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or as foreign. Or as badly maintained.
    The people were not what she had been expecting, either. The fine fleece that had taken much of the journey to spin would stay bundled up in the luggage. She did not want the humiliation of presenting it as a gift and having to watch the stepmother find something polite to say about it.
    While they were traveling she had tried to understand exactly how the Medicus’s family had managed to get itself into such debt, but his attempts to explain how loans worked had only caused more confusion.
    “Imagine,” he had said, “that you borrow a cow for a year. You drink the milk every day. When the time comes to give the cow back, you give back the cow and the calf it’s produced as thanks for having had the use of it.”
    She had said, “What if there is no calf? What if the cow dies?”
    “That’s the advantage of money,” he said, looking as though he thought he was clever. “It doesn’t deteriorate.”
    “Then what is the problem?”
    He had scratched one ear as he did when he was thinking, and admitted that borrowing money could not really be explained in terms of cows. “Basically, you have to make the money make more money,” he said. “Instead, Arria and my father chose to spend the money on a temple to Diana and on home improvements.”
    “So it is as if she slaughtered the cow before it calved, ate the meat and boiled the hooves down for glue, and now she has no meat or a calf to give back.”
    He had pondered that for a moment before agreeing that it was near enough.
    Now that she had seen the house, she understood at last what “home improvements” were. Mosaics on the floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’s father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.
    The water was cool on her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back, and stretched out along the length of the bench. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’s life. Now it was plain that even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.
    Letting one hand trail down, she ran a finger over the parched lichen that had formed on the stone leg of the bench. She found herself picturing the brittle thorns she had seen by the roadside, offering nothing but crops of white snails so maddened by the sun that they climbed up nearer to it to bake themselves under the brilliant sky. She pushed the picture away. It was making her feel hotter. Instead she tried to imagine herself paddling in the willow-fringed shallows of the river at home. It did not help.
    Arria’s insistence that she be led away to be fed and watered had probably been kindly meant. The half sisters had taken the trouble to show her around the umpteen rooms of the house, dutifully pointing out decoration and glass windows, and she had done her best to think of a new way of admiring each one. She had wanted to ask about the farm: Are you worried that the soil is