Diana was eternally grateful to the whims of fate for placing her in the care of the Lady Lucilla

Diana was eternally grateful to the whims of fate for placing her in the household of the Lady Lucilla. Somehow, though she had loathed being reduced from the rank of a patrician's treasured daughter to the level of a servant, she soon came to feel as though it were she being cared for by the Princess, and not vice versa.

Lucilla was unlike any royal lady Diana had met in her pampered life. Her purpose in life seemed more than to set an example for her inferiors, but to see to their welfare personally. She had been a legendarily good mother to Lucius, and as a result, the complete lack of petulance in the boy had at one time been the talk of the land. When someone she loved or felt responsible for – this included her ladies in waiting – was hurt, physically or emotionally, she felt their pain with them, and did everything she humanly could to relieve it.

Her own life had rarely been comfortable and had never been easy, but the optimism and consolation Lucilla brought to those around her made her the most beloved woman in the whole of the Empire, and the one who would never be forgotten. Instead she would be canonised, along with General Maximus, in the imaginations of the people of Rome for many generations to come.

Quintus, therefore, was not the only person to feel the loss of the Princess so keenly. He was, however, the only man as yet to form a design on that which she had supposedly left behind.

* * *

The people of Rome, as they went about their early-morning business, were kind to the lone young woman and her child as she trod the crowded streets, following detailed directions given by the kind driver of the cart who had made the journey with them. These parts of the city were not so squalid or uncivilised as she had once been led to believe. Raising her head to see above the heads of the figures all around her, she saw the grey-bricked building the driver had told her to seek out. As if to give her approval, Julia gurgled, reclining in her arms.

Diana smiled down at the baby and quickened her pace, desperate to be indoors where she could gather her thoughts and decide what to do next. True to her unspoken word, Lucilla had cared for her "chosen one" to the end: Diana had, sewn into the lining of her heavy tunica, more money than she had ever guessed existed – an unsolicited gift from her mistress. She and Julia should have been made more than comfortable, but the former handmaiden, educated thoroughly by the Princess of Rome, was thrifty for the moment.

The apartment she shortly found herself in would serve for the time being: a single room, furnished modestly, with a low but sturdy bed for Diana and a cradle for Julia. Supplies would be needed, and many of them. Diana was scared by the thought, though definitely not for want of finances. She had never bought anything for herself or anyone else in her life. The choice of a communal dwelling rather than an isolated house had not, consequently, been accidental. Her planned tactic for survival was to observe others, discreetly, and then to imitate them.

This was where fate had brought her. Her third life in twenty-one years, yet this latest would be infinitely more complicated and trying than that of a political pawn or a servant had been.

Julia took to her new home much more quickly than her new mother did.

In her cradle, cosseted in the small selection of makeshift coverings Diana had thought to bring with her, the normally jittery child made short work of falling asleep.

Diana removed her clothes, which by now were sticking to her skin with nervous sweat. She did not even notice how hungry she was, so familiar had the feeling become in recent days. After giving Julia her milk and seeing to the baby's every comfort, she often and easily forgot her own needs. She lay down on the bed, finally resting and luxuriating in silence and comfort.

Hours passed as she attempted to relax fully, her mind blank, only slightly cheered by the quiet noises Julia made in her untroubled slumber. The air cooled, and Diana slid beneath a thin, scratchy blanket, tempted to cover up her head, but thinking the better of it in case Julia should cry.

Sleep came eventually, just as soon as her nerves – left on edge by the baby's constant demands – saw fit to calm. In the morning, the last thing Diana would remember seeing in her prolonged wakefulness was the dark azure blue spilling in from the perfect Roman night outside, embracing and beautifying her meagre surroundings like a welcome home gift.

In her blurry dreams, she thought she saw Lucilla, and her heart soared with pleasure. The room around her was suddenly not a paltry rented apartment, but the lady's magnificent chamber of state, rich and golden like a shrine to her great goodness and beauty. Diana strained to see the figure walking towards her from across the grandly elongated room, wanting fiercely to see the fallen lady one more time.

But no. The woman was too short and sturdy, her step too languid and her complexion much too dark to be that of Lucilla. Diana felt a great part of herself, momentarily revived by thoughts of her mistress, lying dormant once more.

"Diana, you shame us," said the woman sternly, still walking.

The voice was like a dagger to her, and she could barely fathom why, until she recognised her mother's face. Thin, drawn and constantly frowning grimly, making her children feel guilty was the only way she had known how to control them.

Slowly, Diana's gaze fell to the other woman's stomach as they both stood still, which was full and round. Her mother was pregnant, quite heavily so.

"Mother…" she began.

Then, the overwhelming, sickening stench of blood came to her nostrils suddenly as torrents of gore began to pour from beneath her mother's skirts. Her belly was deflating, and as it did, she looked down at the shocking spectacle with a look of pure…surprise.

"Oh, Diana," said the vision unhurriedly, standing sedately in a pool of her own life force. "What have you done to us now?"

Diana merely gaped, moaning in horror, and then screamed. Or thought she did. Her instinct was to run away, but she seemed paralysed, staring at the blood and perversely fascinated. She waited to see the dead baby float out from beneath its mother, but it did not. Some repressed memory had been triggered, something frightening and repugnant to her, which for the moment was lost.

When she woke, seconds later, her pillow was soaked with tears. Despite the terror of her nightmare, however, she felt oddly rested and comfortable. Turning over automatically to check on Julia, she breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the baby, still bound up in her blankets and sleeping.

"That's the quietest the little monster's ever been in her life," she said to herself, absently.

Then it came to her.

The games – the stuff of her teenage nightmares. Emperor Commodus, whom she had thankfully directly encountered only once or twice during his reign, parading those people out to kill one another for sport. Most of her contemporaries had thought it good, even necessary for national unity, to display and observe such things.

She had thought it barbaric. Death, the sound of metal crashing upon metal, cries of pain, the roar of the unscrupulous crowd's cheers. The blood. It was a mystery to her, even now, what putrid recesses of human nature would dream up, let alone implement, such horrid concepts. It was just one of the reasons she had despised her family so much.

There were, however, other reasons for her hatred. Other memories, buried like the dead, such as those which caused her, at this moment, to try and forget the image of her mother that she had just revisited.

In all her life to come, Diana knew that rose petals would disgust her, and all because of the part they had played in that horrifying final display.

Rubbing her eyes, and rising sluggishly from her bed, Diana walked the short distance to Julia's cradle, gathering up the resting girl in her arms and rocking her gently, scrutinising her face and the wispy thatch of corn-coloured hair on her tiny head.

In that second, the first traces of gratitude for Lucilla's beautiful legacy manifested themselves. Lying back down, Diana placed Julia next to her and held her close, breathing in her sweet smell, trying to detect the Princess of Rome somewhere in her daughter's aroma.

The link her subconscious had tried to make between childbirth and tragedy seemed obvious to Diana, even in her drowsy mental state. Julia's face beside her own, she was gradually overcome by some oppressed maternal love for the child in Lucilla's eternal absence.

"You," she whispered, "were probably the only good thing, besides your mother, ever to come out of that travesty of a royal bloodline. I wish you could stay tiny forever so that I might never cease talking to you this way."

Diana's attention was caught at that moment by such close inspection of her charge. In all the time that had passed since Lucilla's death, barely a moment had been spared for Diana to give her attention exclusively to Julia. She narrowed her eyes, staring into the tiny sleeping face again, fundamental questions forming in her mind. Golden hair and heartrending smile from her mother. Eyes, not Lucilla's – presumably Julia's anonymous father. Who could he have been?

"I never asked her," Diana thought, eyes filling with tears again, clouding the semi-darkness around her.

* * *

Lucilla and Maximus's aborted affair had not, mercifully, been common knowledge among Rome's citizens. It had, however, burgeoned on the lips of the wives of the capital's highest senators, bored to distraction by their narrow lives. Many men in higher places had subsequently gotten wind of the rumour meant to blacken these people's reputations, but whenever they had, they paid it little heed. The lady was a widow, and a silent though much-loved pillar of the ruling elites. If she were married, still of childbearing age as she had been, there would have been much more cause for concern – the shaky line of succession could simply not afford to be placed in further jeopardy. This was the reason such harsh penalties were imposed upon female adulterers of royal and noble families. As it was, everyone knew that Lady Lucilla abided by only the most upright moral code. She and the General Maximus could certainly never marry, but should they choose to fall in love, most people had far too much love and respect for both of them to interfere or pass judgement upon them.

Then, however, there were those people whose whole livelihoods depended upon every movement in the high places of the Empire. When these people were not desperately working to improve their own position in this great and complex hierarchy, in which family and birthright meant everything, they were usually frustrated and malevolently disdainful towards those who were handed their power on a plate by their affluent fathers.

One such creature was Quintus. The mere second son of an equite – a man of property, slightly less powerful than a patrician – he had lived for seventeen excruciatingly uncertain years in the shadow of his brother Marcellus. Marcellus was the unquestioned favourite, having inherited their mother's fine bone structure and full, handsome face, along with their father's prodigious intelligence and ruthlessness in a political world which, were in not for his tireless efforts, may well have refused to ever accept them.

Their family were not one of the ancient bloodlines that had dominated the social and political elites for centuries, but their attempts to join this upper crust soon became legendary. As a child, always pushed into dark corners while Marcellus was praised for his fledgling achievements in their father's footsteps, Quintus had practically been relegated to the status of a daughter. Yet at the same time, he was denied even the status of his four younger sisters, who (all but one) were married before they turned fourteen to three brothers, all sons of a hideously wealthy patrician.

The company of his one maiden sister, aged ten, was both a blessing and a curse to Quintus in his despair. She had been brain damaged at birth, and her brother spent the whole of her short life trying half-heartedly to make stimulating conversation with her, to engage what intellect she had, just to form the basis of some meaningful companionship between them. He never achieved his goal. No number of expensive physicians could do anything to help young Maria, and she died before her eleventh birthday a few months later.

The power of Quintus's grief surprised him, and then disgusted him. His pride would not allow him to admit that in his whole life, the only friendship he had even come close to having had been with a mentally handicapped girl. It was terrible of him to think such things of his poor sister, his mother had yelled, tears streaming down her face, while beating him for his insolence. Maria had been the one of her babies she thought she would never have to give up. Now, it seemed, she was stranded in their great estates with only Quintus, who enraged her.

Marcellus, meanwhile, married a woman of direct royal descent, practically a cousin of Marcus Aurelius. Then, just before Quintus turned eighteen with still no career prospects of his own beside army duty, his brother was hit by a stray arrow on a hunting expedition at which his father and two of his uncles were present. He was killed outright, aged twenty, with a glittering and hard-earned future in politics wasted and a young bride set to inherit almost everything he left behind.

If Marcellus had not married, all of his property would have gone straight to Quintus. All that was now left to be passed down was their father's ambition for one of his sons, just one, to succeed in Roman politics.

It was all of these things which had formed the basis of Quintus's contempt for the opposite sex: jealously of three of his sisters, more successful than he; irrational anger at Maria for dying and leaving him in such grotesque loneliness; hatred of his mother for hating him; and rage at his sister-in-law for marrying Marcellus and becoming his heir.

Thus, he could never look at a woman without a combination of scorn and condescension to her undoubtedly high rank. High-ranking, ridiculously empowered women were virtually the only kind he had met in his recent life.

Until Lucilla. Now, with her death and the news of the possible existence of an unclaimed child, he was finally faced with a real opportunity to redeem his father's position and render unjust all the man's lowest opinions of his youngest son. The thought made him boil with long-held anger, and then a rare glimmer of happiness with this new possibility.

Lucilla was splendid, but the infant, being hers, was not enough. Her son Lucius remained in Rome, his guardians consolidating his claim to power. Having located it, for the child to be valuable to revolutionaries in Rome, Quintus would have to find evidence that it was also the offspring of the General Maximus.