I leaned my elbow more sociably in the window of her chair. “Delivery carts,” I replied, still gazing ahead. “Waiting to enter at curfew. Looks like a waggon of wine barrels has shed a sticky load.” I turned my head and looked her in the face. “Plus some sort of official rumpus with soldiers and banners: some mighty personage and an escort to match, entering the city with a flourish…”

She held my gaze. I was never good at mending quarrels; I could feel the tendons setting in my neck.

“Didius Falco, do you know my father and Uncle Gaius have a bet?” Helena offered with a wan smile. “Uncle Gaius reckons I will dismiss you in a huff; father says that you will leave me first.”

“Couple of villains,” I remarked, carefully.

“We could prove them wrong, Falco.”

My face twitched. “Waste of their stakes.”

She thought I meant it; abruptly she looked away.

I had a hard pain in the pit of my stomach which I diagnosed as guilt. I touched her cheek with one finger as if she had been Marcia, my little niece. She closed her eyes, presumably in distaste. The traffic began to move again. Then Helena whispered to me dismally, “I don’t want to go home!”

My heart ached for her.

I understood how she felt. She left as a bride, grew up as a wife, ran her own establishment—probably ran it well. Now she had no place. She shrank from remarriage; her brother in Germany had told me that. She must return to her father. Rome permitted women to live no other way. She would be trapped, in a girl’s useless life, a life she had outgrown. Visiting Britain had been her brief escape. Now she was back.

I recognized real panic. She would never have made the confession otherwise, not to me.

Feeling responsible, I said, “You still look seasick. I like to deliver my commissions in a healthy condition. Come and get a glow. I’ll take you on the Embankment and show you Rome!”

How do I invent such harebrained schemes? In the east of the city, miles from where her father lived, you can climb the high earthworks of the original city wall. Once past the squeaking booths of the puppeteers, the men with trained marmosets and the self-employed loom-workers plying for hire, the ancient Servian ramparts form a breezy promenade. To reach it we had to forge right into the city centre, across the main Forum, then out to the Esquiline Hill. Most people turn north towards the Colline Gate; at least I had the sense to walk her in the opposite direction and come down half way home on the Sacred Way.

Heaven knows what the bearers thought. Well, knowing the things that bearers regularly see, I can guess what they thought.