“Little Drusilla Cornelia.” The former Empress nodded to a blue-gowned little girl holding hands with a beaming grandmother from whom she had clearly inherited her deep dimples. “I’m not certain I want her to win—a thirty-year vow of chastity is something I hesitate to wish on a nine-year-old girl—but no doubt it’s an honor to be considered.”

“The new candidates are most carefully selected when a Vestal retires,” Plotina assured her. “I attended to it myself this year, with the Emperor already gone to Germania. The Vestals, well, I don’t need to tell you the importance of picking a girl of unblemished moral character.” The six Vestal Virgins guarded Rome’s eternal hearth, after all. Rome’s morality, in a sense. “Not just any loose-kneed little giggler can fulfill such a task.”

“I don’t know about that. The best Vestal priestess I ever knew had a delightful giggle. And she wasn’t a virgin at all.”

Plotina blinked. A joke? But the former Empress’s face was calm, pensive. “My dear—may I call you Domitia?”

“I don’t go by that name anymore. Domitian conferred it on me; he fancied having a wife named after himself. Now he’s gone, I find I prefer the name I was born with.”

Impossible to read anything from her even voice. Certainly the former Empress always spoke respectfully in public of her dead husband, but one always heard whispers… the marriage had begun with a most scandalous elopement (while she had still been married to another man, no less!), and had not proceeded smoothly. Rumors of lovers, a divorce after a quarrel and then a speedy remarriage… and the rumor that would not die, the rumor that Emperor Domitian’s assassination had been hatched, planned, masterminded, and executed by his wife. The tall woman who now stood at Plotina’s side, sniffing at a rosebush.

Absurd, of course. Plotina of all people knew how people liked to tell tales about women in their position. Jealousy, not only of rank but of innate moral superiority. She had always discounted the rumors.

Though she did wonder why the former Empress never wore black for the husband she claimed to mourn.

“Marcella Longina of the Cornelii, I believe, is the name you were born under?” Plotina asked brightly. “I can see why you prefer it. Fewer painful memories.”

Former Empress Marcella gave a curved smile. “Something like that.”

The five Vestal Virgins were trying to corral the little girls now, herding them toward the temple. Chattering mothers and proud fathers followed in their wake, but Plotina put a hand to her predecessor’s elbow as she turned to follow. “Perhaps I might speak with you, my dear Marcella? There is a matter very close to my heart…”

“Certainly.” They lingered by a statue of some long-dead Vestal, doubled in white perfection in the surface of the pool below.