“Because I only lie when there is something to gain.”

Her face cracked into pain. “Did you lie to her? Oh my poor cousin!” I shot her a look that stopped her for a moment, though it was like trying to calm a runaway ox by holding out a handful of hay. “She was only sixteen!” exclaimed the senator’s daughter, as if that said everything.

Well, it told me what she imagined I had done, and why she held me in such formidable contempt.

With an exasperated explosion, Helena Justina sprang to her feet. She seemed to enjoy rushing out of rooms. She swept past with a curt goodnight. It surprised me to receive even that.

I stayed on my stool for a while, listening warily to this unfamiliar house. Though I tried not to think about Sosia, simply because I was so tired I could not bear it, I felt burdened with troubles, desperately lonely, and a very long way from home.

I had been right: nothing in Britain had substantially changed.

XXIV

Flavius Hilaris explained his plan next day.

Unsettled in a strange house, I had heaved awake as soon as people began to stir. I put on four layers of tunics and edged cautiously downstairs. A slave with a raw cough pointed out the dining room, where a murmur of serious voices stopped immediately I appeared. Aelia Camilla greeted me with her flooding smile.

“Here he is! You emerge early for a man who arrived so late!” She was on her feet ready to go about her household tasks, but first set a breakfast plate for me herself. The informality in this official house was tipping me off balance.

Hilaris himself, with his napkin under his chin, passed me a bread basket. The crab-faced young woman Helena was there. I half expected her to withdraw demurely with her aunt, but she stayed, glowering, with her hands locked round a beaker. Hardly a demure flower.

“Having been stationed here,” her uncle began at once, being the single-minded type who burrowed into business as soon as he trapped an audience, “I expect you’ve kept abreast of recent events.”

I adopted the pious expression of a man who keeps abreast of events.

Fortunately, the procurator was accustomed to starting meetings with a local résumé. He could hardly approach his dinner table without calling for an up-to-date pricelist of in season vegetables. He brought me abreast himself: