Dancing girls had actually become a trial to me in several ways. In a manhunt a bare-waisted panicking dancer would be death. They have their place; they give avidly—though they take with equal enthusiasm, as my banker could confirm. Associating with dancing girls had cost me more than loss of face tonight. One way and another, I had had my fill of them.

Once Helena Justina was asleep, I gradually relaxed.

She was no great weight, but I could hardly forget she was there. She fitted perfectly into the crook of my arm, and by turning my head I could breathe warm draughts of the scent which lingered in her hair. Fine, clean, shining hair that resisted the curling irons and soon dropped into smoother folds than maids in charge of fashionable women like to see. She was wearing Malabathron again. Her black swine of a husband must have given her a mighty great pot—unless of course this girl of strange surprises was saving it for me…(A man can dream.)

I was too exhausted to achieve much by thinking, even when I felt so comfortable. I nuzzled Helena’s scented hair, ready to doze off. I may have sighed, in the slow, sombre way of a man who has failed to solve his problem despite half an hour of thought. At the point when I gave up the struggle it seemed perfectly natural to be lying in a bale of straw with my arm around Helena Justina, and since by that time I had settled close enough to manage it, and since she was asleep, it also seemed natural to kiss her very gently on the forehead before I drifted off myself.

She moved slightly.

It struck me she had been awake all the time.

“Sorry!” M Didius Falco was quaintly embarrassed. “Thought you were asleep.”

I was whispering, though there was no need since the constant shuffling of his fidgety hooves said the damn horse was still wide awake too. Probably half Rome knew what I had done. I heard Helena murmur in her sceptical way, “Is a goodnight kiss on the forehead a service your ladies find on your expenses sheet?”

“All I could reach.” I fell back on bluff. “When I land a lady in a garden stable her kiss is complimentary of course.”

The senator’s daughter lifted her head, leaning up on her elbow as she turned, close above my madly pounding heart. Still holding her lightly, I skulked down into the straw, trying to ignore my fierce consciousness of her body lying against me. She must have felt the tightening of my chest. She looked different with her hair loose. Perhaps she was. I had no way of knowing whether I had stumbled upon some new person, or the woman Helena Justina had always been. But I knew the person she was tonight was someone I liked a great deal.

“And how often does this happen, Falco?”

“Not often enough!”