“Not terribly,” Titus confessed. “Mostly I keep Consul Hadrian and the architect from killing each other. Hadrian oversees the project too, you see, and since he has a great interest in architecture he has a great many ideas how to improve the plans… he didn’t take it very kindly when the architect told him his domes looked like gourds. So I’m a kind of buffer state between them—like Pannonia between Germania and Dacia. I may get trampled on a lot, but I’m fairly essential if you want peace.”

Faustina was squinting at the foundations of the apodyterium. “What kind of brick are you using here?”

“From Tarracina.” He named the suppliers and factory.

“You’ve been given sun-baked bricks instead of kiln-fired,” Faustina said. “Buy brick from me instead.”

Titus blinked. “From you?”

“I own four brick factories,” Faustina explained. “Mother gave them to me for my dowry, but only if I learned something about how they operated. I know about brick. And those bricks have been baked in the sun instead of fired in a kiln. Water wears away sun-baked brick faster than fired brick, and there’s a lot of water in a bathhouse.”

Titus made a note. “Anything else?”

Faustina turned a circle in the partially excavated apodyterium, hands on hips. The sun shone momentarily through her thin blue dress, and Titus had to motion his workers not to stop and leer. “You’ve got shelves for people to leave their clothes when they change?”

“Yes, made of pine.”

“Alder would be better; it doesn’t rot when it gets wet. I’ve got a timber yard as part of my dowry too,” she said, forestalling his question. “And you should have pegs as well as shelves. Women would rather hang up their clothes than fold them.”

“They would?”

“Fold up a linen dress like this one,” Faustina offered a pinch of her skirt, “and you’ll need an iron to press it back out. No woman wants to leave a bathhouse in wrinkly clothes.”

“That is exactly why I wanted a woman’s opinion in the first place.” Titus made another note on his slate. “Anything else?”

“Every bathhouse in Rome has naked mermaids in the mosaics. Women don’t want to look at naked mermaids who have better breasts than we do. Keep the mermaids for the men’s gymnasium, and put something else in the room where women get massages. A sea god with a nice bare chest, for example.”

“No naked mermaids,” Titus promised. “Not in the best baths in the world.”

Faustina fanned brick dust away from her face, tilting her chin up at him. “This is important to you, isn’t it? Even if it isn’t strictly part of your duties.”