“And I thought it was a good idea to give my daughter a classical education,” Marcus shook his head.

“Father, you really should stay a while. Calpurnia feels so sick in the middle months, and she’s always better when you’re here.”

Marcus at once looked worried, taking his wife’s pomegranate-sticky hand. Calpurnia squeezed his fingers with no more than a twinkle of her lashes at Sabina, who hid her own smile in her cup. Her stepmother was approximately as frail as a mountain pony, but she and Sabina had long entered into a tacit conspiracy where any method from mild misdirection to outright lying was appropriate when it came to the care of the man they mutually adored.

“We’ll make a summer of it here, then,” Marcus was deciding. “The five of us. I’ll have time to start teaching Faustina—some Greek, some rhetoric—”

“Marcus, love, she’s barely five. What are you trying to prepare her for, a career in the Senate?”

“Mix the Greek verbs in with a good bedtime story and they’ll go down easy.” Marcus ruffled the little fair head under his arm.

“I like stories,” Faustina volunteered around a mouthful of roast goose. “Father has the best stories. Like the one where the king got murdered in his bath! And the one where the prince had to kill his mother—”

“Greek tragedies, Marcus?” Calpurnia gave her husband a look that made Sabina giggle. “As bedtime stories?”

“Sanitized,” he hedged. “I leave out all the gory details…”

“You did not!” Sabina laughed. “At least not when you were telling them to me!”

“Did he tell you the one where the king gets ripped apart by all those lady wolves?” Faustina piped, bright-eyed. “Or the king who got boiled alive in a pot? All these dead kings, why does anybody want to be a king, anyway?”

“Wise child,” said Marcus. “Maybe we should try something lighter for this summer’s reading, Faustina.”

“How about the one where the women of Athens refuse to sleep with their husbands anymore?” Sabina suggested.

“There’s a thought.” Calpurnia rubbed her heavily rounded stomach.

“We’ll find a comedy to read together,” Marcus said hastily. “I’ll take the male parts, and Sabina can read the women’s—”

“Actually,” Sabina said idly, “I thought I might take my nurse for a chaperone and go back to Rome for the summer.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Calpurnia rescued her bowl of fruit before Linus could knock it over. “Rome in summer—it’ll be hotter than a furnace and smell worse than a sewer.”

“I know.” Sabina tilted a shoulder. “But if I get back to the city, I can avoid the suitors. They’re all coming to Baiae now on vacation, and they’ll be underfoot everywhere. Father, are there any oysters left?”

“They’d go away if you picked one,” Marcus pointed out.