Diana bristled. “You think I’d wear blue after the way that Blues charioteer fouled us at Lupercalia?” There were four racing factions at the Circus Maximus—the Reds, the Blues, the Greens, and the Whites—but to Marcella’s youngest cousin there was only one, and that was the Reds. She went to the circus every other day, cheering her Reds and cursing all the others like a pleb girl on a festival day. It should never have been allowed, but her father was another odd bird in the family Cornelii, and he let his daughter do as she pleased.

So lucky, Marcella thought enviously, and she doesn’t even realize it.

“Enjoy those races while you can, my honey,” Lollia was telling Diana. “Galba disapproves of horse races—‘frivolous waste of funds,’ he calls it. If you think festivals and chariot racing won’t be first in line for budget cuts—”

“Where did you hear that?” Marcella asked over Diana’s groan. “I’m usually the one with all the news.”

“I had myself a Praetorian guard a few months back when Galba was first acclaimed,” Lollia explained, swirling her scarlet bridal veil over her head. “There, am I ready for the banquet?”

“In all ways but modesty.” Cornelia gave a quelling stare as they came forward into the atrium, Marcella laughed, the slaves rushed forward to place festival wreaths on Lollia and her balding husband, and everyone trooped in for the feast.

CORNELIA couldn’t help a weary little exhalation as the wedding banquet swept into full swing. Lollia’s doting grandfather had put on his usual spectacle: silver dining couches heaped with Indian silk cushions, musicians plucking harps in hidden alcoves, jasmine and roses twining every column of the vast blue-marbled triclinium that overlooked the whole of the Palatine Hill. A golden-haired slave in silver tissue stood at every guest’s elbow, and a stream of servitors scurried in and out with a series of exotic dishes: sow’s udders stuffed with soft milky eggs, flamingo boiled with dates, a roast boar stuffed with a roast sheep that was in turn stuffed with game hens . . .

Such pomp and spectacle, Cornelia thought, and for what? She sipped her wine—ancient, expensive, and in exquisite taste, like everything else in this house. So much expense for a marriage that probably wouldn’t last the year. Well, Lollia’s grandfather was just a freed slave, even if he had managed to get rich and marry into an ancient patrician family. No matter how good his taste was, slave blood showed. Cornelia’s own wedding had been a modest thing by comparison—her father would never have countenanced such expense—but she had at least managed to stay married to the same man for eight years.