PART TWO

JULIA

In the Temple of Vesta

Gaius is dead. Executed for treason. My husband, my cousin. Dead.

I had to watch. His eyes accused me when the guards took him away. He is dead. I am alone.

“New rubies, Lady Julia?” Marcus asks me on his next visit.

“A gift.” They wind my throat, a noose of scarlet fl ames. “From my uncle.” He likes me in red. Not green. “My wife wears green,” he said once. “And I hate her. You should wear red.”

“He means the jewels for an apology,” Marcus says quietly. “He does not hold Gaius’s sins against you.”

“Sins? What sins?” My voice sounds shrill. The words pour out, a torrent of them, and when I babble about voices in the shadows and eyes in the corners, Marcus looks troubled and draws me to sit on a marble bench in the atrium as he speaks of lighter things. He has been a great comfort to me. Sometimes he reminds me of my father.

“Grieve for Gaius,” Marcus tells me. “No one will punish you for grief.”

Gaius was never easy with me. After the fi rst week or two he kept his own bed, and we met only at the dinner couch where he would look at me strangely and I would realize I had been muttering again, and biting my nails until they bled. He was angry with me when I refused to eat in his sumptuous new triclinium with the carved golden beasts on the wall. “I see their eyes,” I said in a small voice. “They watch me.”

“Gods, Julia!”

But I’ve always seen eyes. My uncle’s eyes most of all. He tells me I am to call him Uncle and not Lord and God. “Even a Lord and God must have someone who is not afraid.”

But I am afraid. And he is lord and god, at least of my world.

“Like slates,” I tell Marcus dreamily. “His eyes are like slates.”

He looks troubled again. “Are you . . . well, Lady Julia?”

Vesta, holy mother, goddess of hearth and home. How I envy your Vestals, whispering about the temple in their white robes, untouched by any man under pain of death. I would have liked to be a Vestal. Here I am always safe, and I see no eyes at all.

Vesta, watch over me. I have no faith in anyone but you.

Eight

LEPIDA

A. D. 88

EVEN my new pearls didn’t console me. “Get out!” I flung a scent bottle at Iris. “I can’t stand your stupid flat face. Out!”

She fled wailing. What a bovine slut. She turned my hair into a haystack every time she touched it. I’d send her to the slave market and find myself a new maid, that’s what I’d do. A senator’s wife deserved no less.

But what did it matter if my hair looked like a haystack? What did it matter, with no one there to see me?