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with his loom and all his tools. Even if by some miracle she didn’t face prosecution, she could not afford a new loom or the yarn to weave a piece replacing the one promised to the senator.
    God, help me.
    “Metras.” Ruth gently pressed his shoulder, careful not to touch his forearms and hands. “It’s time to change your bandages.”
    His swollen eyelids made heavy by the healer’s pain herbs slowly opened. “Water.” Metras licked his parched lips. “I’m dying of thirst.”
    His thirst had been unquenchable. Just as the healer had predicted when Caecilianus brought her to the flat above the tannery once the sun went down.
    “You must keep the wounds as clean as you can, Ruth,” the healer had said as she cut away the remnants of the old man’s singed garment. “Smear his burns with honey and bran the first week. The mixture will work like an antiseptic and hopefully keep infection at bay. The next week, you can switch him to this concoction of pig fat, resin, and bitumen.” For the pain, she’d left a small leather pouch of awful-smelling powder. “Add a spoonful to watered wine twice a day. His burns are superficial, so you should see improvements within ten to fourteen days.”
    Were blisters and peeling skin improvements? Ruth wasn’t sure. Magdalena had offered to stay longer, but Ruth had insisted the healer return to the proconsul’s palace. After all, why should Magdalena risk her life? Ruth was the one who’d left her mother sitting next to an oil lamp. Thank the Lord no one had died because of her lapse in judgment.
    Ruth lifted a cup to Metras’s lips. “Not too fast. You don’t want to throw up again, do you?” She held his head while he slurped the liquid. “Now try to sleep.” She gently lowered his head to the pillow.
    Waiting until Metras began to snore, she quietly set about cleaning ashes from her mother’s face and hair. Even the cat needed a bath, which she would see to after she tended her mother’s minor burns and laundered the tunics that reeked of smoke. She stripped her mother bare and added the soiled dress to Metras’s pile of dirty clothes.
    “Climb under these covers and nap while I do the wash.” She emptied the oil lamp so there wouldn’t be any chance of another fire. After her mother fell asleep, Ruth loaded her arms with laundry and went to the large tubs simmering over red-hot coals in the apartment courtyard.
    She scrubbed soot from her mother’s tunic wearily and absentmindedly listened to the other women stringing clothes on a line.
    A chunky one with a broad nose shook out a wet garment. “If there’d been a breeze, the whole district would have gone up in flames.”
    “I think it was that crazy woman who sits by the window,” said another. Ruth recognized her as the one she had seen peering into her shop one day while she was working at the loom.
    Ruth was glad she’d not taken the time to wash the soot from her own face. But just in case someone still recognized her, she lowered her head and dunked the garments into and out of the boiling water as fast as she could.
    “Don’t know how Metras will eat without his rent money,” the chunky woman said.
    “He’ll want whoever did this punished.”
    Ruth wrung the water from the last tunic, gathered up the wet clothes, and hurried back to check on the very man who would see her crucified.

7
    R UTH POURED THE BASIN of dirty water from the apartment window. Her back ached from three days of hard work bringing order to the small home of Metras, and her eyes were heavy from the sleepless nights of keeping vigil by the old man’s bed.
    She wiped the basin with a fresh towel. “This place was filthy.”
    “Hasn’t had a good cleaning since my wife left me.” Metras surveyed her work from his propped-up position on the bed. “Don’t think a clean floor makes us even, though.”
    “You saved my mother. I owe a debt I can never repay.”
    A rap at the door gave Ruth such a start she almost