I had had an interesting chat with a treasury official about whether, if I sold goods at auction, I must pay the one per cent auction tax on top of the five per cent for inheritance; you can guess his answer.

‘Thalia is here; have you seen her, Marcus?’

‘I glimpsed her.’ She was lurking at the far end of a table, looking more wrapped up and respectable than usual. ‘Nice of her to hang back and not bother us.’ In fact her demure behaviour had set up anxiety.

‘I shall have a word!’ Helena declared, making me oddly apprehensive.

As she paraded through the guests, Helena identified the surviving witnesses to Father’s will: four of those shaky old fellows who had grasped my hand interminably. I made sure they each had a drink poured from the special amphora of Falernian, which probably shortened their lives by several months; it flowed like rich olive oil and was dangerously potent. Their presence allowed me to read out the will formally. I pretended the contents came as news to me; nobody was fooled. A restrained silence fell. My sisters heard their fates without making a public scene, but assumed foreboding expressions. Ma was too heavily veiled for anyone to see her reaction. She had seemed quiet all day, as if losing the old devil at last had knocked all the spirit out of her.

Soon afterwards, people began to leave. Helena told me it was because I was viewed as tight-fisted. ‘Everybody is whispering that things would have been very different—they mean, more money for them—if Festus had survived.’

That suited me. But many just went because the food and drink were running out. There had been plenty. Some of it was going home in people’s pockets. Anyone who brought their own napkin made sure they took it away laden.

‘I swear there were some “grieving friends” who came with little baskets specially,’ I complained to Maia. Then I noticed her basket.

‘Marcus, darling, I’m family. Any leftover egg-and-anchovy tart is mine!’ She backed down slightly. ‘You don’t want waste, do you?’

Helena had identified my father’s lawyer. Once we were freed from saying farewells in the portico, she brought him to me indoors.

He was surprisingly young, twenty-five or so. He introduced himself as Septimus Parvo. His accent was decent, though not screamingly aristocratic; it sounded as if he had learned how to speak from an elocution teacher, after a plebeian upbringing. His dress was neat, his manner polite. He told me he avoided cut-throat court cases at the Basilica Julia, instead working as a backstreet family lawyer.