Cornelia halted, looking around. How long had she been walking? It wasn’t a quarter of town she knew. Not a quarter of town she wanted to know either—tenements leaning crookedly overhead, the smell of sewage leaking along the gutters. A stray dog bared its teeth, slinking by, and a crowd of naked children ran past, shouting and chasing one another. Two ragged women in a low doorway whispered behind their hands, and Cornelia was suddenly conscious of her fine linen, her tooled sandals, her gold-and-ebony earrings. Perhaps I’ll be robbed and murdered before Fabius can even order my execution. She reversed her steps, looking for the turn that had taken her from the Palatine Hill into the slums, but found only more tenements, more dim streets, more foul smells. A cluster of manure-stained mule drovers staggered past, stinking of wine, whooping. Cornelia put up her chin, forcing herself not to hurry. She’d have to ask for directions . . . there was a man on a stool, leaning against a dingy tenement wall and looking up the street. At least he appeared sober.

“Excuse me,” she said, approaching, and halted as he looked up. “. . . Centurion?”

“Not Centurion,” said Drusus Sempronius Densus. “I was thrown out of the Praetorian Guard, Lady. Or didn’t you know?”

“. . . I heard. It was very unjust.”

He shrugged, very different now from the proud soldier in his breastplate and red plumes. Just a stockily built man in a rough tunic, sitting against the wall of a slum tenement. His eyes were flat and unfriendly.

“I’m lost.” Cornelia felt foolish.

“Thought you must be.” The old tone of dogged courtesy had utterly gone. “Don’t usually see patrician ladies in the slums otherwise.”

“Can you show me the way out?”

“Give me those earrings of yours, and I will.”

Cornelia’s hand flew up to the gold-and-ebony drops swinging by her throat. “My earrings—”

“I don’t draw my centurion’s pay anymore, Lady. I need money.”

She pulled off the earrings Piso had given her and dropped them into Drusus Densus’s callused hand. He came up off his stool in one swift movement, gesturing to the doorway behind him. “I should tell the madam I’ll be gone.”

“The madam—?”

“Wait inside. You’ll be robbed if you stand out here alone.”

Gingerly, Cornelia followed him through the low doorway. A dark hall beyond, ragged strips of cloth curtaining off niches. There was a perch for cloaks by the first door, but she came closer and saw that it was a crude little statue of the god Priapus with his leer and his huge jutting phallus. Then she got a look at the fading frescoes that lined the walls and felt herself turning red.

“Room at the end, Lady,” said Densus curtly. “Wait there unless you want to be taken for the new girl.”