The boy nodded.

“And when you’ve delivered both letters, come back here and describe Verpa to me exactly so that I know you haven’t cheated me and I will give you the other pearl earring.”

She needn’t have given up her pearl earrings, which were worth more than all the fish this boy could catch in a year. To help a cruelly imprisoned lady, to see Rome and go inside a rich man’s house, the youth would have done it for nothing. He extended a brown and muscular arm to take the packet from her. “This man Verpa, he’s your kinsman? Your friend?” “Not exactly. I need his help.” “My father wants to know how long I’ll be away.”

“Seven, eight days if you have to walk the whole way from Naples, but I expect you’ll get a ride in some lady’s coach, a good-looking boy like you.”

He flashed her a white-toothed smile: “If the lady’s as beautiful as you, I won’t mind.”

“Off with you.”

She turned and went up the path again, thinking it not the least of her miseries that the grand-daughter of the Deified Vespasian and the niece of Emperor Domitian must suffer the impudence of a peasant. As beautiful as you? Her mirror told her how this furnace of an island was already ravaging her beauty. Fear etched its mark upon her too. Fear of withering and dying here, forgotten and alone. Fear that the emperor, who had ordered her husband strangled, might turn his wrath on their helpless children, too. Did he have them now? What would that monster not sink to?

Ingentius Verpa, the informer, had denounced her and her husband to Domitian on charges of “atheism” and following Jewish practices. Atheism meant refusing to worship the gods of the official state religion, with the emperor and his deified forebears among them.