“Mmm.” Dear Publius’s wife passed the shuttle along through the threads, yawning. “Perhaps we could go outside for a walk instead. Such a beautiful afternoon, it’s a shame to be cooped up inside.” Sabina glanced up at the long windows, which Plotina had ordered shuttered tight as soon as she arrived.

“Unhealthful,” Plotina said. “This wind will tan your skin, and then what will people think?”

“I don’t know if anyone spends much time thinking about my skin.”

Plotina cast a glance at the girl who should have been all but a daughter to her by now but was somehow not. Sabina’s face was smooth. Surely she could not be laughing at the Empress of Rome? Such a thing was impossible.

But Vibia Sabina had not proved as satisfactory a wife for Dear Publius as Plotina had hoped; there was no doubt about that. Look at her now, barefoot and careless with her hair hanging down her back like a girl’s, her hands far too casual as she flung her shuttle back and forth. Any cloth she wove was loose-warped. And after Plotina had helped her to begin that new piece—a cloak for Dear Publius—and admonished that only an hour’s daily work at least would see it done, the girl still had left it untouched until this morning! Most vexing. And it was not only the weaving…

“I’ve finally managed to track down a copy of that new Greek poet everyone’s talking about,” Sabina was saying. “Hadrian will be so pleased. With any luck the poet will be terrible. We’ll spend an hour over dinner tonight tearing the verses apart, and he’ll have some new material for his standard rant about Rome’s declining intellectual tastes.”

Plotina frowned. Poetry again. The dear boy had always had a weakness for verse. Poets had their uses, at least for the idle, but the future Emperor of Rome should not waste his time on such things. “Steer him to rhetoric, my dear, instead of Greek poets. They already call him the Greekling in the Senate; it won’t do to give them any more fodder.”

“When does anyone steer Hadrian to anything?” Sabina pointed out.

“A clever wife can always manage her husband.”

“Well, we both know I’m not very clever.”

But she was, when she chose to be. Plotina knew that perfectly well. At the last Imperial banquet, Sabina had spent an hour deep in the kind of serious well-informed discourse that was just the sort of thing to advance Dear Publius’s career… if she hadn’t wasted it on some doddering intellectual friend of her father’s. A nobody! Ignoring all the provincial governors, the senators, the useful people Plotina had taken such trouble to cultivate. “He was interesting,” Sabina had shrugged. “They weren’t.”

Juno grant me patience. It was enough to drive even a goddess to distraction.