Dromo did not seek inclusion, nor expect it, but he only needed to be asked once. He sat down.

Faustus and I both surveyed him. It seemed to me the boy was different. He had that subtle alteration that happens with a teenager, marking their shift from child to adulthood. One day you look at them and see a new person. I glanced at Faustus; I reckoned he saw what I thought.

‘I gather this young man did something brave today; he saved a baby,’ Faustus told me. ‘I know he found the event upsetting. I brought him to see if you could help him come to terms.’ Dromo must have told him what I said, that old story from Britain.

‘Why did she want to take the baby with her?’ Dromo had no sense of timing. When he wanted to ask something, he burst straight out with it. Inexperience. Lack of observation. I doubted he would ever improve.

I had sent him to Faustus because Faustus ought to look after him. Why was I now lumbered? But both Faustus and Dromo were waiting for me.

I sighed. ‘Dromo, as far as I understand it, some desperate parents who are contemplating suicide feel they cannot leave their children behind to suffer.’ I did not tell him that others, especially in bitter divorces, think if I can’t have them, he or she won’t have them either … I had been involved in cases like that. The law said a child belonged to its father; in practice, many infants went with their divorced mothers – Aviola’s three (well, his legitimate three) were typical. Once in a while, a couple could not reconcile themselves to either solution. I would try to mediate, though I was normally hired by one side to find dirt in order to prevent their antagonist having custody.

‘Will that baby know what her mother did?’ asked Dromo, very subdued.

‘Who can say? By the time she is old enough to understand, people around her may have forgotten. In any case, the people she grows up with may not know – I believe she is to be sent to a happier life on a farm in the country.’

‘The country?’ Dromo was disgusted. ‘I think I did the wrong thing.’

‘No, Dromo.’

‘I bet you blame your mother for leaving you.’

I felt myself grow tense. ‘I may have done from time to time, but no longer.’

‘Why not?’

‘I came to realise my parents must have loved me. I was not abandoned from choice. They may have known they would be killed. If they did survive the rebellion, they may have tried desperately to find me afterwards … I grew up an extremely unhappy person, but I am not now.’

‘What changed you?’

‘Something I saw many years later.’

‘What?’

‘Dromo, don’t pry any more,’ murmured Tiberius. In my view, it was high time he intervened.

Dromo was still glaring at me, wanting answers.