‘Inevitably your father’s new marriage meant change. You said your mother would not have permitted a liaison − nor would Mucia Lucilia, I imagine. Your mother and Mucia had been friends; I imagine they were women of a like mind. We can say, when your father married, Myla had no further use and was a menace to his new wife?’

‘Exactly!’

‘But Myla would not accept her demotion?’

‘She was being very difficult.’ That would be the problem a wife had to address. She could not have a slave undermining her position. A slave who made demands or harboured expectations. Mucia Lucilia may have been surreptitious with her redecoration plans in the apartment, but for her Myla had to go. Hermes, Mucia’s freedman, claimed she was always diplomatic, but I wondered.

‘Mucia Lucilia saw what had been going on.’ I wondered if Galla even warned her about it. ‘Mucia was no meek young bride, but a woman who knew she had to pre-empt trouble. She insisted that Myla be sold? I am guessing your father agreed, yet found it hard to tell Myla? I expect he wanted Polycarpus to break the bad news.’

‘No.’ Simplicia was quiet. ‘He told her. My father had made it plain to Myla what was to happen.’

You could see that as decent honesty – or a cold attitude.

‘Did Myla believe him?’

‘Not really. The woman is impossible … Yes, Flavia Albia, she was upset. We all knew that, and we are not vicious; we understood. She was verna, born to a slave of ours long ago; she had never been anywhere else and was terrified. I do not blame her feelings, yet she should have seen the position, her own position, my father’s, my new stepmother’s. If she had behaved modestly, shown she was willing to carry out her duties as a general maid, it might have been feasible to keep her in one of our houses. Instead, she was rude, she was belligerent—’

‘And she was carrying another child,’ I said. ‘Did your father, more than reasonably some would say, agree nothing should happen until this baby was born?’

‘He was a decent man.’ His daughter fought a sudden rush of tears.

She was a decent girl – even though she had just evicted her baby half-sister from the family cradle for having the bad fortune to be born to a slave.

43

A change in the activity out in the courtyard signalled that people were leaving. Simplicia stood up and went to rejoin her relatives. She said no farewell to me, simply inclined her head and walked out. In a way, this chit of nineteen treated me with less respect than she gave her father’s slave.

It was a familiar experience. I might be a free citizen, a widow and ten years her senior, but I worked. For many people that put me down at the level of bar staff and public entertainers. To girls like Simplicia, I was practically illegal.