"Thanks!" Vespasian observed civilly, though the girls at the racetrack were definitely not nice and the delicate creatures at the Temple of Isis were quite often not even girls. He let his cloak fall open so it was obvious he was wearing full senatorial fig. "Don't I recognize your passenger?"

"I doubt it!" scoffed the footman, perfectly indifferent to anything less than a consular commander strung around with medals from at least three triumphal campaigns. But he condescended to let a junior senator grease his palm with half a denarius. "That's Caenis," he admitted discreetly.

"Antonia's slave?"

"No, sir," protested the footman, with a smirk that very clearly said, Back off, laddio; she's out of your class! "Antonia's freedwoman!"

There was only one solution now: Laddio backed off; scowled bleakly; and strode home to write Antonia's freedwoman a groveling note.

TEN

Vespasian was brief:

O Lady! A rogue from Crete would very much like to see you!

T.F.V.

He had written to her before.

The letters Vespasian wrote to her from abroad had not been embarrassing effusions. Caenis knew a great deal about love letters, from scribing them for other people. She had been deeply relieved when her own correspondent did not eulogize her as the soul of his heart and the heart of his soul, nor describe her divine eyes as entirely the wrong color, nor spend half a page announcing in gynecological detail the intimacies she could expect upon his return. Juno be praised, he never exclaimed that she was just like his mother. Instead he possessed the gift of apt quotation and a fine eye for the absurd. He told her interesting facts about his province and rude anecdotes about the people with whom he dealt. Years later, when he had earned a wide reputation as a joker, Caenis still thought that none of Vespasian's reported wit was so wickedly funny as the letters that he had written to her as a young man from Crete.