Although Julia clucked like an unhappy mother hen, Nicole wasn’t altogether unhappy when the fuller and dyer stayed out of the restaurant for a few days after her trip to the market. She hoped that meant she’d made him stop and think. No one, she told herself fiercely — not Umma’s brother, not Umma’s lover, no one — was going to take her for granted here.
Despite that determination, her nerves twanged like a Nashville guitar string when, two or three days after she and Brigomarus had got nowhere, Calidius Severus walked in with a man about half his age who otherwise looked just like him — and, unfortunately, smelled just like him, too. They sat down together like an identical-twin act, exact same stoop, exact same turn of the head, even the same shift and hitch on their respective stools. Nicole, watching them, felt a small, distinct shock, a
She’d tangled herself in a brief knot, and he was speaking, ordering dinner with perfect and not perceptibly strained casualness. “Wine and bread and onions for both of us, Umma, “ he said, “and what else have you got that’s good?”
“Snails fried with garlic in olive oil?” she suggested. She’d been holding her breath, she discovered, but she’d had to let it out to play the polite proprietor. “I had Lucius bring me back a basketful of snails this morning.” And Lucius, no doubt, had had as much fun catching them as an eight-year-old boy could. An incongruous bit of English doggerel went reeling through her head:
“Those do sound good,” Titus Calidius Severus said. Nicole had to clamp down hard on a giggle. His son, whose name Nicole resigned herself yet again to having to pick up from conversation, licked his lips and nodded, smiling widely. The smile, at least, was different from his father’s. Titus Calidius Severus was much too sure of himself to indulge in such a goofy grin.
Nicole would sooner have done the snails in butter herself. They had butter in Carnuntum — had it and looked down their noses at it. It was their last resort when they couldn’t get olive oil. No
“Two orders of snails,” she called to Julia. “I’ll get the rest.”
“All right, Mistress,” Julia said from behind the counter. She dropped the snails and chopped garlic into the fierce hiss of hot oil. A wonderful smell wafted out from the pan: oil, garlic, the fishy-sweet scent of snails. Butter would have smelled even better, in Nicole’s opinion, but she was, as far as she could tell, a minority of one. Olive oil was healthier, she consoled herself — until she remembered that the oil, like most of the wine in Carnuntum, was imported in glazed amphorae. She’d never imagined worrying about whether lead was more likely to be dangerous than cholesterol. She’d never imagined living in a place where nobody worried about either one.
Calidius Severus’ son kept watching Julia while she fried the snails. She’d glance at him every now and again, too, and preen a little. If that didn’t mean he’d gone upstairs with her a few times, Nicole would have been astonished.
As Nicole brought them the wine and bread and onions, Titus Calidius Severus whispered something to his son. The younger man frowned. “Is what my father says true?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Nicole answered evenly, arranging food and drink, cups and bowls, on the table in front of them. “What does your father say?”
“That you aren’t letting Julia screw for money anymore,” he said.
She couldn’t say she was startled, though shocked was another matter. From everything she’d heard, Romans charged through the bushes instead of beating around them.
“Yes, it’s true,” Nicole said, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but,
Before his son could make anything out of it, Titus Calidius Severus said, “Why in Ahriman’s name would Ofanius Valens lie to me, Gaius? Why would he lie about something like that, anyhow? No money in it.” He glanced up at Nicole. His expression was honestly curious. “Why aren’t you letting her screw for money anymore?”
“I decided I would sooner have a little less money than be a part-time madam,” she replied as starchily as she knew how.
Gaius Calidius Severus still looked miffed. His father grunted the way he did when he was thinking about something that, in his opinion, bore thinking on. “All right, that’s not a bad answer,” he said at last. “It will likely do your soul good when judging time comes.”
Titus Calidius Severus looked to be on the point of saying something more, but just then Julia sashayed between Nicole and the table, accompanied by a powerful odor of garlic. She carried two dishes of snails and a pair of spoons, which she set down with a flourish. Nicole couldn’t help but notice that the movements showed off her full breasts in the slightly snug tunic, and the fine curve of her hips and buttocks as she turned and sauntered back to the cookfire. The two Calidii pried their eyes off her long enough to pry the snails out of their shells with the handles of the spoons. No doubt about it, when it came to a choice between food and sex, food had at best an even chance.
They ate with lip-smacking relish. They both, obviously, appreciated Nicole’s recipe, if not her social ideas.
Julia didn’t appreciate those, either. As she took her place again by the fire, she put in a bump and a wiggle that would have led to a vice-squad bust on any L.A. street. Gaius Calidius Severus had eaten a couple of snails — enough to take the edge off his hunger for food. The third one stopped halfway to his mouth, forgotten in the glory of the scenery. His eyes reminded Nicole pointedly of the sheep’s eyes she’d seen in the market.
His father watched, too, not without admiration. Men did that. A lot of the time, they didn’t even seem to know they were doing it. It was the way they were made, the kaffeeklatsch queens had said to one another, back in Indiana. Fabia Ursa said it, too, when she came round for a morning’s gossip. So what, Nicole wondered, might Umma have said if she’d caught her boyfriend ogling her slave? Something interesting, she hoped. Something memorable. Something better than Nicole’s tongue-tied silence.
Or maybe the fuller and dyer was checking Julia out for a different reason. Turning back to Nicole, he said, “Do I hear rightly that you’re thinking about manumitting her?”
“Yes, it’s true,” Nicole repeated in the same truculent tone as before. But curiosity got the better of her defiance; she couldn’t keep from asking, “Where did you hear that?”
His smile was on the crooked side, and matched his lopsided shrug. “Somebody who talked to somebody who talked to your brother — you know what gossip’s like. If I heard it straight, your brother isn’t any too happy about it, either.”
“No, he’s not.” Nicole tossed her head. “He’ll get over it — or if he doesn’t, too bad for him. It’s not his business; it’s mine.”
Titus and Gaius Calidius Severus stared at her with the same deeply shocked expression Julia had inflicted on her when she’d said that before. In damned near comic chorus, they echoed Julia word for word: “It’s family business.”
“Well,” said Calidius Severus after a long pause, clicking his tongue between his teeth. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. “ It was not, his expression said, how he would have looked at it. “Families can be a pain, no two ways about it. But you do hate to throw out the connections. You never can tell how things will go — only the gods know that. We mortals, well… it never hurts to have something to fall back on.”
Good, sound, sensible advice. Even if he did smell like an outhouse on a hot summer day, Titus Calidius Severus was a good and sensible man. But Nicole hadn’t got to Carnuntum by being sensible. “I’ll take my chances,” she said.
He shrugged again. “Hey, I’m not your family. You’re not stuck with me.” He smiled that crooked smile again, too, which did the oddest — just this side of annoying — things to her middle. “Like I’m telling you something you didn’t already know.”
Oh, she could read him perfectly well.
