“I may not be as feeble as some of my colleagues have been allowed to think,” Marcus announced, “but I am far too old to go scrambling over heaps of stone. Take my daughter, Titus, and I will sit here in the shade and ponder your architectural plans. You’ve got space here for a very nice archive, I think. Some of us would appreciate a bookshelf or two at the baths, not just racks of weights…”

Titus offered his arm to Faustina as the gray-haired bent-backed senator settled himself on a block of undressed granite. He didn’t know how he would have survived his first months as quaestor without the advice of Sabina’s father. His own grandfather was so frail now, Titus hated to disturb him in the peace of retirement—but Senator Norbanus never seemed to mind giving a tactful piece of advice when Titus asked for it. “Gods, yes, the military payrolls are always in a snarl. But it will give you the best training in Rome when it comes to sniffing out new schemes of graft. And there are always new schemes of graft…”

Marcus waved him off, already deep into the architectural plans, and Titus offered his arm to Faustina. “Mind your step,” he warned as he led her about the work site. “There’s rubble everywhere. Not to mention staring stonemasons who haven’t seen anything as lovely as you up close in their whole lives. Now, here’s the gymnasium… the lavatoria, brass fittings for everything, even the flush handles… Phrygian marble in the entryway; Carrara marble is more famous, but I think the Phrygian has a better sheen when damp and these walls are going to be damp a good bit of the time… Five hundred lamps to light the caldarium…”

He caught himself, realizing he was chattering. “Forgive me, I do go on about my work. A real quaestor doesn’t enjoy his work, or even do it if possible. He’s too busy scheming to be praetor.”

“I didn’t think building projects fell into a quaestor’s duties.” Faustina peered into the excavated hole that would soon, Titus assured her, be a pool tiled in blue with dolphin mosaics.

“Normally, this would be outside my duties. But Emperor Trajan set me to the job. I worked with the architects on his triumphal column for the Dacian campaigns, you see—he wanted someone who’d actually been to Dacia, who could tell the relief-carvers how everything really looked. Everyone else who fought in Dacia had important jobs by the time the column started going up, so the task fell to me. Trajan must have been happy with the result, because he set me to oversee some of the work on these baths next.”

“It sounds important.”