A monkey shrieked and made a full-armed gesture. Something splattered the ornate shield displayed on a frame beside the actor.

Hedia blinked, uncertain of what she had just seen. Oh by Venus! The little beast is throwing its own feces! she realized. She started to whoop with laughter, not because what had happened was particularly funny but because its unexpectedness had broken the shell of fear that had enclosed Hedia since last night's dream.

She stifled the laughter into what she hoped would pass for a coughing fit. She was horrified at herself. The incident would embarrass Saxa if he noticed it, and to have had his own wife leading the seeming mockery would shrivel his soul.

Hedia reached over and this time gripped Saxa's hand firmly. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt the gentle man who had, very likely, saved her life: he had married her when the relatives of her first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, were claiming she had poisoned him.

Maybe some of the relatives had believed that. Latus had been an unpleasant man with unpleasant tastes; one of his partners-particularly the sort of boys he favored-might well have poisoned him. Hedia wasn't the sort, though if someone had brained Latus with a statuette…

She realized she was grinning at the thought; she softened her expression instantly.

Most likely Latus had died of a perfectly ordinary fever, as thousands did every year across the empire. He had been a wealthy man, however, and if his widow was executed for his murder, that wealth would be distributed among his surviving relatives-some of whom were well connected politically.

Hedia knew that if matters had continued in the direction they were going, she would probably have been strangled by the public executioner-though in the entrance of the family home, in deference to her noble status. Instead, Saxa-a distant cousin of Latus-had asked her to marry him. Saxa's wealth and unblemished reputation immediately made the threat of prosecution vanish.