The wedding was over. The priest finished his prayers, and Senator Vinius offered Lollia his arm. Marcella and her sister fell in behind with the rest of the guests, making a slow procession back toward the house of Lollia’s grandfather. Everyone with a spring in their step now, as they looked forward to the wedding banquet. Lollia’s new husband was already engrossed with a gaggle of balding well-wishers, and Lollia beckoned her cousins up on her other side. “Come keep me company! Gods, that was a dull wedding. Is it just me, or do they get more boring every time?”

“It’s marriage, Lollia,” Cornelia sighed. “Your third or not, try to be serious.”

“I think of it as less of a marriage than a lease agreement.” Lollia lowered her voice so her new husband wouldn’t hear. “Senator Vinius gets conditional use of me and my dowry for a period of time not to exceed his usefulness to my grandfather.”

“Fair enough,” Marcella conceded.

“Sorry I’m late.” Diana sauntered up to link her arm with Lollia’s, not sounding at all sorry. Half a dozen charioteer medals clanked around her neck, a sprinkle of freckles gleamed like powdered gold across her nose, and her red silk dress was knotted so carelessly it looked ready to slide right off her shoulders. All the men present were probably hoping it would. “I saw the best race!”

“Oh, don’t go on again,” Marcella groaned. “You’re more boring than the whole Senate house put together.” But a beauty, of course, could get away with being boring: Cornelia Quarta, the youngest of the four of them at sixteen and certainly the most lovely, all white-gold hair and blooming skin and cloudy blue-green eyes. But Diana didn’t care a fig for any of the suitors panting on her doorstep. The only thing that made her eyes shine was horses, horses and chariots wheeling around the hairpin turn at the Circus Maximus. As far as she was concerned everything else could go to Hades, including all the men begging to marry her. The spurned suitors were the ones to nickname her Diana: the virgin huntress who scorned all men.

“I adore Diana,” Lollia had said many times. “But I don’t understand her. If I were that beautiful, the last thing I’d be was a virgin anything.”

Marcella envied Diana too, but not for the beauty or the suitors.

“Diana, your hair looks like a bird’s nest,” Cornelia was scolding. “And couldn’t you have worn something besides red? You know only the bride wears red at a wedding. A nice blue to bring out those eyes—”