A Body in the Bathhouse Read Free

views on midwifery. Things were frosty enough; then I managed to be rude to both of them. At least that gave them a subject on which they could agree.
    The new mite was ailing and I named her in a hurry: Sosia Favonia. In part, it was a nod to my father, whose original cognomen was Favonius. I would never have demeaned myself paying him a compliment if I had thought my daughter would survive. Born skinny and silent, she had looked halfway to Hades. The minute I named her, she rallied. From then on, she was as tough as a totter’s ferret. She also had her own character from the start, a curious little eccentric who never quite seemed to belong with us. But everyone told me she had to be mine: she made so much mess and noise.
    It took at least six weeks before my family’s fury at the name I had chosen died down to simmering sneers that would only be revived on Favonia’s birthday and at family gatherings every Saturnalia, and whenever there was nobody to blame for anything else. People were now nagging me to acquire a children’s nurse. It was nobody’s business but Helena’s and mine, so everyone weighed in. Eventually I gave up and visited a slave market.
    Judging by the pitiful specimens on offer, Rome badly needed some frontier wars. The slave trade was in a slump. The dealer I approached was a creased Delian in a dirty robe, picking his nails on a lopsided tripod while he waited for some naive duffer with a poor eye and a fat purse. He got me. He tried the patter anyway.
    Since Vespasian was rebuilding the Empire, he needed to mint coinage and had raided the slave markets for laborers to put in the gold and silver mines. Titus brought large numbers of Jewish prisoners to Rome after the siege of Jerusalem, but the public service had snapped up the men to build the Flavian Amphitheatre. Who knows where the women ended up. That left a poor display for me. In the dealer’s current batch were a few elderly Oriental secretary types, long past being able to see to read a scroll. Then there were various lumps suitable for farm laboring. I did need a manager for my farm at Tibur, but that would wait. My mother had taught me how to go to market. I won’t say I was scared of Ma, but I had learned to trot home with what was on the shopping list and no private treats for myself.
    “Jupiter. Where do people buy disease-riddled flute girls nowadays?” I had reached the bitter, sarcastic stage. “How come there are no toothless grannies that according to you can dance naked on the table while weaving a side-weave tunic and grinding a modus of wheat?”
    “Females tend to be snapped up, Tribune. …” The dealer winked. I was too careworn to respond. “I can do you a Christian, if you want to stretch a point.”
    “No thanks. They drink their god’s blood while they maunder about love, don’t they?” My late brother Festus had encountered these crazy men out in Judaea and sent home some lurid tales. “I’m looking for a children’s nurse; I cannot have perverts.”
    “No, no; I believe they drink wine—”
    “Forget it. I don’t want a drunk. My darling heirs can pick up bad habits watching me.”
    “These Christians just pray and cry a lot, or try to convert the master and mistress of the house to their beliefs—”
    “You want to get me arrested because some arrogant slave says everyone should deny the sanctity of the Emperor? Vespasian may be a grouchy old barbarian-basher with a tight-arsed Sabine outlook—but I work for him sometimes. When he pays up, I’m happy to say he’s a god.”
    “How about a bonny Briton, then?”
    He proffered a thin, pale-haired girl of about fifteen, wilting under her shame as the filthy trader poked her rags aside to reveal her figure. As tribal maidens go, she was far from buxom. He tried to make her show her teeth, and I would have taken her if she had bitten him, but she just leaned away. Too meek to be trusted. Feed her and clothe her and the next we knew, she’d be