Lindsey Davis - Time to Depart

'I will, of course!' Helena insisted, rather bitterly.

'Better not commit yourself,' I warned. 'When you've had time to think, you may not be too happy about this.'

We were not married. She was two ranks above me. We never would be married unless I could persuade the Emperor to promote me to the middle rank – which had been refused once already. One of the Caesars had turned down my request, even though I had earned quite a few favours from the Palace and my father had lent me the qualifying cash. Humbling myself to take the loan from Pa had been hard; I reckoned the Palace owed me more than favours now.

But the Palace was irrelevant. I was in a fix. Plebeians were not supposed to sleep with senators' female relations. I was not a slave, or I would have been dead meat long ago. There was no husband to be affronted, but Helena's father was entitled to view our crime in the same light as adultety. Unless I was much mistaken about the ancient traditions of our very traditional city, that gave him the right to execute me personally. Luckily Camillus Verus was a calm man.

'So how do you feel, Marcus?'

Fortunately my life as an informer had trained me to avoid saying what I felt when it could only lead to trouble.

Helena filled in the gap for herself wryly, addressing the. sky: 'Marcus is a man. He wants an heir, but he doesn't want a scandal.'

'Close!' I said it with a smile as if both of us were joking. She knew I was dodging the issue. Applying a serious expression, I altered my story: 'It's not me who has to go through with the pregnancy and the dangers of birth.' Not to mention enduring the extreme public interest. 'What I think takes second place.'

'Ho! That will be a novelty. It may not happen,' Helena suggested.

'Looks definite to me.' Helena had been pregnant with a child of mine before, miscarrying before she had even told me. When I found out, I had vowed never to be left out again. Believe me, keeping track had not been easy. Helena was the kind of girl who lost her temper if she felt she was being watched. 'Well, time will show if I'm right.'

'And there's plenty of time,' she murmured. I sat there wondering: time for what?

The child would be illegitimate, of course. It would take its mother's rank – utterly worthless without a father's pedigree to quote as well. Freed slaves stood a better chance.

We could cope with that, if it ever came to it. What was likely to break us, one way or another, would happen to us before the poor scrap was even born.

'I don't want to lose you,' I stated abruptly.

'You won't.'

'Look, I think it's fair to ask what you want to do.'

Helena was frowning. 'Marcus, why can't you be like other men, who don't want to face up to things?' Maybe she was joking, but she sounded serious. I recognised her expression; she was not prepared to think about this. She was not intending to talk.

'Let me say what I have to.' I tried playing the man of the house, knowing this normally only got me laughed at. 'I know you. You'll wait until I leave for the Forum, then you'll worry in private. If you choose a course of action, you'll try to do everything alone. I'll have to come chasing after you, like a farm boy left behind at market when the cart sets off for home.'

'You'll soon catch up,' she answered with a faint smile. 'I know you too.'

I was remembering the little I knew about what she had gone through, on her own, that other time. It was best not to think about it.

Legally, every day I kept her I was robbing her noble father. Once the results of our fling became apparent, Helena would be strongly encouraged to regularise her life. The obvious solution for her family would be a quick arranged marriage to some senator who was either too stupid to notice this, or plain long-suffering. 'Helena, I just want you to promise that if there are decisions to be made, you will let me share in making them.'

Suddenly she laughed, a tense and breathy explosion of dry mirth. 'I think we took our decisions in Palmyra, Marcus Didius!'

The formality cut like a boning knife. Then, just when I thought I really had lost her, she seized me in a hug. 'I love you very much,' she exclaimed – and unexpectedly kissed me.

It was no answer.

On the other hand, when a senator's daughter tells a plebeian that she loves him, the man is entitled to feel a certain low pride. After that it is all too easy to be seduced by the offer of coming indoors for dinner. And there are domestic routines of an even more wicked nature that can be made to follow dinner with a senator's daughter, if you can manage to lure one of these exotic and glorious creatures away from her noble father's house.

Allowing a woman to sidetrack me was routine. Come the morning I was still resolute. Plenty of ineffectual clerks had hired me to chase after heartless females who were giving them the silly story; I was used to being offered sensual bribes to make me forget a mission.

Of course I never accepted the bribes. And of course Helena Justina, that upright, ethical character, would never tty to influence me by shameless means. She went to bed with me that night for the same reason she had always done so: because she wanted to. And the next day, I carried on directly facing up to the situation because that was what I wanted.

Helena carried on dodging. I had made absolutely no progress in finding out how she felt. That was fore. Her motives defied prediction. That was why I was in love with her; I was tired of predictable women. I could be persistent. Maybe that was why she was in love with me.

Assuming she really was. A shiver as I remembered our lovemaking last night convinced me – at which point I stopped worrying.

I washed my face, rinsed my teeth, and bit my way into a hard bread roll. Yesterday's; we lived too far from the street to buy fresh loaves for breakfast. I gulped down some of the warm drink I was preparing for Helena. While she sleepily drank hers in bed, I put on a tunic that had spiced itself up with a gay shower of moth holes and renewed acquaintance with a wrinkled old belt that looked as if it had been tanned from the ox Romulus had used to measure Rome. I dragged a comb into my curls, hit a tangle, and decided to keep the relaxed coiffure that matched my casual clothes. I cleaned my boots and sharpened my knife. I counted my small change – a swift task – then transferred the purse to today's belt.

I kissed Helena, following up with a bit of fumbling under the bedsheet. She accepted the playfulness, laughing at me. 'Oh go and flaunt your Eastern tan where the men show off…' Today she would readily surrender me to the Forum, the baths, even the imperial offices. She knew that when I had had my fill of the city I would come home to her.

After a short tussle with the outer door, which had taken to sticking, I limped downstairs. I had hurt my toe kicking the doorframe and was cursing gently: home again. Everything as I remembered it.

I was absorbing the familiar experience of the ramshackle apartment block: for five floors angry voices reached me from behind curtains and half-doors. Two apartments per storey; two or three rooms per apartment; two and a half families per dwelling and as many as five or six people to a room. Sometimes there were fewer occupants, but they ran a business, like the mirror-polisher and the tailor. Sometimes one room contained an old lady who had been the original tenant, now almost forgotten amidst the rumbustious invaders to whom Smaractus had sublet patts of her home 'to help her with the rent'. He was a professional landlord. Nothing he did was to help anybody but himself.

I noticed a few more graffiti gladiators chalked on the poorly rendered walls. There was a smell like wet dog mingling with yesterday's steamed cabbage. Stepping down around one dark corner I had a narrow escape when I nearly trod on some child's lost pottery horse-on-wheels, which would have skated my foot from under me and probably left me with- broken back. I put the horse on a ledge, alongside a broken rattle and one tiny sandal that had been there when I left for Syria.