‘Yes,’ breathed Olympe in her sweet way. ‘I didn’t want to say that, Flavia Albia. I wasn’t sure if you knew.’

I leaned back in my seat and gazed up at the ceiling. As a magistrate’s room, this was decently done. When Manlius Faustus grew bleary-eyed from counting street-cleaning fines, he could look up at a complicated coffered roof, picked out in several rich tints by a master decorator. Judging by her summer dining room, Mucia Lucilia would have liked to see the designer’s pattern book, though she might not have been able to afford him.

Cosmus was one of Myla’s children.

‘So Cosmus is Myla’s boy, the only one of her family she was ever able to keep near her. This was achieved through Polycarpus taking pity, when Cosmus was put up for sale. The kind act didn’t work too well though, did it? Cosmus kept coming downstairs and hanging about, near his mother. He failed to settle down with Polycarpus and Graecina. Whenever he was unhappy, he came moping to mother. Later, when he heard Myla was to be sold, I suppose Cosmus thought he would lose her altogether … Did that make him very upset?’

‘Yes, Albia, he was,’ said Olympe, solemnly. ‘Isn’t it awful?’

‘Indeed. Myla was in anguish too, of course, trying to blank what was happening to her after all those years living in the same family, everything made worse by her pregnancy, everything made desperate because her master had now married. Cosmus was upset, an angry boy, about to lose the only person with whom he had any close relationship, any relationship at all, perhaps.’

‘Nobody would have much to do with him,’ Olympe confided, twisting her small child-like hands. ‘Nobody liked him or Myla, really.’

‘Let me work it out – so it’s the last night at the apartment. The last time anyone can appeal to Aviola and Mucia not to sell their slaves, including Myla.’

‘She was absolutely top of the list to go,’ said Olympe, not vindictively but full of simple excitement at seeing me set all this out.