Nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em. Nicole hated bugs of any sort. She could deal with them, but she hated them. The idea that she had bugs living on her would make her scalp crawl if it hadn’t been crawling already. She’d felt dirty before. Now she felt unclean. She’d never known what that meant before, or how much worse it was than merely being filthy.

“Lice carry disease,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Sure enough, Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again, and said what she’d expected, as predictable as a sitcom script: “I never heard that before. Bad air or evil spirits or getting your humors out of line some way, yes, but lice? Beg pardon for saying so, but you sure have been coming up with some funny ideas lately, Mistress.”

“Ha, “ Nicole said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha.” Convincing Julia she was right wasn’t the most important thing in the world – and that was lucky, too, because she could tell at a glance she wasn’t going to convince Julia, any more than she’d convinced her lead was poisonous. Julia had that every-body-knows look on her face again, the one impenetrable to everything this side of a baseball bat.

And there it was again, the script according to Julia: “How could lice carry disease? Like I said, almost everybody has ‘em. If they carried disease, people would be sick all the time, wouldn’t they? And they aren’t. So lice can’t carry disease.” The slave hugged herself with glee. “Listen to me, Mistress! I’m reasoning like a philosopher.”

Nicole sighed and went back to grinding flour. Julia’s logic was as good as she thought it was – if all lice carried disease all the time. If some lice carried it some of the time, no. But how could Nicole show that? She couldn’t, not by mere assertion, which was all she had going for her here.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Lice weren’t bad only because they carried disease. They were bad because they were disgusting. They were bad because they were lice. And she had them in her hair. In her hair. Every time she itched, she scratched frantically. Sometimes she drew blood. Every once in a while, she squashed something. She wiped her hands on her tunic, again and again.

When she found half a moment, she yelled for Aurelia. The little girl fidgeted more under her hands than Lucius had. She was just as lousy as her brother. As she had with Lucius, Nicole plucked nit after nit from her hair, and killed a couple of live ones for good measure.

But she didn’t have time to do anything even close to a proper job, not with baking and cooking and dealing with customers. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had had time, because the children’s bedding was sure to be full of nits – and probably full of lice, too. Julia’s, too. And her own. Dear God in heaven, her own too.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Squish – a chitinous yielding under her fingernail. Got one. Five minutes later… Scratch, scratch, scratch.

No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids’ hair, she couldn’t keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn’t been able to keep the kids’ heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn’t enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief – there, they probably figured, they’d be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.

She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed – but there was still the mattress under the sheets. And the floor wasn’t clean either. Nothing short of a house fire was going to get rid of every louse in the place.

She undressed and washed up as best she could, missing toothpaste the most – her teeth felt as if they were coated in flannel. She rubbed them, and tried not to think of lice. The bed waited for her, deceptively tidy, as she’d made it in her innocence, just this morning. How many newly hatched baby lice would crawl onto her, once she lay down?

She couldn’t sleep propped up against the wall. For that matter, she couldn’t live if she went on like this. She’d been walking the edge of hysteria since Lucius found the louse in his hair. She had to stop. She had to stop now – or go straight screaming out of her mind.

Nicole hated nothing so much as a silly, screaming woman. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, two-inch roaches in the kitchen – no, she didn’t like them, but she could handle them. She’d never known anything but contempt for women who couldn’t handle the crawly things in life. What was a louse but another damned crawly thing?

But it was on her. It was laying eggs on her. It was -

“Enough,” she said, so harshly it made her throat ache. She took three deep breaths, each held a few seconds longer than the last. She made herself calm down. It wasn’t completely effective – she was still shaking, and her stomach was tied in a raw and painful knot – but it held her steady enough to lie on the bed. She couldn’t quite bring herself to pull the covers up over herself. She’d work up to that gradually. For now, just lie there. Just let the muscles relax one by one. Forget the worst blow this world had struck her. With everything else, untreated sickness, raw sewage in the street, rampant animal and child abuse, slavery – a few million lice were awesomely trivial. “It’s the small things that get you,” she mumbled. Sleep had seemed lightyears away, but, once she was horizontal, it crept inexorably up on her. It wasn’t just her body that was tired. Her mind was exhausted, wrung out and hung up to dry. Sleep was wonderful. Sleep was beautiful. Sleep would let her forget everything – even the myriad small live things that hatched and crawled and bred and died – but not soon enough – fight on her body.

Wine the next morning at breakfast seemed oddly welcome, not a poison to be drunk in slight preference to a different poison. Did it make her feel a little easier about the likelihood – no, the certainty – she was walking around with six-legged company? Maybe. Did it make her want to scratch a little less? Maybe. If it did, was that bad or good? For the life of her, Nicole didn’t know.

She had two cups with her bread. I’m thirsty, she told herself. When she finished the bread and that second cup of – after all – well-watered wine, she declared, “I’m going to the baths. Aurelia, you’re coming with me.” She sounded very loud and sure, even to herself.

“Oh, good!” Aurelia squealed with glee. No fights here, not like getting Kimberley into the tub. But this wasn’t just getting into the tub. This was an outing, which made it special.

Nicole wanted her to come for two very good and useful reasons. First and foremost was the chance to scrub Aurelia’s hair as well as she could, to get rid of as many lice and nits as possible. While she did that, she’d get an answer to a question that had occurred to her as soon as she remembered baths, ladies’ day, and the kids’ vermin: how would she go about taking care of that with Lucius? Could she bring a boy eight years old to the baths with her on a ladies’ day? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. She’d have to see if she spotted any boys his size there today. If she couldn’t, could she ask Brigomarus, the brother she hadn’t met? Or would Titus Calidius Severus let Lucius go with him when he went to the baths? Did he go to the baths? The way he smelled, it was hard to tell.

Second, and not the least important of matters, either, Aurelia knew the ropes at the baths and Nicole didn’t. Nicole had learned how to run the tavern by watching Julia. Now she would learn how to take a Roman bath by watching… her daughter? She still didn’t think of Aurelia that way. How long did parents who adopted need to start thinking of their new children as if they were actual, blood relations? Aurelia, now – Aurelia was a blood relative, had come from this body, this blood and bone, these genes.