I smiled at his presumption that I would snaffle a handcart for personal use. Mind you … ‘You can take it tomorrow when I send you over to Faustus with a report.’

‘You think I’ll forget it!’

I knew he would. Dromo regarded himself as the archetypal clever slave, but really he was much less clever.

He slouched off into the colonnade outside my room, where he started making himself a nest, laying out the best of the mats, then arranging his choice of crockery around it with the cudgel as a phallic centrepiece. I pottered indoors, doing what I knew he would consider suitable women’s work like positioning cushions. I soon grew tired of that.

I marched out and was about to begin investigating the apartment’s floor-plan when someone arrived with my supper. Dromo snatched it from the take-out waiter (who would be annoyed because he lost his tip). I was ushered back to my room. Dromo disapproved of where I had put the side-table, so he moved it, plonked the tray down, relocated my chair too, rattled me up a bowl and spoon, then produced a napkin grudgingly.

I lifted covers and found two kinds of cold bar food, one beaten-up bread roll, a wilting side salad and some spotty fruit.

‘I expect I have to make do with your leftovers,’ said Dromo, fixing me with a glare.

‘What if there aren’t any?’ I asked mildly.

‘Better be, or I’ll starve.’

Gods, this was hard work. I remembered why I did not own slaves myself.

I soon gave up on my unpalatable dinner, so took what I didn’t want to Dromo then set off to explore.

The apartment was unsymmetrical due to the street-plan outside. The front row of street shops meant there was a very long entrance corridor through them, after which came a decorative space that would have been an atrium, except that upper storey apartments overhead prevented it having an open roof. Where a collecting pool for rainwater might have been stood only a marble table: rectangular, heavy supports at each end, nothing on it. Unexciting. I would have kicked it out and got a rude statue.

Beyond the roofed hallway and overlooked from above was an open courtyard; looking across it should have given a fine view to impress important visitors. Not impressive, in this case. Too small and bare, with no flowers, and scruffy colonnades where the cheap pillars had chipped. Again, statues would have helped. If they existed, they had been taken away to Campania (low plinths remained, so this was likely).

The room allocated to me and other good guest bedrooms lay to right and left of the entrance suite, facing onto the courtyard. There were three or four, all handsome.