Hence the sausage. She had been enjoying both her solitude—rare for a slave—and the food too. She had scraped together the price by writing letters for other people and picking up lost coins from corridor floors. She had crept in here, sliced the meat evenly, and was cooking it in a pan intended for emulsifying face creams before she ate her treat deliberately, on her own. She craved her sausage with good reason: Her starved frame needed the meat and fat; her deprived senses hankered after nuts, spices, and the luxury of food fiercely hot from a pan. She hated being interrupted.

"Excuse me, sirs; you are not allowed in here."

Warily she tried to camouflage her annoyance. In Rome it was wise to be diplomatic. That applied to everyone. Men who thought they possessed the Emperor's confidence today might be exiled or murdered tomorrow. Men who wanted to survive had to inveigle themselves into the clique surrounding Sejanus. Making friends had been unsafe for years, for the wrong association clung like onion juice under a chef's fingernails. Yet so many promising careers were ending in disaster that today's nobodies might just survive to ride in tomorrow's triumph beneath the laurels and ribbons of the golden Etruscan crown.

For a slavegirl it was always best to appear polite: "Lords, if you are wanting Veronica—"

"Oh, do cheer up!" chaffed the first man abruptly. "We might prefer you."

Caenis gave her pan a rapid shimmy, agitating the spatula. She chortled derisively. "Rich, I hope?" The two men glanced at one another; then, with a similar slow regretful grin, both shook their heads. "No use to me then!"

She saw their veiled embarrassment: traditionalists with good family morals—in public, anyway. Veronica would shake them. Veronica was the one to astonish a stiff-necked senator. She believed that a slavegirl who was vivacious and pretty could do as well for herself as she pleased.