“I’ll find out for you. I suspect they make them hungry first, then a man walks alongside with a fistful of grain to bribe them to sit still.”

“Like taking a child to a party,” said Helena. Her mother looked approvingly at ours, who was sitting quietly in the arms of a slave, chewing her pottery rattle; she had even tactfully chosen to gnaw a toy her grandparents had bought for her.

Planning her moment. Little Julia knew how to disrupt mealtimes. She had learned new skills since the estimable Camilli last had a chance to dote on her.

“Isn’t she good!”

Helena and I smiled the shameless public smiles of experienced parents. We had had a year to learn never to confess that our cutelooking dimpled baby could be a screaming troublemaker. We had dressed her nicely in white, combed her soft dark hair into a sweet curl, and now we were waiting with our nerves on edge for the inevitable moment when she decided to roar and rampage.

It was, as always, a good dinner, one which would have been more enjoyable had I felt able to relax. I liked Helena’s father and no longer disliked her mother. They seemed to have accepted that they were stuck with me. Perhaps they had also noticed that I had not yet lived up to expectations and made their daughter unhappy, nor had I been thrown in jail (well, not lately), barred from any public buildings, lampooned in any scurrilous satires, or featured in the rogues’ gallery in the Daily Gazette. Even so, at these gatherings there was always a risk somebody would say something offensive. Sometimes I thought Decimus secretly hoped for the thrill of it. He had a wicked streak. I knew it well; he had passed it on intact to Helena.

“Papa and Mama, you can help us with something,” said Helena over the dessert course. “Do either of you know anything about Laelius Numentinus, the Flamen Dialis, and his family?”

“What’s your problem with a flamen?” her father demanded.

“Well, I have had an early run-in with the silly old bastard,” I hedged, “though it was not face-to-face.”

“Naturally. You’d be at arm’s length, held off with his precious wand.”

“No, he has been retired; his wife died and he had to stand down. Not that it stops him complaining, apparently. The first thing that greeted me in my new post was a crisis caused by his displeasure at unwanted goslings scampering about the Capitol. I managed to avoid meeting him, or I would have been very brusque.”

“After a lifetime of being protected from close contact with the real world, he can’t be good with people-or birds.” Decimus had a definite scorn for the flaminical caste. I had always liked him. He had no time for hypocrisy. And although he was a senator, I reckoned he was politically straight. No one could buy him. That was why he had no money, of course.

He knew few of the right people either; he admitted that Laelius Numentinus was simply a figure glimpsed at public ceremonies.

“What happened to the goslings, Marcus?” asked his wife with amusement.

“I found them a good home,” I answered soberly, not mentioning that the home was ours. Helena eyed me trickily.

“And are you expecting more trouble from the man-or is there some other reason for enquiring?”

“There’s a child in his family whom they expect to be chosen as the next Vestal. I gather the Laelii can mystically influence the lottery.” I aimed the last comment at Decimus.

He raised an eyebrow, this time pretending to be shocked at the imputation of fixing. “Well,” he scoffed. “We wouldn’t want any little unscrubbed plebeian to emerge as the winner, when there are maidens with mile-long patrician pedigrees yearning to carry the water from the shrine of Egeria.”

“Famous for their antique chastity?”

“Absolutely notorious for their purity and simplicity!” concluded Helena dryly.

“No, no. It cannot be,” Julia Justa corrected me. “Being a daughter of a flamen counts as an exemption from the lottery.”

“She is the Flamen’s granddaughter, actually.”

“Then the father must have opted out of the priesthood.” Julia Justa laughed briefly. For a moment, she sounded like Helena. “I bet that went down well!” In explanation she went on, “That family are known for regarding the priesthood as their personal prerogative. The late Flaminica was notorious for her snobbery about it. My mother was a keen attendant at the rites of the Good Goddess-remember she took you once, Helena.”

“Yes. I’ve told Marcus it was just a sewing circle with dainty almond cakes.”

“Oh, of course!”

They were teasing Decimus and me. The festival of the Bona Dea was a famously secretive gathering of matrons, nocturnal and forbidden to men. All sorts of suspicions circulated about what went on there. Women took over the house of the senior magistrate-turfing him out-and then enjoyed letting their menfolk sweat over what kind of orgy they had organized.

“I seem to remember,” I challenged Helena, “you always made out that you disliked the Bona Dea festival-why was that, beloved? Too staid for you?” I smiled, playing the tolerant type and turning back to Julia Justa. “So the Flaminica would have been a regular at the festival in her official capacity?”

“And her overbearing sister too,” answered Julia Justa, with an unaccustomed smirk. “The sister, Terentia Paulla, was a Vestal Virgin.”

“A Vestal presides, if rumor is correct?”

“Well, she tries!” Julia Justa laughed. “A group of women does not necessarily succumb to leadership as a group of men would-especially once the refreshments arrive.” Out of control, eh? That confirmed the worst fears of our masculine citizenship. Not to mention suggestions that wine played a major part in the girls’ giggling rites. “My mother, who was a shrewd woman-”

“Bound to be!” I grinned, including both Helena and Julia Justa in the compliment.

“Yes, Marcus dear.” Marcus dear? I gulped back my disquiet. “Mama held that the Flaminica was very loose living.”

“Oho! On what evidence?”

“She had a lover. Everyone knew. It was more or less open. She and her ghastly sister were always arguing about it. The affair went on for years.”

“I am shocked.”

“You are not,” said Helena, flipping me with her dinner napkin. “ You are a hard-bitten and cynical private informer; you expect adultery at every turn. Mind you, I am shocked, Mama.”

“Of course you are, darling; I brought you up in a very sheltered way… Well, being Flaminica is a difficult role,” Julia Justa returned. Like Helena, she could be fair. She was a sophisticated woman: nowadays she even managed to be fair to me. “The Flamen Dialis and his wife are selected from a very narrow circle-they have to fulfill strict traditional criteria. She has to be a virgin-”

“That’s surely no trouble!” inserted Decimus satirically.

“They both have to be born of parents who have been married by confarreatio, the old-fashioned religious ceremony in front of ten witnesses, with the Pontifex Maximus and the Flamen Dialis present. Then, Marcus, they have to be married themselves with those ceremonies and can never divorce. The chances of them finding each other tolerable are remote to begin with, and if things go wrong they are trapped for life.”

“Plus the pressure of constantly appearing in public together to carry out their official functions-” I suggested.

“Oh, anyone can go through the motions in public!” Julia Justa disagreed. “It would be back at home that the tension would show.”

We all nodded sagely, while pretending to consider the concept of domestic disagreement as something remote from our own experience. As one does.

“So, what is the problem with the little girl?” asked the senator.

“Nothing at all, according to the family,” I said. “The child herself told Helena she has been threatened with serious harm. She came to see us with this tale, and I confess, I failed to take it seriously. I should have asked more questions.”