Entranced by a neglected sprawl of jasmine, Caenis had made this her private domain. It was a faintly dusty, comfortable place, kept private from formal visitors. She liked to lounge there even late in the day, when the palest sunshine lancing down low over the main pantiles soon made it surprisingly warm. Sometimes after dinner, when Antonia retired early to bed, Caenis sat there in silence in the dark.

Her little slave, a child who lacked any susceptibility to the romance of private thought, usually brought her a bowl of pistachios and a proper table lamp.

* * *

"Hello, Caenis."

There was a lamp being brought but no nuts, and it was not her little slave.

"Who is it?" she gurgled foolishly. Pointless; no one else spoke her name with the solemnity of a religious address. Vespasian's substantial shadow unraveled and shrank down and up the folding doors that led out from the house. "Oh! I had better call my girl."

"You had better not," he retorted calmly. "I've just given her a copper to keep out of the way."

Reaching her, he held aloft his pottery lamp: the same sunny disposition, the same frowning face. Gazing back, where she reclined among cushions, wrapped in a deep-blue robe, Caenis felt herself breaking into a slow, tranquil grin to welcome him.

"Antonia Caenis; Caenis Antonia!" He pronounced it in full as a deliberate compliment, acknowledging her new right to be named after her patroness: that bad-tempered slavey he had first met with the pan of hot sausage, forever now allied to the noble families of Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony.

"Just Caenis." She shrugged. He barked with mirth; she would never change.

He set his lamp on a plinth. "An imperial freedwoman," he marveled. "Smiling on a veranda under the stars." He sat on the edge of a pillar base, holding his head ruefully between his hands. "O elegant and influential young lady! Far, far above a poor provincial bumpkin's reach."