A Body in the Bathhouse Read Free Page A

stealing Helena’s tunics and throwing the baby on its head. The man assured me she was healthy, a good breeder, and had no claims at law hanging onto her. “Very popular, Britons,” he said, leering.
    “Why’s that?”
    “Dirt cheap. Then your wife won’t worry about you chasing this pitiful thing around the kitchen the way she would with some ogling Syrian who knows it all.”
    I shuddered. “I do have some standards. Does your British girl know Latin?”
    “You are joking, Tribune.”
    “No good, then. Look, I want a clean woman with experience of headstrong children, who would fit in with a young, upwardly moving family—”
    “You’ve got expensive taste!” His eyes fell on my new gold equestrian ring. It told him my financial position exactly; his disgust was open. “We do a basic model with no trimmings. Lots of potential, but you have to train the bint yourself. … You can win them over with kind treatment, you know. Ends up they would die for you.”
    “What—and land me with the funeral costs?”
    “Stuff you, then!”
    So we all knew where we were.
    I went home without a slave. It did not matter. The noble Julia Justa, Helena’s mother, had the bright idea of giving us the daughter of Helena’s own old nurse. Camilla Hyspale was thirty years old and newly given her liberty. Her freedwoman status would overcome any squeamishness I felt about owning slaves (though I would have to do it; I was middle class now, and obliged to show my clout). There was a downside. I reckoned we had about six months before Hyspale wanted to exploit her new citizenship and marry. She would fall for some limp waste of space; she had him lined up already, I bet. Then I would feel responsible for him too. …
    Hyspale had not approved when Helena Justina abandoned her smart senatorial home to live with an informer. She came to us with great reluctance. It was made clear at our first interview (
she
interviewed us, of course) that Hyspale expected a room of her own in a respectable dwelling, the right to more time off than time on duty, use of the family carrying chair to protect her modesty on shopping trips, and the occasional treat of a ticket for the theater, or better still a pair of tickets so she could go with a friend. She would not accept being quizzed on the sex or identity of the friend.
    A slave or freedwoman soon rules your life. To satisfy Hyspale’s need for social standing, dear gods, I had to buy a carrying chair. Pa lent me a couple of bearers temporarily; this was just his excuse to use
my
chair to transport
his
property to his new home on the Janiculan. To give Hyspale her room, we had to move in before Pa’s old house was ready for us. For weeks we lived alongside our decorators, which would have been bad enough even if I had not been lured into giving work to my brother-in-law Mico, the plasterer. He was thrilled. Since he was working for a relative, he assumed he could bring his motherless brats with him—and that our nursemaid would look after them. At least that way I got back at the nurse. Mico had been married to my most terrible sister; Victorina’s character was showing up well in her orphans. It was a rude shock for Hyspale, who kept rushing over to the Capena Gate to complain about her horrid life to Helena’s parents. The senator reproached me with her stories every time I met him at the gym we shared.
    “Why in Hades did she come to us?” I grumbled. “She must have had some inkling what it would be like.”
    “The girl is very fond of my daughter,” suggested Camillus Verus loyally. “Besides, I’m told she believed you would provide the opportunity for travel and adventure in exotic foreign provinces.”
    I told the excellent Camillus which ghastly province I had just been invited to visit and we had a good laugh.
    Julius Frontinus, an ex-consul I had met during an investigation in Rome two years ago, was now suffering his reward for a blameless reputation: Vespasian had made