“Not the word I’d use.” Diana brushed away the slave girls and took a step forward, hair falling down her naked back. “You say you’ve given up writing histories. But you’re always writing—up in your tablinum , at dinner parties on napkins, at the races on parchment scraps. What are you writing, Marcella?”

She smiled: Cornelia’s tall sister wrapped in her white towel, wet hair combed sleekly down her back, her face carved and cool. “Nothing important.”

Diana looked at the bathhouse attendants. “Leave us.”

“What’s this about?” Cornelia asked as the slave girls filed out. Lollia’s puzzled eyes peered out from her stiff white mask of bread paste.

“When you’re not writing, Marcella, you’re whispering all over town,” Diana continued as if Cornelia hadn’t spoken. A few matrons glanced over from the opposite corner, but no one was close enough to hear. “I see you meeting with Domitian in the Forum, and it doesn’t look like any lover’s assignation. I see you sitting next to Caecina Alienus at a play, and neither of you is paying attention to the play. I see you at one of Otho’s parties, whispering into the ear of Vitellius’s brother. And at Galba’s parties months and months ago, I see you whispering to Otho.”

Cornelia looked at her sister, who sat quite still with a comb in her hand and a faint smile playing on her lips.

“All that whispering,” Diana continued. “To senators who went over from Vitellius to Vespasian. To praetors who went over from Otho to Vitellius. To governors who went from Galba to Otho. And now there’s Domitian in your bed.”

“Diana,” Cornelia began, “what are you—”

“You really don’t write histories anymore, do you?” Diana’s blue-green gaze never wavered from Marcella. “Too pointless, just like you said. You’ve started writing history.”

“Goodness,” Marcella said mildly. “I just do a little whispering now and then. No harm in that.”

“Isn’t there?”

“Will someone tell me what you’re both gabbling on about?” Lollia interrupted. Her masked face was beginning to flake.

“I’ll tell you.” Diana crossed the room in two lithe steps. Diana the Huntress they all called her teasingly—but now she was the huntress, stalking her prey. “Marcella got bored writing histories, and decided she’d start meddling in the real thing. A comment to Otho, maybe; something he hatched into a rebellion. Then Vitellius declared himself Emperor up in Germania, and she wondered what would happen if she passed on information about Otho’s troops.”

“Marcella didn’t do that.” Cornelia flushed. “I did. I was so crazed after Piso died, I just wanted Otho dead—”