The work was light. There were only two other guards, both grizzled and graying, happy to dice in the cool garden while I headed off to escort the master to the Senate house. Senator Norbanus was a good master—he might be eagle-eyed over his scrolls, but he was absentminded as far as his household went. In the absence of his wife and children he was content to eat in his study, dropping crumbs unconcernedly on his wax tablets, or to take a packet of bread and cheese from the cook and limp down to the Capitoline Library, where he’d spend half the day in research. No beatings in this house; no slaves running away in the night or whipped for breaking a dish. I had a new cloak, thick enough to keep the summer rainstorms off my back. I had regular days off to go to the races or the games or the taverns or anywhere else I pleased. The hardest work I had to do was carry an armload of scrolls for Marcus Norbanus on his way to the Senate house.

So why did I feel so bloody sour?

“You’re so scowly, Vix,” the freckled slave girl giggled at me. Gaia, her name was, a Greek girl who’d grown up in the Norbanus household, and soon I was counting the freckles on more than her nose. She was buxom and giggly, a soft armful in the night, but I still lay there scowling up at the ceiling after she’d slipped out of my room with another sleepy giggle. And I’d go get drunk on my day off, drunk as I could, and come back with a head so sore even the senator didn’t offer me his usual absent “Good morning” on the way to the Senate house.

Sabina and her stepmother stayed up in Baiae, and that made me sore too. I saw the letters her father wrote to them both; he might have mentioned he had a new guard in the household, mightn’t he? And maybe she’d have come home a little sooner, hearing that, but she didn’t, and why should she? Rich girls, they probably all kissed pleb boys in alleys after a day at the races. Just a bit of spice for them, a cheap thrill before they married and got as fat and painted and plucked as their mothers.

I wasn’t the only one looking for the daughter of the house. Hardly a day went by when some hopeful fellow in a toga didn’t turn up on the doorstep. Old or young, their faces all fell when I said she wasn’t there. “What’s she got that everyone wants?” I demanded of a patrician boy younger than me who had brought a bouquet of lilies and his brand-new toga to the door. “There’s plenty of senators’ daughters in Rome. Lots have got to be prettier than her, richer than her.”