“More times than I can remember, before we fled to Masada. And after that, do you think my people just sat and waited for the Romans to kill them, like dormice in a jar? They died, rather than surrender. May God forgive me for my own cowardice.” Martha looks up, and for the first time, Amara sees her. Not the heartsick, silent maid, dragged hundreds of miles across the world to serve, but the woman she must once have been, whose name Amara does not even know. “Ask the Admiral of the Fleet about the brutality of Rome’s soldiers, if you do not believe me. Ask him why Jerusalem is now nothing more than ashes.” Martha’s face is filled with loathing. Amara remembers her serving Pliny in this house, how Martha stood beside him while he tasted the food, giving no sign of what she must have felt. It is perhaps lucky the maid did not poison him.

“I believe you,” Britannica says, squatting down beside Martha. The two enslaved women look at one another. “Fabia will live?”

Martha strokes Fabia’s hair, more gently than she has ever touched Amara. “If she does, it will only be by the will of Almighty God.”

“We should move her to a bed.” Amara turns to Philos and Juventus. “Are you able to carry her to Victoria’s room?” The men lift Fabia carefully, laboriously taking her up the stairs, Juventus cursing softly as he nearly stumbles.

“It would have been closer to take her there.” Martha points to Amara’s rooms, where they all know the empty couch lies.

“Rufus,” Amara replies. “I don’t want him finding any trace of her.”

The maid nods. “I will not tell.” Her voice is quiet. Martha looks between Amara and Britannica. “Not for you. Not for the old woman. But because I owe them nothing.”

Amara is with Fabia when she dies in the night, Philos sitting beside her. Fabia never regains consciousness. Her son’s name, spoken in the atrium, the only word she gave before passing over to the underworld.

“Felix must have known she told me,” Amara whispers, still holding Fabia’s hand, even as her skin grows cold, “when Phoebe and Lais did not arrive at Cornelius’s house.”

“You can’t blame yourself. Felix was always going to strike.”

Amara says nothing. She feels guilt over Fabia, for what she forced her to tell, and yet she knows it would be no easier to see Phoebe or Lais lying here. Grief burns her eyes. “Victoria.”

“Victoria won’t have known what Felix would do.”