Household Gods

He tossed it down, smacked his lips with stagey relish, and said, “Sure, wine’s good, and plenty of it. But the more choices you give your customers, the more customers you’re likely to get. Don’t you think so, Mistress Umma?”

He was good. If he’d lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he would have sold a hell of a lot of encyclopedias or aluminum siding or whatever he was peddling, because sure as hell he would have been peddling something.

Even so, if Nicole had intended to say no, he would have been out the door before he got well warmed up to his pitch. Her mother had been death on door-to-door salesmen, and Nicole had continued the family tradition with telemarketers.

But she wasn’t going to turn this salesman down. If she could get in more choices that didn’t involve ingesting lead in toxic quantities – not to mention a choice that might not involve ingesting quite so much alcohol – then she might not be totally happy, but she’d be happier than she was now. She looked him in the eye and said, “How much do you want for each barrel, and how many cups can I get per barrel?”

Julius Rufus beamed at her. “You think of your profit margin, I see. Good for you! If your arithmetic is weak, I’ll be happy to help you with your figuring, so that you – “

“My arithmetic is fine, thank you,” Nicole snapped. Her arithmetic, from what she’d seen, was a damn sight better than that of any local without a counting board in front of him. The Romans, naturally enough, used and thought in terms of Roman numerals, and Roman numerals were to arithmetic what cruel and unusual punishment was to jurisprudence.

The dicker that followed left Julius Rufus sweating. “Mistress Umma, do you want my children to starve?” he wailed at the midpoint.

“They won’t starve,“ she retorted. “They can drink the beer you don’t sell me. This isn’t something I have to have. It’s something I might want to have – if the price is right. This tavern’s done fine without beer for a long time. We can go right on doing fine without it, as long as it’s going to cost six times as much as it’s worth.”

“What a terrifying woman you are,“ Julius Rufus muttered.

Nicole smiled a smile that Frank had likened to a shark’s. “You say the sweetest things,” she said. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.

She ended up buying the beer at something less than half the price he’d quoted. She still had a scrap left of the papyrus on which she’d written out Julia’s letters of manumission; she got out the pen and ink and set down on the scrap the terms to which she and Julius Rufus had agreed. When it was written up as it should be, she shoved the papyrus across the bar at him. “Just sign this, if you would.”

“Sweet Isis the merciful!” he cried. He mumbled his slow way through the three-line contract, then scrawled something that might have said Julius Rufus below it. “There! Are you happy now?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Nicole said, and seized the papyrus and stowed it away in the box before he could think of grabbing it for himself. She turned to Julia. “Pour this nice man a cup of Falernian, if you please.” She was the soul of politeness now, even if she’d been a barracuda only moments before. Why not? Nothing wrong with being friendly after she’d got her way.

10

Well have good weather for the beast show,” Titus Calidius Severus said, as smug as if he’d ordered it especially for the occasion. “This sort of thing is a lot less fun in the rain and mud.”

“Yes,” Nicole said, barely remembering to answer him at all. She was excited out of all proportion to the occasion, almost quivering with eagerness at the chance to do something out of the ordinary. She’d even fixed herself up with a sitter: she’d promised Julia a couple of extra sesterces above her usual wages, to ride herd on things. Julia had agreed so readily, Nicole suspected she was plotting to earn a few more sesterces on the side – or on her back.

Nicole almost didn’t care. Or, no: she cared. But there wasn’t anything she could do about Julia once Julia was out of her sight. And she wanted – God, how she wanted – to get away for the day.

“This will be -“ she began, but stopped abruptly, before she said something she might regret.

Titus Calidius Severus wasn’t about to let her off that particular hook. “Be what?” he asked in all apparent innocence.

“Fun,” Nicole said after a pause. It wasn’t what she’d intended to say. But, while this would be the first time she’d gone outside the walls of Carnuntum, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Umma had done so. Nicole wasn’t about to blow her cover now. Not after all this time.