“Obviously,” the elder sister – Ila, yes – said, “nothing has anything to do with why you did it. It’s not as if you could afford to throw away that much money. Are you having an attack of remorse, the way the Christians are said to be prone to? Sometimes they give away everything before they believe they’re due to die.”

“She doesn’t look anywhere near dying yet,” the younger sister said with a sniff that tried and signally failed to be as haughty as her mother’s. “Mother, Ila, this is such a bore. Pacatus, take me home, do. I’ve a new perfume I’m dying to try, and I’ve been promised my necklace today, and my dressmaker will be waiting. You know how I hate to keep her waiting!”

Everybody ignored her, including her husband. Tabica, Nicole deduced, was a chronic whiner. She seemed the sort of person who would flaunt all her successes in her sister’s face, till it became habit so ingrained that she didn’t even know she did it.

Ila had more backbone, though her air of discontent was just as strong. She reminded Nicole of certain of the partners’ wives at her old law firm, in particular the ones who’d had ambitions – toward Hollywood, toward a profession, toward anything but being a trophy wife for a partner in a mediocre law firm. In Los Angeles there’d been a little scope for such women, jobs they could take, committees to lord it over, charities and benefits and the not-so-infrequent celebrity bash. Carnuntum had nothing to compare with that.

Ila didn’t whine. Ila exercised herself in rancor: “It’s not as if you were born to better things, Umma, though some of us have aspired to and even achieved them.” She slanted a glance at her mother, who sat in regal silence, letting her daughters make idiots of themselves. “Even so, a person of your status in the world should know better than to do a thing as ill-advised as this – and against the family’s wishes, too. Any foolish thing that you do, we bear the brunt of it.”

“Oh, do you?” Nicole inquired. “And how are you materially impaired by the freeing of my slave?”

Pacatus surprised her by rolling his eyes and whistling softly. “Oho! Been talking to some of your educated customers, have you? Which of them taught you those words?”

“Maybe I found them for myself,” Nicole said acidly. She folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Well? Do I get an answer? How does Julia’s manumission hurt you – aside from the blow to your pride?” To your little power trip, she wanted to say, but no words in Latin quite matched the idiom.

Nobody did answer, so she did it for them. “It doesn’t hurt you a bit, does it? It’s my financial loss, and my choice to take it.”

“And our burden when you fall into penury,” Atpomara said, “as you will do if you make any more such choices. What will you do next? Give this tavern to some passerby off the street, and go off to be a wandering philosopher?”

“If I do that,” said Nicole, “I suppose I’ll live off the charity of others. Not you. Believe me, I won’t come to you for one single as.”

“What an ungrateful little chit you are!” said Ila. “Is this how you address your mother?”

She’s not my mother, lady, Nicole wanted to say, but that would have been a very bad idea. She settled for a lift of the chin and a curl of the lip. “I’ll make it on my own. Just you wait and see.”

“But you can’t do that, “ said Brigomarus. “Unless…” A look of wild speculation came over his face. “Don’t tell me. You’re going to marry old Pisspot across the way.” He thumped his fist down on the table, too loud and sudden for Nicole to get a word in edgewise. “That’s it. That is emphatically it. I will not have it. I forbid it!”

“You may go right ahead and forbid it,” Nicole said with rising heat, “and I may go right ahead and do as I see fit. I am not your property, and I am not your child. I will not duck my head and do what you want, simply because it is you who wants it.” She turned on the sisters. “Or you.” And, last and fiercest, on Atpomara: “Or you. I am my own woman. I have my own life here, I make my own living, I decide for myself what I will do and not do. You have no say in it.”

Pacatus and Marcus Flavius Probus exchanged glances. “Poor woman,” said Pacatus.

“Hellebore,” said Marcus Flavius Probus, nodding ponderously.

Pacatus blinked but seemed to get the point, which was more than Nicole could claim. “Oh, yes, she’s off her head – or else she’s up to something with that dyer. What if he encouraged her to free the slave for some purpose of his own? Is he clever enough for that? He’ll have dyed his brains bright blue by now, I should think, with all the fumes from his work.”

Marcus Flavius Probus had no sense of humor, that was evident. He seized on the one thing that must have made sense to him, and worried at it like a dog on a bone. “She can’t marry that person. It’s beneath us all.”

“She is beneath us all,” Ila said.

Nicole stepped in before they could go on. She was quite coldly angry by now, the same anger she’d honed so well in dealing with Frank and his late-model bimbo. “You had better leave,” she said.

No one seemed to hear her. The brothers-in-law and Ila were too busy dissecting her mental state. Tabica was elaborately and tearfully bored. Brigomarus frothed and steamed. Atpomara sat in state, waiting for someone to notice her lofty silence.

Nicole hefted one of the heavy iron skillets near at hand, and let it fall with a ringing crash. That got their attention, one and all. She braced her hands on the bar and leaned across it, glaring at the lot of them. “Did you hear me? I asked you to leave.”

“You can’t do that,” Brigomarus said. It seemed to be a favorite refrain.

“This is my house,” Nicole said, shaping each word with care. “This is my business. This is my life. If you can do nothing better with or for it than play the petty tyrant, then I don’t want or need you. I’ve been getting by on my own so far. I’ll keep right on doing it, too.”

“How can you get by on your own?” Brigomarus demanded. “You’re a woman. You can’t do a single legal thing without my approval.”

“Would you like to bet on it?” Nicole asked him. She thumped a fist on the papyrus that still lay, unregarded, on the bar. “If there’s anything I know about the way the law works, it’s that there’s a way around everything. Sometimes it’s hard, often it’s twisted, but it is there. No law was ever written that didn’t have a loophole somewhere. And I,” she said, “will be sure to find it. “

“My, my,” murmured Ila. “Aren’t we cocky today? What’s got you going, sister dear? Your so-fragrant beloved?”

“I don’t need a man to get going, as you put it,” Nicole shot back, “least of all that one – though he’s worth ten of you. Now get out. I have work to do.”

She thought she’d have to eject them bodily – and wasn’t it ironic that she’d never needed a bouncer in all her time in the tavern, but now, with her putative family, she would dearly have loved to have one. Ila and Brigomarus seemed inclined to camp there till she broke down and let them run all over her.

They’d wait a good long time if so, and she wasn’t lying. She did have work to do. Lots of it. Which she would go ahead and do, starting with cleaning the area behind the bar, till they got fed up and left.

It wasn’t too hard to ignore them. They couldn’t or wouldn’t get at her with the bar between. Their bluster fell on deaf ears. Nobody was inclined to get physical – the one thing she’d been afraid of, because when it came right down to it, a woman was at a major disadvantage against three men.

Nobody came to her rescue, either. Julia was hiding upstairs with the kids. The Calidii Severi were safe in their shop, oblivious to the trouble she was in – and, she had no doubt, to the family’s interpretation of her relationship with Titus Calidius Severus. Her regular morning customers seemed to have conspired to stay away.