This was a superb location for commercial dealers. The town had a slightly dusty, off-season look but it could easily perk up. By reputation the fine foreshore villas were beautified with exclusive original art and expensive modern reproductions. Most of the enormous houses were still lived in, and by people with funds for house and garden makeovers. It was astonishing that a pair of reputable art dealers would leave a place with such potential.

A Temple of Fortune was the big public monument. I applied there for information. Since Gornia’s fruitless visit, a certain Sextus Silanus, a nephew of Primilla’s, had left a message that enquirers should consult him. I had to pay the priests extortionately to be told; it would have been friendlier if the nephew had just chalked up a note on his uncle’s locked front door.

The bad news was, Silanus lived at Lanuvium. To get there we had to take an unnamed road through famously unhealthy country on the northern edge of the Pontine plain. The Pontine Marshes have a fearsome reputation. Still, they should have dried out in summer and Lanuvium was on a spur of the Via Appia, which led straight back to Rome.

10

Lanuvium was an extremely ancient hilltop city in Latium, on the Alban Hills, lying just south of the Via Appia. The town was dominated by a clutch of temples, especially the richly endowed Temple of Juno Sospes, to which belonged much of the land between here and the coast. We knew, from passing through it, that the soil was unusually fertile, though the area was very thinly populated. For most of the route we saw no one but a few pasty-looking slaves. The state of the road suggested vehicles were unusual and the labourers stared at us as if they never saw travellers. Well, they stared until Albia glared at them. Then they turned away nervously.

‘There are many rivers draining the hills; they carry down rich alluvium silt.’ I was taking on Helena’s role, had she been with us. Just because Albia had a broken heart, she need not be ignorant. ‘So the Pontine plain has some of the best land in Italy for grazing animals and growing crops, but you won’t see many people. The water table is very high and the sand dunes on the coast trap the floods, so for much of the year, especially south of here, it is a pestilential place. Clouds of biting insects make the marshes almost uninhabitable—keep yourself well covered up; they carry horrible diseases.’ We were north of the real swamps, which suited me. Attempts had been made to drain them. The attempts all failed.