It was late in the evening before his father returned from the offices of the imperial secretariat. By the faint glow of an oil lamp Cato saw the anxious expression in his lined face, and then the grey eyes flickered towards his son, registering surprise that the boy was still awake.

‘You should be asleep,’ he whispered.

‘I couldn’t sleep, Daddy. Too much noise. What’s happened?’ Cato asked as innocently as he could. ‘The Praetorian Guards were running about all over the palace. Has Sejanus caught another traitor?’

His father gave a grim smile in response. ‘No. Sejanus will never catch any more traitors now. He’s gone.’

‘Gone? Left the palace?’ A sudden anxiety sparked in Cato’s mind. ‘Does that mean I can’t play with little Marcus any more?’

‘Yes… yes, it does. Marcus… and his sister…’ His father’s face twisted into a grimace at the appalling outrage that had been wrought on the innocent children of Sejanus during the day’s blood-letting. Then he leaned over his son and kissed his brow. ‘They’ve gone with their father. I’m afraid you won’t be able to see them again.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you later. In a few days, maybe.’

But his father never did explain. Instead, Cato heard it all from the other slaves in the palace kitchen the following morning. At the news of Sejanus’s death, Cato’s first reaction was great relief that the previous day’s events had had nothing to do with his theft of the spoon. All the anxiety, the dreadful anticipation of capture and punishment lifted from his childish shoulders. That was all that was important to him that morning.

Now, over ten years later, his face burned with embarrassment at the memory. That moment, and several others like it, frequently reached out to torment him into helpless self-loathing. Just as his present self-important fear did, and doubtless would again in the future. He seemed unable to escape these wearing rounds of harsh self-examination and he wondered if he would ever be able to live at ease with himself.

The sky remained a dismal grey for the rest of the day and there was not a whisper of breeze in the forest. The still and silent trees provoked a brooding nervousness in the riders. Cato persuaded himself that in less dangerous circumstances the harsh aesthetics of winter might lend the forest a kind of beauty. But for now, every rustle in the undergrowth or crack of a twig made him jump in his saddle and anxiously scan the shadows.