Daughters of Rome

by Kate Quinn

  Just half an hour ago Cornelia had watched her sister dashing into the wetness, chivvied off on some errand of Tullia’s. She’d been gone in an instant behind shifting curtains of rain, and Cornelia’s heart squeezed. The last time I’ll ever see my sister. If she could have just said good-bye . . . but no. Marcella would ruin everything if she knew. Better to get it all finished and done with while she and her sharp all-seeing eyes were safely out of the house. The rest of the household was busy, after all, running itself ragged for the upcoming party. Tullia wouldn’t come looking for hours, or Gaius, or the harried slaves.

  It was time.

  “Zoe.” Cornelia turned to her maid. “Get out my black stola, please. And make up the bed.” Perhaps a little dusting too . . . Cornelia ran a finger through the dust on the bedside table, frowning. She was certainly not going to commit suicide in an untidy room.

  “Gaius, did you confirm Otho’s chamberlain for this evening?” Tullia’s hectoring voice, floating up the stairs. “Gaius, I asked you to invite him a week ago!”

  Cornelia reached under the bed for the black basalt urn she’d stored so carefully. Piso’s ashes, which she’d had brought up from the mausoleum yesterday. He’d be with her at the end. Perhaps his shade was waiting even now, smiling. Not much longer, my love, Cornelia thought as her maid tidied the bed. Not much longer. What else was there for her? A near-empress, a beloved wife, turned into an obscure unwanted widow. She might as well put a knife in this endless pain in her chest, and have done.

  “Tullia, can you squeeze one more guest in tonight?” Marcella’s husband Lucius’s voice came from the other end of the hall. “Pomponius Ollius, he’s very useful to me—”

  “Another guest? Another guest at this late notice? Lucius—”

  Why couldn’t Marcella have been the one to be widowed? Cornelia didn’t think her sister would have cared at all—Lucius was such a bombastic drone, he hadn’t even troubled to present his sympathies on Piso’s death now that Cornelia was no longer important. Why not Lucius instead of Piso? Why not Marcella instead of me? Cornelia scrubbed at her eyes a moment and then made an effort to smile at her maid. “A goblet of wine, please, Zoe. And then you’re free to go.”

  She waited until Zoe slipped out, then drew out the dagger she’d hidden beneath her cushions. No use involving the slaves, after all. Either they’d run tattling to Tullia, or they wouldn’t and would then get a beating for it once Cornelia was dead.

  She drew a finger down the dagger’s edge, sharpened to a whisper, and laid it on the table beside the black basalt urn. No emotional haste here; nothing messy, nothing squalid; all done properly. There were forms to be observed for suicide, after all.

  Cornelia slipped into her black stola, binding her hair tight and glossy about her head. No jewelry; that would be ostentatious. Another Cornelia had become famous long ago for saying that her sons were her jewels—well, this Cornelia might have no sons, but her name would be known too, as a good and loyal wife who had followed her husband into death once honor became impossible. She’d already written out a scroll with instructions for her funeral, as well as good-byes for each of the family. Quite beautiful, really. She’d spent hours on them.

  She went to close the shutter and saw Diana splashing through the mud toward the door, her pale head sleek as a seal’s in the rain. Not even taking a litter in this storm, never mind a chaperone. Perhaps my example of wifely duty will inspire her to better behavior in future.

  Cornelia poured herself a cup of wine and sat on the edge of the bed, arranging the dagger across her knees. Properly there should be music playing, preferably a harp—she’d always liked the sound of a harp. Surely drifting away into death would be much easier to the sound of good music. But for a harp you had to have a harpist—and Juno’s mercy, what was that racket coming from downstairs? Can’t I get any peace to commit suicide in?

  “—holding you personally responsible if they drown, Gaius!” Diana was yelling downstairs.

  “Diana, my dear, be reasonable—I’m sure the Reds faction director has any number of places he can send his horses if the stables flood—”

  “Yes, on the other side of the city, and hours away now that the Pons Silica is down! I’m just asking if I could put up my Anemoi here a few days if the rains get harder; Father doesn’t have the room—”

  Cornelia closed her eyes, draining the wine, but all her peace was shattered. A whole roomful of harpists couldn’t have drowned out Diana’s voice.

  More flapping of wet cloaks outside, and feet tramping up the stairs. “By Jove”—Cornelia heard Lucius’s voice outside her door, admiringly—“Is that little Diana down there? I haven’t seen her since she was fourteen. She’s certainly grown up . . .”

  “If you’re not four-legged, Lucius,” Marcella’s voice sounded crisply, coming up the stairs, “then Diana isn’t interested.”

  Cornelia’s heart knocked. Marcella was supposed to be gone at least another hour. Juno’s mercy, did I take too long?

  “—family lackey, that’s what I am.” Cornelia could hear her sister muttering to herself as she thumped upstairs. “Don’t send a slave out in this weather, oh no, they might get sick and die and there goes fifteen thousand denarii. Send Marcella, she’s expendable—”

  Oh, why didn’t I just stab myself without all the trimmings? Cornelia wailed inside. Dead is dead!

  A knock came at the door, and Marcella’s voice sounded. “Cornelia?”

  She dived across the room to hide the urn.

  “Cornelia, you can’t be sleeping. Nobody could sleep through that racket downstairs.” Marcella struck open the door. “One Emperor murdered this year and another one crowned, but none of it with a quarter of the hysteria that descends on this house every time Tullia hosts—” Marcella stopped. Too late, Cornelia remembered to hold the dagger behind her back.

  Marcella’s eyebrows rose, gaze traveling around the room from her sister’s black dress to the cup of wine to the basalt urn Cornelia hadn’t quite managed to hide. “Goodness,” Marcella said at last. “I know you’d do anything to avoid Tullia’s dinner party, but suicide seems a little extreme.”

  Outside in the hall came the sound of a slap, a slave bursting into tears, the steward scolding. Below, Diana was still roaring at Gaius. Suddenly Cornelia couldn’t help a smile, as she brought the dagger out from behind her back and turned it over in her hands. “All houses sound alike when they’re preparing for a dinner party, don’t they?”

  “Not as much shrieking as ours,” Marcella said.

  “Piso and I gave so many parties.” The memory was suddenly vivid, and Cornelia felt her throat tighten. “He was always wandering in asking where I’d put his best synthesis, just when everything was the most chaotic. That annoyed me so much . . . but afterward we’d sit in the triclinium sharing a cup of wine while the slaves cleared up, and we’d laugh about the things our guests said.” Her smile wobbled, and she put it away before it could turn to tears. “I can’t imagine him laughing now.”

  “All right, that’s enough.” Marcella marched in, calling over one shoulder for Cornelia’s maid.

  “Go away.” Cornelia tested the edge of the dagger, eyes still blurring. “I’m going to join my husband.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” Marcella said. “Though it’s a pity to dismantle such a beautiful scene. Really, you have all the details just perfect, and if this were a history and you were an empress, I’d commend your sense of the proprieties.”

  “Marcella, I’ve made up my mind, so please don’t—what are you doing?”

  “Bringing you back to your senses, that’s what I’m doing. Please take this back to the mausoleum,” Marcella instructed the maid, plunking the urn of Piso’s ashes into her startled hands.

  “You can’t stop me!” Cornelia cried.

  “I certainly can.” Marcella plucked the dagger away before Cornelia could think to poise it at her wrist or under her breast. “You’re being absurd. What’s this? A
nother funeral urn? You ordered one for yourself ?” Looking at the engraving. “ ‘Together in death’—Cornelia, how morbid. I wonder if the engraver will take it back? Might as well try, I suppose.”

  Cornelia suddenly felt very small and silly, sitting on the edge of the bed in her black dress. As if she were the little sister now, and Marcella the older and wiser. “You don’t understand. I just want to be with my husband again.”

  “Well, Piso wanted you to live,” Marcella said shortly. “His last act in life was to shove you toward safety. Why don’t you take his wishes into account?”

  “I don’t want to live,” Cornelia said wretchedly. “I just want him.”

  “Well, think about that poor centurion who saved you. Are you going to waste all his effort?”

  “I don’t care!”

  Marcella eyed her a moment. “Come with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Cornelia collapsed back on the bed, but Marcella hauled her up by one arm.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Where? Where are we supposed to go?”

  “A good question. I’d suggest visiting Lollia but you aren’t speaking to her, and anyway she sent me word she’s gone to her grandfather’s house to help feed the huddled refugees from the floods. Which probably means she’s in bed with her Gaul—can you imagine Lollia getting her shoes muddy?” Marcella rummaged for a cloak. “You’d better realize what a sacrifice I’m making. I’ve been trying all day to start my account of Vitellius—the newest Emperor up north, or hadn’t you heard?—and between Tullia’s errands and your ridiculous suicide attempt, I’ve written exactly six words.”

  “Vitellius?” Cornelia cried as her sister bundled her into a cloak. “My life is over, and all you can talk about is your wretched political accounts?”

  “It’s what I have, Cornelia. At least you’re a grieving widow; there’s stature in that. I’m just an unnecessary sister and an unwanted wife, and I’m at everyone’s beck and call. Including yours, and really I could feel quite resentful about that, but I don’t want to stamp off in a huff and come back to find you dead. Come on.”

  She pushed Cornelia along, down the stairs toward the quarrel that was still raging: Diana, standing wet and truculent as Tullia berated her.

  “Such language! You should have your mouth washed out—”

  Diana stuck her chin out. “Father says worse when he chips a mallet.”

  “I don’t care what your father says, you’ll behave like a decent well-raised girl in my house!”

  “Then I guess I won’t be staying for your dinner party.” Diana headed for the atrium. “Shame.”

  “Wait,” said Marcella. “We’re coming too.”

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me, you insolent little slut!” Tullia screamed after Diana.

  “Oh, we’re not walking, Tullia,” Diana called back over her spiky shoulder. “We’re running. Fast as we can.”

  “Mind if we run along with you?” Marcella caught up, still towing Cornelia behind her. Rain poured in a sheet through the square opening of the atrium. “Cornelia needs sanctuary. She was trying to commit suicide. So will I, if I stay in this house any longer.”

  “Where are you going?” Tullia cried behind them. “My party—”

  “I don’t want sanctuary.” Cornelia burst suddenly into tears, hot drops mixing with the cold rain already blowing into her face from the open roof. “Oh, why did you have to come home early? Why?”

  “—finally get some work done today,” Marcella added in a mutter, ignoring her. “Six words—”

  “What a fuss, eh?” Lucius wandered past, looking idly at the rain. “Marcella, will you have a word with the slaves about my togas? Too much starch.”

  Marcella looked her husband in the eye. “Lucius,” she said levelly, ignoring Cornelia’s tears and Diana’s tapping foot and Tullia still fuming at the other end of the atrium. “You made it perfectly clear the other day that you are never going to make me mistress of my own household. So I am a guest here, just like you, and if you don’t like how your togas are being pressed then you can damn well talk to the slaves yourself.”

  And she dragged Cornelia out into the rain.

  DEAR gods, not those blankets—I wouldn’t give them to a dog.” Lollia wrinkled her nose. “Do we have anything in the storerooms?”

  “They were given out yesterday, Domina.”

  “Horse blankets, then. If they’re clean and warm, no one will care if they smell like horse.” Lollia wheeled around, back toward the culina, and the stewards and the slaves wheeled after her like a trail of ducklings. Flavia trotted at her heels, curly and unconcerned, but everyone else wore frowns.

  “Domina,” the pastry cook began in aggrieved tones as Lollia swept into the culina, “this is beneath my position! I have made pastry for emperors, for kings—and now you have me making flatbread for plebs?”

  “Pastry isn’t much use in a flood.” Lollia peered through a crack in the shutter to the courtyard outside. Nothing but huddled, patient shapes waiting in line, heads bowed under the rain. “Heavens, it isn’t letting up at all, is it?”

  “But Domina—”

  “Oppius, I know you’ve probably never even seen anything as awful as barley flour before, but this is an emergency. You’re providing a great service to our tenants, and I’ll see you get a bonus for it.” She patted his flour-dusted shoulder. “Flatbread, please—and as much as you can turn out.”

  She scooped Flavia up, set her on the nearest table with a kiss and a bowl of flour to play in, and reversed out of the culina with the steward at one elbow and Thrax solid and golden on the other. “Better open the gates. The line looks even longer today.”

  What a mess. The rains coming far too late in the season, and the Tiber overflowing its banks, and then the Pons Silica crashing down. Entire blocks of crumbling tenement collapsed in a shower of old bricks and mortar; several granaries flooded and the grain turned moldy; shops closed everywhere as shopkeepers fled for higher ground. The fashionable house Lollia shared with her new husband, Salvius, had water lapping over its doorstep, so she had retreated with Flavia to her grandfather’s vast house clinging to the higher side of the Palatine Hill. Still, even her grandfather had been robbed by the flooding—two tenement buildings belonging to him had come down, and four streets’ worth of client shopkeepers had been forced to close their doors.

  “No pushing—you’ll all be served, so please line up.” The crowd filed into the courtyard, ten days ago a vista of winter lilies and early spring moss, and now just a sea of mud. Lollia had the slaves well drilled now; a calm and orderly line meeting the human tide with baskets of flatbread, cauldrons of barley soup, armfuls of coarse blankets.

  “Domina,” the steward complained, “some of these people are common plebs from across town. We have an obligation only to feed our own clients.”

  “Feed them all, Aelius. We can afford it.” Slaves, plebs, tenants, they all held out their hands, drenched and shivering, and Lollia’s job was to stand to one side with a hefty bag of coppers, distributing money and soothing words. She knew how to do it, too, no matter what her cousins might say about how she never got her hands dirty. They’re ones to talk. I might like my parties and pleasures when times are good, but at least I know how to roll up my sleeves when necessary. Her grandfather had taught her that—he had been a slave, after all, and slaves didn’t forget where they came from.

  “There’s plenty for all,” Lollia soothed. “Yes, you can take another blanket if you need one. Goodness, madam, you shouldn’t be out in this rain in your condition. When is the baby due? Go to the kitchens and warm yourself by the fire before you go. No, sir, my grandfather has suspended all rents until business resumes. Open the bakery when you can and don’t worry about the rents. Madam, you may talk to my steward about the damage to your roof, all necessary repairs will be made—”

  “Domina,” Thrax said softly at her elbow in his vague Gallic accent. “You should not be her
e. You make yourself ill.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Passing a blanket over to a wide-eyed woman with two bedraggled children clinging to each hip. “It’s my job.”

  “The steward, he can take care of it.”

  “He’ll pocket all the coppers and sell the grain.”

  “Not when I watch,” Thrax said. He’d already caught one of the grooms hoarding blankets to sell out the back of the stables to desperate beggars. He’d lifted the man up with one hand, cracked him a few times against a roof beam, and tossed him into an overflowing gutter full of stinking refuse. I do like a man of action!

  Thrax stuck at Lollia’s elbow all afternoon, passing new bags of coppers when she’d given out the last coins in her hands, scowling at a butcher who raved too loudly about the damages done to his shop. When Flavia escaped her nurse and came running down to the courtyard, it was Thrax who saw her first and swung her up to sit on his shoulders before her feet could even get muddy. He took a moment to run her through the rain, her little hands stretched out to catch the falling drops, then swung her down and returned her squealing to her nurse. His golden hair was just as bright in the rain as in the sunlight, Lollia thought. And he did look wonderful wet! Tunic clinging to wide shoulders and long flanks, muscles moving under a rainy gleam of skin . . .

  “That’s the end of the flatbread, Domina,” the steward reported.

  “Close the gates until tomorrow, then.”

  The maids dispensed the last blankets; Lollia divvied up her remaining coppers and allowed the shivering children to dip a second bowl into the soup cauldron to take away with them. Thrax and the grooms herded the rest out through the gates. There were a few grumbles, but Lollia had had the grooms armed with stout cudgels, and no one put up much of a fuss. More than one house in this city had been overrun by desperate plebs looking for shelter, and there would probably be more—but none of them would belong to her.