Household Gods

Aurelia stirred and kicked off the covers. Nicole froze, but neither child woke. Aurelia was clutching a cloth doll the way Kimberley would have hung onto Scratchy the bobcat. Other toys lay on the floor: another doll or two, a toy cart, a wooden sword.

Nicole frowned at the sword. No children of hers were going to play with war toys – even if they weren’t, strictly speaking, her children.

Her frown changed, darkened. Lucius’ father had been a soldier, from what she’d heard. Titus Calidius Severus was a veteran, too; he’d made that plain. Several of her other customers, from snatches of overheard conversation, also must have served in the legions. A legion had been based around here – she remembered that from her honeymoon day trip to Petronell. Hadn’t Rome had a Vietnam, then? Didn’t they understand what a horror war was?

She shook herself, shrugged. War was far enough away from this here and this now, that there was no point in worrying about it. She slipped backward as quietly as she could, let the door-curtain fall back into place, and trudged down to her work. She was her own boss, after all. Nobody else was going to do it for her. No secretarial pool, no janitorial staff. Just herself – and Julia.

Julia had the tavern open already, the fires going, everything in order and ready to start the day. She greeted Nicole almost too brightly, though her words were solicitous enough: “Good morning, Mistress! How are you doing now? Are you well?”

Nicole caught herself wondering just how smug Julia felt. She quashed the thought and answered as civilly as she could manage, which wasn’t very, without coffee and with none in sight for the next however many hundred years. “I’m all right. I may even live.”

Julia smiled one of her wide halfwit smiles. “Oh, Mistress! The last couple of days, you’ve had such a funny way of putting things.”

Nicole’s heart thudded. God – what if Julia had guessed – what in the world was she going to -

But Julia’s smile had turned conspiratorial. “And here you put your paint on, and you didn’t even bother with it yesterday.”

“Right,” Nicole said a little too quickly. “Yes, that’s right. I didn’t need it yesterday. Today – “

Julia nodded, woman to woman now instead of slave to mistress. “I know just what you mean. There’s nothing like a nice coating of white lead to keep people from guessing you aren’t right underneath it.” She stopped. Her voice rose in surprise. “Mistress! Where are you going?”

Nicole was already halfway up the stairs. “To wash it off! “ she flung back. My God, she thought, over and over. My God! Had she swallowed any? Had any gone up her nose?

My God. Even the makeup was poisonous. And hadn’t she thought it looked a little like cocaine? It was worse than cocaine – a more certain, a more deadly killer than cocaine had ever been. Had she got any in her eyes? Could the blood vessels in her eyes absorb it? God, what was she supposed to do? She didn’t know a thing about lead poisoning, except that it was bad – and she was a prime candidate for it.

At the top of the stairs, she almost bowled over Lucius, who obviously had felt well enough to get out of bed. “Mother!” he called as she rushed past him. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer. She dived into her bedroom, slammed and barred the door, and leaped on the washbasin. No facecloth, no towel, but rags – rags! She yanked a fistful out of the drawer and dunked them, and scrubbed at her face, over and over, till the skin stung and burned. Every time she splashed herself with water, she made herself blow out through her mouth and nose, to keep from getting any more of the lead into her system. Once she had it all off, or hoped to heaven she did, she took the little pot of makeup over to the window and dumped it out, as she had with the chamberpot not long before. This time, she watched the cloud of white powder drift down to the ground. No one was passing below, to be startled by the small deadly snow. Nothing moved but the flies, seething in the noisome mess that, she could see, lined every house-wall. There’d be a few million fewer, she thought, thanks to her latest contribution.

She was calm again – or calm enough, at least, to face the world. She took a deep breath and braved the stairs again.

Lucius and Aurelia were both down below and both eating breakfast: a little bit of bread without oil, and something in a cup that was probably watered wine. Nicole couldn’t find the energy to make an issue of it.

Julia, of course, wasn’t about to leave well enough alone. “Why did you get rid of your makeup, Mistress?” she asked. “You looked nice with it on.”

Nicole caught herself wondering if Julia was a little slow in the head – or if it was a game slaves played, to ask questions that sounded wide-eyed innocent but were calculated to catch a person in the raw.