I wanted to go to bed. I went back into the main room, picked up one of my lamps, then steered my tired legs out onto the balcony. I was utterly exhausted and completely unarmed.

The air was soft, and faint noises of the city in the dark rose occasionally with that odd sharpness you get sometimes as sounds reach the sixth floor.

“Now there’s a sight!”

She was standing by the balustrade staring out, but as soon as I spoke she turned around: eyes like warm caramel in a creamy almond face. The gods only know how long she had been there; or what doubts assailed her confidence while she waited for me to come home.

“Sosia wrote to me about your view.”

“Not the view,” I said.

And went on looking at Helena.

She stood there, and I stood here, she in the dark and I with my lamp, neither of us certain any longer if we were friends. Distressed moths began to zoom in from the night. One day we would talk about what had happened, but not now; there was too much to re-establish between us first.

“I thought you would never come. Are you drunk?” I had called at several all-night wine shops on my way home.

“I’m sobering rapidly. How long have you been waiting?”

“A long time. Are you surprised?”

I thought about that. No. Knowing her, I was not surprised.

“I thought I would never see you again. Lady, what can I say?”

“Now you’ve spat in my eye in public, perhaps you should call me Helena.”

“Helena,” I murmured obediently.

I had to sit down. Levering myself onto the bench I kept for dreaming out of doors, I groaned with weariness.

“You want me to go,” she offered awkwardly.

“Too late,” I said, echoing another day. “Too dark. Too dangerous…I want you to stay. Sit by me, Helena; sit with a man on his balcony and listen to the night!” But she stayed where she was.

“Have you been with a woman?”

It was too dark for me to see her face.

“Business,” I said.

Helena Justina turned away, looking over the city again. There was a tight band squeezing my ribcage from the side where I damaged myself in Britain right round to the side I was not hurt at all. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Me?” She turned back fiercely. “Or just anyone at all?”

“You,” I said.

“Oh Marcus, wherever have you been?” This time when she asked there was a different catch in her voice.

I told her about the Embankment, and I told her about Vespasian.

“Does that mean you’re working for the Emperor?”

I was working for her.

“I’m working for myself. But he agrees that if I save up the money to qualify, he’ll include me in the lists as second rank.”

“How long will it take?”

“About four hundred years.”

“I can wait!”