“At least it’s all been properly taken care of now.” Tullia had been vastly relieved once the funeral rites were over and Piso’s dreadful staring head had been reduced along with the rest of his body to a tidy urn. “I suppose we should thank Diana for that, although I can’t imagine what she was thinking, tramping through the Praetorian barracks! She couldn’t have just sent a slave, like a normal person?”

“Terrible,” Cornelia had managed to say, right before vomiting all over Tullia’s mosaics. She’d thrown up over and over—into vases, into the lavatorium, into a basin by the bed. She’d felt so ill, she was sure . . . the charm she’d bought from the Temple of Isis was still firmly tied about her wrist, after all. Surely it had worked? Surely if Fortuna took my husband away, she’ll leave me with his child to raise. She had been so certain, lying desperately still with her hands cupped about her belly, imagining a little boy with his father’s name and his father’s dark hair.

But her blood came a week later, not a day late, and Cornelia tore the Egyptian charm off and flung it out the window before crawling back into bed, wanting to die or at least to scream and scream and scream. But the women of the Cornelii did not scream. It was not fitting.

“Talk to me,” Marcella had pleaded. “I’m your sister; let me help you.” But Cornelia slammed the door in her face. What did Marcella know? She didn’t want children; she used pastes and tinctures to keep herself from conceiving on the rare occasions she and Lucius shared a bed—and secretly that had always been a relief to Cornelia, because what would people have whispered if her sister had had a clutch of babies and she’d had none?

Shame on you, Cornelia Prima, she told herself. Marcella was only trying to be kind.

A bright chatter of voices outside. Cornelia heard Tullia’s twittering and Gaius’s rolling tones—he had been practicing his “important” voice in the bathhouse, where it echoed. Lollia’s husky giggle sounded, and Cornelia felt a bright green spurt of hatred. Lollia had been widowed too, though no one would ever think it to look at her. But Lollia was a shallow, brainless little tart who never felt anything deeply in her life. Already remarried, and did she even seem to care?