were roasted twin birds on a platter while the ornatrix fastened the necklace of dark garnets that would draw every eye to the depths of her cleavage. Then she hurtled across the room to the door. As soon as she crossed the threshold, her entire bearing changed. She moved languorously to the balustrade, stretched as if she had just woken up, and then leaned over it, resting her chin in one hand. Those of us inside the chamber could hear the sound of one male voice below.
“Why Decius Mundus,” she cooed, yes cooed. “My favorite equestrian. What a surprise. I didn’t know you were back.”
There were a few soft snorts from the chamber slaves and a great deal of eye rolling.
“Ah, my dear domina. What a vision you are. Like a goddess calling from on high to a mere mortal.”
The slaves were now in an agony to keep from exploding with laughter. I might have bonded with them then, I suppose, but no one caught my eye, and I felt a new and unwelcome wariness. How could I know who was trustworthy? How could you trust anyone in a place as miserable as this one, where body parts could be lopped off on a whim?
“Are you in Rome for long this time?”
“I’ve been posted here for the winter, domina.”
“Then I shall expect you to dine with us today, Decius.”
“It will be my great pleasure, domina. Until then!”
Paulina turned from the balustrade, her enticing smile still in place for an instant. Then she discarded it—that’s how it seemed—and the petulant expression was back.
“Get me the other stola,” she said wearily.
Wisely no one questioned her. Everyone welcomed the brooding silence into which she had fallen. She was tractable as a doll as the a veste removed the red tunic and dressed her again in the somber one.
“You.” She roused herself and focused on me again. “Can you spin and weave?”
“Not very well.” My mothers had been so busy teaching me things like how to cast a spear from a moving chariot that they’d neglected the traditional female arts.
“Neither can I,” she sighed. “But I have to pretend I can every damn morning while the clients line up to see Claudius.”
“Why?” I asked sincerely puzzled. Wasn’t that the point of having slaves? To do the work for you?
“Don’t you know, honey?” the male slave jumped in. “The virtuous wife of Old Republican Stock, like our lovely domina here, is industrious.” The man seemed incapable of getting his tongue out of his cheek. “She clothes her household. Why, the great Emperor Augustus himself only wore garments made by his womenfolk—”
“Shut up, Reginus!” snapped Paulina; clearly if it was up to her, he would have been as tongueless as Boca. “Nobody asked you, and nobody is to answer her questions anyway, which she has no right to ask.
“Now hear this, all chamber slaves: Red is my slave. Mine! I bought her. I beat her. I’m training her as my pedisequa. She is to attend me whenever I want her and to do whatever I tell her to do. Right now I’m taking her with me to the textile room. If anyone has any complaints about her or notices any disrespect or shirking in her, you are to come directly to me. Not my husband. Not my father. Is that understood?”
There was a hearty chorus of “Yes, domina!”
She could hardly have isolated me more, if she told everyone I was her personal leper.
“Come!” she snapped her fingers.
I had a momentary vision of simply lying down and forcing her to drag me—to my death no doubt, which would be the honorable course to choose. I glanced around the room to see if there was a shard of glass. Then I could cut her throat or mine. Where was a sword when you needed to fall on one? Or a vial of poison or a basket full of asps?
“Red!”
I shrugged and followed her out of the chamber with the eyes of other slaves lodged in my back like knives.
The only thing that kept my first day from being as tedious as countless days to follow was the novelty. I might as well tell you about it, because then we can skip over days and weeks and months at a time. After the labor-intensive toilet, we enacted the fraudulent tableau of the industrious matron in a room adjoining the antechamber where Appius Claudius spent the morning receiving his clients. He lolled in purple-trimmed splendor on a sumptuous couch cushioned not only by pillows but by his own rolls of fat. His crown of laurels—too small for his thick, bald head—was frequently rearranged by one of the pubescent boys who clustered around him, a phalanx of overgrown cupids. Although Berta claimed that she had serviced him standing on his head, I did not recognize him as a Vine and Fig Tree regular.
I did, however, know many of the men lining up to flatter, deal, or receive their private dole. Some of them stopped by to greet the lovely, virtuous young matron, but, to my initial surprise, none of them gave any indication that he remembered me. Considering that I’d given most of them blow jobs, you’d think the top of my fiery head alone would jog their memory. How could I be so forgettable? For a while I tried to tell myself that I was simply out of context for them, but there was no point in hiding from the truth. Unless they wanted something from me, I was just a brand x slave girl.
“Stop gaping at your betters,” Paulina reprimanded me. “By Hestia, your thread is even more uneven than mine.”
It wasn’t true, but there was no point in arguing. Hestia help me, I might as well turn my attention to the spinning, get good enough at it so that I could lose myself in the rhythm of it, disappear into mindlessness.
As the clients thinned out, various slaves reported to Paulina. The social secretary, the courier, the chef, among others. They all pretended deference to her. And although Paulina was rude and capricious, she only played at giving orders. She wasn’t really interested in the workings of her household, and her slaves had no intention of taking direction from her. Paulina, I realized, had no more power or responsibility than a child.
After some mid-morning refreshment, which she did not share with me, Paulina perked up. It was her favorite part of the day: shopping. She rode in a litter to the markets followed by six slaves, including me. When she alighted to bargain and haggle and pick over merchandise, we were there to carry her purchases: costly fabrics—so much for weaving her own cloth—make-up, exotic beauty treatments like asses’ milk and Nile River mud packs, absurd hair ornaments, perfumes, and when we came to that part of the market, food delicacies such as pickled larks’ tongues and jellied eels.
At the end of the morning, we headed for the women’s baths where the leading matrons held the first century equivalent of a coffee klatch before resuming their duties as hostesses at the midday banquet. They all had half a dozen slaves with them, who waited in the foyer till they
