Amara struggles from the bench after her master, looking back at her friends enjoying their free lunch. Beronice is digging into the food again, Cressa seems to have dozed off and Victoria is purposely avoiding her eye. Dido mouths good luck. She walks round the corner to Felix’s flat, trailing behind him on the narrow pavement. Paris opens the door, and their boss shoves past him, pulling Amara up the stairs.

“In here,” he ushers her into his study. The room, which always used to intimidate her, seems small after Zoilus’s house. The painted bulls’ skulls, usually so full of menace, look flat after the exquisite frescoes in Quintus’s bedroom. She is already imagining herself elsewhere. Felix sits down, making himself comfortable. “So when can we expect more from our boys?”

“At the Festival of Flora,” Amara replies, pulling up a stool without being invited. “But it’s a different client. A man called Cornelius. This booking is a sort of . . . trial. He wants to see if we can do even better. Then he might have us more regularly.”

“Do better?” Felix frowns. “He fucked you too but without paying?”

“No.” Amara tries not to let her irritation show. “He wants us to do better at the singing and dancing. He’s asked us to join him for the first night of the festival next month, for the Floralia, to perform at a private party. He didn’t use either of us.” She thinks of the way Cornelius gripped her thigh, his calculating stare. “Though I’m sure that would be part of the price. He said to tell you it would be seventy for the trial. Ninety for future bookings.”

“All this money for singing,” Felix says, taking his tablets out of a drawer to scribble down the sums she has promised. “Well, whatever works. You and Dido had better practice. You can play up here, so I know what you’re up to.”

“There was something else,” Amara says. She takes a silver coin from her purse, the one Nicia had pressed into her hand as she and Dido left. For your sweet words, he had said. For Fortunata. It is almost physically painful for her to place it on the desk in front of Felix and move her hand away. “A tip,” she says, looking at him. “I would like to spend it on performance clothes for us both, maybe some music lessons.”

“You expect me to be grateful for your honesty?”

“No. I expect you to understand a good investment. These men want a certain style. This”—Amara plucks at the worn material of her toga—“is not it. We performed naked last night. But you can’t play the same trick every time.”