She shrugged. I had never met her cousin, yet my instinct had been to resent the woman ever since Sosia first tried to use her name as a disguise when she would not trust me. In fact my only real grudge against Helena was that I could see she wielded considerable influence over Sosia Camillina. I preferred to influence Sosia myself. I reckoned Sosia was wrong anyway. I normally liked women. But if this Helena felt protective towards her younger relative, as I gathered she did, the chances were that she would not like me.

“I write to her,” Sosia explained, as if she read my thoughts.

I said nothing. I was leaving. There was no longer anything to say. I stood, half aware of the clean scents of summer flowers and the lazy warmth beating off the stones.

“I tell Helena everything.”

I stared at her more kindly, smitten with unease. It is an odd fact, you feel more ashamed when you have nothing to answer for than when you are disguising some brazen act of scandal.

Since I was still silent, Sosia continued to talk. It was her one annoying habit; she never could sit quiet.

“You’re really going away? I won’t see you again? There’s something I want to say. Marcus Didius Falco, I’ve been wondering for days how to—”

She had used my formal name. No one ever did that. Her respectful tone was more than I could bear. I had stumbled into a real emergency. My anger fled.

“Don’t!” I exclaimed urgently. “Sosia, believe me, when you need to spend days composing your script, the reason is it’s best to say nothing at all.”

She hesitated.

“You don’t know—”

I was a spare-time poet; there were many things I would never know, but I recognized this. “Oh Sosia—I know!”

For one fantastic moment I flashed into a dream where I took Sosia Camillina into my life. I flashed back. Only a fool tries to step across the barriers of rank in that way. A man may buy himself into the middle class, or have the gold ring donated to him for services to the Emperor (especially if the services are of a dubious kind), but so long as her father and her uncle knew what they were about—and her uncle must, he was a millionaire—then even with that queer problem of having no mother to name, Sosia Camillina would be disposed of in some way to enhance her own position and their family bank account. Our two lives could never converge. At heart she understood, for despite her brave attempt she stared at her toes in their knotted gold sandals, biting her lip but accepting what I said.

“If I need you—” she began in a subdued tone.