Household Gods

No, she thought. Face it. She hadn’t gone over because she hadn’t known what to say, and she couldn’t be bothered with a baby on top of everything else.

She raised an eyebrow at the baby’s father. “Fabia Honorata? Not the wet nurse?”

“No, not the wet nurse,” Longinius lulus answered. He did look a little haggard after all. “That’s the other reason I came in here. She’s sick. It’s the new sickness that’s been going around, the one that really hits you hard. Gods only know if she’ll pull through. I wanted to ask you who nursed Aurelia. That wasn’t so long ago – she might still be in business.”

Nicole’s first thought was pity. What a life for a woman, going from baby to baby, no more valued for herself than a milk cow, and not too different from one either. Perpetually full and aching breasts, no relief from baby howls and babyshit, and no time off unless she wanted her livelihood to dry up.

Hard on the heels of that came fear. If the wet nurse was down with the pestilence, that meant she’d brought it into the tinker’s shop. Even now it might be fighting a still-silent war against his body’s defenses. And if that was so, then he was breathing it right into her face.

She didn’t want to feel what she felt – it wasn’t noble at all. She wanted him to go away. She gave what answer she could, as patiently as she could, considering. “I don’t really remember the name of the woman who nursed Aurelia,” she said. “It’s been a bit of a while, after all. Julia, do you recall?”

Julia came to the rescue as she so often had before, with the ingrained habit of obedience, and a nature that accepted whatever people chose to throw at her. “Wasn’t that Velina, the wet nurse who used to live on the other side of the place where the town council meets?” she said. “Didn’t she and her husband move back to Vindobona last year, to be with his kin?”

“Yes, she did. I remember that,” Longinius lulus said. Nicole nodded and hoped her face didn’t look too blankly foolish. She’d had to do that again and again when pretending to recall things Umma certainly would have remembered. Sooner or later, someone was going to trip her up over it.

Not today. Please God, not tomorrow either, or the day after.

“What will you do now?” she asked Longinius lulus.

He sighed. “Have to look for somebody else, I suppose,” he answered. “I can’t feed him myself, though I wish to heaven I could. It’d be a lot easier and cheaper. If Fabia Ursa had lived – “ He broke off, took a deep breath, blinked rapidly but held in the tears. “It’s the gods’ will. Isis’ priestess said it, so it must be true.”

But it wasn’t the gods’ will. It was plain old ignorance and lack of sanitation. Fabia Ursa needn’t have died.

If Nicole had told anyone how antibiotics could cure childbed fever, they’d have thought she was mad. And she couldn’t prove that it worked. She knew that it worked, but not why it worked or how to make it work. It had been just the same with the measles vaccine, and with the concept of antisepsis, of touching a woman in labor with absolutely clean hands so that she wouldn’t pick up the germs that caused childbed fever. Nobody here believed that such a thing could exist. And she had no way to show them.

If she’d stopped to think at all, before she lived this life, she’d have thought that she could save the world with all the things she knew. But she didn’t know anything that really mattered – anything that could help, or that anyone would let her use to help.

“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning all of it, more than he could ever know.

“I’m sorry, too,” Longinius lulus said. “I miss Fabia.”

And yet, even as he said it, and seemed to mean it, his eyes slid toward Julia, who stood at the hand mill grinding grain into flour. Julia couldn’t even be conscious of the way the tunic clung to her body as she worked, or how her breasts bounced, big double handfuls that had never been softened or slackened by the bearing or nursing of a baby.

All Nicole’s sympathy for him evaporated. Was that why he missed Fabia Ursa: because she was available whenever he wanted a stroke? Did he think he could go upstairs with Julia, someday when Nicole wasn’t around to say no?

Nicole scowled. She was angry at him, but at herself too. He’d loved his wife – he’d worn it on his face when he looked at her, and in his voice when he spoke of her. If he was still a normal man, if he still could want what a woman gave, who was she to fault him for it? Nicole hadn’t exactly shut herself down when Frank walked out, either.