Nicole had just finished a long and lively exchange with a muleteer whose name she could never remember but whose face she couldn’t forget – he had a quite imposing wen at the corner of his left eye – when a half-dozen new customers came trooping in. All but one were strangers. That one, coming in behind but clearly a part of the group, as if he were herding it onward, was Umma’s brother Brigomarus. His expression mirrored the rest. The best word Nicole could find for it was thunderous.
Her bright mood darkened, and not slowly either. From the way Brigomarus acted toward the others, and the resemblance the women bore to him and to each other – and, for that matter, to Umma – she couldn’t exactly miss who they were. The two younger women had to be Umma’s sisters, and the older one, she of the steel-gray bun and steely stare, their mother. The men, in turn, had to be the sisters’ husbands. One was a great deal older than the woman whose elbow he supported. The other was thirty-five or so, and probably a few years older than his apparent wife.
Nicole had learned in her time in Carnuntum that clothes very definitely made the man here – or the woman. The rich never affected the local equivalent of torn jeans and ratty T-shirts, and the poor never tried to dress up like the rich, even if they could have afforded it. There were no designer knockoffs in discount outlets here. One could, quite easily, determine a person’s status by the type and quality of clothes he or she wore, and by the kind and quantity of jewelry, as well as by the intricacy of a woman’s hairstyle.
These women, these sisters of Umma the tavernkeeper, were a good cut above her with her combed-out-anyhow hair and her two good tunics. They wore soft wool dyed in amazingly off-key colors, and linen that might have made a decent summer power suit in Los Angeles; and they were hung everywhere, it seemed, with necklaces and armlets, rings and earrings. Not all or even most of it was gold, but enough of it was, particularly on the sister with the older man, that Nicole was left in no doubt as to their economic status. These were the local equivalent of prosperous businessmen and their wives. The older man was even tricked out in a toga – about as formal as a dinner jacket, and overwhelmingly so in the humble surroundings of a tavern.
Even the mother’s simplicity of hair and dress – a couple of layers of black tunic and a black cloak – was deceptive. Her one ornament was a ring on her finger where Nicole’s twentieth-century eye looked for a wedding ring, and it was gold.
Nicole was more than glad she’d drunk well-watered wine with breakfast, and eaten a good half-loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. If she’d been as full of Falernian as she was at Julia’s manumission party, she’d have said exactly what she thought: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Slumming, I suppose?”
They did have the look, and no mistake. The younger man, a tall reedy fellow with the scars of old acne on his sparsely bearded cheeks, dusted off a bench with an air of great fastidiousness, and helped his mother-in-law to a seat thereon. She allowed him to assist her, but not without paying for it: “Not so solicitous, Pacatus, if you please. It makes you look like a legacy-hunter. Not, I suspect, that you aren’t eager to see me die and leave you my holdings, but it’s more polite to act as if it doesn’t matter.”
She had a voice like poisoned honey, which was probably what had brought her this far up in the world – widow of a well-to-do man, Nicole guessed, but that man hadn’t been Umma’s father, not by a long leap up the social ladder.
The old lady got herself settled with much clucking and fussing from all concerned; all but Nicole, who stayed right where she was, safe behind the bar. In the process she picked up names to attach to faces: Pacatus the younger son-in-law, Tabica his wife, Ila the older – and probably oldest – sister; she looked older than Umma. And, most overweeningly pompous of that whole pompous crew, Ila’s togaed husband, Marcus Flavius Probus. No one, not even his wife, called him by his praenomen. Nicole doubted Ila ever did, even in bed. He bore the full triune burden of his name, wherever and whenever he was.
While the in-laws catered to the old lady, whom Marcus Flavius Probus addressed as my dearest Atpomara, but everyone else called simply Mother, Brigomarus stood a little apart with arms folded, quietly but conspicuously removed from the fray. Nicole didn’t know that she liked him any better for it. He was the light of his mother’s eye, she could see that without half trying. Atpomara sneered at her sons-in-law and tyrannized over her daughters, but when she looked at her son her terrible old eyes went almost soft.
Queen bee, Nicole thought, and disliked the woman on sight.
One way and another, the tavern managed to empty of customers while Atpomara got herself settled. Either they knew something was up and were too polite to hang around and witness it, or people knew this family too well to want to be anywhere near it once it assembled in force. Even Julia, who wasn’t usually any kind of coward, muttered something about seeing if the kids were up to something upstairs, and left Nicole to face the music alone.
She had no doubt at all that that was what was coming. Six pairs of eyes followed Julia out of the room. If the men had been dogs, their tongues would have been hanging out. The women would have been bristling and snarling, of course, like bitches everywhere.
Oh, dear, Nicole thought. She really had taken a disliking to these relatives of Umma’s. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of close affection among them, either, not even enough to put up a pretense of squealing and cheek-kissing and oh-it’s-been-so-long. From the sisters’ expressions, they didn’t want to touch their poor relation for fear of catching a disease.
True, they were notably cleaner and better kempt than Nicole managed to be. By twentieth-century American standards they were still fairly ripe, and those elaborate hairstyles reminded Nicole rather forcibly of stories she’d heard her mother tell about the ratted and lacquered constructions of the Sixties, complete with urban legends of spiders and literal rats’ nests. She let herself dwell on that for a while, as she stood behind the bar and waited for someone to speak.
It took a long uncomfortable while, but Brigomarus didn’t disappoint her after all. “Good morning, Umma,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said civilly. “May I serve you anything? Wine? The bread’s fresh, and we have a nice raisin compote today.”
He glanced at the others. They were all affecting interest in matters far removed from this low and none too sanitary place. “No,” he said after a pause. “No, thank you. We won’t be staying long.”
“Really?” Nicole raised her eyebrows. “You’ve come for the company, then? That’s the only other reason to come to a tavern, isn’t it?”
“In… a manner of speaking,” he said. He was nicely uncomfortable. Or maybe his tunic was new and inclined to itch.
Nicole wasn’t going to give him any help at all. She folded her arms and waited him out. It had been a useful tactic in court. It did the job here. He blurted out what he maybe had been instructed to frame more tactfully, from the way Atpomara’s face clouded over. “Umma, what were you thinking? You know I forbade you to manumit that slave!”
“Julia, “ Nicole said with great care and attention to the woman’s name, “was my property. It was my decision, and my right, to set her free.”
“It was not,” Brigomarus said heatedly. She’d got him on the defensive, and he didn’t like it one bit. “You, in case you’ve forgotten, are a woman. A woman should not act without the approval of her male relatives. That’s the law. “
“It is also the law that a person of either sex may manumit a slave informally in the presence of a suitable number of witnesses. Male witnesses,” Nicole said pointedly. She reached under the bar where she’d stowed the box with the document in it, brought it out and laid it on the bar.