Brigomarus scowled. “Listen, you know it’s not that simple.” He paused as if to control his temper, or maybe to come up with an argument a silly woman would understand. “Look, Umma, if you’re bound and determined, I don’t want to fight over it. Life is too short as it is. Let’s do it like this, if you’ve got your mind set on it.” He waited for Nicole’s emphatic nod, then went on, “Let her earn more money and keep more money, so she can pay back what she cost.”
Julia’s face fell. Nicole could make a pretty good guess what that meant: with what Julia could make, she’d never be able to pay for herself — unless she sold her body, and sold it and sold it… That was partly why Nicole shook her head even more violently than she’d nodded, but only partly. She could not stomach owning a slave for one more instant. And there was no way in hell she was going to compromise with the system by taking money from Julia in return for Julia’s freedom. “No,” Nicole said. “I’m going to emancipate her, and that’s that. “
“I say you’re not going to do anything of the sort.” Brigomarus sounded as revoltingly sure of himself as any senior partner at her old law firm.
“You may be my brother” — and then again, you may not — “but you’re not my master, so don’t treat me as if you think you are,” Nicole snapped. Brigomarus stared at her as if she, or rather Umma, had never spoken to him like that before. If Umma hadn’t, she’d probably wasted a lot of good chances. “She’s not your slave, she’s mine, and I’m going to do with her as I think best.”
“As you think best?” Brigomarus1 eyebrows had climbed to his hairline in an expression of comic incredulity — but there was nothing comic about his tone. “And what does that have to do with it? You have a family, Umma, and you seem to have forgotten about it.”
“I haven’t forgotten!” Nicole said hotly — and honestly enough. She never forgot Kimberley or Justin, either, even in the deep throes of life in Carnuntum.
She knew what he meant, nevertheless, and couldn’t help a stab of guilt at the actual, if not technical, falsehood.
“Oh, you haven’t?” Brigomarus drawled. “Not that I’d blame you for wanting to forget dear Mother and our snotty sisters, after they’ve married up and you’ve stayed where we came from, and I know they never waste a chance to remind you of it, either. But even so, Umma, and even if you don’t care what this does to the rest of the family, I never imagined you, of all people, throwing away good money for no good reason.”
Nicole stiffened her back and lifted her chin. “I’m going to do what’s best for me and what’s best for Julia, and that’s all I’m worried about,” she said.
She’d shocked Brigomarus: she saw it in his eyes. And she’d shocked Julia, which shocked her in turn.
Well, she thought, if the second century isn’t ready for a little twentieth-century assertiveness — and only a little, because she’d soft-pedaled it as best she could — too damn bad.
Stiffly, Brigomarus said, “We’ll speak of this further when you’ve come to your senses. The gods grant it be soon.” He looked into his cup, saw he had a swallow of wine left, and gulped it down. Then he stalked out of the tavern, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. He hadn’t, Nicole noticed, said good-bye, even to the kids.
“Mistress — “ Julia looked and sounded deeply worried. “Mistress, are you really sure you want to quarrel with your family over me? A family’s the most important thing in the world. If you don’t have a family you’re on good terms with, who’s going to nurse you when you’re sick? Who’s going to take care of your children if you die? Who’s going to help you if you go into debt? If I had a family, I’d never get them angry at me.”
Nicole looked at Julia as if seeing her for the first time. She was all alone in the world. As a slave, she was more thoroughly isolated from everyone around her than anyone in the twentieth century could be. That, thought Nicole, no doubt made her look at family with a wistful longing only distantly connected to anything real. You needed to be in a family to know how horrible it could actually be.
Umma apparently knew. “Dear” Mother and a couple of upwardly mobile sisters, was it? Then they probably didn’t just drop in to visit, the way Brigomarus felt free to do; and that was a relief. It was enough of a tightrope walk to keep Umma’s image going in this tavern and in the neighborhood, without trying to fool Umma’s own mother into believing that Nicole was Umma.
So where was Umma? Back in West Hills trying desperately to cope? Floating somewhere in limbo? Or — with a jolt that made her gasp — dead? Dead and… gone?
For now, Nicole focused on a simpler problem. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said to Julia. “Everything’s going to be fine, and Brigomarus will figure out he’d be smart to keep his nose out of things that are none of his business.”
“How can you say they’re none of his business?” Nicole hadn’t pegged Julia as a worrier, but neither had she presented Julia with a problem that pertained directly to her. “You’re part of his family. They’ll all be up in arms when they hear what you want to do, mark my words.”
In the United States of the late twentieth century, family was a pallid thing — so pallid that Frank, damn him, could abandon his with hardly a backward glance, and abandon it without disapproval from anyone but Nicole. If anything, his colleagues were jealous he’d latched on to a new, young, sexy girlfriend. And Nicole herself, while she liked her sisters well enough, lived two thousand miles away from them and didn’t call as often as she should, let alone write. She’d hardly thought of them at all in the week before she came to Carnuntum, except to wish she could palm the kids off on them for a couple of days after she found out Josefina was heading for Ciudad Obregon.
On the whole, Nicole had liked things that way. She hadn’t cared for it when Frank bugged out, not even a little bit, but she’d enjoyed being free herself, ever since she’d got big enough to tell her mother no and make it stick. If she didn’t have to kill herself over money and her job, she liked responsibility, liked being, from day to day, the only one who really took care of the house, the kids, her life in general.
Julia sounded as if family disapproval in Carnuntum was like being shunned in an Amish community — Nicole had seen something on television about that, and been caught by the intensity of reaction to something that amounted to the silent treatment. Silence was lovely, she’d thought. So was being left alone. She could have used a lot of that when she was growing up, stuck sharing a bedroom with a sister she could barely stand the sight of, who’d grown up into a reasonably decent person but with whom Nicole had next to nothing in common.
It seemed Umma had about the same relationship with her sisters as Nicole had — but The Family meant far, far more.
Well. So it did. She d weathered infidelity, shed weathered divorce. She could weather family disapproval, too. She was her own person, first, last, and always.
She said so, loudly and emphatically. She had no real hope of raising Julia’s consciousness, but maybe, over time and with repetition, some of it would stick.
Right at the moment, Julia didn’t look enlightened. She looked horrified. Nicole was used to working hostile audiences; it was what a lawyer did for a living. But Julia had a look that warned her to go slow or she’d lose the case. She tried one more time, regardless: “I am my own person. You can be your own person. Family doesn’t have to dictate every breath you take. It isn’t even your family! I’m not worried about it. Why should you be?”
Julia’s chin was set, her face closed. She wrapped herself in a cloud of flour, slapping together another batch of bread for the evening crowd, immersing herself in work to keep from listening — or perhaps to keep from screaming at her mistress to shut up.