead! Poor Piso, if he’d known half her antics—”

Cornelia’s eyes dropped to the floor a moment, but she lifted her chin and gave a blind, bright smile. “Juno’s mercy,” she said, trying to laugh, “I’ll be glad when they move on to some new scandal.”