His father’s dinner parties were infrequent and pleasantly similar. The same low-voiced guests reclining on their cushions, the same simple supper, the same white-bearded orator declaiming Greek verse (why were Greek orators always white-bearded?), the same philosophical banter back and forth across the couches. When he was a boy, these dinners had always bored him cross-eyed. They still did, but now he knew his father’s table fed the best minds in the Empire. Once anyone started quoting Plato (and they always did) Paulinus was utterly lost, but there was something comforting about lying here on the cushions watching his unassuming father so easy among the great minds of Rome. Comforting knowing that your father was just as brilliant as you thought he was when you were a boy.

He looked better these days. Neater, more distinguished. Lady Lepida’s influence, of course. Paulinus looked over at his stepmother.

She reclined against the cushions eating grapes from a silver bowl, the taut line of her throat very young and unprotected somehow. She’d barely said a word all evening. Paulinus felt a rush of sympathy for her. Naturally she must feel out of her depth, married to such a brilliant man. She really was very young—twenty-one, only two years younger than himself. And she hardly looked any older than she had at sixteen when he had first seen her in the red bridal veil. He smiled at her across the table.

LEPIDA

I hadn’t been so bored since—well, I don’t know when. Boring Marcus and his boring friends and that boring Greek orator and all their boring speculation about the Fate of the Empire. Every time I thought they were finally winding it up, someone would start up again on Plato. Or one of Marcus’s awful treatises.

“I found your views on the declining birth rate quite interesting, Norbanus,” Senator Sulpicius or Gratianus or somebody boring would say, and off they’d go for another hour, talking about Marcus’s awful boring treatise, which I’d had to read last year just to keep him happy. Of course they all pressed him to read aloud from it, and thank goodness he refused, even though I could tell he was bursting with conceit. How simple he was. They didn’t care anything about his treatise; they were just hoping for another free meal. Anyone could see that. Anyone but my stupid husband.

Paulinus was the last to leave. He insisted that Marcus take him upstairs first to say good night to Sabina. Just sickening, the look on their faces as they gazed down at the little bed. I didn’t see why they were so fond of her. She looked nothing like me. One could hardly even take her out in decent society, not the way she fell into seizures in public places. Twitching, foaming brat. I should have known any child of Marcus’s would be deformed. And she was Marcus’s child; I’d made sure of that.

“I thought it went very well, my dear,” Marcus said as we waved Paulinus out at last.