One shall tame a mighty foe,

The other strike to save Rome’s fame.

Neither will achieve their aim.

Look aloft if you dare, though what you fear cannot fly,

Both will face it before you die.

There were a surprising number of scrolls relating to the Cornelii family, which Marcellus opened reluctantly. He could not believe that, locked away, they contained praise of his father’s lifelong friend. Aulus Cornelius had been, to him, the very embodiment of Roman virtue, a successful general not once but twice; a soldier’s soldier revered by the men he led; tall, handsome, with a noble brow, the very embodiment of the Roman imperium. Bound to his father by a youthful blood oath, Aulus and Lucius had been like two peas in a pod until something happened to ruin their mutual attachment. Marcellus now learnt how and when that deep companionship had become fractured.

It could not be just that Aulus had failed to attend Marcellus’s birth — certainly a deep breach of his obligations — but enough to threaten a lifelong friendship? Reading on, the reason for that absence shocked him. Campaigning in Spain, fighting a rebel leader called Brennos, Aulus’s second wife, twenty years his junior, had been taken prisoner by the Celt-Iberians. It took two seasons of hard fighting to get her back, and when discovered, she was found to be with child. Aulus had failed to attend his birth because he was attending that of his wife’s bastard, a fact unearthed by a Nubian spy, a slave that Lucius had placed in his old friend’s house.

There were good grounds to believe the child had been exposed, a perfectly natural thing to do, though there were patrician husbands who would have killed their own wife rather than risk the disgrace. More interesting was the information the slave had supplied, which indicated that the Lady Claudia was tormented by the location of that exposure, that she had in fact searched as though expecting to find the child alive, strange behaviour when any sensible person would do whatever they could to put such a damning event behind them.