Vespasian's slaves knew now that there was a woman on his mind. They were still not sure if it was any particular one.

Capito gossiped happily of libel actions, charioteers, trade, the elections, his mother-in-law, his gambling debts, his barber's new Gallic pomades. A companion rarely had to answer him; he just liked a body there to spare him the ignominy of talking to himself. . . .

There were two young women standing on the bathhouse steps.

"What's up?" Capito demanded, when his companion's cursory attention dried up altogether. He bore no malice; he was only surprised that Vespasian had troubled himself to loiter so long. The man was affable, but not renowned for chat.

"Wonder if I know that girl?"

Capito came to his shoulder.

One was a blonde, flimsily wrapped in a riveting crimson robe, with parcels spilling around her feet. She was exquisite, and no doubt exquisitely expensive. Cataracts of silver tumbled from her ears, flashing like cymbals in an amphitheater parade; filigree ropes wound over her dramatic chest. She remained barefaced and bareheaded, ignoring passers-by while the bead-sellers, the augurs' bowl boys, the plasterers, pastry chefs, and pensioned-off centurions all longingly stared at her.

"It's Veronica," announced Capito. At once a number of necks craned dangerously among their slaves. "Much sought after, and amenable to being sought! Want an introduction?"

The other debated the offer as long as was polite. His slaves watched him curiously, keen for him to try his luck. They knew that when he chose he never went short. They also knew that he reckoned never to pay.

"Not my type." He stroked his chin. Capito laughed.

Even from halfway down the street, Veronica's companion looked wondrously dignified.

The second girl—hardly a girl now—was wound several times in modest layers of cloth, wrapped around her body and over her head until her shape was completely disguised and her face invisible. Even so, that fine way she stood was all her own. Capito had said nothing about her. Nor did Vespasian. "Thanks, Capito."

With a nod to his escort, he left everyone behind and began to work nearer up the street.

He was waiting for the women to separate, but despite the poor weather they were dawdling on the steps. He stopped, sidestepping under the portico of a butcher's shop, pretending to eye a rack of Spanish hams.

At last: Veronica was being collected by a double sedan chair; behind its opaque talc windows lurked a shadowy figure, no doubt some well-gilded crab. She scrambled aboard. The other woman patiently helped hand in the parcels, then leaned forward to allow herself to be kissed good-bye. As she straightened, her mantle fell back from her head. It was definitely Caenis.

She looked different.

This Caenis had parted her hair in the middle, twisted back interesting loops above her ears with glinting combs, then pinned up all the rest in fantastic braids. With a man's eccentricity he wondered first of all why?—before he realized from the smart, poised, elegant set of her head exactly why: That was how Caenis had been born to look. The real question was: Who paid for her hairdresser?

There was something wrong with her face. The defiant, demon-haunted look had been sharpened up with cosmetics—he could soon get used to that—and there was something else. Caenis had a strong face with a clear expression. He remembered the expression perfectly: the painful mixture of striving and mistrust. It had gone. Something had happened to her. Somebody had changed her. This Caenis looked strangely serene.

She had kept her knack of standing perfectly straight and still. She was trying to lift her mantle again, but blusters of wind constantly snatched the edge from her hand. Vespasian arrived near enough to glimpse coral beads in her ears. What bastard gave her those?

Then something astounding happened.

Caenis turned suddenly, calling to a wizened scrap who skipped out from a pillar with the thong of an oil flask wrapped around her wrist. It almost looked as if she had her own slave, though that should be impossible. A discreet litter drew up; Caenis and her companion hurried in, and at once the steps were folded away, the half-door shut for them and curtains impenetrably pulled.

As Vespasian sprang forward to roar out her name, an unusually solid footman swung smack into his path.

"Now, sir!"

Rome had turned upside down.

"I want a word with that woman—" The chair was already moving off.

"Not that one, sir! Try the racetrack," advised the footman frankly, "or the Temple of Isis. Plenty of nice girls about."

"Thanks!" Vespasian observed civilly, though the girls at the racetrack were definitely not nice and the delicate creatures at the Temple of Isis were quite often not even girls. He let his cloak fall open so it was obvious he was wearing full senatorial fig. "Don't I recognize your passenger?"

"I doubt it!" scoffed the footman, perfectly indifferent to anything less than a consular commander strung around with medals from at least three triumphal campaigns. But he condescended to let a junior senator grease his palm with half a denarius. "That's Caenis," he admitted discreetly.

"Antonia's slave?"

"No, sir," protested the footman, with a smirk that very clearly said, Back off, laddio; she's out of your class! "Antonia's freedwoman!"

There was only one solution now: Laddio backed off; scowled bleakly; and strode home to write Antonia's freedwoman a groveling note.

TEN

Vespasian was brief:

O Lady! A rogue from Crete would very much like to see you!

T.F.V.

He had written to her before.

The letters Vespasian wrote to her from abroad had not been embarrassing effusions. Caenis knew a great deal about love letters, from scribing them for other people. She had been deeply relieved when her own correspondent did not eulogize her as the soul of his heart and the heart of his soul, nor describe her divine eyes as entirely the wrong color, nor spend half a page announcing in gynecological detail the intimacies she could expect upon his return. Juno be praised, he never exclaimed that she was just like his mother. Instead he possessed the gift of apt quotation and a fine eye for the absurd. He told her interesting facts about his province and rude anecdotes about the people with whom he dealt. Years later, when he had earned a wide reputation as a joker, Caenis still thought that none of Vespasian's reported wit was so wickedly funny as the letters that he had written to her as a young man from Crete.

She had expected him to practice his shorthand. In fact, since she had given him her ciphering notes too, he used code. At the back of her reference sheets he had found a system the teenaged Caenis once invented herself: "My Code: By Caenis" was excellent; without the key, it took Caenis herself three weeks to unravel Vespasian's first letter, even though she had once been the star of her cipher class.

She took a long time to reply. Caenis had never written a letter for herself. Vespasian's second arrived before she had answered his first. Yet by the middle of his tour she too had found her style and her length; she settled into speaking directly with the candor that he obviously liked, and learned to enjoy herself. Enjoying herself was almost certainly a mistake, but she no longer cared.

* * *

For reasons she could not explain, Caenis had never mentioned to him that she had gained her freedom.

That year a sense of fatality had afflicted her mistress, Antonia. She was bound to feel the loneliness of a woman whose contemporaries had all gone, many in grim circumstances, which as an elderly lady she remembered more distinctly than her breakfast that morning. She was smitten by an urge to set things in order.