"Nudged into it, eh?" The custodian pretended not to understand him. "What's that racket over there?"

"Overhauling the main catalogue, sir; quite a task. A lady who is helping reminded us about the two hundred thousand volumes Mark Antony lifted from the Library at Pergamum. Some poor dog must have recorded those! She said, did we realize that Cleopatra was just a girl who liked to curl up with a good read. . . ." He subsided into giggles.

After a worrying pause the senator abruptly grinned too, transfiguring his face. "Sounds like Caenis!" He could hear her voice in his head, deceptive and crisp, as she made the daft comment. "Is she here?"

"Not now."

"Ah."

Another pause.

Eighteen months abroad was nothing to a man who had already lived away from home, doing his military service at a much younger, more impressionable age. Who could say what eighteen months might bring to an ambitious female slave?

He had expected Caenis to make her way. Yet there seemed an odd discrepancy today. He had marked her as a worker. Now she seemed to rely on others, while she merely went flitting from place to place, never needing to lift her pen; for a slave she was taking horribly public risks.

"Speaking of Caenis—I have something of hers I borrowed."

"You could drop in on her at Antonia's house, sir. You might be offered lunch!"

A much longer pause: Antonia's house? Drop in? Lunch?

On rare occasions elderly citizens grew so incapable of managing their own affairs that unscrupulous slaves took over their property and ruled like monarchs in their homes, while the senile patrons were locked away in little rooms and starved. . . . Still, Antonia had family to protect her interests. Her son Claudius, though kept from public life, was an author and antiquarian—perfectly fit to supervise if ever his mother's capacities failed. And not Caenis, surely? Caenis could not be capable of abusing an old woman.