He laughed shortly, with an implication I objected to. “Cast you off?”

Helena ignored the remark. “A down payment on an Empire!” she marvelled in her old, bitter way. “Falco would have liked to see this. Such a pity he found out that three quarters of this eerie booty no longer contains any silver at all.”

“Clever old Falco!” Publius said quietly. “I can’t see the Praetorians knocking at seaside villas in Pompeii and Oplontis, trying to sell them cheap lead water pipes!” He seemed more positive than I remembered him before. “What were you doing here all alone when I came in?”

“Thinking.” She sounded sad. “Thinking about Sosia. I wondered if this vault was where she died. She knew it was here; she visited once with Gnaeus and me. She may have come, knowing that it was a secret place—”

With an abrupt movement Sosia’s father set his lamp on a shelf and folded his arms, gazing round bleakly as lines deeply incised his face.

“It’s too late to make any difference!” he stated, in a strained voice. He wanted to stop her. For his sake, so did I. He could not stand here and face it. His voice had the harsh break I remembered from Sosia’s funeral, as if he were still fretting to avoid the fact of her death, brusquely rejecting anyone who reminded him.

Helena sighed. “Fair, reverent and dutiful; father read me your eulogy. He was so upset—”

“He copes!” Publius rapped.

“Not so well as he did. Father said to me recently, he felt he was drowning in a whirlpool—now I see this I understand.”

“What?” I saw Publius’ head come up.

Helena Justina demanded almost impatiently but with a tinge of bitterness, “Isn’t it obvious?” She straightened her shoulders, then declared in the taut voice I had only heard her use when insulted to the heart by me, “Pertinax may have provided the warehouse with its secret vault, but he had not the brains to devise a plot so devious. I assume it is my father who organized all this.”

As she gestured angrily towards the bank of ingots, Camillus Meto stared at her. They and I contemplated the consequences of what she had suggested. In a Roman scandal none of the family escapes. Unborn generations, judged by the honour of their ancestors, were already condemned by this act against the state. The disgrace of a senator would drag down all his relations. His loss of honour afflicted the respectable and the innocent too, including his brother and his sons. Publius would be permanently scarred. The good-hearted lad I had met in Germany with Helena would find his career blighted before it was under way; his brother in Spain too. Far away in Britain this curse would fall unhappily on Aelia Camilla; through her marriage, even onto Gaius. And here—on Helena.