Cicero still said nothing. Tiro wrinkled his brow impatiently and fidgeted.
Sulla sat back. The lamplight crept over his brow and into his eyes, which sparkled like glass beads. 'No matter. The Metelli recruited you against me, one way or another. So they told you this Sextus Roscius was innocent. And did you believe them?'
Tiro could stand it no more. 'Of course!' he blurted out. 'Because he is. That's why my master defended him — not to put himself into the pocket of a noble family—'
Cicero silenced him with a gentle touch on the wrist. Sulla looked at Tiro and raised an appraising eyebrow, as if noticing him for the first time. 'The slave is hardly handsome enough to be allowed to get away with that type of insolence. If you were any sort of Roman, Cicero, you'd have him beaten to within a knuckle of his life here on the spot.'
Cicero's smile wavered. 'Please, Lucius Sulla, forgive his impertinence.'
'Then answer the question instead of letting your slave answer it for you. When they told you Sextus Roscius was innocent, did you believe them?'
"Yes, I did,' Cicero sighed. He pressed his fingertips together and flexed the knuckles. He glanced at me briefly and then stared at his knuckles. 'At first.'
'Ah.' It was Sulla now who wore a faint, inscrutable smile. 'I thought you seemed too clever to have been fooled for long. When did you figure out the truth?'
Cicero shrugged. 'I suspected it almost from the beginning, not that it ever made a difference. There still is no proof that Sextus Roscius conspired with his cousins to have the old man murdered.'
'No proof Sulla laughed. 'You advocates! Always on one hand there is evidence and proof. And on the other there is truth.' He shook his head. 'These greedy fools, Capito and Magnus, thinking they could have their cousin Sextus convicted without confessing their own part in the crime. How could Chrysogonus ever have got himself mixed up with such trash?'
'I don't understand,' Tiro whispered. The look on his face might have been comic had it not been betrayed by such pain and confusion. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for myself Until that moment I had been struggling to hold on to the same illusion that Tiro clung to so effortlessly — the belief that all our work for Sextus Roscius had a higher purpose than politics or ambition, that we had served something called justice. The belief that Sextus Roscius was innocent, after all.
Sulla raised an eyebrow and harrumphed. 'Your insolent slave does not understand, Cicero. Aren't you an enlightened Roman? Don't you see to the boy's education? Explain it for him.'
Cicero turned heavy-lidded and studied his fingers. 'I thought you knew the truth by now, Tiro. I thought you would have figured it out for yourself. Honestly, I did. Gordianus knows, I think. Don't you, Gordianus? Let him explain it. That's what he's paid for.'
Tiro looked at me so plaintively I found myself speaking against my will. 'It was all because of the whore,' I said. 'You remember, Tiro, the young girl called Elena who worked at the House of Swans.'
Sulla nodded sagely but raised a finger to interrupt. 'You've jumped ahead of the story. The younger brother…'
'Gaius Roscius, yes. Murdered by his brother in their home in
Ameria. Perhaps the locals were fooled, but his symptoms were hardly caused by eating a pickled mushroom.' 'Colocynth,' Cicero suggested.
'Wild gourd? Possibly,' I said, 'especially in conjunction with some more palatable poison. I knew of an incident in Antioch once with very similar symptoms — the clear bile vomited up, followed by a surge of blood and immediate death. Perhaps Sextus was colluding with his cousin Magnus even then. A man with Magnus's connections can find just about any sort of poison in Rome, for a price.
'As for the motive, Sextus Roscius pater almost certainly intended to disinherit his elder son in favour of Gaius, or so at least Sextus filius was convinced. A commonplace crime for a commonplace motive. But that wasn't the end of it.
'Perhaps the old man suspected Sextus of killing Gaius. Perhaps he simply detested him so much he was looking for any excuse to disinherit him. At the same time he was becoming infatuated with the pretty young whore Elena. When she became pregnant, whether by Roscius or not, the old man hatched a scheme to buy her, liberate her, and adopt the freeborn child. Evidently he wasn't able to buy her right away; probably he bungled the purchase — the brothel owner sniffed his eagerness and drove the price absurdly high, thinking he could take advantage of an addled, lovesick old widower. This is only speculation—'
'More than speculation,' Sulla said. 'There is, or was, concrete evidence: a letter addressed to his son and dictated by the elder Roscius to his slave Felix, who thus knew the contents. According to Felix, the old man was in a drunken rage. In the letter he explicidy threatened to do what you have just described — disinherit Sextus Roscius in favour of a son as yet unborn. The document was subsequently destroyed, but the slave remembers.'
Sulla paused for me to continue. Tiro looked at Cicero, who did not look back, and then desperately at me. 'So Sextus Roscius decided to kill his father,' I said. 'Naturally he couldn't do it himself, and another poisoning would be far too suspicious; besides, the two were so estranged he had no easy access to the old man. So he called on his cousins Magnus and Capito. Perhaps they had assisted in Gaius's poisoning; perhaps they were already pressuring Sextus to do away with his father. The three of them formed a conspiracy. Sextus would inherit his father's estates and pay off his cousins later. There must have been assurances…;'
'Indeed,' said Sulla, 'there was a written contract of sorts. A statement of intent, if you will, to do away with old Roscius, signed by all three of them in triplicate. A copy for each, so they could all blackmail one another to a stalemate if things fell apart.'
'But things did fall apart,' I said.
'Yes.' Sulla curled his lip, as if the whole affair had a smell. 'After the murder Sextus Roscius tried to double-cross his cousins. He became sole owner of the estates by inheritance; how could they take what was his when the document they had all signed was equally incriminating to each? Sextus Roscius must have thought himself very clever; what a fool he was to try to break his bargain with the likes of those vultures.'
Sulla took a breath and continued. 'It seems it was Capito who came up with the false proscription ploy; Magnus knew Chrysogonus from some shady transaction or other and approached him with the scheme — how many times have I warned that boy not to let his avarice cloud his better judgment? Ah, well! The estates were proscribed and seized by the state; Chrysogonus bought them up himself and in turn shared them as agreed beforehand with Capito and Magnus. Sextus Roscius was left in the cold. What a fool he must have felt! What could he do? Run to the authorities waving a piece of paper that implicated himself along with the others in his father's murder?
'Of course there was always the possibility that in a fit of madness or guilt he might do just that, and so Capito allowed Sextus to stay on at the old family estate where he could keep an eye on him, living in poverty and humiliation. What grudges these country cousins all harboured for one another!'
Tiro, not daring to speak to Sulla, looked at me. 'But what about Elena?'
I opened my mouth to speak, but Sulla was too deep in the telling to pass the story to another. 'All the while Sextus Roscius was scheming to get back his estate somehow or other. That meant that the whore's child might still some day be his rival, or at least his enemy. Imagme him brooding day after day on the uselessness of his crime, the vileness of it; on the bitterness of Fortune, his own guilt, his ruined family. And it was all because of Elena and her child that he had first embroiled himself in the plot to kill his father! When the baby was born, Roscius killed it with his own hand.'