Daughters of Rome Page 4

  “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.

  Yours to command.

  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 an
d 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.

  Diana stepped back, chewing absently on a piece of straw. “Who’s driving, Xerxes?”

  “A Greek boy. Won a few races at the Circus Flaminius. Got good hands.”

  “The bays run too?” More than one team of horses could run for each color faction.

  “Aye. Under Tarquin.”

  “He’ll win, if those buggardly Blues don’t foul him.”

  “Diana!” Marcella broke into the litany. Uninterrupted, Diana would go on all day. “Cornelia sent me down for you. She’s going mad trying to make everything perfect.”

  “Go on with her, Lady,” Xerxes grunted at Diana. “Take your pretty sandals out of the muck.”

  Diana came forward, catching one of the gray stallions by the nose and dragging his head down. Her arms looked too slim to hold a big horse, but the stallion’s broad nose dropped under her hand, and the baleful gaze was caught by a pair of cloudy blue-green eyes that had half the men in Rome stammering like schoolboys. “Keep steady out there,” Diana told the horse. “It’s a wild time once the flag drops.”

  The stallion chuffed against her hand, scarlet ribbons fluttering in his braided mane just like the red ribbons plaited into Diana’s hair. Marcella tugged at her elbow again, and the grooms ran forward with the red-dyed harness. Behind stood the racing chariot, slung light between two gilded wheels, crested by a fire god’s head with writhing scarlet snakes for hair. The charioteer stood ready, a skinny dark-eyed boy barely older than Diana, and she stared over her shoulder at him as Marcella hauled her out through the stable doors.

  “Your eyes are about to fall out of your head.” Stopping to pluck a few wisps of straw from Diana’s hair. “Have you finally fallen in love? Lollia will be so pleased.”

  “I’m not in love with him.” Diana brushed that thought away just as she brushed away Marcella’s hands. “I want to be him.”

  No doubt. Plenty of people liked to hiss rumors about Diana’s reputation, but Marcella didn’t believe that her youngest cousin haunted the stables for the charioteers. Plenty of fine ladies might flop on their backs for a famous driver, but not Diana. At a Lupercalia faction party last year, Marcella had watched the star charioteer for the Blues trail his fingers along Diana’s neck and ask her if she wouldn’t like a walk in the moonlit gardens—and Diana had fixed him with a blank blue-green stare and said, “I wouldn’t walk out of a burning house with a man who steered a turn as badly as you.” Not a girl with hayrick tumbles on her mind.

  If Diana had a mind. Marcella had never been entirely sure. How much did horses think?

  Diana glared at her as they started up the broad path away from the faction stables. “You didn’t wear red.”

  “It’s pink. Sort of red.”

  “But there’s no pink faction!”

  No, not much of a mind there.

  They returned to the Cornelii box, where Diana dropped a kiss on the head of her absentminded father. As beautiful as his daughter, Marcella thought, and just as crazy. Nicknamed Paris by the besotted women of Rome, after the prince whose pretty face won him Helen of Troy. Diana’s father wasn’t so interested in causing trouble as that Paris, though. In fact, he wasn’t interested in anything but sculpting marble. What really annoys the family is how good he is. Even now he sat ignoring anyone who tried to talk to him and making sketches for his statues. “Good face,” he told Cornelia’s startled centurion, Densus or whatever his name was. “You might make me a good Vulcan. Maybe a Neptune if you had a beard. How long would it take you to grow a beard? Profile, please.”

  “Um,” the centurion stammered. “I’m on duty.”

  “You can be on duty in profile, can’t you? Turn around.”

  Diana was looking at the centurion and the row of silent Praetorians at the wall behind him. “What are they doing here?” she asked Marcella. “Arresting us?”

  “No, they’re Cornelia’s new toys.” Marcella took a handful of grapes from a silver bowl. “Piso’s bound to be announced heir any day now.”

  “Piso likes the races,” Diana said, hopeful. “He won’t cancel festivals if he becomes Emperor, will he?”

  “He likes everything and will cancel nothing. It would be too much of a decision for him.” Marcella looked over at her sister’s husband where he stood with a wine cup and several senators. He was nodding seriously at something, but then he was always nodding seriously. Lucius is bad enough, Marcella thought, but eight years of Piso would have me dead from boredom. “Your precious Reds will be safe.”

  “Don’t joke. It’s looking like a lean winter for the charioteers, with Galba canceling celebrations left and right. ‘Frivolous waste of funds,’ he calls them.” Diana flopped her folded arms on the marble balustrade, contemplating the circus with its fantastic carved spina and golden dolphins, shut up and shrouded for the long Galban winter. “The horses will go stale.”

  “Cheer up. Galba’s sure to die soon.”

  Diana looked at her. “And they all think I’m the shocking one.”

  “I run around with parchment and pens, not charioteers,” Marcella said cheerfully, reaching for more grapes. �
��Much more respectable.”

  Diana cast her eyes back to the circus. Marcella turned to take a goblet from a slave and noted Lollia and her new husband hissing at each other in low voices, almost nose to nose.

  “—disgracing me! No wife of mine paints herself in public like a whore.”

  “Your last wife was a whore, Vinius. You divorced her for humping half of Gaul, or did you think we hadn’t all heard about that here in Rome?” Lollia looked very bright and pretty in violent magenta silk checkered in silver around the hem and a pearl-and-silver necklace, but the glare she aimed at her new husband was ferocious.

  He glared back. “Wipe your face, or I will send you home.”

  “I’ll speak to my grandfather about this.” Scrubbing at her cheeks in angry little jerks.

  “Do. That vulgar old freedman will never—”

  “What did you call him? After he paid your debts and funded your campaign for—”

  Cornelia’s voice broke through the hissing. “Flavia, be careful!”

  Lollia’s little daughter had escaped her mother’s lap and was trying to climb up the railing of the box. Cornelia started forward, but the centurion at her back had moved first. He swooped the little girl up capably, his professional hardness cracking into a friendly grin as he returned her to Lollia’s lap. Lollia gave a last scowl to her new husband and hugged her daughter absently.

  “Thank you, Centurion.” Cornelia touched his arm in thanks and rounded on Lollia. “You couldn’t keep a closer eye on her? Three years old, you know she’s climbing into everything—she could have fallen!”

  “With your gallant centurion standing guard?” Lollia fluttered her lashes at the chestnut-haired Praetorian. Senator Vinius glared again.

  “I see you’d rather flirt than watch your own daughter.” Cornelia looked as if she’d like to say more—a great deal more—but she just gave Lollia one last heartfelt glare and glided away to join Piso. Lollia just shrugged, gave a final narrow-eyed look to her husband, and moved pointedly away to join Marcella. Little Flavia wriggled in her arms, crowing, and Lollia set her down and gave her a diamond bracelet to play with. Flavia cooed, twirling the bracelet around her chubby wrist.