FIVE

When Vespasian came to get her he held out his hand and swiftly clasped hers. Nobody had ever done that before.

"Hello, Caenis." With the greeting his voice dropped half a tone. Her breath tangled somewhere above her middle ribs as she withdrew her hand with care.

"Hello . . ." She did not know how to address him.

He gazed at her for a moment inscrutably. "Titus," he instructed.

Very few people ever used his personal name. In the offhand Roman way his whole family was named Titus—grandfather, father, brothers, and cousins all the same—so people called him Vespasian, even at home. This intimacy offered to Caenis was the measure of the mistake the man was letting himself make. Presumably he did not realize; Caenis did.

"You look nice."

For once she smiled. Antonia had given her a new dress.

* * *

She had felt compelled to mention him to Antonia.

"Madam, when I go to the theater this evening, I have made an arrangement to meet a gentleman." The statement plunged her into visible difficulty. Doubt was transfiguring her mistress's face.

They had been in a room at Livia's House where the walls were decorated with elegant swags of greenery looped between columns, below a high golden frieze portraying tiny figures in dreamy cityscapes. Antonia reclined in a long sloping chair, while Caenis perched on a low stool with a tablet on her knees. Antonia liked to work hard without distractions, but once they finished, sometimes she kept back her secretary for a few moments of casual talk. It did her good to unbend. She tired more easily nowadays than she wanted to admit. She had lived twice as long as many people and survived more griefs than most.