“If I don’t?” His voice rose, a thin edge higher and higher. His bright eyes snapped open and held hers. “If I don’t?”

“You will fall on your own sword,” she found herself saying. “Like the kings of old. You’ll never see them strip your palace or deface your statues. You’ll stab yourself and then you’ll sit at Jove’s right hand. You’ll escape it all.”

“Yes,” he said, voice spiraling down again. “I’ll escape it all. I’ll escape it all.”

He fell asleep, still muttering. Marcella would have sat all night with the Emperor’s head on her lap, too frozen to move, but the slaves descended and bore him skillfully off without waking him, more used to this than she was. She’d staggered home, reeking of scent from that horrible revolving ceiling, to a family that wouldn’t quite look her in the eye. In two days’ time Nero was pronounced a public enemy of Rome by the Senate. Galba was proclaimed Emperor and Nero fled, committing suicide long before the Praetorians could imprison him—escaping it all. His last words, so they said, were “What an artist dies in me!”

I think I did it, you see, Marcella thought. The one thing she had not put in her history of Nero. I think that in my way, I killed an emperor.

Eight

Eight

A slave dropped a dish outside the bedroom door with a crash and burst into tears. “Stow that,” Cornelia heard another slave hiss. “Or Domina will have the skin off your back!”

Feet pattered. She listened at the door, alert for every sound.

Sandals clicked sharply. “Oh, this rain,” Tullia moaned somewhere down the hall, rapidly coming closer. “Such bad timing; our guests will have to swim to get to the front door.” She and Gaius were hosting a dinner party and the whole house was in an uproar, but that hardly concerned Cornelia. She wasn’t going.

That is, she was going somewhere, but not their wretched dinner party.

“Sea urchins and turbot, is it ostentatious?” Tullia’s voice again, hectoring the steward. “Perhaps turtle doves boiled in their plumage instead. Perhaps both. Yes, both. Gaius—”

Cornelia left the door and went to her window, pushing the shutter aside and looking down at the street outside. Gray waves of rain beat down in gusts, and passersby scurried like mice wrapped in wet wool, wading ankle deep in the gutters. The winter rains had finally arrived last week, and arrived with a vengeance. The Pons Silica had come crashing down just yesterday when the Tiber overflowed. The oldest bridge in the city—Cornelia had heard the slaves whispering about it, saying it was a bad omen for Otho’s reign. Surely Tullia would cancel the party? That would have ruined everything, but no, Tullia hadn’t canceled her party. “Why should we? Nobody we know lives on the other side of the Pons Silica!”