behind me: a small table, three stools, shelves with a few crocks, pots and beakers, a next-to-useless cooking bench.
`Oh yes.'
For the past few months my sister Maia would have valiantly toiled up the six flights from time to time, making sure for us that no one broke in and that Smaractus, my pig of a landlord, had not tried his usual trick of squeezing extra cash from subtenants if he thought I was not here. Maia had also kept the balcony garden watered and had pinched back the herbs, though she drew the line at controlling the rose. She reckoned I had only planted it to get cheap flowers for seducing girls. All my sisters were naturally unfair.
I took charge of Helena's finger, removing the thorn with adept pressure from one thumbnail. My right hand was habitually caressing the two-month-old scar on her forearm where she had been stung by a scorpion in the Syrian desert.
`I'll be in trouble over your war wound.' Both my own mother and Helena's noble parent would blame me for taking her to such a dangerous province and bringing her back scarred for life… And there might be another new situation that would set both our mothers on the alert. Newly home after a whole summer abroad, I did not want to start broaching issues. But I took a slow breath and braced myself. `Maybe there's worse than that in store for me.'
Helena showed no reaction: so much for being mysterious.
`I think there's something we need to talk about.'
She heard the message in my tone that time. She looked at me askance. `What's wrong, Marcus?'
Before I was ready I heard myself saying: `I'm beginning to suspect I'm going to be a father.'
I fixed my gaze on the laniculan Mount and waited for her to accept or reject the news.
Helena was silent for a moment, then asked quietly, `Why do you say that?' There was a very slight rasp in her voice.
`Observation.' I tried to sound nonchalant. `Matching evidence with probability is my job, after all.'
`Well, I'm sure you're the one who knows!' Helena spoke like an angry householder whose chief steward had just accused a favourite slave of raiding the wine cellar. `How do you reckon it happened?'
`The usual way!' Now I sounded tetchy. We had only ourselves to blame. It was a classic failure of contraception – not the alum in wax letting anyone down, but two people failing to bother to use it.
`Oh,' she said.
`Oh, indeed! I'm referring to a certain occasion in Palmyra `I remember the date and time.'
As I, feared, she was sounding far from overjoyed. I decided that my consoling hand on the scorpion scar might be unwelcome; I drew back and folded my arms. Once again I gazed out beyond the Tiber to the Janiculan Hill, where I sometimes dreamed of owning a villa if Destiny ever forgot that I was the one she liked tormenting with hammerblows. My chance of ever becoming a householder in a quiet and spacious home was in fact ludicrously slim.
`I know you have your position in society to think about,' I told Helena, more stiffly than I had intended. `Your family's reputation, and of course your own.' Unhelpfully, she made no comment. It tipped me into flippancy: `I'm not asking you to stand by me.'
`I will, of course!' Helena insisted, rather bitterly.
`Better not commit yourself,' I warned. `When you've had time to think, you may not be too happy about this.'
We were not married. She was two ranks about me. We never would be married unless I could persuade the Emperor to promote me to the middle rank – which had been refused once already. One of the Caesars had turned down my request, even though I had earned quite a few favours from the Palace and my father had lent me the qualifying cash. Humbling myself to take the loan from Pa had been hard; I reckoned the Palace owed me more than favours now.
But the Palace was irrelevant. I was in a fix. Plebeians were not supposed to sleep with senators' female relations. I was not a slave, or I would have been dead meat long ago. There was no husband to be affronted, but Helena's father was entitled to view our crime in the same light as adultery. Unless I was much mistaken about the ancient traditions of our very traditional city, that gave him the right to execute me personally. Luckily Camillus Verus was a calm man.
`So how do you feel, Marcus?' Fortunately my life as an informer had trained me to avoid saying what I felt when it could only lead to trouble.
Helena filled in the gap for herself wryly, addressing the sky: `Marcus is a man. He wants an heir, but he doesn't want a scandal.'
`Close!' I said it with a smile as if both. of us were joking. She knew I was dodging the issue. Applying a serious expression, I altered my story: `It's not me who has to go through with the pregnancy and the dangers of birth.' Not to mention enduring the extreme public interest. `What I think takes second place.'
`Ho! That will be a novelty, It may not happen,' Helena suggested.
`Looks definite to me.' Helena had been pregnant with a child of mine before, miscarrying before she had even told me. When I found out, I had vowed never to be left out again. Believe me, keeping track had not been easy. Helena was the kind of girl who lost her temper if she felt she was being watched. `Well, time will show if I'm right.'
`And there's plenty of time,' she murmured. I sat there wondering: time for what?
The child would be illegitimate, of course. It would take its mother's rank – utterly worthless without a father's pedigree to quote as well. Freed slaves stood a better chance.
We could cope with that, if it ever came to it. What was likely to break us, one way or another, would happen to us before the poor scrap was even born.
`I don't want to lose you,' I stated abruptly. `You won't.'
`Look, I think it's fair to ask what you want to do.'
Helena was frowning. `Marcus, why can't you be like other men, who don't want to face up to things?' Maybe she was joking, but she sounded serious. I recognised her expression; she was not prepared to think about this. She was not intending to talk.
`Let me say what I have to.' I tried playing the man of the house, knowing this normally only got me laughed at. `I know you. You'll wait until I leave for the Forum, then you'll worry in private. If you choose a course of action, you'll try to do everything alone. I'll have to come chasing after you, like a farm boy left behind at market when the cart sets off for home.'
`You'll soon catch up,' she answered with a faint smile. `I know you too.'
I was remembering the little I knew about what she had gone through, on her own, that other time. It was best not to think, about it.
Legally, every day I kept her I was robbing her noble father. Once the results of our fling became apparent, Helena would be strongly encouraged to regularise her life. The obvious solution for her family would be a quick arranged marriage to some senator who was either too stupid to notice this, or plain long-suffering. `Helena, I just want you to promise that if there are decisions to be made, you will let me share in making them.'
Suddenly she laughed, a tense and breathy explosion of dry mirth. `I think we took our decisions in Palmyra, Marcus Didius!'
The formality cut like a boning knife. Then, just when I thought I really had lost her, she seized me in a hug. `I love you very much,' she exclaimed – and unexpectedly kissed me.
It was no answer.
On the other hand, when a senator's daughter tells a plebeian that she loves him, the man is entitled to feel a certain low pride. After that it is all too easy to be seduced by the offer of coming indoors for dinner. And there are domestic routines of an even more wicked nature that can be made to follow dinner with a senator's daughter, if you can manage to lure one of these exotic and glorious creatures away from her noble father's house.
VIII
