“Is there something we can — “ Nicole began, without much hope, but she had to ask.
Fabia Ursa interrupted her. “I’ll be all right,” she said.
She didn’t sound all right. She didn’t merely sound exhausted, either. She sounded sick, with the same whining, dragging quality to her voice that Nicole’s kids had when they were coming down with something. It reminded her so vividly of Kimberley that last day in West Hills, her heart contracted. If she could be back there, right now — if she could be right there, with all the troubles she’d had, and the stink of vomit, and every other delight of that awful day — oh, God, what she wouldn’t give to have it all back again.
She’d never wanted it so much. At first she’d been too elated. Later she’d been too busy surviving. Now…
Now she couldn’t indulge herself. “I have some willow bark,” she said with a tinge of desperation. “Wait here; I’ll go get it.” As if they could do anything but wait. They didn’t say so. Both Sextus Longinius lulus and Fabia Honorata nodded gratefully. Fabia Ursa sat mute, sunk again in that frightening lethargy.
Julia frowned when Nicole asked for the decoction. “Fabia Ursa?” she asked. Nicole nodded. “That’s not good,” Julia said. “Fever after you have a baby — that can kill you.”
“I know,” Nicole said irritably. She didn’t, not down in her bones where real belief was, but she’d seen Fabia Ursa. That was a very sick woman. Sick, she thought, as a dog.
Julia fetched the willow-bark decoction from its storage place, moving quickly, but not nearly quickly enough for Nicole’s peace of mind. She snatched the jar with scant thanks and hurried back to the tinker’s shop.
Fabia Ursa had gone upstairs — a good sign, maybe, if she could travel that far: now wasn’t it? Sextus Longinius lulus took the painfully inadequate jar with gratitude that made Nicole want to burst into tears. “Thank you, Umma,” he said. “You’re a good neighbor.”
Nicole started to brush him off, but caught herself. He needed to be grateful more than she needed to be comfortable about it. “I’ll bring you a loaf of bread every day,” she said, “and food your wife might like. All you’ll have to worry about is getting her well.”
She’d done it now: he looked ready to fall at her feet. “You are the best of neighbors,” he said. “The gods blessed me and my family when they set us next to you.”
Nicole mumbled something and fled. It was cowardly, and she really should have gone upstairs with him to make sure Fabia Ursa took the medicine, but she’d had all she could stand.
It wasn’t cowardice, she told herself, not really, that kept her away all the rest of that day and all the next. There was the marketing, there was the laundry, there was a flood of customers that ran her flat out from dawn to dusk. It was two days before she could scrape out enough time to get away. She had managed to send food over, once by Lucius and a time or two by Julia. She’d kept her promise in that much.
She found the tinker’s shop deserted. The same pot he’d been mending before, or another just like it, lay forgotten on the workbench. As she stood hesitating in the doorway, a man’s voice floated down the stairs: “ — warm fomentations on the belly, an enema of warm olive oil, and gruel for nourishment. If she should show improvement, thin, sour wine would be best. “
None of what he’d told Longinius lulus sounded unreasonable, though Nicole wouldn’t have wanted an enema if she felt like hell. But they were all things she would have done for the flu in L.A. They weren’t much good for anything more serious.
He was trying to make Fabia Ursa as comfortable as he could, because he couldn’t make her well. Nobody could do that, except Fabia Ursa herself. And that included Nicole.
She wavered, debating the good sense of going up to see if there was anything after all that she could do. But in the end she didn’t go. She left the loaf of Julia’s fresh-made bread and a bowl of stewed pears on the counter, and retreated to the tavern.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. The night again was broken by the baby’s crying, quickly suppressed: the wet nurse was doing her job, Nicole had to suppose.
Fabia Honorata was downstairs in the shop when Nicole went over the next morning, sitting on the tinker’s bench, looking as if she hadn’t sat down or rested in days. She looked up as Nicole came in, and managed a greeting, but not a smile.
Nicole asked the question she had to ask. “Fabia Ursa?”
“Not good,” Fabia Honorata said, too exhausted for anything resembling dramatics. “She doesn’t recognize any of us. She thrashes in the bed. The fever burns her like fire. Pray to whoever you think will hear you. I’d even pray to the Christians’ blustering fool of a god if I thought it would do any good.”
Nicole felt as if she’d been hit in the stomach. It didn’t matter that she’d been expecting such news. She’d hoped — against hope, she’d known from the start — that she’d find Fabia Ursa sleeping, the fever broken, and everything as well as it could be.
She should have known that this world didn’t have much to do with hope. Again she left the food she’d brought, again she fled to the sanctuary of the tavern. There in the comforting smells of bread and wine and humanity, she prayed as Fabia Honorata had asked her to. She did it halfheartedly, self-consciously. Somewhere on the road out of childhood, she’d lost the knack. But she tried. She hoped that would count for something.
That evening, as she was closing the tavern, she discovered what it had counted for. A storm of weeping and wailing broke from the shop next door. Fabia Honorata ran out in its wake, hair awry, tunic torn. “She’s dead!” she cried. “My sister’s dead!”
12
The next day dawned bright and warm, by no means as common a thing in that part of the world as it was in California. Nicole had come to welcome sun through the newly opened shutters of a morning, instead of taking it for granted. But today, as she squinted in the bright light after the stuffy dimness of her bedroom, the smile died as soon as it was born. There was an empty place in the world, a vacancy where Fabia Ursa had been. She’d been a constant, almost daily presence in Nicole’s life, not drinking much, but eating like a teenager, packing it away somewhere in that bird-boned frame. Her voice had washed over Nicole while she went about the business of the tavern, a half-annoying, half-comforting rattle of gossip, opinions, hearsay, and cheerful nonsense. She’d always had something to say to the kids, and had looked after them when Nicole needed an extra hand, without complaint and without asking to be paid. Nicole had found ways: a bowl of stew or a chunk of bread with olive oil on the house, or a cup of wine for her husband if he happened by.
Now she was gone. The funeral was this morning, just late enough to let her open the tavern and yet again leave Julia to look after it while she went elsewhere. Julia didn’t object. She liked the sensation of being the owner of the place, Nicole thought; and if she was turning tricks for spending money, she could do it a whole lot more easily when Nicole was away.
Nicole didn’t want to think about that today. She didn’t want to think about death, either, but death wasn’t so easily evaded.
Most of the neighbors had turned out for the funeral procession. They seemed like a decent crowd as they gathered in the alley, waiting for the body to be carried out of the house, but there couldn’t have been more than a couple of dozen in all. Two women whom Nicole couldn’t immediately place by name or face took their places at the head of what would be a small, sad procession. They were hired mourners, she realized, in garments artistically rent and with hair almost too dramatically disarrayed. As two strapping undertaker’s assistants carried the body out of the house, wrapped in a linen shroud and laid on a wooden bier, the mourners began to keen. A pair of flute- players, one with a large instrument, one with a small, joined in just out of synch. The combined racket put Nicole in mind of scalded cats.
