The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis

help.
    He invented an excuse to potter about, enlisting advice from the custodian of maps. ‘Granicus, sir? Is that somewhere near the Bosphorus? No, here we are—it’s on the Sea of Marmora.’
    â€˜Thanks. Stupid of me. Must have plodded through Alexander’s campaigns often enough at school.’
    A familiar shape on a mapskin arrested him. Caenis had called the island a scrawny goose braised in a swordfish pot: ‘Somebody interested in Crete?’
    â€˜Just been returned, sir.’ The custodian looked sheepish. ‘We don’t normally loan out the maps.’
    â€˜Nudged into it, eh?’ The custodian pretended not to understand him. ‘What’s that racket over there?’
    â€˜Overhauling the main catalogue, sir; quite a task. A lady who is helping reminded us about the two hundred thousand volumes Mark Antony lifted from the Library at Pergamum. Some poor dog must have recorded those! She said, did we realise that Cleopatra was just a girl who liked to curl up with a good read . . .’ He subsided into giggles.
    After a worrying pause the senator abruptly grinned too, transfiguring his face. ‘Sounds like Caenis!’ He could hear her voice in his head, deceptive and crisp, as she made the daft comment. ‘Is she here?’
    â€˜Not now.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    Another pause.
    Eighteen months abroad was nothing to a man who had already lived away from home, doing his military service at a much younger, more impressionable age. Who could say what eighteen months might bring to an ambitious female slave?
    He had expected Caenis to make her way. Yet there seemed an odd discrepancy today. He had marked her as a worker. Now she seemed to rely on others, while she merely went flitting from place to place never needing to lift her pen; for a slave she was taking horribly public risks.
    â€˜Speaking of Caenis—I have something of hers I borrowed.’
    â€˜You could drop in on her at Antonia’s house, sir. You might be offered lunch!’
    A much longer pause: Antonia’s house? Drop in?
Lunch?
    On rare occasions elderly citizens grew so incapable of managing their own affairs that unscrupulous slaves took over their property and ruled like monarchs in their homes, while the senile patrons were locked away in little rooms and starved . . . Still Antonia had family to protect her interests. Her son Claudius, though kept from public life, was an author and antiquarian—perfectly fit to supervise if ever his mother’s capacities failed. And not Caenis, surely? Caenis could not be capable of abusing an old woman.
    â€˜Thanks!’ the senator contented himself with saying sternly in reply.
    He went home. He had lunch by himself.
    Â 
    There were two hundred public bathhouses in Rome. Fortunately Phania and Melpomene had mentioned which one Caenis used.
    He was struggling down the Clivus Tuscus from the main Roman Forum, dragging his tired train of attendants like a magpie’s unwieldy tail, when Cornelius Capito came out of the bookshop on the corner, hailed him and tagged along. By then the baths were in sight, so he stopped to converse as a man was supposed to do. A detachment ofGuards came tramping straight up the centre of the road, grinding down anyone who meandered in their path; as the grumbling crowds pressed back into the gutters, Vespasian and Capito moved under the awning of a wineshop. Vespasian propped himself on the counter with its inset jars of red and white beverages; he paid for warmed measures for his acquaintance and himself, then spun a coin to the captain of his slaves so they too organised a round, glancing at him sideways, unable to believe their luck.
    Vespasian’s slaves knew now that there was a woman on his mind. They were still not sure if it was any particular one.
    Capito gossiped happily of libel actions, charioteers, trade, the elections, his mother-in-law, his gambling debts, his