Free Empress of the Seven Hills by Kate Quinn Page B

lodgings on the Aventine, and—well, not in front of the children.” Calpurnia raised her eyebrows. “Not to mention that he’s eight years older than you.”
    “You’re one to talk!” Sabina laughed. “How old was Father when you married him, Calpurnia? Sixty-three?”
    “That’s different. Your father was settled, steady, and ready to marry; a man of twenty-six is not. And I was madly in love with your father, and you aren’t in love with Hadrian or anyone else as far as I can tell—”
    “I’m too old for this bantering,” Marcus protested, and as Sabina had hoped, the discussion descended into lighthearted family teasing, and by the following afternoon she was loading her books and gowns into a palanquin for the journey back to Rome.
    “Oh, dear,” she whispered to her father as one of the older heavyset guards tramped out with his spear to act as escort. “Do you suppose I could have Vix instead, Father? I want to go on a great many long walks this summer, and I always worry that Celsus will throw his back out if he has to do anything harder than lifting a wine cup… yes, that would be nice, thank you—” She hadn’t really decided what to do about Vix, but it would be good to have him on hand.
    Just in case.
    “Bliss,” Sabina said as she came into the quiet summer-dusked house on the Capitoline Hill, shaking the travel dust out of her dress. “No visitors, no family. All alone at last.” As much as she loved her father and Calpurnia and the children… well, all she seemed to cravelately was quiet. Space. Time—to herself, to think, to decide. So many things to decide, it seemed lately.
    “Fruit on the terrace, Quintus,” Sabina told her father’s steward. “After that, you may please yourself. Go to the races, go to the games, go to the taverns; we’re all free now.”
    TITUS
    Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus took a deep breath and looked his father in the eye. “Any advice?”
    His father stared back, kindly but silent.
    “I haven’t really done this before, you know,” Titus said. “Gone courting a girl, I mean. I called on her once before, but she wasn’t there. She’s back now, so I don’t really have any more excuses to dodge this. I could use a few tips.”
    His father looked encouraging, but stayed silent. That was the problem when your father was dead, and all you had was a marble bust of him mounted on a plinth in the atrium.
    Titus straightened his thin shoulders. “Well, wish me luck.”
    He checked his toga for stains, rearranged the folds over his arm, tried vainly to smooth down the tuft of hair that kicked up on the back of his head no matter how short he told the barber to razor it. The last time he’d gone calling on Senator Norbanus’s daughter, he’d tried desperately to flatten his hair down with goose grease, and his grandfather had told him he looked like a Bithynian bum-boy. “No need to trick yourself out, lad! Your name will do the trick; her father and I are like brothers. I’ve already spoken to him; now all you have to do is charm the girl a bit.”
    Titus sighed. His friends at school complained about tight-fisted fathers, unsympathetic uncles, demanding grandfathers. But Titus had a grandfather who thought he was perfect and a father who had
been
perfect and was now dead, and that was far harder to live up to. It wasabsolutely no use telling his grandfather that an heiress related to the Emperor and courted by half of Rome was not going to be impressed by a boy of sixteen with nothing to boast but an armload of violets and six unpronounceable names. She’d probably laugh him right off her doorstep.
    “You’re in luck today,” the broad-shouldered young guard told him. “She’s in the library. I’ll show you back.”
    “Thank you for the advice about the violets,” Titus said, lengthening his stride to keep up with the guard’s long swaggering steps. He dearly wished for a little swagger himself.
    “She likes sort of