Daughters of Rome (5 page)

“The Reds don’t run for a purse,” Diana flashed back. “They run for glory. You will come, won’t you?”

“Better the races than watching the gladiators die in the arena.” Cornelia detested the gladiatorial festivals. It made her sick to see so many people—from good families too! Not just plebeians—stand there shrieking for blood. The races, now, they had turned into something quite different from the staid laps of her childhood. Emperor Nero had been mad for racing—or perhaps just mad—and Cornelia might deplore the money he had spent, but there was no denying that the result was impressive. The Circus Maximus was now a proper arena with a central
spina
thick in carvings, golden dolphins dropping their noses for each of the seven laps, sprays of victory palm for the winning charioteers. A place to see and be seen . . . and who better to be seen by all Rome than her husband?

“Domina,” a maid said breathlessly, tumbling into the blue-tiled atrium, “the wine has been delivered to your box at the Circus Maximus.”

“Was it properly warmed? Last time the steward had it boiling—Lollia’s grandfather gave me the pick of his own cellars for the occasion,” Cornelia explained to Piso. “Falernian, Aminean, Nomentan—”

“With his breeding, you’d think he’d drink common beer.” Piso made a face. “He’s vulgar as Hades.”

“Oh, surely not. He has exquisite taste. Not one of our friends or relations has anything to match his house, or his collection of statues, or his wine cellar.”

“Yes, and that’s my point. Freed slaves should live modestly, not flaunt themselves higher than their birth.”

“Well, he has been very helpful to us,” Cornelia murmured. More than helpful, really—Lollia’s grandfather was extremely generous with gifts, and there was no denying that his assistance in other areas had been invaluable. Piso’s family had been hard hit under Nero’s suspicious eye, and even Claudius’s before that—she and Piso would never have kept their house and assets if not for a few timely loans. . . .

“It’s still not fitting.” Piso frowned, and Cornelia tactfully changed the subject. Her husband, she knew, liked things in their place—patricians of good blood and family in the Senate, equites to serve them, plebs to serve
them,
and freed slaves who showed proper appreciation for their station in life. Freedmen as rich as Midas who had to be applied to for loans had no place in Piso’s orderly vision of Rome. Cornelia patted his arm brightly and turned to the maids. “Leda, Zoe, did you arrange the ivy and the larkspur in the box as I showed you?”

“Yes, Domina—”

Cornelia had been up by dawn, flitting to the Circus Maximus to set her slave girls to work on the Cornelii family box: an enclosed marble space perched high in the tiers with a breathtaking view of the track’s hairpin turn below. The arena attendants had been raking the sand of the track, and pale fingers of sunlight stretching over the top of the tiers, when Cornelia set the slaves to work. Flowers, swags of ivy, silver platters and gold wine cups—she’d give her guests more than just a good view. She’d give them a bower, a last breath of summer in the pale blue coolness of autumn. The slaves had been flying about the box like bees by the time she raced back to the house, her hair coming down and her cheeks pink with excitement, to prepare herself and her husband for their grand entrance.

“What a general you are, my dear,” Piso said as she rearranged the folds of his toga over the shoulder. Of course he didn’t lean down and kiss her, not with slaves present, but his eyes crinkled approvingly. “And a beautiful general at that.”

“I wish I didn’t have to wear red,” Cornelia said ruefully, looking down at her dark-red gown with the jet beads at the hem. “Diana swore she’d behave herself today if I just wore red for her precious team. Not my best color—
why
couldn’t she support the Greens instead?”

“Nonsense, red suits you. Do sit down, my dear, you’ve been sprinting about since dawn.”

“I want everything just right. The Emperor may drop by, after all.”

“Doubtful. He dislikes festivals.”

“But he likes
you
.” Cornelia reached up to smooth a stray strand of her husband’s hair. “Perhaps he’ll make the announcement today.”

“Why today?”

“He’s made himself very unpopular lately with all the new tax levies, that’s all.” All Rome knew that Galba’s stern-faced accountants had swept up the jeweled butterflies of Nero’s court and were squeezing them for every sesterce they had ever sucked away from the treasury. There was a great deal of complaining, of course, as people watched their houses, their jewels, their slaves and estates flowing into Galba’s eager, wrinkled hands—but Cornelia approved. Everyone knew Nero had spent the treasury empty. Had no one thought the account would ever come due?

But still, people were inclined to mutter resentfully now when they heard Galba’s name. He’d want to soothe the crowds, give them something new to talk about.

Like an Imperial heir. A young, handsome, able, and vigorous heir.

“You look very handsome, Piso. Very distinguished.” Very
Imperial
. “Shall we go?”

They came from the atrium to the brilliant sunlight of the steps outside. Piso lifted a hand for the litter, and Cornelia raised the sunshade over her face.

A man’s voice came from the glitter of sun. “Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus?”

Cornelia blinked and saw a soldier at the foot of the steps before their house. A soldier in full armor and red-plumed helmet, a half-dozen guards behind him.

“Yes?” Piso’s voice sharpened.

“Centurion Drusus Sempronius Densus of the Praetorian Guard.” The man stepped forward into a crisp salute. “I have the honor of serving as your escort and bodyguard, by order of the Emperor. I am yours to command, Senator.”

The Praetorian Guard. Second only to the Emperor . . . or to members of the Imperial family.

Cornelia felt a smile breaking over her face, but suppressed it with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Piso looked cool as cream—like he’d had Imperial bodyguards at his heels all his life. She all but burst with pride. “Thank you, Centurion,” she heard Piso say. “We would be pleased if you would escort us to the Circus Maximus.”

“Senator.” Another salute, and the Praetorians fell in behind the litter. Piso nodded dismissal to the centurion, but Cornelia came forward down the steps.

“Drusus Sempronius Densus, you said?”

“Yes, Lady.” He removed his helmet, bowing, and Cornelia saw a younger man than she would have anticipated, chestnut-brown hair curling vigorously despite the close cut. He stood stocky and broad-chested in his armor, not tall—she had grown used to tilting her head back to meet her husband’s eyes, but this centurion was scarcely taller than she was.

Cornelia offered her hand with a smile. “I welcome you to our service, Centurion. And I charge you with my husband’s care.”

“My life for his, Lady.” The centurion bowed over her hand, his own fingers rough. An Imperial sword had roughened them—an Imperial sword that now belonged to her, and to Piso.

Cornelia saw the looks on the faces of her guests when she and Piso made their entrance to the box, just late enough for the second heat. She saw the eyes evaluating her flowers, her wines, her Praetorians . . . her husband.

The bows were deeper now. The smiles more ingratiating. The voices tinged with respect.

It’s going to happen
, Cornelia thought wonderingly as she nodded and smiled through the rounds of well-wishers.
It really is. My husband is going to be Imperial heir.

She gestured her maid forward with a sunshade. Even less than a snub nose and dimples, the wife of a prince of Rome could not have a sunburn.

THE
family was out in full ghastly force. Cousins Marcella hadn’t seen for years had come scurrying to the Cornelii box now that Piso stood in such high favor. He stood looking pleased and a little dazed, and of course Cornelia looked as serene as if she’d had Praetorians at her beck and call all her life. Tullia cast a resentful eye over the inlaid chairs and garlanded tables, and gave a sniff. “All this larkspur—I could have told her roses would make a better display for fall—”

“Only if she asked your advice,” Marcella said to her sister-in-law. “And why would Cornelia need to do that? She managed to outshine you without any help at all.”

Marcella left Tullia sulking into her wine cup, turning to smile at the nearest relative. “Marcus! How lovely to see you again, it’s been an age.”

“Lady Marcella.” He bowed over her hand: Senator Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus, Tullia’s former husband and a distant cousin in his own right. Grandson of old Emperor Augustus through some illicit love affair, and Marcella thought she could see the resemblance in Marcus, who looked so noble and senatorial in his snowy toga that he should have been carved in marble and stuck on top of the Senate house. For all that, he wasn’t boring—in fact, he was one of the few cousins Marcella could stand.

She smiled again, and his eyes swept over her in pleasant appreciation. Marcella was glad she’d worn her pale-pink
stola
, fluted in dozens of intricate folds like the pillars of a temple. No jewelry—Lucius had sold her last string of pearls to bribe the governor of Lower Germania last year—but Marcella knew she didn’t need jewelry to be noticed. Who cared if her olive skin wasn’t much next to Lollia’s vivid complexion, if her hair was dead-leaf brown to Cornelia’s rich dark coils, and if her features didn’t have nearly the beauty and delicacy of Diana’s? Marcella counted herself the proud owner of the best breasts in the entire family. “Possibly all Rome,” Lollia often sighed, enviously. “What I’d give for a figure like yours!” Even a scholarly man like Marcus Norbanus, Marcella was glad to see, wasn’t above a glance of appreciation.

“I was sorry to hear about your recent misfortunes, Senator.” Marcus’s descent from Emperor Augustus had clearly made Galba nervous, because one of his first actions after taking the purple had been to strip Marcus of most of his lands and estates. “I think it very unfair.”

“Emperors have disliked me before,” Marcus said dryly. “I expect I’ll survive.”

“On the other hand, you’ve had some good fortune as well.”

“Such as?” He raised graying brows—he was only thirty-five or so, but he’d already begun to gray rather devastatingly around the edges.

“On getting rid of Tullia, of course.” Marcella lowered her voice. “That certainly deserves congratulations.”

He smiled—too polite, of course, to disparage a woman. Even a woman who richly deserved it. Why did the nicest men always end up with the nastiest wives?

At least Tullia and Marcus’s three-year-old son took after his father. Little Paulinus stood round-eyed and well behaved at Marcus’s side, ignored by his mother, and when Marcus unpacked the paperwork he usually took to the races, Marcella bent down and whispered into the little ear. Paulinus nodded happily, trotting off, and five minutes later there was a shriek as Tullia discovered a beetle in her wine goblet.

“Marcella, can you find Diana for me? She’s already disappeared into the stables.” Cornelia cast her eyes to the heavens.
She might not be a mother yet
, Marcella thought,
but she has the exasperated sigh down to perfection.
“And of course Lollia’s flirting with my new centurion. I swear, if I didn’t have you, the other two would drive me stark raving mad!”

“Then be glad you have me.”

The stables of the Circus Maximus: a different world, Marcella often thought. The whisper of straw and the swearing of stable boys, the creak of wheels, the grooms rushing back and forth with arm-loads of harness. The roars of the crowd filtering down distantly from the tiers, the charioteers muttering their prayers and fingering their good-luck charms, the stallions giving their full-throated whinnies. A different world—certainly not Marcella’s world, as the grooms and charioteers and even the horses seemed to know, looking at her dubiously as she picked through the straw and manure. But oddly enough, it was Diana’s world.

Marcella found her youngest cousin in the Reds quarter beside the Reds faction director, a squat bald man named Xerxes who looked like a scarred frog. They stared with equal concentration at a quartet of gray stallions tied to the grooming posts.

“They’re getting old,” Diana was saying. “We need a new team for backup.”

“They have a few victories left in them.”

Diana walked behind the stallions, too close as she trailed her hand down a glossy flank, but horses never seemed to kick Diana. She should have been as out-of-place as Marcella—a pretty little thing with her scarlet silks and pale hair—but no one gave her a second glance. The faction director for the Reds had given up trying to boot her out by the time she was eight, when he found her playing unconcerned under the belly of a stallion who had kicked in the heads of no less than four grooms. What a ruckus in the family
that
had been.