“Yes, Domina,” the woman said without looking up from her needle. The Empress, they all knew by now, did not encourage response from her slaves even when she addressed them directly. Plotina nodded approval, tugging her dark-purple palla closer about herself against the brisk autumn breeze.

Speaking of the alimenta scheme, Sabina wishes to make a contribution to help launch the program.

The idea, Plotina supposed grudgingly, had merit. Imperial funds offering yearly living allowances for orphaned freeborn children—all well and good. But it had hardly been little Sabina’s idea! Dear Publius had suggested a similar scheme to Trajan not two years ago, and been brushed off. Of course if it was Sabina’s idea, her husband couldn’t wait to endorse it. Anything for his little pet!

Sabina wishes to contribute one hundred thousand sesterces from her own private purse, to launch the alimenta program. I knew you would be pleased.

One hundred thousand sesterces? Plotina was not at all pleased with that. Oh, the girl might finally be interesting herself in some respectable charitable works for a change, rather than picking up whores out of slums and offering them jobs—but a token gesture would have been good enough. One hundred thousand sesterces; that was a quarter the fee a plebeian paid to be entered into the equite class! And this talk of her private funds. A wife had no private funds. That money belonged to Dear Publius, and he could hardly spare it. Public life was so expensive—the fees, the bribes, the public appearances, the entertainments. She had far better spend that hundred thousand sesterces advancing Dear Publius’s career.

And of course the girl knew it. She did it only to irritate Plotina, whose advice she routinely snubbed, whose letters she ignored. Had she responded to even one of Plotina’s many letters since the beginning of the campaign, letters intended to guide and mold, to give advice where advice was due?

She had not.

Plotina exhaled sharply, looking up from Dear Publius’s letter. The little fountain splashed softly behind her, the double lane of cypress trees waved their bare black branches in the breeze, but the Empress of Rome took no pleasure in any of it. Her pleasure in the day had been spoiled.

“Niobe,” she snapped at the slave girl just holding up a piece of household cloth, “unpick that seam and do it again.”

“Yes, Domina.”

I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation, Dear Publius wrote, and went on to other things. A lighthearted account of the hunting he had been able to do now that Sarmizegetusa had been reached and the legions encamped around it in siege. But Plotina put the letter away. A waste to read Dear Publius’s letters when she was in a bad mood. Besides, she had a better idea how to spend the afternoon…