At Carta’s insistence she had brought her scrolls and tablets with her from the Wall. Carta said that she should try to keep up her studies, for it was surely what Aetius would have wanted.

At first she tried. She would study in the courtyard of the house, or in her room when Marina was working. But she had to work alone. There was nobody here who could tutor her. For all his obvious business acumen and firm grasp of people, Carausias was no more educated than his niece, and beyond telling anecdotes of half-remembered plays from a decade before, he could not help her. He certainly couldn’t afford to hire a tutor.

Gradually she got bored with her solitary studying. And as the weeks wore on, the days shortening as winter approached, the work came to seem less and less worthwhile. Who was ever going to care if she remembered lists of emperors and their accession dates or not? Nobody in Verulamium was sure who the current emperor was.

And then there was Amator to distract her.

One day, as she was trying to study in her room, Amator came wandering in. “Study, study, study,” he teased her. “All you ever do. You’re so boring.”

“And you are a lazy clod with nothing better to do than annoy people,” she shot back, repeating one of his father’s taunts.

He strolled to Marina’s bed. Grinning at her, he got to his knees and felt about in the space beneath the pallet. “Aha!” he proclaimed in triumph, and he pulled out a bit of bloody rag. It was one of the loincloths Marina used to pad herself during her periods. He sniffed the dried blood and rubbed it against his cheek. “Ah, the scent of a woman . . .”

Regina was laughing, and outraged. She put down her papyrus and came after him. “That’s disgusting! Give it back—”

But he wouldn’t, and they chased around the room for a while. They had developed a way of chasing without touching, of coming close but not quite into contact, a game with subtle, unspoken rules.

At length he yielded, threw himself down on Marina’s bed, and tucked the bloody little relic back where it had come from.

“She’ll know,” said Regina.

“So what if she does? It’s only Marina.” He got up again and walked to her lararium, in one corner. “I’ve never taken a proper look at this before.” He picked up one of the matres. “By Cybele’s left nipple, how ugly.”

“Put it down.”

“And how cheap—”

“Put it down.”

He looked up, startled at her tone. “All right, all right.” He put down the little statuette—not in the right place; she promised herself she would fix it later. He said, “So every day you waste good food and wine on these bits of nonsense . . .” He eyed her. “But have you ever seen a real god?”

“What do you mean?”