Marcella fled upstairs to her tablinum, taking the steps two at a time, and tried to compose a good epigram on the absolute horror of family life, but for once her pen failed her. She took out her unfinished account of Galba’s reign instead and penned his death in a few vicious paragraphs. Rage made the words come easily: every drop of blood that fell, every cry of terror and roar of the mob. Purple prose. She mocked herself savagely. Where’s the impartiality you bragged about to Lucius? But Marcella wasn’t in the mood for impartiality anymore. Or for subtlety, or for decorum, or for good behavior. Where had it gotten her?

Where had it gotten anyone this year?

IT was some days before her fury subsided enough to give cool consideration to the news Lucius had brought her: the news about Vitellius. The city had already seen two emperors within two months—and now, these rumblings about a third.

No one, Marcella thought, knew exactly which way to turn. Galba had been sober, frugal, distinguished and suitable; Otho was madcap, extravagant, charming, and shrewd. Women who walked the streets with their heads covered under Galba’s eye bare their hair and their shoulders too under Otho’s rules, Marcella wrote on a new tablet, shoving the scroll on Galba aside. Senators who struggled to look serious and well informed for Galba now hire poets to make up epigrams so Otho will think them witty and entertaining. Rome is . . .

What? Dazed? Spinning? Staggering?

Whatever it was, Marcella didn’t know if her pen could ever capture the strange febrile excitement that now gripped the streets. The fever that gripped them all—Cornelia, who kept hurling vases at her bedroom door if anyone dared knock on it; Diana, who ranted on about her damned Reds until they all wanted to throttle her; Lollia, whose laughter at every party got shriller and whose eyes behind the painted lines of kohl got sadder. The tide was rising, catching them all in its restless grip.

Even me, Marcella thought.

“Don’t you feel it?” she asked Lollia the next day as they were being fitted for new gowns. “Like the whole city is on edge, and everyone in it?”

“Oh, I’ve felt it.” Lollia stirred restlessly. “Don’t we all? Except Cornelia, maybe. She’s the lucky one.”

“I’d hardly call her lucky.” The bedchamber was a riot of color: bolts of silk unrolled everywhere, maids dashing here and there with pins and needles and reels of thread. Marcella brushed away the coral silk the maid held up for her approval. “No, too bright. Let me see the pale yellow—”

“Well, I’d call Cornelia lucky. She didn’t get to be Empress, but at least she has a tragic love.” Lollia twisted before the glass, surveying a new stola in oyster silk hemmed with pearls. “Too plain . . .”