‘My family. After they finished beating me.’ Her eyes fell to the floor. ‘Seems that I caused them some embarrassment after that last night we had in the inn. When I got home to my uncle’s house they were all waiting for me. Somehow, they’d found out. My uncle took me out to his stable and whipped me. He kept shouting that I had shamed him, shamed my family and shamed my tribe. And all the time he whipped me. I–I’ve never known a person could feel such pain…’

Macro had been beaten a few times in his younger days — at the hands of a centurion wielding a vine staff with all the brutality the officer could muster. He remembered the agony well enough, and understood what she must have endured. Rage and pity welled up inside him. He rose from the cot and went to sit beside her.

‘I thought he was going to kill me,’ whispered Boudica.

Macro put his arm round her shoulder and gave her a comforting squeeze. He felt her body flinch at his touch.

‘Don’t, Macro. For pity’s sake don’t touch me. I can’t bear it.’

The chilling despair of rejection turned Macro’s guts to ice. He frowned angry with himself for having let this woman work her way into his heart so completely. He could imagine the other centurions laughing contemptuously into their cups if they ever got wind of his infatuation with some native girl. Screwing them was one thing; forming an emotional attachment was quite another. It was just the sort of pathetic behaviour he himself had once been so critical of. He recalled the jibes he had given Cato when the lad had fallen for the slave girl Lavinia. But that had been a harmless teenage fling; just the kind of thing to be expected of youngsters before the harsh demands of adulthood closed down such experimentation with all that life had to offer. Macro was thirty-five, nearly ten years older than Boudica. True, there were relationships with greater differences in age, but they were rightly derided by most people. The gap in age that had charmed him so utterly a few months earlier now mocked him. The centurion felt like one of the pathetic old gropers who haunted the Circus Maximus, trying their hand with women young enough to be their grandchildren. The comparison made him burn with shame. He stirred uncomfortably.

‘So they forced you never to see me again?’

Boudica nodded.

‘And you went along with it.’

She turned her face to him, twisted with bitterness. ‘What else could I do? They said if I was ever caught with another Roman I’d be beaten again. I think I’d rather die than face that. Truly’ Her expression softened. ‘Sorry, Macro. I can’t risk it. I have to think about my future.’