by Kate Quinn
“—and how long have you been disgracing this family? How long have you been making a fool out of me?”
Cornelia looked at her scornfully. “Tullia,” she said, “you were easy to fool. The next time a woman tells you she spent five hours at the bathhouse, rest assured she was not taking a bath.”
Tullia inhaled for a scream of rage, but Gaius put a hasty hand on her arm. “Dear, allow me. Cornelia—”
“I know what you’re going to say, Gaius.” Cornelia sounded tired. “Yes, I’ve been discreet. No one else knows but us.”
“And about twenty-two slaves,” Marcella added. “All eavesdropping as hard as they can.”
“This—soldier.” Gaius could barely pronounce the word. “Will he make trouble?”
Cornelia turned her head away. “No.”
“Whore,” Tullia hissed.
“Really, Cornelia.” Gaius looked reproving. “I would not have thought it of you. Have you no respect for our family name, our position, our reputation—to say nothing of your own—”
“Perhaps that can wait a moment.” Marcella rose. “Fascinating as Cornelia’s clandestine lover is, and I am fascinated, I’ve learned something else of interest this afternoon. Fabius Valens was captured and executed in Urvinum, and his troops have surrendered.”
Utter silence. Gaius swung around, and Tullia paused midway through another stream of insults. Cornelia stared blindly into her lap.
“The Emperor and his advisers know by now, and the news is leaking through the Senate,” Marcella continued.
Cornelia looked at her. “How do you know these things?”
“Domitian,” Marcella shrugged.
“The Emperor—” Gaius’s voice came out in a squeak; he cleared his throat. “The Emperor will deploy another army—”
“He doesn’t have another army. And the Moesian legions are marching on Rome. They’re camped about fifty miles north.”
Another frozen silence. All through November, Marcella thought, everyone had been so sure something would come to save Rome. Fabius Valens, or loyal legions in the south—or maybe the gods. Anyone or anything.
“Oh, no.” Tullia resumed her pacing, back and forth across the mosaics. “Oh no, oh no. Oh no. We can’t stay, Gaius, we can’t stay. Barbarians knocking at the gates, all those legionaries from Dacia and Germania—”
“Might I recommend Tarracina?” Color was coming back into Cornelia’s face now. “I spent two weeks there with my soldier from the slums. I admit I never got around to fixing the hypocaust, but the weather is lovely this time of year.”
But Tullia wasn’t listening anymore. She ran out into the atrium, calling for the steward, calling for little Paulinus, calling for the slaves, who all hastily started polishing things to prove they hadn’t been eavesdropping and then started running in circles when they realized their mistress was in hysterics. Gaius rushed upstairs toward his tablinum, and Cornelia and Marcella were left sitting in the atrium. Cornelia was staring at the mosaics, as if trying to imagine those savage advancing legionaries marching over them.
“So—” Marcella looked at her sister. “Who is this lover of yours?”
“Does it matter?” Cornelia blinked hard, her dark hair gleaming and her hands motionless in her lap. “It’s over now. I won’t drag him into trouble with Tullia and Gaius.”
“Lollia and her slave,” Marcella said, amused. “You and your soldier. Diana and her charioteer. All the Cornelias are being scandalous this year.”
“Except you.” Cornelia managed a watery smile.
“Marcella, Cornelia—” Gaius rushed back downstairs, a case exploding with scrolls under one arm. “Surely you should pack a few things. Brundisium, that’s far enough away—”
“I’m not going,” said Cornelia.
“Why?” Gaius glared. “Refusing to leave your pleb lover, are you?”
“No.” She looked at him coldly. “Perhaps I have some idea of patrician duty, Gaius.”
He reddened. “Marcella, talk to her.”
“I’m not leaving either,” Marcella said. “I want to see what happens.”
Gaius reddened even further, scuffing a sandal across a loose tile in the mosaics. He opened his mouth, but then something shattered in the hall and a slave burst into tears and Tullia called “Gaius!” and he bustled away.
Cornelia picked up her palla, moving as slowly as if she were underwater. “I’d better go to Lollia. She should know she’s been widowed again.”
“I’m sure she’ll be delighted.” Marcella picked up her own palla.
Cornelia looked back over one shoulder. “Where are you going?”
Marcella spread her arms. “To tell the world.”
“LEAVE my house?”
Lollia watched her grandfather gaze around the atrium—his pride and joy, still blooming with banks of bronze crocuses in late November, every column imported fluted and perfect from Corinth, every niche adorned with a life-sized ebony statue with carved ivory eyes. A wealth of rooms beyond the atrium, each one spacious and perfect, the mosaics worth a fortune, every vase and statue lovingly chosen from the best the world had to offer. The house he had spent a lifetime assembling for himself piece by piece; the house Lollia knew he had dreamed of when he was a slave boy polishing other people’s possessions.
“The legions won’t get inside Rome,” she promised her grandfather. “Vespasian’s men will set up camp outside the gates, the Senate will flutter, then we’ll surrender and Fortuna knows what will happen to Vitellius. But the house will be safe.”
“Then why leave it?” He fingered a little carved nymph in rosy marble.
“Because I want my daughter out of Rome,” Lollia said grimly.
“The house in Ostia,” her grandfather relented after another hour of browbeating. “Is that far enough for you, my jewel? We’ll leave in two days—”
“No, you go tomorrow. Take Flavia. I’ll go with Cornelia and Marcella and Uncle Paris when they leave for Brundisium.”
“Aren’t they going with Gaius and Tullia?” Lollia’s grandfather winced. “That woman has a voice like a cart over flagstones.”
“I’m sure I can put up with it for a few days.”
Lies, of course. Lollia had no intention of going with Gaius and Tullia to Brundisium, and she knew Cornelia and Marcella didn’t either. They would stay together in Rome, and Lollia couldn’t help wondering why. Well, Cornelia would stay because of patrician duty, and Marcella would stay because of boundless curiosity. But why me? Why didn’t she feel the urge to pack her jewels and her daughter and go with her grandfather to Ostia? A few weeks on his sunlit terrace overlooking the sea—playing with Flavia, celebrating her widowhood now that Fabius was dead, and waiting for the trouble in Rome to be over. Half the patricians in Rome were making discreet and speedy exits. Why not me?
Lollia didn’t know. Most of the time she prided herself on being practical, like her grandfather with his slave good sense . . . but she’d had a patrician father, and sometimes patrician duty bit her too.
She made soothing noises and set her grandfather to packing before he could change his mind. For herself, Lollia retired down to one of the storerooms to hide as many of his beautiful things as she could. His collection of African ivories, the lacquered bowls from India, the white and green jade figurines, the rare books in their inlaid cases . . . She had just filled one of his many hidden caches when she heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Domina?”
“Hello, Thrax.” Lollia picked up a malachite gaming board imported from Crete and packed it carefully away into another little paneled cupboard cut into the wall. She heard Thrax descending the last step, coming into the dim coolness of the storeroom.
“The steward—he says you won’t go to Ostia, Domina?”
“No, I won’t.” She looked at a marble nymph—too tall for the cupboard. “Shouldn’t you be helping Flavia pack, Thrax? Make sure she takes her jade menagerie animals and her pearls. They’re her favorite things.”
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He ignored that, coming closer. Lollia had never seen him agitated before, but now his hands were clenching at his sides. “Domina, you won’t be safe here.”
“Oh, I won’t be here in Rome. I’ll be leaving for Brundisium with my cousins—”
Thrax gave a sharp shake of his head. “Lie. I know you, Domina.”
“It appears you do,” Lollia said wryly. “Well, don’t worry about me. No one will dare sack Rome.”
“Then why have the little one taken away?”
“Better safe than sorry.” The second cupboard was full, and Lollia closed it up. If looters did break into the house, at least some of her grandfather’s favorite pieces would be saved.
“You should have guards, Domina.” Thrax sounded stubborn.
“I’ll hire some.”
He hesitated. “Let me stay with you.”
“No. You need to stay with Flavia.” His face was stormy. “Please, Thrax.”
He looked away. Lollia drank in the sight of his fair hair, his wide shoulders, his broad Gallic face and blue eyes, memorizing everything. They hadn’t touched or spoken alone since she’d transferred him to her grandfather’s house with his back a sheet of lash marks . . .
“Let me ask you something, Thrax.” She looked down at an ivory bowl, turning it over in her hands. “Fabius got sick, just before he was supposed to march north.”
“Yes, Domina?” He looked suddenly cautious.
“Food poisoning, everyone said. From that banquet my grandfather threw in this house for Vitellius. And really, who wouldn’t get food poisoning, eating fifty courses and throwing them up and eating fifty more? But Fabius has—had—a stomach like an ox. He never got sick before, eating red mullet.”
Thrax wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“You tried to poison him, didn’t you?”
A long silence.
“I won’t tell,” she sighed. “I just want to know.”
“The first time I see him since you sent me away,” Thrax said softly. “And he’s laughing. And you look so sad next to him, the sad with your eyes and not your mouth. And—and I just go to the cupboard where the cook keeps nightshade to kill rats . . . but he didn’t get enough, not with the way they all throw up their food between courses. Not enough.” A sigh. “I wasn’t thinking. I should not have tried—my Lord, he doesn’t like murder.”
“I think he’d have forgiven you, Thrax.” But Lollia shivered, thinking of the penalties for slaves who attacked their masters. Public execution in the Forum, disembowelment in the arena—no punishment was too harsh. He’d risked the lives of the other slaves too, who would have been put to death for his crime, and even the life of her grandfather, who had lived in panic of being accused of killing the Emperor’s right-hand man. “Gods, Thrax, why? Why did you risk it? Because he had you flogged?”
Thrax blinked, surprised. “Because he hurt you.” Fingers brushed her throat, light as butterflies where Fabius had struck her after she came to Thrax’s defense.
“But I’m not worth it!” she cried. “I’m a stupid girl who gets married too much and drinks more wine than she should and spends too much money—”
“You were kind to me,” he said.
“Was I? It’s my fault you were flogged, Thrax, all my fault—I should have known Fabius would hurt you if he found out—”
“You were kind to me,” Thrax repeated stubbornly. His accent was stronger now as he struggled for words. “Always kind. You asked my name. Asked about my family—my sister. Said ‘Thank you’ when I got you things.”
“What does that matter?”
“Owners, they—I’ve had three, since I was ten. All three, they bought me for prettiness, but—” He gave an awkward shrug. “They used me, hard. You were kind. Are kind.”
Lollia could hardly bear to meet his eyes, they were so full of light.
“I didn’t look out for you, with Fabius,” she managed to say. “But I’m doing it now, Thrax. You’ll take Flavia now, and you’ll get to safety.”
“Domina—”
“There’s no one else I trust my daughter to, Thrax.” Lollia looked up at him. “Please—take care of her.”
“Like she’s mine,” he said simply. “Sometimes I pretend she is mine.”
Lollia reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand. “When this is over, I will find your sister and I will buy her, and any other family you still have, and I will bring them all here for you.”
He turned his face against her hand, kissing the palm. Lollia hesitated for a moment, thinking of Fabius and his whip and the blood flying in sprays across a flower-filled atrium—but Fabius was dead now, beheaded in Urvinum, and for what he’d done to Thrax, Lollia hoped the headsman had been drunk and taken at least ten messy strokes to get Fabius’s foul screaming head off his neck. A hundred strokes. But fast death or slow, he was dead; she was a widow twice in one year—and for once this wasn’t adultery. So Lollia put her hands on Thrax’s shoulders and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and pushed him to sit on a barrel of salted herring as she climbed into his lap. He knew a hundred different ways to please her by now, but this time she wanted to please him, and she pushed his hands away. She moved slowly, slowly as she could, and he gripped her hard and the words he muttered into her hair were in his own language. She knew the last word, though. “Lollia,” he gasped against her throat, shuddering, and Lollia held him a moment longer. The first time he ever called me by name.
“We’d better go,” she said softly.
He disentangled himself, and for a moment Lollia thought he’d just throw her across one shoulder and carry her out of Rome kicking and screaming rather than abandon her here. But his habit of obedience was still strong, and so instead he just helped her move a gold-inlaid wine service into another of her grandfather’s hidden cubbyholes. She brushed a cobweb out of Thrax’s fair hair, and he took the little wooden cross from his neck and slipped it over her head. “For God to protect you.” He reached for her hand, gripping it for a long desperate moment, and then he went back up the stairs.
Lollia watched her grandfather leave for Ostia the following morning, taking with him Thrax and Flavia and his cash box and most of his slaves. Flavia had a tantrum at the last moment, wanting her mother to come along, but Thrax fixed her with a stern look and she subsided, waving over his shoulder as he carried her into the wagon. Lollia waved back with a happy smile, waved until they were just specks in the road. Afterward she went back inside and sat in the deserted atrium and had a good cry, clutching Thrax’s little wooden cross and surrounded by ivory-eyed ebony statues. Me crying, she thought. Lollia the scandalous. This time, scandalwise, she’d really surpassed herself. What would the other Cornelias say if they knew she’d done the worst—worse than taking lovers, worse than marrying five times by the age of twenty, and three of those marriages in one year?
She’d gone and fallen in love with a slave.
I think I’ve seen enough,” said Diana.
“Enough?” Marcella’s heart was pounding. He’s finished; Vitellius is done. There would be no escape now, no mercy—and she’d seen it all. “You want to leave already?”
“Don’t you?” Diana looked down the long hall of the Domus Aurea, curiously empty though the streets outside resounded with uproar.
“I thought you’d be glad to see it,” Marcella said. “You’ve been furious at Vitellius since your race, after all.”
“I don’t like seeing a horse stagger along with a broken leg,” Diana said tightly. “Still alive, but not knowing it’s dead.”
“Oh, I think Vitellius knows. And it won’t be long before someone comes to knock him on the head and put him out of his misery.”
“I hope I don’t have to see it, that’s all.” Diana looked as lovely as ever in a blue cloak pinned at the shoulder with a round silver brooch from Britannia, but there were shadows under her eyes. “Let’s go before the streets get worse.”
Reluctantly, Marcella let herself be tugged along. Seei
ng history being made close at hand might be exciting, but she had no desire to get killed in a mob. That was a little too close at hand.
A moon was rising in the frosty purple sky by the time they fought their way out into the streets. Rough and jubilant crowds shouted on every street corner and in every forum, and Marcella was glad of the guards Vitellius had distractedly assigned to escort them home. Anything for his little pet, even now.
“Wait.” Diana stiffened for a moment, craning her neck, then slipped out from behind a pair of Praetorians. “What are you doing here?”
A man paused, looking down at her. Iron-gray hair, a bronze torc, breeches—yes, the rebel’s son, Llyn ap Caradoc. Marcella remembered how resentful she’d felt at the games earlier this spring when he’d ignored her questions about his father’s rebellion in Britannia. Why was I so interested? she wondered. A failed rebellion twenty years ago certainly isn’t as interesting as a simmering rebellion under my nose. Especially when I’ve done so much to help it simmer!
“You shouldn’t be out in the streets, Lady,” he was telling Diana. “I heard there was killing before the Capitol.”
“There was.” Diana rubbed the back of her neck tiredly. “Vitellius tried to abdicate. He didn’t know how to do it, really—there’s never been an emperor who abdicated before. So he offered his dagger to the crowd and made a speech, but he was drunk and it didn’t go over very well.”
Marcella thought of Vitellius’s bravado as he went out to make his abdication speech, his terrified eyes over a wide smile as the crowd roared his name. “Well,” he said, coming back inside and spreading his rough horseman’s hands, “I suppose I’m still Emperor. They seem to want me.” There had been a mix of horror and courage in that reddened, food-bloated face.
Llyn’s eyes gleamed like two pieces of steel. “Is he dead?”
“No,” said Diana, “but his soldiers ran wild. They went looking for Vespasian’s son to kill, but they couldn’t find him. So they found some inoffensive brother of Vespasian’s and tore him to bits instead.”
Marcella wondered absently if Domitian would survive the next few days. The Moesian legions who supported his father’s claim were rumored to be camped just ten miles away . . . still, Domitian wouldn’t live to see their arrival unless he found a very safe place to wait out the danger. I’m certainly not going to hide him under the bed if he comes crawling to my door.
