So, Nicole thought numbly. People could think like that here, too. She resisted an urge to run out and ask what the boy had died of. People did die of things other than pestilence. Young people especially, and children most of all.
She was not reassured. When the procession had passed and faded into the background hum of the city, someone in the street sneezed. She jumped like a startled cat.
Right behind her, Lucius sneezed explosively. Her heart leaped into her throat. She whirled. “Are you all right?” she practically shrieked at him.
When she’d first come to Carnuntum, that concern would have been partly feigned. Not now. Little by little, by almost imperceptible stages, Lucius and Aurelia had become hers. And if one of hers was sneezing -
But he looked at her as if she’d gone demented, and laughed at her expression. “Oh, Mother! I’m fine.”
Julia glared at him, and shook her finger under his nose. Which, Nicole happened to notice, had a somewhat dusty look to it. “He was trying to breathe flour,” she said. “I saw him grab a pinch.”
“Oh, he was, was he?” Nicole said in a dangerous purr. “You did, did you?”
Lucius might be silly, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognized the sort of question that meant he should make himself scarce.
He didn’t recognize it quite soon enough. Nicole caught him by the arm as he scooted past. Her free hand applied a fundamental lesson to his seat of knowledge. His squawk had more surprise in it than pain. Her second whack remedied the imbalance.
She let him go. He scampered off, not much the worse for wear. He didn’t indulge in the tears and histrionics that an American child would have gone in for. Less than a minute later, he was laughing again.
Children were tough little creatures: tougher than Nicole had realized. She was the one who stood as if poleaxed, staring at her own hand. Why in the world had she just done that? She never had before. She would have been appalled if she’d thought before she did it. She was worried, that was it. Worried half to death. That worry had magnified her anger at what was, at worst, mild misbehavior.
It didn’t seem reason enough. It probably wasn’t. But it also probably hadn’t been child abuse. Nicole wouldn’t have said that before she came to Carnuntum. It was happening again: the Romans she lived among had infected her with their own attitudes.
It was better than being infected with measles, or whatever this new and deadly disease was.
She was still thinking about that when Sextus Longinius lulus came in and sat at one of the tables near the door. “Let me have a cup of your one-as wine, would you, Umma,” he said, “and some olives, too, if you please.”
When she’d given him what he asked for and he’d paid her, she paused. He looked all right – not wonderful, not happy, but not broken down with grief, either. People who couldn’t deal with death wouldn’t last long in this world. “How’s your son?” she asked.
He spat out an olive pit and drank a swallow of wine. “He seems healthy enough, the gods be praised. Fabia Honorata’s looking after him right now.”
Nicole suppressed a stab of guilt. She should have gone over there days ago and seen if she could help. But she’d been busy, the tavern took up most of her time, she had her own kids to raise -
No, she thought. Face it. She hadn’t gone over because she hadn’t known what to say, and she couldn’t be bothered with a baby on top of everything else.
She raised an eyebrow at the baby’s father. “Fabia Honorata? Not the wet nurse?”
“No, not the wet nurse,” Longinius lulus answered. He did look a little haggard after all. “That’s the other reason I came in here. She’s sick. It’s the new sickness that’s been going around, the one that really hits you hard. Gods only know if she’ll pull through. I wanted to ask you who nursed Aurelia. That wasn’t so long ago – she might still be in business.”
Nicole’s first thought was pity. What a life for a woman, going from baby to baby, no more valued for herself than a milk cow, and not too different from one either. Perpetually full and aching breasts, no relief from baby howls and babyshit, and no time off unless she wanted her livelihood to dry up.
Hard on the heels of that came fear. If the wet nurse was down with the pestilence, that meant she’d brought it into the tinker’s shop. Even now it might be fighting a still-silent war against his body’s defenses. And if that was so, then he was breathing it right into her face.
She didn’t want to feel what she felt – it wasn’t noble at all. She wanted him to go away. She gave what answer she could, as patiently as she could, considering. “I don’t really remember the name of the woman who nursed Aurelia,” she said. “It’s been a bit of a while, after all. Julia, do you recall?”
Julia came to the rescue as she so often had before, with the ingrained habit of obedience, and a nature that accepted whatever people chose to throw at her. “Wasn’t that Velina, the wet nurse who used to live on the other side of the place where the town council meets?” she said. “Didn’t she and her husband move back to Vindobona last year, to be with his kin?”
“Yes, she did. I remember that,” Longinius lulus said. Nicole nodded and hoped her face didn’t look too blankly foolish. She’d had to do that again and again when pretending to recall things Umma certainly would have remembered. Sooner or later, someone was going to trip her up over it.
Not today. Please God, not tomorrow either, or the day after.
“What will you do now?” she asked Longinius lulus.
He sighed. “Have to look for somebody else, I suppose,” he answered. “I can’t feed him myself, though I wish to heaven I could. It’d be a lot easier and cheaper. If Fabia Ursa had lived – “ He broke off, took a deep breath, blinked rapidly but held in the tears. “It’s the gods’ will. Isis’ priestess said it, so it must be true.”
But it wasn’t the gods’ will. It was plain old ignorance and lack of sanitation. Fabia Ursa needn’t have died.
If Nicole had told anyone how antibiotics could cure childbed fever, they’d have thought she was mad. And she couldn’t prove that it worked. She knew that it worked, but not why it worked or how to make it work. It had been just the same with the measles vaccine, and with the concept of antisepsis, of touching a woman in labor with absolutely clean hands so that she wouldn’t pick up the germs that caused childbed fever. Nobody here believed that such a thing could exist. And she had no way to show them.
If she’d stopped to think at all, before she lived this life, she’d have thought that she could save the world with all the things she knew. But she didn’t know anything that really mattered – anything that could help, or that anyone would let her use to help.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning all of it, more than he could ever know.
“I’m sorry, too,” Longinius lulus said. “I miss Fabia.”
And yet, even as he said it, and seemed to mean it, his eyes slid toward Julia, who stood at the hand mill grinding grain into flour. Julia couldn’t even be conscious of the way the tunic clung to her body as she worked, or how her breasts bounced, big double handfuls that had never been softened or slackened by the bearing or nursing of a baby.
All Nicole’s sympathy for him evaporated. Was that why he missed Fabia Ursa: because she was available whenever he wanted a stroke? Did he think he could go upstairs with Julia, someday when Nicole wasn’t around to say no?
Nicole scowled. She was angry at him, but at herself too. He’d loved his wife – he’d worn it on his face when he looked at her, and in his voice when he spoke of her. If he was still a normal man, if he still could want what a woman gave, who was she to fault him for it? Nicole hadn’t exactly shut herself down when Frank walked out, either.