But it was obvious that the estate had seen better days. It had once been the home of a senatorial family that, having backed the wrong candidate in one of Rome’s many fratricidal contests over the imperial purple, had fallen on hard times and had been forced to sell up. The water supply from the aqueduct system had failed and the bathhouse had been closed down. With many roofs leaking, and the paving in the atrium and peristylium cracked and weed-ridden, some of the other buildings had been abandoned, too.

The Order itself hadn’t been much healthier than the estate. The numbers in the little community had been dwindling for some time, and when Regina arrived they were down to twenty-five. Those who remained were crammed into the surviving buildings, where they slept on bunks, stacked up like amphorae on shelves.

Still, Regina and Brica had made themselves at home here. Regina had introduced her three sullen little goddesses into the estate’s small temple: once the lararium of a senator, and now the shrine of a new and more complex family. But she was careful not to provoke Christian wrath. It had long been a tradition for Romans to identify their own deities with those of the barbarian folk they encountered in the provinces. So the matres, she said, were manifestations of the virgin mother of Christ, their three faces representing the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.

Regina had not been shy in forcing her opinions and suggestions on Julia and Helena, even from her first days.

Money was the basic problem, as always. The Order was still essentially funded by savings from the last days of the Vestal Virgins, but that was a finite resource that was quickly running down. And as much of it was held in the form of gold coins and jewelry in underground caches, it was, Regina realized quickly, uncomfortably vulnerable to robbery. The only income came from the sporadic earnings of the Order’s younger members, in such jobs as Brica’s in Amator’s bakery. But that was too little and too uneven: few women had ever earned high wages in Rome. And the group was top-heavy with older members like Julia and Helena who had no earnings at all.

Regina had immediately set about establishing a new stream of income.