“I could never see over the top of that. I wonder if it’s still there.”

“Yes,” Carta said firmly. “I’m sure of it. You know your grandfather put the villa in the hands of a steward.”

“But in these times you can’t be sure of anything,” said Regina.

Carta giggled girlishly. “Oh, my. You sound like an old woman! You can trust your grandfather to look after your family’s property. He’s a good man, and family is everything to him. You are everything . . . Won’t he be worried about you? Maybe I should send a message—”

Regina shrugged. “Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding.”

Carta snorted. “I think he’d rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that.”

“Anyway he saw which way I came. If he’s worried he’ll come after me.”

Carta sipped her tea. “He doesn’t often come here, to the shadow of the Wall.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t fit. For one thing he’s older than anybody here.”

“What? That can’t be true.”

“Think about it,” Carta said, eyeing her. “You know a good few people here. You’re popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?”

None, Regina thought, shocked—even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents’ circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.

“Why is it like this?”

Carta laughed. “Because we don’t live in villas. We don’t have servants and slaves to clean our teeth. We have to work hard, all the time. It’s the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old.”

Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave—even a former slave—even Carta. “There was no shame in the way we lived,” she said hotly. “Our family was civilized, in the Roman way.”

To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, “ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naÏveté the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “

“What’s that?”

“Tacitus. You’re not the only one who’s learning to read, Regina.” She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.

It was evening, a few days after Regina’s humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. “ ‘Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together . . .’ “ She had asked for Tacitus after Carta’s mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.