Vix. I looked out from the balcony of my new bedchamber, over the panorama of Rome and beyond. Vix, are you in Tivoli now?

Arius . . .

Don’t think about either of them. Only survive.

How I’ve gone up in the world. I’ve got a gold bowl to hold my blood now.

WE’RE leaving tonight,” said Flavia. “For Tivoli. I’ve got a villa there; that’s where we’ll hide you. Do you know anything about gardening?”

“Gardening?” The burn on his arm was starting to hurt now, but mostly he felt tired.

“Yes, gardening. I need another gardener, and you need an occupation. And a disguise, while we give people time to forget that famous face of yours. Hmm. What do you think of ‘Stephanus the faithful gardener’?”

“Mmm.” The motion of the litter was putting him to sleep. The dog was already chewing on the silk tassel of the litter cushions. “If we get that far.”

“Oh, but we will. No one will search this litter at the gate. I’m the Emperor’s niece.” Flavia smiled. “Why don’t you go ahead and pass out now.”

He closed his eyes. Arius the Barbarian left the city, dead to the world.

PART FOUR

The Temple of Vesta

Now and then, Marcus comes to the Temple of Vesta. Not to give the goddess thanks—he can think of no hearth and home more cursed than his own—but to pray for Julia.

“I feel her here,” he says. The Chief Vestal is his friend; she has a fi erce spirit under her white veil, and the two of them have collaborated, once or twice, against some of the Emperor’s harsher decrees.

“Perhaps she is here, Marcus Norbanus.”

He holds his hands out to the eternal fl ame on its quiet altar. “Vesta, goddess of hearth and home, guard the soul of Lady Julia. She was always your servant.”

Twenty-one

LEPIDA

A. D. 92

IF you want a villa in Tivoli, by all means, buy one.” Marcus barely looked up from his scrolls. “Any house you wish, as long as I’m not in it.”

“Thank you, darling.” Marcus could be rude to me, he could drill me with those marble-hard eyes, he could say blistering things across the breakfast figs on the few occasions we still met at home, but in the end we both knew who was in charge.

So, a villa in Tivoli. In Rome I had my own house on the most fashionable side of the Palatine hill, source of all Rome’s finest parties and far from Marcus’s quiet domus near the Capitoline library where he stayed with Sabina—but for summers, the fashionable needed another watering hole. Baiae had once been popular, but Emperor Domitian had a villa in Tivoli and now no one who was anyone went anywhere else. So I had my new villa with its huge circular triclinium and atrium cascading with flowers, with enough ancestral busts of Marcus’s illustrious ancestors to make a show. Perfect for entertaining. I could fi x it up properly during my mourning period this spring. Silver couches with rose silk hangings, intricate mosaics, perhaps some of those new erotic statues that looked so daring. A month to put everything straight, and everything ready in time for the summer season. No need to mourn longer than a month; Father wouldn’t have wanted me sitting at home moldering in grief. A fever had taken him—too tiresome, when he was just starting to climb the ladder and stop being an embarrassment to me.