“It’s a step on the ladder,” the estate manager replied calmly, indicating the messenger with his eyes. Julius understood and dismissed the runner back to the city.

When they were alone, Tubruk clapped him on the back.

“Congratulations. Now are you going to tell me how you earned it? Unlike the Senate, I don’t have messengers to run all over the place for me. All I have heard is that you beat Mithridates and overran an army twenty times your size.”

Julius barked a surprised laugh. “Next week it will be thirty times the size, as the Roman gossips tell the story. Perhaps I shouldn’t correct them,” he said wryly. “Come for a walk with me and I’ll tell you all the details. I want to see where this new boundary is.”

He saw Tubruk’s sudden frown and smiled to ease the man’s worry.

“I was surprised when Cornelia told me. I never thought you of all people would sell land.”

“It was that or send the ransom short, lad, and there’s only one son of the house.”

Julius gripped his shoulder in sudden affection. “I know, I’m only teasing you. It was the right thing to do and I have the funds to buy it back.”

“I sold it to Suetonius’s father,” Tubruk said grimly.

Julius paused as he took this in. “He would have known it was for the ransom. He had to raise one for his son, after all. Did you get a good price?”

Tubruk replied with a pained expression. “Not really. He drove a very hard bargain and I had to let more of it go than I wanted. I’m sure he saw it as good business, but it was”—he screwed his face up as if something bitter had entered his mouth—“shameful.”

Julius took a deep breath. “Show me how much we’ve lost and then we’ll work out how to get the old man to return it to me. If he’s anything like his son, it won’t be easy. I want to be back for when my mother wakes, Tubruk. I have a . . . great deal to tell her.”

Something stopped Julius telling Tubruk about the head wound and the fits that came after it. In part, it was shame at the lack of understanding he had shown his mother over the years, which he knew he had to put right. More than that, though, he didn’t want to see pity in the old gladiator’s eyes. He didn’t think he could bear it.

Together, they walked out of the estate and up the hill to the woods that Julius had run through as a boy, Tubruk listening as Julius told him everything that had happened in the years he had been away from the city.