"Wait there," called a woman's voice. I heard whispered conversation and more laughter. Finally she appeared in the doorway, wearing a loose, unbelted gown which did very little to conceal the plump, voluptuous contours of her body. Masses of ginger-coloured hair were piled and pinned atop her head. Whatever she had been doing in her bath, she had managed not to get her hair wet.

I had met her father once long ago. The dictator Sulla had been near the end of his life; Fausta Cornelia must have been no more than a child then. Thirty years later, she was still too young to show the ravages of severe dissipation, which had ruined her father's looks, but there was a decided family resemblance – the same fair complexion, the same carnivorous smile, the same wilful fire behind the eyes. She was not graceful; when she moved, some part of her body always seemed to jiggle or sway. Instead of grace, she exuded a ripe fleshiness, and even from a considerable distance I could feel the radiant heat of her body, flushed and pink from her hot bath. Her high birth had attracted two promising husbands; other attributes had attracted a steady string of lovers, and I was being given a good look at them.

"So, you're the Finder," she said.

"Yes. I came to see your husband on a matter of business." "My husband isn't here."

"No?" I looked towards the door to the bath. I could still hear an occasional splash and the sound of voices.

"If Milo were here, do you think I'd be taking a bath with two of his gladiators?"

She looked to see if her candour would shock me. I did my best to keep a blank expression.

"I realize that Milo must be very busy during his last days in Rome," I said. "It isn't absolutely necessary that I see him face to face, but I do want to make sure that he receives this." I held up the little scroll with Pompey's seal.

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, not another bill! Thank the gods I kept my own income, even if it is in my brother's name." She took the scroll from me and walked down a short hallway. She jiggled a good deal behind as well, I noticed. We came to a cluttered room filled with documents. "My husband's study," she announced, with an air of distaste. "From here, he was going to run the Republic. What a joke that turned out to be! I suppose there'll never be another man like my father, a real man who can bring this unruly town to heel."

"I'm not so sure of that," I said quietly, thinking of Pompey, and of Caesar.

She didn't hear. "This is the latest pile of bills," she said, indicating a tall box overflowing with scrolls and scraps of parchment. "Shall we toss yours on top? There. But don't be surprised if it gets moved to the bottom, or lost altogether."

"Who's attending to sorting out all these bills? Is your husband doing it himself?"

"Gods, no! Milo's a wreckage; he can hardly sort out which shoe to put on first in the morning. One peek inside this room and he's reduced to a blubbering baby. No, this will all be dealt with after he leaves. Cicero will take care of it. Or Tiro will, I should say; Tiro is a wonder at organizing things."

"I see. Here, then, let's put my request aside from all the rest. If you would, tell Cicero to honour it first. Tell him that Gordianus the Finder insists. Cicero will know why. So will Tiro."

She looked at me wryly. "And you think I don't? I know who you are, Finder. I'm more aware of my husband's affairs than you seem to think. He was quite bent on killing you, you know. It was all he talked about for days."

"Really?" Her candour about her lovers was not nearly as startling as her candour about her husband's plots.

"Oh, yes. Milo considered you to be quite a menace. You should be honoured, I suppose. Of course, towards the end, he was seeing an assassin in every cupboard and a spy behind every bush. You obsessed him for a while. Cicero kept telling him that he was blowing any threat you posed out of all proportion. Cicero said that your reputation was grossly inflated, that you were barely competent, really, and that Milo should stop worrying about you."

"How kind of Cicero."

"He was trying to protect you, you fool. But Milo was determined to see you dead, in a cold sweat about it. In the end Cicero made him agree to a compromise, and Milo simply had you abducted But you must be as clever and persevering as he thought – you escaped before the trial came up. By Hercules, what a fright you must have given Cicero when you popped up on the road right in front of him!" She emitted a short, barking laugh.

"I only wish I could have appreciated the humour at the time."

"Can't we all say that, in retrospect? If only I'd known that marrying Milo would turn into such a joke! And that horrible day on the Appian Way, when I thought I was living through a nightmare, it was really all a grotesque farce from beginning to end. The cruellest irony of all was that Milo never intended to kill Clodius. The fight broke out on its own, and when Milo sent his men after Clodius, he ordered them to spare him! The gladiators still swear that they didn't touch Clodius at the inn."

"Is that a fact?"

"Do you doubt it? Come, I'll let them tell you the story themselves." She took me back to her room. "Boys! You can come out of the bath now. My visitor has promised not to bite you."

First one appeared, then the other; the two of them could not possibly have fitted through the door at once. They wore-loincloths but were otherwise naked and still damp from their bath, two great steaming masses of hairy flesh, each of them twice the size of an ordinary man. I noticed that they were nicked with little scars here and there, but were mostly unmarked, as one might expect of gladiators who had never lost a match. They moved with surprising lightness and grace considering their bulk. Unlike Fausta, nothing shook or jiggled when they walked; for all their fleshiness, their muscles were as solid as marble.

I winced to see their famously ugly faces so close. "Eudamus and Birria," I whispered.

They walked across the room with supreme nonchalance, pushed aside the diaphanous drapery and lay down side by side on Fausta's sleeping couch. The frame groaned and sagged under their weight.

"My husband intends to take them with him to Massilia," said Fausta wistfully. "He'll need protection, of course. But gods, I shall miss the two of them!"

"I take it that you don't intend to accompany your husband into exile?"

"Follow Milo to Massilia, to live among Greeks and Gauls and washed-up Roman windbags? I had sooner live out my days on Milo's pig farm down in Lanuvium."

I looked at Eudamus and Birria warily. "Are you sure they can talk?"

"It seems almost too much to expect, doesn't it, given all their other talents? But yes, they can actually speak – though it's Birria who does all the talking. Eudamus is the shy one, because he's so much prettier, I suppose." The less repulsive of the two made a simpering smile and actually blushed. The uglier one wrinkled his nose and grunted. "Boys, this is Gordianus. I was telling him a few things about the day that Clodius died, and he didn't believe me."

"Do you want us to tear his head off his shoulders?"

"No, Birria. Perhaps some other time. Do you remember how the fight started that day?"

"Of course." Birria crossed his arms behind his head, showing off biceps as big as his head. "We met that fool Clodius on the road, which might have been trouble right off, but we passed without a hitch, everything as smooth as silk. But the fool couldn't let the opportunity pass to shout an insult at us at the last moment."

"And you lost your temper, didn't you?" Fausta commiserated.

"I did. I threw my spear at him. I meant it to whizz by his head, but he made a move and it hit his shoulder." Birria laughed. "Knocked him clean off his horse, and I didn't even mean to. Then it was Mars in charge and every man for himself. We got the best of them. Pretty soon they were running like rabbits into the woods and down the road."