Household Gods

The clerk smiled. It was not at all a pleasant smile. It was, in fact, more of a leer. “Well,” he said. “Of course. One can’t expect a woman to know how the law works, now, can one?” It took all of Nicole’s years of legal training and dealing with good-ole-boy judges and sleazy lawyers to keep from braining him with his own bronze inkpot. He went on in blind complacency, reciting as if by rote, in just about the same tone she would have used for explaining torts to a four-year-old: “Formal manumission is more complicated, of course, and grants a slave higher status. It makes her free, and it makes her a Roman citizen. She’d still be your client, of course, and you, or rather your guardian, her patron. She won’t be able to hold office” – he smiled that nasty smile again, as if to show how unlikely that was in any case – “but her freeborn children, if she should have any, will be.”

Julia nodded as if she’d known that all along. Her expression was eager, but there was wariness underneath, like a dog that accepts a bone but looks for a kick to follow.

Nicole made herself ignore Julia and concentrate on what the clerk was saying. “And informal manumission?” she asked.

“As I said,” the clerk replied with a little sniff of scorn, “for that you needn’t have come here. She’d be free then, but not a Roman citizen. Junian Latin rights, we call it.” And anyone but an idiot or a woman, his expression said, would know as much. “When she dies, whatever property she’s acquired while she’s free reverts back to you.”

That didn’t seem like much of a choice to Nicole. “We’ll do it the formal way, “ she said.

“The other difference,” the clerk said, “is the twenty-denarius tax for formal manumission: five percent of her approximate value. “

Nicole winced. “That’s a lot of money.”

“One gets what one pays for,” the clerk said: a bureaucrat indeed, and no mistake. “For your twenty denarii you receive full and proper documentation.” He paused. His eyebrows rose slightly. “I gather you haven’t brought the proper fee? “

Nicole had an all but irresistible urge to ask if he took MasterCard or Visa. “No, I haven’t,” she said a little testily. No credit cards here, either – not even a bank, that she’d seen or heard of. And what would people write checks on? The walls?

Meanwhile, there was the issue of the fee, and the fact that twenty denarii would lighten the cash box by a significant degree. So Julia was worth about four hundred denarii. That was a lot of money. No wonder Julia hadn’t thought she could save it on her own – and no wonder Brigomarus had been so upset. Nicole was, in effect, giving away the family Mercedes.

The clerk was no kinder and certainly no pleasanter, but he seemed – for whatever reason – to have decided against the usual bureaucratic obstructionism. “Well then,” he said. “You can get the money, I suppose.”

Nicole nodded. She had practice in looking sincere – it was a lawyer’s stock in trade – but she wasn’t lying, either.

The clerk seemed to know it, or else it was the one hour a day when he cut his victims an inch of slack. “Very well. I’ll draw up the documents. You go, collect the money, and come back with your guardian. “

“My guardian?” Nicole said. That was the second time he’d used the term. So what was she, a minor child? Or did the word have another meaning?

“That would be your husband, of course,” the clerk said, unsurprised by what had to look to him like female imbecility, “but your husband is dead.

Let me see. “ The clerk frowned into space, mentally reviewing family connections he knew better than Nicole did. “He was his own man, not in anyone’s patria potestas, which means that you no longer come under the legal authority of any male in his family. Which returns responsibility to your own, birth family. Father’s dead. Brothers – you have a brother, yes? Britomartis – Brigomarus. We’ll need his signature, or failing this his witnessed mark, before the documents are legal and binding.”

“Why?” Nicole demanded. “I can sign for myself.”

The clerk laughed, a strikingly rich and full sound to have come from so pinched and small a mouth. “Why, Madam Umma, of course you can! You can write your name wherever you like, if you can write it at all. But if this transaction is to be legal, it must have a man’s name attached to it.”

“What?” Nicole veered between fury and horror. First, to have to ask Brigomarus to agree to Julia’s manumission, after what he’d said and implied when Nicole informed him of it – fat chance. And second, and worse, her own approval wasn’t enough – because she was a woman, she had no right or power to sign a legally binding contract. That – by God, that was positively medieval.

But this wasn’t even the Middle Ages yet, she didn’t think. It was a long and apparently unenlightened time before that.