Cornelia put Lollia’s hand into that of Senator Flaccus Vinius and took her own place in the crowd of wedding guests. “Don’t tell me,” Marcella murmured. “You gave Lollia your little speech about how when she put the red veil on she was a carefree girl, and when she takes it off she’ll be a married woman with all the attendant duties and responsibilities.”
“What makes you say that?” Cornelia whispered back as the priest began to intone a homily on the virtues of marriage.
“You gave me the same speech at my wedding. You really should get some new material, you know.”
“Well, I’m her bridal escort. I’m supposed to prepare her for what’s coming.”
“She’s nineteen, and it’s her third wedding. Believe me, she knows what’s coming.”
“Ssshh!”
“Quando tu Gaius, ego Gaia.” Lollia joined hands with her senator at the altar, intoning the ritual words.
“At my wedding I was so excited I could hardly stammer the vows,” Cornelia whispered, and Marcella heard the smile in her voice.
“At mine I was too busy hoping I’d wake up and find it wasn’t real.”
Lollia and Senator Vinius shared the ritual cake, sitting on stools inlaid with gold. Lollia’s rubies winked—cuffs on both wrists, brooches at both shoulders, shoulder-sweeping earrings, and a collar wrapping her throat. “Lollia gets such nice presents from her grandfather whenever she gets married,” Marcella mused. “All Father gave me was a letter of congratulations sent four months late from Gaul. And he couldn’t remember who I married.”
“Our father was a great man.”
“He couldn’t even tell us apart! He barely bothered giving us enough of a dowry to marry on, and he didn’t come home from his precious legions one year in five—”
“Great men have more important matters to tend to than domestic concerns,” Cornelia sniffed. She had mourned their father very properly when Emperor Nero ordered his suicide, observing all the correct rituals, but Marcella hadn’t seen any point in pretending grief. She hardly knew her father, after all—he’d been too busy crashing around Gaul during her childhood, racking up victories. I suppose all those victories made Nero nervous. It just goes to show that too much success is bad for one’s health. That might make a neat little aphorism on ambition, with a bit of rewording. Just the thing to finish up her account of the life and reign of Emperor Nero . . .
A white bull was led forward onto the steps of the altar, and the priest shoved back his sleeves and cut its throat with a practiced double slash. The bull bellowed, but went down easily before the shrine—a good omen for the marriage. Marcella twitched her pale-blue hem away from a creeping trickle of blood and heard a careless voice at her shoulder.
“Am I late?”
“Yes,” Marcella and her sister said in unison. Diana, of course—late for everything. The bull might be dead on the altar and Lollia fidgeting, but the priest was fussing with the bloodied knife and consecrating it to the goddess of marriage, so Diana slid into place behind them.
“I saw the most marvelous race in one of the little circuses! Four Arab stallions and a Greek running for the Whites beat Perseus and the Greens—gods’ wheels, Cornelia, what are you fussing about? Lollia won’t care if I’m late. Can you imagine the Whites beating the Greens? They’ve already sworn the Greek can’t do it in the Circus Maximus, but I think he might. Good hands, a nice sense of timing, driven eight months for the Whites so of course he hardly has any victories because Helios the Sun God couldn’t get many wins driving those mules the Whites call horses—Marcella, what are you rolling your eyes at me for?”
“Because you’re drowning out the priest and everybody’s shushing you, that’s why.”
The wedding was over. The priest finished his prayers, and Senator Vinius offered Lollia his arm. Marcella and her sister fell in behind with the rest of the guests, making a slow procession back toward the house of Lollia’s grandfather. Everyone with a spring in their step now, as they looked forward to the wedding banquet. Lollia’s new husband was already engrossed with a gaggle of balding well-wishers, and Lollia beckoned her cousins up on her other side. “Come keep me company! Gods, that was a dull wedding. Is it just me, or do they get more boring every time?”
“It’s marriage, Lollia,” Cornelia sighed. “Your third or not, try to be serious.”
“I think of it as less of a marriage than a lease agreement.” Lollia lowered her voice so her new husband wouldn’t hear. “Senator Vinius gets conditional use of me and my dowry for a period of time not to exceed his usefulness to my grandfather.”
“Fair enough,” Marcella conceded.
“Sorry I’m late.” Diana sauntered up to link her arm with Lollia’s, not sounding at all sorry. Half a dozen charioteer medals clanked around her neck, a sprinkle of freckles gleamed like powdered gold across her nose, and her red silk dress was knotted so carelessly it looked ready to slide right off her shoulders. All the men present were probably hoping it would. “I saw the best race!”
“Oh, don’t go on again,” Marcella groaned. “You’re more boring than the whole Senate house put together.” But a beauty, of course, could get away with being boring: Cornelia Quarta, the youngest of the four of them at sixteen and certainly the most lovely, all white-gold hair and blooming skin and cloudy blue-green eyes. But Diana didn’t care a fig for any of the suitors panting on her doorstep. The only thing that made her eyes shine was horses, horses and chariots wheeling around the hairpin turn at the Circus Maximus. As far as she was concerned everything else could go to Hades, including all the men begging to marry her. The spurned suitors were the ones to nickname her Diana: the virgin huntress who scorned all men.
“I adore Diana,” Lollia had said many times. “But I don’t understand her. If I were that beautiful, the last thing I’d be was a virgin anything.”
Marcella envied Diana too, but not for the beauty or the suitors.
“Diana, your hair looks like a bird’s nest,” Cornelia was scolding. “And couldn’t you have worn something besides red? You know only the bride wears red at a wedding. A nice blue to bring out those eyes—”
Diana bristled. “You think I’d wear blue after the way that Blues charioteer fouled us at Lupercalia?” There were four racing factions at the Circus Maximus—the Reds, the Blues, the Greens, and the Whites—but to Marcella’s youngest cousin there was only one, and that was the Reds. She went to the circus every other day, cheering her Reds and cursing all the others like a pleb girl on a festival day. It should never have been allowed, but her father was another odd bird in the family Cornelii, and he let his daughter do as she pleased.
So lucky, Marcella thought enviously, and she doesn’t even realize it.
“Enjoy those races while you can, my honey,” Lollia was telling Diana. “Galba disapproves of horse races—‘frivolous waste of funds,’ he calls it. If you think festivals and chariot racing won’t be first in line for budget cuts—”
“Where did you hear that?” Marcella asked over Diana’s groan. “I’m usually the one with all the news.”
“I had myself a Praetorian guard a few months back when Galba was first acclaimed,” Lollia explained, swirling her scarlet bridal veil over her head. “There, am I ready for the banquet?”
“In all ways but modesty.” Cornelia gave a quelling stare as they came forward into the atrium, Marcella laughed, the slaves rushed forward to place festival wreaths on Lollia and her balding husband, and everyone trooped in for the feast.
CORNELIA couldn’t help a weary little exhalation as the wedding banquet swept into full swing. Lollia’s doting grandfather had put on his usual spectacle: silver dining couches heaped with Indian silk cushions, musicians plucking harps in hidden alcoves, jasmine and roses twining every column of the vast blue-marbled triclinium that overlooked the whole of the Palatine Hill. A golden-haired slave in silver tissue stood at every guest’s elbow, and a stream of servitors scurried in and out with a series of exotic
dishes: sow’s udders stuffed with soft milky eggs, flamingo boiled with dates, a roast boar stuffed with a roast sheep that was in turn stuffed with game hens . . .
Such pomp and spectacle, Cornelia thought, and for what? She sipped her wine—ancient, expensive, and in exquisite taste, like everything else in this house. So much expense for a marriage that probably wouldn’t last the year. Well, Lollia’s grandfather was just a freed slave, even if he had managed to get rich and marry into an ancient patrician family. No matter how good his taste was, slave blood showed. Cornelia’s own wedding had been a modest thing by comparison—her father would never have countenanced such expense—but she had at least managed to stay married to the same man for eight years.
Entertainers streamed out between courses: dancers in thin gauzes, poets with hymns to married love, jugglers with gilded balls. An orator in a Greek robe was just preparing a recitation when a sudden blare of trumpets drowned the plucking of harps. Cornelia looked up to see a line of red-and-gold-clad soldiers filing into the triclinium. The Praetorian Guard, personal army and bodyguards of the Pontifex Maximus and ruler of the world. Whispers ran across the throng: “The Emperor!”
A hunched figure in Imperial purple stumped in. As one, all the guests in the room, from host to bride, rose from their couches.
“So that’s him?” Marcella managed to cast her glance upward even when she bowed with the rest of the guests. “Oh, good. My first close look.”
“Sshh!” Cornelia had seen Emperor Galba many times before—he was a distant cousin of her husband’s, after all, and a guest at her table long before he’d taken the purple. A man of seventy-one, hawk-nosed, wrinkled as a tortoise but still sturdy. Emperor for five months now, appointed by the Senate upon Nero’s suicide. The Imperial mouth turned down in a frown as Galba looked around at the wreaths of flowers, the silver dishes, the flagons of wine. Everyone knew the Emperor had frugal tastes. “Some might even say cheap,” Marcella murmured whenever the latest money-saving decree passed through the Senate.
Galba made greetings in his barking voice, waving irritably for the guests to resume, and Cornelia rose from her bow and threaded breathlessly through the throng to the only figure in the crowd of Imperial arrivals who mattered. “Piso!”
“My dear.” He smiled down at her: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, her husband of eight years. Chosen for her at sixteen, and she had never wanted another. “How lovely you look.”
“Did he say anything?” Cornelia lowered her voice as Galba stood barking orders at his Praetorians, and a troop of dancers in bells and beads undulated in to entertain the guests. “The Emperor?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m sure it will come soon.”
Neither of them elaborated. It rang loud enough unspoken: The day when Galba chooses you as heir.
Who else could the Emperor choose, after all? A man of seventy-one needed an heir, the sooner the better, and who would be more suitable than his distinguished and serious young cousin? Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, with his distinguished bloodlines and impeccable record of service to the Imperium? Everyone knew it would be Piso.
Certainly no man in Rome would make a handsomer Emperor. Cornelia looked at her husband: tall and lean, his features somber but lightening when he smiled, his eyes that always looked straight at the world where other men looked for shadows. Emperor Nero had once mistrusted that straight gaze and threatened to exile her husband to Capri or even Pandetaria, where few men survived—but Piso had never looked away, and Nero had found a new fancy for his fears.
“You look very serious,” Piso smiled.
Cornelia reached up to smooth back a strand of his dark hair. “Just thinking of our own wedding day.”
“Was that such a serious occasion?” His dark eyes twinkled.
“Well, I took it seriously.” Cornelia shook her head at Lollia, who was pealing laughter from her dining couch and utterly ignoring her new husband. “Piso, do let me introduce you to the new Praetorian Prefect. Be sure to ask about his son’s appointment in the legions; he’s very proud of that—”
Cornelia was very proud herself, watching her husband from the corner of her eye as they made their way through the throng. A smile here and a nod there, a wine cup ready in one hand for a toast, the other hand ready to clap the shoulder of a colleague or press the fingers of a new acquaintance. Reserved, courteous, gracious . . . regal . . .
She made the introduction to the new Prefect, smiled, and bowed out as a proper wife should once the conversation turned to politics. Emperor Galba stayed at the banquet only a few moments more, casting another disapproving glare around the lavish room and stumping out as abruptly as he’d arrived. “Thank goodness,” Lollia tittered all too audibly as the Praetorians filed after him. “That sour face! Nero may have been crazy but at least he had glamour.”
“And Lollia may be an idiot, but she’s right,” Marcella murmured in Cornelia’s ear.
“She is not. Galba had a very distinguished career.”
“He’s a sour, cheap old man.” Marcella spoke under cover of the white-bearded orator who had just come out for the second time to launch into sonorous Greek verse. “All those money-skimping policies—”
“Nero emptied out the treasury. We should be glad someone’s trying to refill it.”
“Well, it won’t make him popular. That will work in your favor, of course—by the time Galba dies, and at his age that can’t be long, everyone will be cheering your Piso like a god.”
“Marcella, hush!”
“It’s truth, Cornelia. And I always speak truth, at least to my sister.” Marcella lifted her goblet. “Or should I say, my future Empress?”
“You should not say.” Empress . . .
Marcella’s knowing smile curled Cornelia’s toes. She never could fool her little sister—though half the time people assumed Marcella was the older: half a hand taller and as statuesque as a temple pillar; a column of cool blue ice topped with leaf-brown hair and a calm carved face. Much more regal-looking than me. Oh, why didn’t I get her nose? “You should go talk to Caesonius Frugi, Marcella. He spoke very fondly of your husband, I believe they were tribunes together in the Twelfth. I’m sure you could do something for Lucius there, advance his career—”
“Lucius can take care of his own career,” Marcella said. “I’m having much more fun watching you work the room.”
“I don’t see why you’re always so dismissive of Lucius. He’s perfectly pleasant.”
“You aren’t married to him. We weren’t all lucky enough to fall madly in love with the man our father picked for us, you know.” Marcella’s eyes drifted over Cornelia’s shoulder. “Dear Fortuna. Is that the ghastly Tullia headed straight for us? Hide me.”
“You always do that!” Cornelia accused. “Ever since we were little! Disappearing to let me face the worst—Tullia, how delightful to see you!”
“I can’t say the same for you, Cornelia—I understand you’ve had the Emperor to dine last week, and you didn’t invite me! Your own sister-in-law—”
Eventually the sun fell, the wine sank in everyone’s goblets, and soon the guests were drifting out for the final procession. Cornelia took her husband’s arm and joined the throng, Lollia and Senator Vinius in the lead, the slaves darting ahead to throw walnuts for fertility and silver coins for prosperity. Cornelia applauded with the rest as Lollia was carried over the threshold of her new home and knelt for the first time to light the fire in her new hearth. Squealing girls lined up for the bridal torch, and Lollia tossed it straight at Diana. Diana poked the business end of the torch at a young tribune begging her for a kiss.
“—must come with me,” Lollia was groaning to Marcella and Diana as Cornelia approached. The last of the guests were trailing out of Senator Vinius’s house with tipsy congratulations. “It’s sure to be dull as Hades—Cornelia, Vinius is dragging me to dinner at the palace with sour old Galba next week. Tell me you’ll come and glare at me for drinking too muc
h wine—”
“Of course I’ll come,” Cornelia smiled. “Piso and I were already invited. I thought I’d wear my blue—”
“Not blue,” Diana said at once. “I hate blue, and we all have to dress in the same color when we sally out in force.”
“Why?” Marcella met her sister’s eyes over Diana’s head, and they traded familiar amused glances.
“Because we’re like a chariot team,” Diana explained. “Cornelia on the inside—slow, but like a rock around the turns. Marcella next, steady on the inner pair. Then Lollia, fast but wild. And on the outside, me. Fastest of anybody.”
“Why am I the slow one?” Cornelia wondered, and they all started giggling. Vinius frowned.
“Better go, my loves.” Lollia caught his expression, groaning. “And pity me, because the worst part of the day is yet to come.”
“Don’t be crude,” Cornelia chided.
“He smells like sour milk,” Marcella said, “and I imagine he’ll last about as long.”
“Is he a Reds fan?” Diana asked.
Lollia kissed them out the door, and Cornelia took her husband’s arm. She turned to wave her sister and cousin into the dark and saw Diana toss the wedding torch into the gutter.
“A very good wedding.” Piso raised a hand, and one of the hovering slaves dashed forward to beckon their litter. “An older man will steady Lollia, I’m sure.”
“He won’t have her long enough to steady her.” The litter approached; Cornelia accepted her husband’s hand in and drew the rose-silk curtains against the garish yellow glow of the streetlamps. “Lollia’s grandfather will have her divorced and married to someone else the minute Senator Vinius ceases to be of use.”
Piso gave the litter a tap, and it rose swaying on the backs of six Gauls and went trotting into the night. The curtains fluttered, and a wedge of yellow lamplight cut across his aquiline nose and square jaw. Cornelia smiled. Her husband smiled back, moving from one side of the litter to the other to settle his arm about her, and she could feel the litter-bearers hitching below to accommodate the shifted weight.