polished bronze mirror in her makeup kit, she winced.
She couldn’t just sit here wishing she were dead. There was money to earn: bread to bake, food to cook and serve, wine to ladle out into waiting cups. It didn’t, at the moment, seem any more appealing than sucking up to fat assholes of law partners. A couple of weeks in the tavern business had shown her all too clearly that, while a woman could make a living at it, she wasn’t going to retire to the Riviera any time soon.
The loss of a day’s proceeds would hurt.
Inspiration struck. She winced. Julia! Julia could run the tavern. She usually did anyway, more than Nicole hoped she knew.
No. Nicole winced again. That wouldn’t do, not for more than a few hours. Some things — the cash box, for example — had to stay under Nicole’s supervision. And it really took two to run the tavern properly; actually they could have used a third pair of hands, even with the kids’ intermittent help.
No real help for it. Running a tavern in any era was no easy nine-to-five. Sunup to sundown, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no paid vacations — and no sick leave. She had to get herself out there and get to work. If she looked like grim death… she did, that was all. She’d had plenty of customers who looked the same way, and for the same reasons, too.
Julia was already downstairs, getting things ready for a new day. To Nicole’s guilty relief, Julia, who was normally resilient to the point of perkiness, looked as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet, too.
“Hello, Mistress.” Julia managed a smile, but it was wan. “Now we remember why getting drunk all the time isn’t such a good idea.”
“What, you needed reminding?” Nicole said — not too loud; her own voice hurt her ears. Julia, she noticed, hadn’t opened the shutters. Nicole didn’t blame her one bit. The light creeping between the wooden slats already seemed bright enough to blind a person.
Another cart banged and rattled along the street outside. Nicole and Julia winced in unison.
“I ate some raw cabbage,” Julia said, “and I drank a little wine — not too much, by the gods!” Her sigh was mournful. “Hasn’t done much good yet.”
“Raw cabbage?” Nicole sighed just as Julia had, gustily. “I’ll try some, too — and a
She wasn’t fond of raw cabbage to begin with. She was even less fond of it after she’d choked down a handful of leaves. Her stomach asked, loudly and pointedly, what the hell she thought she was doing to it. Maybe the idea behind this particular hangover cure was to make you feel miserable somewhere else, so you wouldn’t worry about your head falling off. If that was the case — she’d rather carry her head around under her arm than deal with a stomach in open revolt.
She also discovered that, if there was any one thing in the world wine didn’t go with, raw cabbage was it.
“Time to bite the bullet,” she muttered. There was no toilet to run to, and no sink either, just the open front door. She couldn’t even say the words in Latin; she had to resort to English. Latin knew nothing about bullets.
Life in the second century was nothing like what she’d expected. One by one, every idea she’d had, had turned out to be wrong. Still, she thought with a kind of desperate optimism, this was a world without bullets, without guns. It had to be safer, didn’t it? It had to be more secure than the world she’d left behind.
A few minutes after Nicole opened the door, the sun went behind a cloud — a nice, thick, rainy-looking cloud. Clouds like that had been a cause for universal groans in Indiana, but in California they were wonderfully welcome.
Here, too, after so long a drought — and after a hangover. She beamed at Julia. Julia beamed back.
That relief — and whatever she got from the cabbage and wine, which wasn’t much — didn’t last long. Lucius and Aurelia came downstairs and started raising hell. Probably they weren’t any noisier than usual, but no way was Nicole up for kid-noise on that scale.
Nicole told them several times to be quiet, which did as much good as she’d figured it would: zilch, zero, zip. Her head hurt. Her tooth throbbed in sledgehammer rhythm.
Aurelia stampeded past with Lucius in roaring pursuit. Nicole snagged first one and then the other, and laid a solid smack on each backside. “Shut up!” she yelled at them both. “Just — shut —
She stopped cold.
She never said it, because even while the words took shape on her tongue, she noticed something. It was quiet in the tavern. The kids had slunk off to do something useful: Lucius chopping nuts, Aurelia helping Julia grind flour for the next batch of bread. They weren’t sniveling or acting abused. They were simply… quiet. And they stayed quiet for a good while. Not forever, but long enough.
Nicole never did voice her apology. She didn’t like herself much for it, either.
Were peace and quiet worth an occasional whack? The people of Carnuntum certainly thought so. Nicole never had. She’d sworn when she was a little girl, after her father had left another set of bruises on her mother’s face — and her mother told people she’d walked into a door — that she’d never raise her hand in anger to anyone, adult or child. And here she’d broken that vow.
She was breaking down, belief by belief, conviction by conviction. If the parents of Carnuntum had been transported as suddenly to Los Angeles as Nicole had to Carnuntum, every last one of them would have faced losing custody of their children. Most would have done jail time for child abuse. But here no one looked twice, even when a father was caught beating his son till the boy screamed for mercy.
From everything she’d read, that should have made the adults of Carnuntum — the grown-up survivors of abuse — a hateful pack of social misfits. And yet they weren’t. They were just people. Maybe they were cruder than people in Los Angeles, but there was no denying the resemblance. Human nature, whatever that was, hadn’t changed. People fell in and out of love, they quarreled and made up, they did business, they gossiped, they got drunk — as Nicole’s aching head too well knew — all as they might have done eighteen hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic.
So what did that say about all the books she’d read and the television talk shows she’d watched, and all the theory she’d taken as gospel? The Romans had a theory that it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to buy and sell another. That theory, as far as she was concerned, was dead wrong, no matter how elaborately they justified it.
The next thought, the corollary, was amazingly hard to face. What if her own theories — her own assumptions — weren’t exactly right, either? What if they were all skewed somehow? So where did right end and wrong begin? Who could know, and how?
She clutched her head in her hands. It was pounding worse than ever, but not with the hangover, not any longer. Tough questions of law and ethics had done that to her, too, when she was in law school. She’d been glad to get out of those courses with a passing grade.
There wasn’t anybody standing over her now, demanding that she think about things that she plain didn’t want to think about. It didn’t make any difference. The thoughts were there. She could make them go away, but they kept coming back, mutating and changing, till they changed
“Hurry up with my order there,” a customer said. He hadn’t given it much more than a minute or two before. Julia was scrambling as fast as she could to fill it.
And Nicole had had it up to here. If she wasn’t going to take any guff from Lucius and Aurelia, she sure as hell wasn’t about to let an obstreperous customer push her around, either. “Keep your drawers on,” she snapped.
