Others soon joined us: first Albia, then Petronius and Maia. I had considered including Ma, but my habit of keeping secrets from her was too great. Helena rose to close the double doors for privacy. Before she resumed her seat, she stood for a moment: tall, wearing white with coloured bands and informal jewellery, just a matron at home, as ever on the edge of domestic harassment, always alert in case she was called away to scorched meat in the kitchen or bruises in the nursery . . . It would not happen today. Arrangements were in place. Here she was, the woman I loved, taking on the wider role of a Roman wife and mother: steering her family towards great decisions and the righting of intolerable wrongs.

I smiled at her faintly. She understood what I was thinking. I had made a good choice.

Helena said, ‘This will be a family conference—in every sense, because we are all members of a family, and families are what we have to talk about. Nothing that is to be said in this room today may be mentioned outside it to anyone.’

‘Sub rosa,’ said Aulus.

‘Isca rules,’ nodded Petro.

‘Our rules,’ my ever-caustic sister Maia corrected him.

A formal family conference is the symbol of emergency in Roman society. It happens rarely, because it only happens after outside measures have been tried and have failed. A fallback when public systems have collapsed, it is used for both utterly private reasons and for arranging a challenge to political tyranny. This is the last meeting before assassinations, executions, exile or disgrace. This is where wives are summoned to account for adultery by stern old-fashioned husbands, then humiliating punishments levied with unpleasant aunts’ encouragement. It is where necessary usurpation of rulers is plotted. Where suicide or honour killing is carried out, after rape or other violation.

Our family council was where seven of us, my closest and dearest, assembled to unpick the full connection between the Claudii and Anacrites. Then we would decide what to do about it.

First, Quintus reported events in Latium. I watched him, tall, still boyish in appearance though increasingly firm in manner. He had his father’s straight rather spiky hair, his mother’s bearing and good looks. He was more slightly built than his brother, though Aulus had lost weight since his marriage: stress, presumably.

Quintus was concise, his tone almost pleasant. He could have been assessing routine logistics for a fort commander in a frontier province, as he concluded: ‘We never had a chance to interrogate Claudius Nobilis. Everything else about him has to be conjectural—except one thing: his eyes. After he died, Marcus and I noticed they were odd. Nobilis had pale eyes, eyes that were neither one colour nor another. Part grey, part brown. Extremely unusual.’

I heard Maia catch her breath as she made the link. Albia was twisting her hands in her lap.