Household Gods

While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as my dearest Atpomara, but everyone else called simply Mother, Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn’t know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother’s eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes went almost soft.

Queen bee, Nicole thought, and disliked the woman on sight.

One way and another, the tavern managed to empty of customers while Atpomara got herself settled. Either they knew something was up and were too polite to hang around and witness it, or people knew this family too well to want to be anywhere near it once it assembled in force. Even Julia, who wasn’t usually any kind of coward, muttered something about seeing if the kids were up to something upstairs, and left Nicole to face the music alone.

She had no doubt at all that that was what was coming. Six pairs of eyes followed Julia out of the room. If the men had been dogs, their tongues would have been hanging out. The women would have been bristling and snarling, of course, like bitches everywhere.

Oh, dear, Nicole thought. She really had taken a disliking to these relatives of Umma’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of close affection among them, either, not even enough to put up a pretense of squealing and cheek-kissing and oh-it’s-been-so-long. From the sisters’ expressions, they didn’t want to touch their poor relation for fear of catching a disease.

True, they were notably cleaner and better kempt than Nicole managed to be. By twentieth-century American standards they were still fairly ripe, and those elaborate hairstyles reminded Nicole rather forcibly of stories she’d heard her mother tell about the ratted and lacquered constructions of the Sixties, complete with urban legends of spiders and literal rats’ nests. She let herself dwell on that for a while, as she stood behind the bar and waited for someone to speak.

It took a long uncomfortable while, but Brigomarus didn’t disappoint her after all. “Good morning, Umma,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said civilly. “May I serve you anything? Wine? The bread’s fresh, and we have a nice raisin compote today.”

He glanced at the others. They were all affecting interest in matters far removed from this low and none too sanitary place. “No,” he said after a pause. “No, thank you. We won’t be staying long.”

“Really?” Nicole raised her eyebrows. “You’ve come for the company, then? That’s the only other reason to come to a tavern, isn’t it?”

“In… a manner of speaking,” he said. He was nicely uncomfortable. Or maybe his tunic was new and inclined to itch.

Nicole wasn’t going to give him any help at all. She folded her arms and waited him out. It had been a useful tactic in court. It did the job here. He blurted out what he maybe had been instructed to frame more tactfully, from the way Atpomara’s face clouded over. “Umma, what were you thinking? You know I forbade you to manumit that slave!”

“Julia, “ Nicole said with great care and attention to the woman’s name, “was my property. It was my decision, and my right, to set her free.”

“It was not,” Brigomarus said heatedly. She’d got him on the defensive, and he didn’t like it one bit. “You, in case you’ve forgotten, are a woman. A woman should not act without the approval of her male relatives. That’s the law. “

“It is also the law that a person of either sex may manumit a slave informally in the presence of a suitable number of witnesses. Male witnesses,” Nicole said pointedly. She reached under the bar where she’d stowed the box with the document in it, brought it out and laid it on the bar.

He made no move to pick it up, still less to read it. “You can’t do that,” he said.

“On the contrary,” said Nicole, “I already did.”

Evidently Atpomara decided that her son might be the light of her eye, but when it came to pitched battles, he needed stronger reinforcements. She shot a glare at the elder son-in-law that made him jerk forward as if stung. “What is done can be undone,” he said with blustering confidence. “Come, dear Umma, consider the path of reason, the light of good sense, the beauty of obedience to one’s blood and kin and kind. Was it not Homer who said, ‘Happy the man who loves his homeland’? Is not one’s family even more sacred? Should one not – “

Nicole had had plenty of practice in listening to pompous asses both on and off the judge’s bench, but her time in Carnuntum had worn her patience a little thinner than perhaps it should have been. She let him rattle on a while longer, till he came to something approximating a full stop. His words and theme were remarkably similar to twentieth-century political bombast, right down to the stump-thumping about Family Values.

When he paused for air, she said, “No.”