“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, Want to make something out of it?
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.” And that, their tone said, should most certainly be that.
Not for me, Nicole thought stubbornly. Not now. and not while I’m alive to say so. “I’m not going to let that smother me,” she said aloud. “I’ll do what’s best for me and what’s best for Julia. If that’s not what the family wants — then too bad for the family. They can just learn to live with it.”
“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. You used to want me and now you don’t, and I can’t figure out why. That was what he meant. Still, he didn’t say it, not out loud. He didn’t sound angry, either, just perplexed. When you got down to it, that was a pretty… civilized way of going about things. It was a hell of a lot more civilized than the come-ons she’d suffered through in California. The guys who’d made those hadn’t even been to bed with her, and they were assuming rights she damned well didn’t want to give them. Calidius Severus had slept with her, or thought he had; and he was letting her decide just how to handle this thing between them.
Damn, she was starting to like him again. Worse; to sympathize with him. She wasn’t used to sympathizing with a man. Men were pains, every last one of them. Except — this one didn’t seem to be, nor did he seem to be pretending. He really was a decent sort. She should have hated him for it. Instead, she hated herself either for letting down the side so far as to actually like a member of the Y-chromosome set, or for being such a bitch that she couldn’t see a decent human being when he stood in front of her face.
He had to make it worse, too, when she wouldn’t rise to his bait. He shrugged one last time, reached into his belt pouch, didn’t push or lecture her, but just said, “I know what I owe you for everything but the snails. You don’t do those often enough for me to remember.”
“A dupondius a plate,” she said. It came out clear enough, after all, through a throat just a little tight.
Calidius Severus didn’t complain. No one else had, either. He paid the bill, then put down an extra as. “Give this to Lucius. The hunter deserves his reward.”