“Well lady, since we’re on the subject of curls, I liked you better without!”

Vespasian’s banquets were extremely old-fashioned; the waitresses kept their clothes on and he never poisoned the food.

Vespasian was not a keen entertainer, though he gave regular banquets; he gave them to cheer up the people he invited and to keep caterers in funds. As a republican I refused to be impressed. Attending one of the Emperor’s well-run dinners made me feel morose. I deny any recollection of what the menu was; I kept adding up how much it must have cost. Luckily Vespasian was seated too far away for me to tell him my views. He looked pretty silent. Knowing him, he too was totting up the damage to the privy purse.

Halfway through my refusing to enjoy myself, an usher tapped my shoulder. Helena Justina and I were slid out from the meal so skilfully I was still carrying a lobster claw and she had one cheek bulging with half-eaten squid-in-its-ink. A cloakroom slave whisked me into my toga, achieving in five seconds a dignified drape that back at home had taken me an hour; a shoe-boy had us respectably reshod; an escort led us to a lavish anteroom, two spear-carriers gave way to a bronzed inner door, a doorman opened it, the escort announced our names to a chamberlain, the chamberlain repeated them to his boy, the boy recited them again in a clear voice with only the fact that he got both slightly wrong spoiling an otherwise portentous effect. We passed inside. A slave who until then had been doing nothing in particular accepted what was left of my lobster claw.

A curtain dropped, muffling the outside noise. A young man—a man my own age, not over tall, with a jutting chin that was sprouting marble copies throughout Rome—bounded from a purple-draped chair. His body was hard as a brick; his energy made me groan. The gold braid acanthus leaves on the hem of his tunic rolled in padded waves an inch thick round a band four inches deep. He waved away the attendants and rushed forwards to greet us himself.

“Please come in! Didius Falco? I wanted to congratulate you on your efforts in the north.”

There was no need for Helena to touch my arm in warning. I knew who he was at once, and at once I understood who both my employers were. I was not, as I had assumed until then, working at the direction of some snobbish secretariat of oriental freedmen lurking in the lower echelons of Palace protocol.

It was Titus Caesar himself.

XLII

He had just spent five years in the desert, but by Jove he was fit. He was bursting with talent. You could see at once how he carried off commanding a legion at twenty-six, then mobilized half the Empire to win his father’s throne.