“What?”
He reddened, but his chestnut eyes were steady. “You are taking care, aren’t you?” His rough fingers brushed her belly mutely. “The madam, she said patrician women knew what to do . . .”
“No need for that.” Cornelia shook her head. “I’m barren.” Still a painful word to speak, but she forced it out matter-of-factly. “It makes things easy now, though, doesn’t it? Otherwise I’d have to ask my cousin Lollia for those Egyptian tricks that keep her out of trouble, and Lollia can’t keep a secret to save her life.”
“Be careful about everything else, too.” He kissed the tip of Cornelia’s nose.
“I’m a fine patrician lady—I know how to sneak!”
But somehow she couldn’t manage to be careful.
For four days the following week, Tullia fancied herself ill and dumped the house’s supervision on Cornelia. Meals had to be planned, the slaves supervised, little Paulinus tended, and there was no time to spare for the squalid whorehouse in the Subura slums. Cornelia ran there all the way the following morning when Tullia finally pronounced herself well again, and when she saw the smile that split Drusus’s face she seized his hand and dragged him back through the narrow stinking hallway toward his room, shrugging down the shoulders of her gown before the flimsy door was even closed. “Gods, I missed you,” he groaned against her mouth, and they didn’t even make it to the bed. Four days was too long, three days was too long. Cornelia came every other day, dry-mouthed, every inch of her skin burning. “They think I’m at the bathhouse—they think I’m at the races—they think I went to bed early.” Any excuse she could find.
“You should go.” Drusus ran a hand down the curve of her back at the end of a long hot afternoon. “Most people don’t take five-hour baths.”
“Mmm. No.” But she nestled against his hard shoulder, drowsing another half hour in the baking heat instead of getting up. “Oh, Juno’s mercy, is it twilight?” she exclaimed, looking at the slant of light through his narrow slit of a window. “Where’s my gown?”
“And they say patrician women take hours to get dressed.” Drusus grinned, watching her fly around the little room. Cornelia made a face at him, twisting her hair into a knot at the back of her neck, hopping on one foot to lace her sandal.
“Tomorrow—” She collected her palla, holding one hand out for a quick squeeze. “I’ll be back tomorrow; I’ve begged off a family banquet.”
“Tomorrow.” His fingers squeezed hers, warm and hard. Cornelia looked at him, sitting on the edge of the bed with his chestnut hair mussed, his eyes warm and steady, and she dropped her palla on the floor and climbed into his lap and made love to him again, fierce and silent, before running back to the Palatine Hill and coming home far later than she had any right to be. She looked in the glass that night, hastily tidying herself, and didn’t know her own face. These flushed cheeks and over-bright eyes and wild hair couldn’t possibly belong to the cool and elegant Cornelia Prima, the impeccable matron who never did anything unseemly or incorrect, who would have wrinkled her nose at the very idea of taking a common soldier for a lover. This was someone else entirely.
They’ll notice, she thought in dread. Juno’s mercy, someone’s bound to notice. But to her astonishment, no one noticed. Gaius was out from dawn until dusk trying to curry favor with Vitellius or at least keep up with his frantic pace of feasting. Marcella was obsessed with Vespasian’s whispered march on Rome. Lollia could normally be counted on to pick up the slightest hint of any love affair; Cornelia waited with an inward wince for her laughing wink and her whispered, “Well, who is he?” But even Lollia seemed wrapped in her own somber thoughts. The rest of the family, Tullia in the lead, were so diverted by Diana’s new status as the Emperor’s pet that they had no time for anything else.
“If Diana could get a provincial governorship for Gaius,” Tullia breathed. “Lower Germania—the Emperor did say he would need a new governor there . . .”
“I don’t know if I really want to govern Lower Germania,” Gaius ventured. “Nasty cold place.”
“Gaius, don’t be ridiculous! Of course you want to! Or maybe Pannonia . . .”
“No one has time for me in all this fuss over Diana,” Cornelia told Drusus. “The family’s after her day and night to get Imperial posts and appointments and favors out of Vitellius for them. Even more, they want her to marry someone very grand. But she keeps turning down all the suitors, and the family keeps going into spasms.”
“Turning them down?”
“She turned down Fabius’s chief commander Alienus; that wasn’t pretty. And not a week later one of his German officers caught her after the races and tried to drag her off by force—she broke a driving whip over his head, and said she’d stab him if he tried again.”
Drusus blinked. “How does a little thing like that know how to stab anyone?”
“We all do.” Cornelia demonstrated. “Under the breast into the heart, fast and clean. All patrician women know how to die.”
“You people are savages.” He curled a hand protectively around the threatened breast.
“Diana’s certainly a savage,” Cornelia admitted. “Thank the gods Vitellius is too amused by her to be offended. He just keeps saying there are some fillies that won’t ever be saddled.”
“What about you?” Drusus grinned.
“I am a woman of Cornelii,” Cornelia said primly. “I certainly refuse to be saddled.”
“What about worshipped?” As he tipped her over on her back.
“You have a peculiar notion of worship, Drusus . . .”
Cornelia bribed the doorkeeper. She bribed the steward. She bribed her maid. They pretended not to smirk when she came back to the house disheveled and yawning, and still no one put the signs together. “Are you happier these days?” Marcella asked one night, idly.
“What do you mean?” Cornelia tried to keep the edge out of her voice.
“You always bite your nails when you’re wretched. And look at them now, all smooth again for the first time in months. So you must be happy.”
“Well, I’m happy I escaped marrying that German thug,” Cornelia said lightly, and braced herself for one of Marcella’s knowing smiles. She could never hide secrets for long, not from her little sister—but Marcella just wandered away with a yawn. It wasn’t like her, to drop a clue where it lay instead of pursuing it—but Cornelia didn’t question her luck. She was far better off if Marcella’s observant eyes weren’t fixed on her.
Fool, she told herself harshly in the quiet dark of her bedchamber. You know what will happen if anyone finds out. A dalliance with a man of her own class was one thing. Gaius might glare and Tullia might say cutting things about loose-moraled widows, but Lollia would be the first to wink and bid her good luck, and plenty of others would do the same as long as Cornelia was discreet. But a common soldier who rousted drunks out of a whorehouse in the slums . . . a man accused of treason, sentenced to death for failing to protect her own husband . . .
I’d have to leave Rome, if the scandal got out. Every night Cornelia made herself dwell on it: the whispers, the snickers, the disgrace. My family would be humiliated. Gaius would disown me. And Drusus would likely be caught, arrested, executed on the warrant that had never been brought to charge. He’d die, because of me.
Every night Cornelia made herself think of it, every grinding detail of humiliation and disgrace and death, until she dropped off to an exhausted sleep. I’ll come to my senses in the morning. I’ll realize what a fool I’m being. But then morning came and a slave brought a plate of breakfast fruit and eggs, and before Cornelia even rose from her bed she was planning how soon she could get out of the house to see Drusus.
“Coming every day now, Lady?” The raddled madam of the Subura whorehouse raised her painted eyebrows as Cornelia slipped into the hall. “My, my. That boy must be doing something right. You make more noise than any of my whores.”
Cornelia drew herself up with a freezing glare, but the madam ch
uckled unafraid. “Don’t play the great lady with me. You’re here for the same thing they are.” She gestured at the men who slipped in and out of the little curtained niches, grabbing at the whores, hitching their belts. “Only difference is, that boy back there is too addled to make you pay for it.”
“Now there’s an idea,” said Drusus when Cornelia reported this in sputtering rage. “Should I start charging you, Lady? How much?”
“Maybe I should charge you!” Cornelia wriggled away from him, but he flung her back down on the bed. She struggled but he pinned her easily, grinning. “At least you could pay for all those hired litters I have to take getting down here,” she informed him.
“Can’t I pay you in services rendered?” He pried her arms apart, setting his mouth at the base of her throat.
“Not on my neck!” Cornelia broke down laughing. “I’m getting marks—Lollia’s bound to notice soon.”
“Lollia’s the one who loves horses?”
“No, that’s Diana. She wouldn’t notice a mark on anyone’s neck, unless it was one of her precious Anemoi. But Lollia’s got sharp eyes.”
“So I’ll stay away from your neck for a while,” Drusus murmured against her waist. “Too bad, it’s such a pretty neck . . .”
He knew all about her family now. Sweating, too hot in the airless little room even for a sheet, they lay naked on the narrow bed that sank in the middle and talked. “What about your family?” Cornelia asked, propping her chin on her hand.
“I grew up in Toscana.” He linked his hands behind his head on the pillow. “My father ran a wine shop. A good wine shop,” Drusus added rather defensively. “He was able to buy entrance to the equestrian class three years ago.”
“Equestrian class?” Cornelia smiled. “Oh, good.”
“Better than bedding a pleb?” He pinched her hip gently.
“Well, if you were a pleb, then these meetings of ours wouldn’t be just ill-advised, they would be illegal.” She began to enumerate the various laws forbidding congress between plebeians and patricians, but Drusus stopped her mouth with a kiss.
“Snob. But I’ll forgive you, just for those dimples.” He kissed them too, one by one. “You know how often I tried to make you smile, following you around on guard duty, just so I could see those dimples? I could put my thumb in them up to the knuckle . . .”
“Your family?” Cornelia prompted after a while.
“Yes, my family. My mother has a house with an atrium now—she’s very proud of it. And my younger sister will make a good marriage; we’re all proud of that. I’ve got an older brother in the legions, doing his tour somewhere in Dacia. He might make optio, but he doesn’t care much. He just likes the life.”
“So you’re the pride and joy of the family?” Cornelia ran a hand through his hair. “Centurion in the Praetorian Guard by thirty-four! They must be proud.”
“They were.” His smile disappeared. “I’ve kept away from them this year. Don’t want to drag them down with me.”
Cornelia kissed him silently. Hiding in a whorehouse when once he’d guarded emperors at a palace—even with her here, she knew he still felt the shame of his demotion. “So your sister will be married soon?” she said, changing the subject. “Does she have a sweetheart, or are your parents arranging a proper match?”
“There’s a boy she wants.” He smiled again. “Son of another local shopkeeper. My father would rather see her married to a magistrate, but likely she’ll get her way.”
“Your father should arrange a marriage for her,” Cornelia decreed. “Young girls don’t have the sense to pick out a dress, much less a husband. And it’s not just young girls, either—does anyone pick sensibly for themselves? Lollia’s current choice is a slave from Gaul, Diana would rather marry a horse than any man—”
“And my choice is you.” Drusus lifted Cornelia’s sweat-damp hair off her neck, coiling it around his hand. “My family would be appalled at me. Aspiring to one of the Cornelii? You’re right, no one picks well for themselves.”
“No.” She settled against his arm. “I let my father choose for me, and I was very happy.”
“Senator Piso?”
Cornelia nodded. The first time either of them had brought up that name. Drusus’s hand slowed in her hair.
“Do you—think of him often?”
“Not here.” She drew a finger over Drusus’s chest. “It’s just us in here.”
“This room’s too small for anyone else. Even a flea.”
“There’s always room for fleas! My maid keeps finding them in my clothes and complaining—one more thing to bribe her to keep quiet about—”
Drusus laughed, pulling Cornelia over him. But she thought about Piso on the way home, as the hired bearers trudged back toward the house. That seemed to be where he seeped into her mind, almost unobtrusively.
Eight months dead. If Otho’s coup had failed, Galba might have died naturally by now and Piso would be Emperor. Emperor Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, attending the Senate, hailing the crowds. Certainly never making love to his wife in the middle of the day; it wasn’t seemly and anyway there would never be time. Frowning if he saw his wife with her hair disheveled, but a Caesar’s wife would never have disheveled hair anyway. She would be Empress of Rome, riding jeweled and applauded through the streets rather than furtively sneaking through back alleys, never thinking of the sturdy centurion at her back as anything but a bodyguard.
I’m sorry, Cornelia thought toward her husband, I’m sorry—but she hardly knew what she was sorry for. He’d been gone so much longer than eight months, surely. She could still call his dark handsome face perfectly to mind, his lean body that looked so well in the pleats and folds of a toga, his beautifully kept hands and his half-smile. He’d be shocked to see me now. His cool immaculate wife who had always modestly pulled the sheet over herself after making love, eternally calm, eternally in order; now rushing off like a madwoman at all hours of the day into the arms of the man who had once been his bodyguard, lying naked and sweating and unashamed afterward in a narrow little bed that smelled of mold.
Piso wouldn’t approve of me now, Cornelia thought with a twist. He’d think I was behaving like Lollia, like a light woman.
But Piso would have been even more shocked at the events of this year, had he lived to see them. Emperor succeeding emperor succeeding emperor, every patrician family in Rome running madly to keep up and keep in favor, men of ancient lineage and unstained service like Senator Marcus Norbanus thrown in prison to rot while swaggering jumped-up plebs like Fabius Valens preened like princes. That would have shocked Piso profoundly. So maybe, with the whole world going mad, he would have forgiven his wife. Even if he were shocked, maybe he would be glad to see me happy.
September, now. Marcella reported that the Moesian legions had declared for Vespasian; that Vitellius would have no choice but to fight. Vitellius still caroused in the Domus Aurea every night and insisted he could lick Vespasian in one battle, but Rome worried—Rome worried a great deal as Fabius Valens began to assemble an army. Everyone worried except Cornelia . . . and one other person, she realized one sweltering afternoon.
“I saw you yesterday,” Cornelia said abruptly to Diana one evening as they waited to go to an Imperial banquet. Marcella had appeared, unjeweled as always, and Lollia declared she looked too plain and dragged her off to be fitted with earrings and brooches. Diana and Cornelia had been left alone. “I know your secret.”
“Do you?” Diana twirled one of the charioteer medallions around her neck.
“Your father says you’ve been sneaking out in the afternoons to meet some charioteer from Britannia. And yesterday on the Campus Martius, I saw you with him.”
Cornelia had been hurrying to Drusus, taking a shortcut. The Campus Martius had been quite empty in the fierce heat of the afternoon—empty except for one chariot and a team of tired horses, with two figures flanking it. Cornelia’s little fair-haired cousin, and another figure much taller.
&nb
sp; “I usually go to his villa to drive,” Diana said, unembarrassed. “But no one else uses the Campus Martius in this heat, so he took me to the city to practice on a real track.”
“Just practicing?” Cornelia asked gently. She’d seen them only from a distance, but there had been such ease between Diana’s little figure and the tall one, whoever he was. Diana had playfully squeezed half a water skin over the back of his neck, and he’d smiled and picked her up quite unselfconsciously to toss her into the chariot. “You looked very—well, close.”
Diana smiled.
“I won’t tell,” Cornelia sighed. “I should, but I won’t.”
“Good. Because I’m not stopping.”
Cornelia looked at her youngest cousin, so little and so brave, sneaking off to meet her charioteer. I know I should disapprove but I can’t. Juno’s mercy, I can’t.
“Cornelia?” Drusus was a dim shape in the darkness, sitting up in bed, reaching in reflex for his sword. “You’ve never come at night before—how long can you stay?”
“All night,” Cornelia whispered, crawling naked into bed beside him in the hot little room, half drunk with her own daring. “All night, Drusus. Every night.” She kissed him, twining her arms around his neck as the sounds of moans and grunts came through the thin walls on either side—and realized she was happy.
She hoped Piso would have been a little glad.
Sixteen
���FLAVIA!”
Cornelia smiled as Lollia picked up her daughter and whirled her in a circle. “Or is it Flavia?” Lollia continued. “We dropped a giggling little girl off to stay with her great-grandfather, and you are a beautiful young lady. Where’s Flavia?”
Lollia pretended to look around, and Flavia giggled. “Four years old,” Lollia said softly. “What a big girl you are. Did you like your party?”
“Great-grandfather gave me a pony! And a pearl necklace an’ a fan an’ little jade animals—”
“It was a beautiful party,” Cornelia said. “She had a lovely time.” Little Flavia had been the center of a heap of gifts; riding her proud great-grandfather’s shoulders, scrambling on and off various laps, harnessing Diana with a ribbon and driving her around the garden. Lollia had been unable to go; Fabius wanted her at an Imperial banquet. “She was too busy to miss you, Lollia.”