It hadn't been a joke. Alphena had known that as soon as she realized that Agrippinus was trembling with fear. He had obviously guessed how Alphena would take the news, and he knew also that Saxa would have allowed his furious daughter to punish the major domo any way she pleased even though he had only been carrying out his master's orders.

Saxa had left for his estate in the Sabine Hills that morning. He too had been concerned about how Alphena was going to take the news.

When Hedia arrived, Alphena had found no difficulty in hating her. What she couldn't do-what nobody seemed able to do-was to ignore her stepmother. Instead of ignoring Saxa's children the way their birth mother had, she had become their mother in fact as well as law. That hadn't affected Varus much; he continued to take classes and, in his spare time, write poetry-an acceptable occupation for a nobleman if not a very heroic one.

Alphena, though, had found herself being forced into ladylike pursuits. She couldn't fool her stepmother, and she had found to her amazement that Hedia's voice was louder than her "daughter's" and that she had no compunction about causing a scene.

For that matter, the servants were more afraid of Saxa's wife than they were of his daughter. Alphena and her famously bad temper could no longer rule the household. For three months she had subsided into sullen anger, which Hedia had resolutely ignored as she ignored everything that didn't suit her.

Then Alphena had found herself trapped in a place she couldn't have freed herself from, and Hedia had rescued her. Alphena had already felt gratitude toward her stepmother even before she learned that Hedia had literally gone down into the Underworld for her.

A fragment of myth fluttered through Alphena's mind: Hercules had visited the Underworld too, but he had brought the monster Cerberus back to the surface with him. What would Hedia say if Saxa had commissioned a mime on that subject instead of the conquest of Lusitania?