Four sesterces to a denarius. Nicole filed that away. And two asses made a dupondius. and two dupondii a sestertius.

What was even worse, considering how unhappy her customer already was, she was still an as short of being able to give him the right change. He’d already complained about shelling out silver – real money – for fiat-currency pocket change. He’d be even less delighted to come up short of what he was supposed to be owed. It wasn’t just that he was getting toy money for his fifty-dollar bill – that toy money didn’t even equal the amount of his change.

Julia saw the same thing at the same time. She looked around, seemed not to find what she was looking for, and turned back to Nicole. “Mistress, didn’t you bring the cash box downstairs with you this morning?”

Nicole’s stomach clenched, as it had been doing at intervals since she woke in a strange bed. If it did much more of that, she’d end up with an ulcer. She shook her head in reply to Julia’s question.

Julia made a noise that hadn’t changed between whenever this was and the 1990s: a small sigh that meant, I may be stuck working for you. but which one of us is the dummy?

Nicole sighed herself and prayed for calm – never mind whom she prayed to; it didn’t matter. “Go and get the box,” she said. And added, probably not wisely: “Please.”

For the first time Julia didn’t go running to do her mistress’ bidding. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said. “You can’t trick me that way. I don’t spy on you, no I don’t.” She folded her arms and set her lips thin and made herself a picture of triumphant virtue. It was so exaggerated, so downright stagey, that Nicole almost laughed and told her come off it – but she didn’t dare. This was worse than dealing with the secretarial pool, and much worse than knowing what to do with all the flocking servers in an upscale restaurant. She didn’t own the secretaries, and she certainly didn’t have the power to torture or kill the maitre d’ at Spago.

“Well,” she said to cover the pause, which was stretching a little too long. “I certainly am glad that I can trust you.” If she could. But she wasn’t going to think about that. She nodded to the customer, who was starting to twitch with impatience, and almost fled up the stairs. If a slave had to get permission from her owner to receive even an as of her own, it made a horrid kind of sense that she wouldn’t be allowed to know where the cash was stashed. Unfortunately, neither did Nicole.

It seemed logical that the money should be somewhere in the room where she’d awakened. But when she stood in the doorway, the little bare box of a place didn’t look as if it offered a hiding place for one sestertius, let alone a box full of them. She dropped to one knee to peer under the bed. Only the chamberpot there, as she’d seen earlier in the morning. Fear rose to choke her. If the box was lurking behind a loose board or in some kind of hidden compartment, she’d never find it – and her customer was waiting. Everyone was waiting for Nicole to give herself away, to prove she wasn’t Umma.

She rummaged hastily through the drawers of the chest. The only box there was the one she’d found earlier, with its pots and jars of makeup. More out of desperation than anything else, she pulled the chest away from the wall – and nearly fell down in relief. There where it must have rested between chest and wall sat a wooden box. She picked it up, and grunted a little with surprise. It was heavy – and it rattled, a lovely, faintly sweet sound, the sound – she hoped – of coins sliding against one another.

The dizziness of relief went briefly dark. She’d crowed too soon. This had to be the cash box, and that was wonderful – but the box was locked.

The lock, broader and deeper than a regular padlock, was of shiny brass like a sestertius. So were the hasps holding it to the cash box. Those hasps looked stout. Nicole tugged hard at the lock. No give at all. No way she’d pull that lock off, or break it either, not without tools. She had to find the key.

And if she wanted to keep people downstairs from suspecting that she wasn’t Umma, she’d have to find the key pretty damn quick. “Where the hell did she put it?” she muttered in English. The words felt strange on her tongue after so many hours of speaking Latin.

She knew what was in the drawer with the makeup case. She’d emptied that one out most thoroughly. She shuffled through the others one at a time, with rapidly receding hope. Last of all and reluctantly, with the same sensation she’d had when she had to change a loaded diaper, she opened the drawer filled with stained rags. She tossed them on the floor, trying to touch them as little as possible. Close to the bottom, tangled in a knot of ill-washed scraps, something caught at her fingers. She pulled at the rags. The thing inside them slipped free. She’d been afraid it would be a brooch or a buckle or a bit of useless jewelry, but her luck had finally turned. A brass key gleamed in the shadow of the drawer. It was an odd-looking thing, the teeth cut perpendicular to the shaft instead of along its edge as on the keys she knew.

When she thrust the key into the lock, it refused to turn. “Oh, come on!” she snapped at it. She twisted and jiggled. Nothing. Her fingers clenched till they began to ache.

She hissed at them and at the intractable lock – God, don’t tell me that’s not the key, it’s got to be the key. Just as she was about to scream in frustration, the lock clicked and, grudgingly, ground open.

She held her breath as she opened the box. If it proved to be full of buttons or bangles or something equally worthless, she really was going to scream.

Her breath rushed out in a groan of relief. The box was filled nearly full: copper, bronze, even a little silver, coins of all sizes and states of wear, from dim and almost illegible asses to silver denarii like the one she had to make change for, and quickly too. It would be just her luck if the customer had cursed her and her fool of a slave, taken his change and his denarius too, and left in a snit.

She hurled the rags all anyhow back into the drawer, slammed it shut, shoved the chest against the wall, and fairly fell downstairs. The man was still there, for a miracle. He’d fallen into conversation with another of the customers, she hoped not about how strangely Umma was acting today; he broke it off in his own good time, and took the three sesterces that she handed him, scowling at their brassy gleam. “Took you long enough,” he growled. “What did you have to do, fetch them from the mint?”

“Was that lock giving you trouble again, Mistress?” Julia asked with an air of great solicitude. Turning to the customer, she went on, “You should hear all the things Mistress Umma calls that lock. Anybody would think she’d been in the legion herself, not just married to a veteran – may he rest in peace among the shades.”

“Heh,” the man said: one syllable’s worth of laughter. He tossed the change into his purse and stalked off jingling.

When he was gone, Nicole lifted her brows at Julia. “Am I really as bad as that about the lock?” she asked.

Julia nodded, wide-eyed: another of her exaggerated stage effects. “Worse, Mistress, since you’re the one who wants to know,” she replied. Lucius and Aurelia mirrored her nod, big eyes and all. So were they in it together, or was Nicole – Umma – as paranoid as that?

It paid to be paranoid in Los Angeles, but here? What could there be to be afraid of, that anyone from the twentieth century should worry about – except being discovered for what she was?

It was midmorning, as best Nicole could determine, and the children still showed no sign of going off to school. Either this was a weekend (did the Romans have weekends?), or they didn’t go. Nicole could read and write, of course, and she’d seen that she was literate in Latin, too. Had Umma been as well? She hadn’t seen any books in the bedroom, but that didn’t prove anything. There hadn’t been any in her bedroom in West Hills, either, only the latest issue of Cosmo. Most of the books in the house, and all the bookcases, had gone with Frank. If Nicole ever had time to read at all, she read legal briefs that she’d brought home from the office.