freedwoman to stay down here with her would have been pretty transparent, too, to say nothing of insulting to Calidius Severus. Nicole had seen often enough that he wasn’t the sort who couldn’t hear
Calidius set a couple of
Nicole didn’t feel like having any more wine, but she didn’t see how she could turn down her friend, either — for friend he was, just as surely as Fabia Ursa had been no more than a cordial acquaintance. As she plied the dipper, the baby next door started to cry. She jerked her head toward the noise. “Sometimes the gods choose not to work miracles.”
“That’s so.” In the lamplight, the fuller and dyer’s frown was full of shadows. The baby kept on crying. Calidius Severus sighed. “Poor Longinius. He’s going to have a tough time now. He thought the sun rose and set on Fabia Ursa.”
“They were happy together.” Nicole carried the two cups of wine to the table, hooked a stool with her ankle, and sat opposite Calidius. She was peripherally aware of tables that still needed wiping, floor that could use a sweeping, and the last of the day’s stew baking onto the bottom of a pot. None of them mattered much, right at the moment.
Calidius Severus took the cup she pushed toward him and sipped. Cheap wine you chugged down as fast as you could, to get past the taste. Falernian you sipped if you could, savoring the rich sweetness. “Ah,” he said. “That’s the stuff.” He frowned. “You’re not drinking.”
She made herself raise the cup to her lips. The wine was sweet. If she didn’t think about lead, if she didn’t think about alcohol, she might even have said it was good. “It was hard losing Fabia Ursa,” she said at last. “That should never have happened.”
“Dexter’s a pretty fair doctor,” Titus Calidius Severus said. “He did everything he knew how to do.”
“But he didn’t know enough!” Nicole blazed at him as she hadn’t quite had the temerity to blaze at Isis’ priestess.
Still, she thought unwillingly, it wasn’t Dexter’s fault, not really. In an odd way, it was Nicole’s, for knowing what would be possible eighteen hundred years from now, and blaming the doctor because he didn’t. The fuller and dyer was right; Dexter had done everything he knew how to do.
“Talk to any honest doctor and he’ll tell you he doesn’t know as much as he’d like to.” Calidius Severus reached across the table and set his hand on Nicole’s. In a different tone of voice, he went on, “Who does?”
The lamp sputtered and flared, bringing out the dark stains that would never leave the fuller and dyer’s skin. Nicole smelled the hot olive oil inside the lamp. After a moment, she realized that was all she smelled. Calidius Severus had lost his usual summer-privy reek. “You’ve been to the baths!” she said.
“What if I have?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “If I pay a call on a lady, I don’t want her to think less of me because my work makes me smell like a pissoir.”
“Oh,” Nicole said. It was more of a gasp than a word. She didn’t know if she dared laugh. It wasn’t funny, not at all. And yet she hadn’t thought, not really, that he understood how bad he smelled. His nose must have accustomed itself to the reek, just as hers had got used to the stink of Carnuntum.
He was watching, waiting for her to speak. “That was very… thoughtful of you,” she said a little desperately — and with dawning awareness. She knew what he had in mind. She wasn’t surprised. What else, after all, did a man usually have on his mind?
What was surprising, and not exactly thrilling either, was the realization that she had it on her mind, too. She glowered down at the wine cup, as if the Falernian in there had betrayed her. But alcohol had very little to do with it. She was sober as a judge — more sober than a couple of judges she’d known. Some of it was fear of extinction hammered home by Fabia Ursa’s untimely death. More, she admitted, had to do with Calidius Severus’ patient pursuit of her. He hadn’t taken no for an answer, but he hadn’t made a nuisance of himself, either. But most of it was the loneliness and isolation she felt here. This, she’d thought, would be her ideal world, her best escape from the twentieth century: simple, idyllic, egalitarian, worth even abandoning her kids; after all, didn’t men do it all the time? It was none of those things — not even close. And now, to her deep dismay, she needed an escape from the escape.
If she could go back -
No. Not even for Kimberley and Justin. She loved them, a fierce, visceral love that had nothing to do with anything she’d done or not done. It hadn’t kept her from leaving them, and it wouldn’t bring her back. Not as long as she found life in that world unlivable. Even Dawn-the-bimbo was better for them than Nicole in the state she’d been in when she made her prayer to Liber and Libera. Nicole now, worn thin with the simple effort of survival in a world she’d never been prepared for and certainly never fit into, was even less able to be the kind of mother they needed. She couldn’t even make this world a better place, and she was living in it. All her grand plans, her ambitions to “invent” everything from the chimney to the cotton swab, had lost themselves somewhere, so completely she couldn’t even regret that they were gone. Every scrap of energy she had was devoted to staying alive, fed, and more or less sane.
All of that came together into a decision of sorts. “Let’s wait a little longer,” she said, “to make sure Julia’s gone to sleep.”
“Well, well,” Titus said in unguarded surprise. Then he laughed quietly. “Well, well.” He laughed again, more freely, with a brightness of joy in it that she found contagious. “However you like. I’ve been saying that all along.”
She sipped at the wine without answering. She’d made a choice, and it wasn’t easily revocable. She should have relaxed into it; been glad for the release, at long last, of tension. Instead, she was twitchier than ever. She was, in a manner of speaking, about to lose her virginity again — her first time in this body. First times were always strange. How much stranger this was, when her lover didn’t even know it was the first time. As far as he knew, this was the same woman he’d made love to — how many times before? Many, if Nicole was any judge.
After a while, her cup was empty. So was Calidius Severus’. It probably had been for a bit. He raised an eyebrow and smiled that lopsided smile of his. It had always appealed to her. Now it made her belly quiver.
She took a deep breath, and nodded. They rose from the table together. She took the lamp to light their way upstairs. No flicking switches here.
At the top of the stairs, she paused to listen. All she heard was a triple chorus of deep, regular breathing. She nodded to Calidius. He slanted her an approving look and headed down the hall toward her bedroom. His strides were long and confident. Why not? He knew the way.
The door shut with a slightly disturbing thud. Nicole resisted the urge to run back and fling it open. She set the lamp on the chest of drawers. By its dim, flickering light, she barred the door as quietly as she could. When she turned back to face the room, she saw two things. The first was what lay beside the lamp on the chest, that Nicole had certainly never put there: a twist of wool and a small wooden box. Nicole could well guess what it contained. Wool and pine resin, Julia had told her. Julia, it seemed, had decided to help Nicole in the best way she could.
The second thing Nicole saw was Calidius Severus standing by the bed. The light made him look younger, and really, not bad at all in his Latin way. Better than Frank Perrin had ever been, that much she could be sure of.
She bent abruptly and blew out the lamp. The room plunged into darkness. “Ahh, why did you go and do that?” Titus Calidius Severus said in a grumpy whisper. “I wanted to see you. Not to mention,” he added pragmatically, “I’m liable to break my fool neck going downstairs without a light.”
“Don’t worry,” Nicole said, with a bit of a snap in it. “We’ll manage. We’ll manage everything just fine.” She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Groping along the top of the chest of drawers, she found the wool and the little box. She couldn’t retreat to a bathroom, and didn’t want Calidius Severus watching while she put the twist in place. Maybe that was twentieth-century modesty, but she didn’t care. It was hers.
She squatted and did what was needful, working by feel. It wasn’t any worse than putting in a diaphragm in a hurry while Frank cooled his heels, and certain other parts of his anatomy, in the marital bed.
When she’d done as well as she could, she rose and groped across the room. She heard him breathing and shuffling around — undressing? Probably. Just short of where her skin told her he was, and the bed just past him, she yanked the tunic off over her head and let it fall to the floor. It was a defiant thing to do, even if he couldn’t see it. She slid down her drawers and stepped out of them, and shifted till she felt the bed’s edge against her knees. She lay back on that solid, invisible surface.
