This hilltop village was still small and, in its rough unplanned clutter, hardly a Roman community. But pilgrims came from afar to visit Alban’s martyrium, bringing their wealth with them. Even today, listening to this dry stuff about the nature of sin, there might have been forty people—a big gathering for Verulamium nowadays—and many of them were brightly dressed for the occasion, in jauntily dyed tunics and cloaks. People had brought their children, who played at their feet. There was even a seller of roast meat working the crowd, adding to the odd carnival atmosphere.

She looked back down the hill to the old town itself. From here she could easily trace the lines of its walls, the lozenge shape sketched on the plain by the river, and she could make out the neat gridwork of the street layout, connected up to the roads that marched away to north, south, and west. There was plenty of activity, carts and pedestrians passing along the main roads and through the gates, and a bustle of activity around the stalls in the Forum. But she could see how stretches of the wall had been broken down, and how, even in the six years she had been here, the green had risen like a tide, encroaching the center of the town and flooding the broken-down shells of abandoned buildings.

Carausias complained of how the community around the shrine was drawing the last blood out of the old town. But Regina cared nothing for that. Why should she bother about the upkeep of public buildings, or the problems of paying soldiers, or keeping bacaudae out of the town? She was seventeen years old. All she wanted was to have fun. And the fact was, such excitement as there was to be had was up here on the Christians’ hill.

“. . . Who would ever have thought that my little Regina would grow up to be a student of theology?”

It was Amator. At the sound of his voice Regina whirled.

He stood close, not a hand’s breadth away. He was dressed in a bright tunic of yellow and green, and he wore an elaborate scarf of what looked like silk, pinned at his throat by a small brooch. His thick black hair, brushed back from his tanned face, was heavy with powder and oil. At his side was a man she did not recognize: perhaps about the same age, he was a thickset fellow wearing a tunic in the barbarian style, made of leather and wool and studded with a big, crudely constructed silver brooch.