Veronica usually tried to be kind, for she felt Caenis had never enjoyed much of a life. "Some of them don't know the rules. When you say no, they think you mean it."

Caenis bobbed away from the side of the swimming bath, then paddled gently back. "I did."

"Darling, there's your answer, then!"

Before she back-flipped like some overeager performing dolphin, Caenis added with rueful bitterness, "It's my own fault. When he promised that he would see me again, I forgot the free citizen's prerogative—not to bother to tell the truth to someone else's scabby slave!"

Then Veronica replied with the two things a girl needed her friend to say: "You're not scabby, you're lovely—and your Sabine friend's a fool!"

* * *

Going home to his mother was not the ideal escape. His mother had plans for him.

Flavius Vespasianus had been brought up in a family where women had a voice. The men went about their business in a perfectly capable manner, but they owed their position in society to the women they had married, and those women refused to be ciphers. For instance, though his brother had the same cognomen as their father, Vespasian was named after his mother. Vespasia Polla was not unique in receiving this sign of respect, though many women were denied it.

Vespasian's grandfather had married money; then his father allied himself to social status. While his father was away making a useful fortune as a banker in Helvetia, Vespasian had been brought up by his grandmother Tertulla on her large estate at Cosa on the northwest coast of Italy. Nowadays, with the family established nearer to Rome, his mother had assumed the influence that his grandmother had wielded during his happy childhood in Etruria.