Lady of the Eternal City by Kate Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

and shouldn’t have. A blue scarf from the hair of yet another woman, one I still cared for. Small things, because a soldier never accumulates more than he can carry on a long day’s march.
    But I’d somehow accumulated more over the years. I’d accumulated people, people I couldn’t divest as easily as I’d cut off my friend Titus. I couldn’t really afford carrying people about in my heart, not with an emperor’s enmity hanging over my head—but I did. And my heart was singing that morning in Gesoriacum as I thought,
She’s here!
    I was supposed to be doing any number of things: making preparations for the Emperor’s imminent arrival, reading a stack of reports from those officious little supply clerks called the
frumentarii
with their endless tattling of the latest rumors. And I was ignoring it all, rushing down the dock with my heart fluttering in my throat, because my wife had finally disembarked.
    She let our daughters tackle me first, both of them pelting across the docks with their dark curls flying. They were getting big, but not too big yet to swoop against my armored chest, one in each arm. I smiled at their mother over their heads, and she smiled back.
    “I got
seasick
,” Dinah complained, wrinkling her nose. My eldest, a fastidious little thing even at eight. At least, I thought she was eight. Children, even my own, all looked more or less the same age to me: small. “I threw up
everywhere
.”
    “So did I,” Chaya confessed, looking worried. My second daughter always looked worried. She’d been born in the middle of an earthquake in Antioch; the world to Chaya was an uneasy place where even the ground under your feet couldn’t be trusted. “Antinous didn’t get seasick! It’s not fair!”
    “Sorry, girls, you both inherited my stomach. Next time I’ll send for you by road.” Since it was summer and the seas calm, I’d had my family brought to Gaul by boat—even on a calm sea, I’d have been heaving my guts up just as badly as my little ones. I kissed their dark curls, setting them down so I could take my wife in my arms at last, but my tall son came at me next, and I clasped him by the shoulder rather than embracing him because he was sixteen and getting too big to be tousled and hugged. “Hello, Narcissus.”
    “I hate it when you call me that,” he complained, ruffling a hand over his curly hair. Narcissus was the boy in the myth who was so beautiful he’d fallen in love with his own reflection, and my adopted son Antinous put him to shame: straight-nosed, honey-haired, near as tall as me but far more graceful, with a lean-muscled body like a young Apollo and cheekbones that could cut marble. Unlike Narcissus, though, Antinous had not one drop of vanity.
    “Antinous got in trouble,” Dinah said gleefully from my hip. “On the boat—”
    “Tattler,” he accused her.
    “You got caught kissing a
girl
in the hold!”
    I gave him a look. “Was it someone’s wife?”
    “She kissed me!” He grinned guiltily, and I could see his beautiful Bithynian mother in his smile. She hadn’t been a great passion of mine, just a girl who had kept my bed warm, but I felt enough responsibility to take charge of her young son after she died. I knew what happened to pretty children like Antinous when they didn’t have anyone to care for them. Even though I hadn’t sired him, he’d long since become my son. There’s more in life than blood.
    “It was a clerk’s wife Antinous got caught kissing, and a painted little flirt of a thing she was, too,” my wife said tartly, and my heart jumped to hear her voice. I pushed through all my various children and at last, at
last
, scooped their mother up into my arms.
    “I see you missed me, Tribune.” Mirah wound her arms tight about my neck: my russet-haired wife with her short freckled nose and her eyes a warm blue against the green scarf she’d tied about her hair to keep it from tangling in the wind. My wife, a Jew like my own mother, a