Household Gods

As soon as it began to get dark, business didn’t just fall off: it died. Nicole didn’t fully understand that till she lighted a lamp. Matches she didn’t have; she had to use a twist of straw from a basket by one of the cookfires, and light it from the fire. The oil-soaked wick sputtered and guttered before it came alive. The flame did next to nothing to push back the gathering gloom. Not for the first time, and very probably not for the last, she missed the daily magic of electric power.

The taberna was empty. So was the street. The children had come in not long before, devoured a supper of bread and cheese and a little of the smoked pork, and gone upstairs with Julia. They hadn’t insisted that she kiss them, though they’d stood in a line, slave and children alike, and said a polite good night. Nicole hadn’t tried to keep them downstairs, or tried to persuade them to eat a few vegetables with their bread and protein. She was too tired to fight that battle tonight. Tomorrow, she’d promised herself, on the children’s behalf. Even as she thought it she’d been struck with a memory of older guilt: Justin and his chicken nuggets and French fries, eating a meal that couldn’t possibly be good for him, because his mother was too tired to fix a proper dinner.

She missed him suddenly, so fiercely that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She missed Kimberley. She missed the house in West Hills. She even -

No. She didn’t miss Frank. Not for one split second.

She took the lamp with her to the front door and stood in it, peering out. Good Lord, she thought: she hadn’t set foot outside all day. She looked across the street, then up and down. A few torches and lamps flickered, but only a few. Above the flat black line of roofs, a piercingly bright star – Venus? – hung in the western sky, at the edge of the skirts of twilight.

After work back in West Hills, she would have watched TV or read a magazine or put a CD on the stereo. No TV here, no magazines, no stereo or CDs.

Even if she’d had the energy for them, she’d have been too exhausted to bother. She pulled the solid weight of the door shut and barred it, then shuttered the windows. Picking up the feeble lamp again from where she’d set it on the table by the door, she retrieved the cash box and carried it upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than ever in that bare hint of light, narrow and precipitous and ripe for a fall. But she managed them without even tripping, let alone breaking her neck.

The curtains were drawn in the other rooms. She ventured to look in. Two were empty, though one had a bed in it. The third was full of the sound of quiet breathing. Something large lay across the door. The rasp of a snore sent Nicole starting back, even as she realized what it was. Julia, sleeping on the floor, being a living obstacle to anything that tried to come in and get at the children. It was touching, in its way, though Nicole made a mental note to give Julia permission to sleep in one of the unused rooms. Whatever those were for. Guests? Storage? In the morning, or whenever she could, she’d have to look and see.

But not tonight. She was swaying on her feet. If Julia hadn’t been in the way, she might have gone in and tucked the children in as she would have done with Justin or Kimberley, but she wasn’t at all sure she could do it without waking the slave. Best to let them be.

In the room that she’d begun to think of as hers, she set the lamp on the chest and the cash box beside it. She had no energy at all for wrestling the heavy chest and hiding the box. What could happen to it, after all? The door was locked below, and she’d barred the door up here. She used the chamberpot – a luxury she’d had too little of in that long full day – and let herself sink down on the bed. Before she could even rise to blow out the lamp, she was deeply and soundly asleep.

5

Nicole woke earlier than she’d intended. The lamp had gone out. It was pitch-black outside, though the moon had climbed over the roof of the house, the shop, whatever it was, next door and sent a thin strip of wan gray light through the bedroom window. She hadn’t bothered to shutter it: this was the second floor; what could get in?

She noticed the light only peripherally, in that it helped her find the chamberpot. The one advantage of having the damned thing right there under the bed was that she didn’t need to race down the hall to the bathroom. That was as well, for she didn’t think she would have made it. The next couple of minutes were among the most urgently unpleasant she’d known for as long as she could remember.

“Stomach flu!” she groaned when the worst of it was over. What awful luck!