LEPIDA

LEPIDA!” “Lady Lepida!”

“You’re back!”

I flung my arms out: the star guest at one of Lady Lollia Cornelia’s sensational dinner parties. “Darlings, it’s been desolate without you.”

They hastened to assure me that it was Rome that had been desolate without me, and I wafted in on a wave of adulation. Ah, this was what I’d been missing: the parties, the suitors, the jewels, the gossip . . . I made three trysts that night. Kept two, left the third waiting. How much fun it would be to coax him back into good humor next time!

“The Emperor has taken himself back to Dacia,” Marcus told me, not bothering to look up from his scrolls. “He’ll be gone a long time, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll find plenty to do until he comes back.” I swanned out just in time to see Sabina scurry behind a pillar. She avoided me these days. If I said a word to her she just stared back with huge eyes. How had I ever borne such a child?

“She’s an utter idiot,” I shrugged to Aemilius Graccus over bedside wine. “Just like her father, really. What a pair.” I collapsed into laughter as he improvised a wicked little impromptu verse on the subject of my idiot husband and daughter. All Rome was laughing by the end of the week.

“I’m fair game,” Marcus told me pleasantly. “Sabina is not. If I hear another verse about my daughter, I’ll have you in the courts regardless of what pretty stories you threaten to tell. Is that understood?”

“Oh, yawn,” I drawled—but I kept Aemilius’s little versifications away from my daughter after that. Better not push Marcus too far.

We dined weekly at the palace through that fall, but without Domitian’s powerful presence it wasn’t the same. The Empress was far too impeccable a hostess to be entertaining—oh, how I quivered when I saw her emeralds, though!—and Lady Julia was as silent and twitchy as Sabina. Grown ugly, too; wasted away into a positive stick. Hadn’t she once petitioned her uncle for permission to join the Vestal Virgins? Best place for her. What man would want her now? But the Vestals wouldn’t take widows, even Imperial ones. Pity.

Oh, I was full of plans. I was back in Rome and life was good, and everything was falling into place exactly as I wanted it. This was what I’d been born for!

THEA

PAULINUS left Brundisium at the end of that October without a word to me—it wasn’t like him, but I took it with a shrug. Some crisis in the Praetorian barracks, maybe. He’d been very distant and preoccupied lately, hardly visiting me at all. Perhaps some crisis in the family—any family with Lepida Pollia was bound for havoc. Or perhaps Paulinus was tiring of me. That was all right, too. I liked him, but there were one or two other young tribunes already angling for my company. They embarrassed my master.

“You’re a musician, child,” Praetor Larcius chided me. “An artist. You should have an audience, not—clients.”