Empress Julia.’
‘Livia,’ he repeated. He liked the name, not to mention the way her tongue flicked to the front of her mouth as she pronounced it. ‘Then you may call me Marius.’
Her lips curved again and he crouched down on his haunches beside her. That seemed a reasonable compromise. He wasn’t sitting down, not exactly, and if anyone asked—not that anyone beside Pulex would dare—he could say that they’d simply been discussing the journey.
‘She seems like a good child.’ He gestured towards the girl, leaping and dancing around the moorland now like an animal newly released from a cage.
‘She is.’
‘How old?’
‘Four years last autumn.’
‘You’re a widow?’
‘As opposed to?’ Her smile vanished and he winced at his own tactlessness.
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply anything else.’
She gave him a long look and then shrugged. ‘It’s all right. At my age I suppose I could just as easily have been divorced.’
He lifted an eyebrow at the words. A lady didn’t usually mention her age, let alone the possibility of divorce. The laws around marriage had been tightened considerably over recent years, so that a man could no longer readily divorce his wife unless he could prove adultery, but for some reason he didn’t want to think about that.
‘Have you been widowed long?’
‘Two months.’
‘Only two?’
He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. If Scaevola had arrived in Coria a month ago and the betrothal had been arranged before he’d left Lindum then it meant that her brother must have betrothed her within weeks of her husband’s death.
‘Only two.’ She repeated the words quietly, though with a distinct edge of bitterness.
He frowned at the implication. Bad enough that she was being sent to marry Scaevola, but to betroth her while she was still in mourning... He felt a flicker of anger towards the unseen brother. What kind of man would do such a thing?
‘You looked surprised when you saw Julia.’ She sounded anxious this time. ‘Weren’t you expecting her?’
He hesitated briefly and then shook his head. So much for not asking awkward questions...
‘No, but I only received my orders this morning. Perhaps it was simply an oversight.’
‘It wasn’t.’ She clasped her hands together in her lap with an air of conviction. ‘My brother must not have mentioned her.’
‘I understand it was your brother who arranged the betrothal.’ He wondered what on earth was compelling him to pursue the subject.
‘Yes.’ She gave a bleak-sounding laugh. ‘He knows an opportunity when he sees one. But I suppose there’s no turning back now...’
He felt an obscure sense of discomfort. The wistful note in her voice made the words sound like a question, as if she were actually asking him to let her turn back, to let her escape.
Escape? The word entered his head unexpectedly, increasing his sense of unease, though he resented its meaning. He wasn’t her captor and Coria wasn’t a prison. He was only following his orders, escorting her to a new life with a new husband, that was all. There was no coercion or force on his part. If anything, he was protecting her. There was certainly no need for him to feel guilty, even if something about her made him feel strangely defensive.
‘Is that what you want, to turn back?’ He asked the question before he could think better of it and saw her eyes widen with a look of surprise.
‘Yes...no... I don’t know.’ She looked and sounded genuinely torn. ‘That is, I want to see the wall. I’ve always wanted to see it, ever since I was a little girl...but not like this.’ She clamped her lips together as if she were trying to stop herself from saying something else and then couldn’t resist, her blue-green eyes blazing with sparks of defiance as the words seemed to burst out of her. ‘As for Lucius Scaevola, I wish he’d never come to Lindum. I wish he’d never set foot inside my brother’s tavern. Most of all, I wish I’d never heard his name!’
‘We’re almost there, lady.’
Livia pulled back the window curtain at the sound of Marius’s voice. He was walking beside the carriage, looking no different to the way he had earlier, as if the day’s march had been nothing more than a light stroll. His uniform still looked pristine, without so much as a speck of dust on it. How was that possible?
‘You mean Coria?’
‘Take a look.’
He gestured ahead and she craned her head out of the window, surprised to see that they were already entering the outskirts of a small town. There were shops and stalls and taverns as well as several stone villas, more than she would have expected at such a remote outpost.
‘Most visitors from the south are surprised.’ Marius gave her a knowing look. ‘But not everyone here is a legionary.’
‘But I thought it was a fortress?’
‘It is. Over there.’ He pointed down the street towards a tall stone palisade fronted by two massive watchtowers. ‘This is just the vicus, the town that’s grown up around it.’
‘What about the great wall? Is it behind the fort?’
‘No, lady, we’re still two miles from the wall. Coria is a base for the Sixth Legion, four cohorts of it anyway. The forts along the wall are manned by auxiliaries.’
‘Auxiliaries?’ She didn’t understand the distinction. ‘What are those?’
‘Soldiers who aren’t citizens.’
‘You mean they aren’t Roman?’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘Then why do they man the wall? Why fight for Rome?’
‘To gain their citizenship—’ he gave her a strange look as if the answer ought to be obvious ‘—once they’ve served their twenty-five years like the rest of us.’
‘So they do all the hard work while you sit back here?’
‘Not exactly.’ His expression slipped into a frown. ‘The legion was sent back from Gaul by Emperor Severus to restore those parts of the wall damaged by the northern invasion a few years ago. That means hundreds of men doing building work and providing military support where necessary. Believe me, none of us gets to sit back and do nothing.’
‘Oh...no, I suppose not.’
She bit her tongue, already regretting the words. It had been an insulting, not to mention revealing,
