"Larius! You are not nice."

While I contributed the refined commentary, Justinus rushed past me. He helped my nephew batten onto the man again. Clutching his neck, Mandumerus gave in a second time.

Now we had a problem. Persuading a reluctant captive to descend a ladder is no joke. "You can go down nicely or we'll throw you off."

That was a start. We acted as if we meant it while Mandumerus looked as if he didn't care a damn. I dropped my sword to Aelianus so he could stand guard at the bottom. Larius did gymnastics down the scaffold, then jumped the last six feet. The Briton reached ground level. The ladder must have been merely lent against the scaffold (or else he slipped its ties as he went down). Now he grasped the heavy thing and hauled it away from its position. I had been about to follow him down, so I had to make a jump for safety. He swiped Aelianus and Larius with the ladder and left me dangling from a scaffold pole. Then he threw down the ladder and was gone.

I had no alternative: I sized up the distance to the ground, then as my wrists began to go, I dropped. Luckily, I broke no bones. Larius and I replaced the ladder for Justinus to descend.

The fugitive made it to the end of the garden colonnade. Then two figures appeared unexpectedly, discussing some abstruse design point in the fading light of dusk. I recognised the parties and feared the worst. Yet they turned out to be quite handy. One threw himself headlong in a tackle and brought Mandumerus down: Plancus. Maybe a low lunge to the knees was how he acquired new boyfriends. The other grappled with a garden statue (faun with pan pipes rather hairy, anatomically suspect; dubious musical fingering). He wrested it from off its plinth then dumped the armful on the prone escapee: Strephon.

We cheered enthusiastically.

Being captured by a pair of effete architects hurt Mandumerus' pride. He subsided, grizzling tears of shame. As he pleaded in crude Latin that he had meant no harm, Strephon and Plancus assumed the high-handed manners of their fine profession. They summoned staff, loudly complained about rowdiness on site, denounced the clerk of works for permitting horseplay on a scaffold and generally enjoyed themselves. We left them to supervise the miscreant's removal to the lock-up. Thanking them quietly, we continued to our suite.

LIV

maia was alone with my children. She was furious. I could handle that. She was anxious too.

"Where's everyone?" I meant, where was Helena.

The Camilli and Larius, sensing domestic danger, shuffled off to another room where I could soon hear them trying to repair the damage to their outfits. At least their bruises made them look like men to reckon with.

My sister's mouth was tight with distaste for yet another stupid situation. She told me Hyspale had gone off with her 'friend'; he had turned out to be Blandus, the chief painter. Hyspale must have met him when she was hanging around the artists' habitat, hoping to encounter Larius.

I was disgusted and annoyed. "Blandus should not be entrusted with an unmarried woman- one with limited sense and no experience! Helena allowed that?"

"Helena forbade it," Maia retorted. "Hyspale sneaked off anyway. When none of you men came back for hours, Helena Justina went after her." Of course; she would.

"You couldn't stop her?"

"It's her freed woman She said she couldn't leave Hyspale to her fate."

"I'm surprised you stayed at home," I scoffed at my sister.

"I would have gone to see the fun!" Maia assured me. "But you have two babes in arms, Marcus. Your nurse is a complete wastrel and since their mother has abandoned them, I'm looking after them."

I was making preparations. I called out to the others. There was a water flagon on a tray; I drained it. We had no time to rest. No time to wash off the sweat, blood and smells of the dog kennel. I checked my bootstraps and weapons.

"Where did Hyspale and Blandus go?"

"The Rainbow Trout. Hyspale wanted to see the dancer." To be a woman in the company of the men "Stupenda' aroused would not be clever. Helena would instinctively understand that. Hyspale had no idea. Hyspale had been nothing but trouble to the pair of us, but Helena made up for the other woman's complete absence of feeling for danger. "He'll jump her said Maia bleakly. Nobody needed to tell me that. "And the silly chit will be so surprised."

I'll go. Don't worry."

"With you in charge?" Maia was now positively caustic. I told myself it was a form of relief since I would have to take the blame.

All my sisters liked to disrupt life with a complete turnaround just when plans had been made. "I'm coming too," Maia suddenly declared.

"Maia! As you said just now, there are two small children '

But it seemed one crisis had forced her to speak out over another. The moment was inconvenient but that never stopped Maia. She gripped my arms, her fingers digging through my tunic sleeves. "Ask yourself then, Marcus! If you feel like this about your children, what about mine? Who is looking after mine, Marcus? Where are they? What condition are they in? Are they frightened? Are they in danger? Are they crying for me?"

I forced myself to listen patiently. The truth was, I did find it odd that Petronius Longus had never sent a single word of what the situation was. He must have made arrangements for my sister's children with Ma looking after them, probably. I would have expected a letter, at least one that was heavily coded, if not to Maia then to me.

T don't know what is going on, Maia. I was not in on the plot."

"The children had help," Maia insisted. "Helena Justina." Helena had admitted it. "Petronius Longus." That was obvious. "You too?" Maia demanded.

"No, really. I knew nothing."

It was the truth. Maybe my sister believed it. At any rate, she agreed to take care of my two daughters, and she let me go.

It had been a long afternoon, but a much longer evening lay ahead.

LV

the rainbow trout was a dump. I expected that. It stood at the junction of a puddled lane with a frightening alley, just two or three kinks in the road from the town's south gate. Calling its location a road is a courtesy. However, it did have a set of road-menders installing new cobbles at one end- and the inevitable workmen following them, tearing up the brand-new blocks in order to fiddle with a drain. Civic-amenity management in true Roman style had hit this province.

There was no streetside space where food shops with marble counters could offer food and drink to passers-by. A grubby wall, mainly blank, offered a couple of tiny barred windows too high to see in through. The heavy door stood half open; that passed as a welcome. A petite signboard showed a sad grey fish who would be a waste of pan space. There was no graffiti on any outside the wall, which told us that no one in this neighbourhood could read. In any case, they had cleared the streets. Provincials don't dally. Why linger to socialise when your province has no meaningful society?

I had the Camilli and Larius with me. We stepped down a couple of uneven treads into a gloomy cavern. It had a warm rank smell: too much to hope this was caused by animals- the people alone were responsible. There was one interior drinking den, with misshapen curtains half concealing filthy anterooms that ran off to the sides like burrows. Quality customers were perhaps reclining in an upstairs gallery, though it seemed unlikely. There was no upstairs.

That was to be rectified. Like everywhere these days, the Rainbow Trout had a facility-improvement programme. It was being extended upwards; so far, percentage progress was zero. A gaping hole in the ceiling marked the spot where a stairway was to be opened up. That was all.