“Of course not! I shall tend to the matter myself, I assure you.”

“Very good. And promptly, if you please.” Plotina drew a line through another name on her wax tablet. Trajan’s letters from the east still had distressingly little to say in praise of Dear Publius, but there were other men he praised to the skies. A certain Aulus Cornelius Palma was always being mentioned, held in high favor because of some past conquest he’d made among the Nabataean Arabs. Lucius Publilius Celsus’s name too had begun cropping up with great Imperial approval. It would hardly do for their stars to shine brighter than that of Dear Publius, would it?

And when Plotina had learned of a certain renowned senator’s recent batch of failed investments, it had been all too easy. The offer of a dowry for his daughter and the rescue of his family home before it went under the hammer—he had not even blinked at the price Plotina named in return.

“A little whispered slander,” she murmured. “Nothing too overt, mind. Just a word or two dropped to your colleagues over the next dinner party. Perhaps you’ll remember that young Palma seduced a Roman girl of good family, who killed herself when he refused to marry her. Or that former consul Celsus lined his purse out of his last appointment.” Just enough gossip to taint a man’s reputation among his peers. A man whispered as a lecher or a thief among his colleagues could never be presented as Imperial heir. “You know the kind of thing I mean? It’s for the good of Rome, you understand.”

“Of course, Lady!”

“You might add a word or two about former consul Servianus as well,” she added, musing. Dear Publius’s brother-in-law, and another name that cropped up regularly in Trajan’s letters. “Perhaps you’ll remember to murmur to one or two people that he’s a drunkard or a lecher in his private life?”

“No one will believe it, Lady—Servianus, he’s the most virtuous man in Rome.”

“Well, just the other two, then.” Good enough for a day’s work.

The senator bowed out backward, still spilling compliments. Plotina put her wax tablet aside, giving a little pat to her hair, which now had the most dignified and flattering streaks of gray along the temples. “My face on a statue of Juno,” she said aloud. “I do hope you won’t be offended, dear sister?”

Plotina didn’t have to go to the temple now to speak with Juno. Her sister goddess, she knew, attended her every word.

CHAPTER 22

Winter A.D. 114

TITUS

“Ennia?” Titus wandered into the atrium where Ennia was giving two slave girls a brisk tongue-lashing for dawdling over the laundry. “Have a look at this, and tell me I’m reading it right.”