Ennia came bustling in then, surveying the picked-over detritus of plates and bones. “You weren’t joking, Dominus,” she commented. “He does eat for five.”

She bent a slightly more approving gaze on Vix as she cleared the table, and Vix openly admired her as she swung out, the end of her black plait switching against her waist. “You like your housekeepers pretty.”

Titus ran a hand through his hair, self-conscious. Ennia had been a freedwoman in his grandfather’s house—black-eyed, twenty-five years old, with a thin pretty face and a tart lash of a tongue—and when Titus had left to make his own living arrangements, he’d made her a certain offer. “It won’t be a large house to manage,” he told her. “Just a few slaves, enough to handle meals and laundry for a man on his own. But you’d be in charge, not just one of the crowd of freedmen in this house.”

“Housekeeper,” she said in her brisk way. “Bedwarmer too, Dominus?”

“Well, if you don’t mind. It’s not a condition of the job, but you’re very pretty.” A little shyly. “And I really would rather have that side of things settled… I haven’t got a wife yet, I don’t care for brothels, and I can’t really afford courtesans.”

“I don’t hold with orgies, and I don’t service your friends.” She gave an emphatic scowl. “What’s the pay, Dominus?”

He named a modest but reasonable salary. She sniffed. He raised the offer. She lifted her eyebrows.

“I’m afraid that’s all I can afford,” he said firmly. “What if I throw in two new gowns a year and a present at Saturnalia?”

“Done.” She nodded. “I’ll stay till you marry. That should see me enough to retire on.”

Easy as that, he had acquired a mistress. “You don’t know much about women, do you?” she’d said, and undertaken his education with the same energy she took to reorganizing his household. Both Titus and the household had been happy for the improvement.

“I thought you’d be married by now,” Vix was saying, unconsciously echoing Ennia. “Some pretty bit of fluff should have mounted your head on her wall.”

“I came close last year. A legate’s daughter—she had red hair.”

“I like a redhead,” Vix whistled.

“I do too, but Vibia Sabina warned me off her. She said to just look at the girl’s slaves, and did I want to see the same cowed expression looking back at me from my mirror.”

Vix paused in the act of slicing a peach in half. “You still see Sabina?”

“When she’s in Rome.” Which hadn’t been often, since Hadrian had taken his wife with him to Pannonia. Titus cored an apple with a little silver knife, feeling a thread of mischief uncoil. “She’s back in the city now, you know.” Casually.