“You’ve no need to get up so early,” Amara says, embarrassed. “Please. You can rest until I call you.”

“Master said I was to wait on you,” Martha replies, moving over to the dressing table, gesturing at Amara to sit down so that she can style her hair.

The two women are silent while Martha works, teasing the comb through Amara’s curls where she has slept on them, making her look presentable.

“Were you a maid back in your hometown?” Amara eventually asks. “In Masada?”

Martha stops so abruptly, the tug on her scalp makes Amara wince. “Who told you that?”

“You must have mentioned it,” Amara says, not wanting to reveal that she heard it from Philos.

“I was not a maid, no. I was married.” Martha’s voice is flat. She resumes her brushing.

Amara realizes then that Martha might also have been a mother, that perhaps she has just intruded on another woman’s deepest agony—the theft or murder of her children. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It is hard to be taken from your home. And your family.”

“It is as God wills,” Martha replies. “Not for me to question.” And not for you either, is the implication she leaves unsaid.

Amara gives up. Let Martha keep her secrets. After all, the maid owns nothing else. She closes her eyes, imagines that it is her friend Victoria dressing her hair instead, that the fingers she can feel belong to someone who loves her. Victoria always used to wake everyone at the brothel by singing in the morning, however dark the night before had been. Even the memory of her sweet voice makes Amara smile. Martha finishes styling her hair in silence, then holds out the mirror for Amara to draw her eyes. When she is done, mistress and maid part company with what Amara suspects is a mutual sense of relief.

She walks out into the garden. The bench is empty now, the jug and wine glasses all cleared away. Above her, the sky is the pale blue of a new day, the sun not long risen. She can smell the dew, still fresh in the air. Water falls into the fountain with a gentle murmur, a small marble Venus reclining at the edge of the pool. Amara feels a wash of happiness. This is what it means to be free, to have all this to enjoy.

She bends down to inspect the thyme Philos mangled yesterday, to discover what other medicinal herbs might be growing alongside it. All these months, she’s been here and not paid proper attention.

“You have no need to fear the flowers. You put them all to shame.”

She jumps up, startled by his voice. “Rufus!”

Her patron is standing at the edge of the garden, watching her. She runs over to embrace him.