Read Online A Point of Law by John Maddox Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

described the condition of the body. She’d seen worse.
    “So it wasn’t just one man out for a reputation,” she said. “I didn’t think so. But now there seems to be a whole crowd involved. A conspiracy. I think it’s to be expected if it’s a move against your family.”
    “Possibly against the great families in general,” I pointed out.
    She raised a hand to her brow. “Let’s try to limit this. If it’s a prelude to class war, it’s too big for us.”
    “Do you know anything about this tribune, Manilius?” Julia had spent far more time in Rome than I in recent years.
    “Just another young climber. Do you think he’s involved?”
    “He was on the scene awfully fast, and of all the tribunes, he’s the only one I’ve heard of who has declared neither for Caesar nor Pompey.”
    “That
is
odd. Will you attend this
contio
he’s called?”
    “My presence might be seen as disruptive. Besides, I want to use whatever time I have left free to investigate. If he gets a decision to go to trial before the whole assembly, he may call for my arrest.” Usually, that meant that I would be confined to the house of one of the praetors until trial. I could always flee the City; but that would be an admission of guilt and I would just be tried in absentia, found guilty, and exiled.
    I pushed away the plates. “Now tell me what you learned yesterday.”
    She picked at her own lunch, which consisted mostly of fruit. I wondered if this were another of her fertility-inducing fads. The pome-granites suggested I was right.
    “I called on Fulvia yesterday evening. As I suspected, she was glad of company. Clodius’s old friends are mostly staying away from town, and she won’t be received in decent society. Her brother-in-law, Appius, is even making noises about taking the house back.”
    “Unfortunate woman,” I said idly.
    “She’s brought it on herself. Anyway, she says she was about to give up and go back home to Baiae, but now she’s thought better of it since she’s to remarry.”
    “I don’t expect to see Antonius back from Gaul anytime soon,” I said, raising a cup of her heavily watered wine.
    “But she isn’t to marry Antonius. She’s going to marry that man you asked about this morning: Curio.”
    I all but choked in midswallow. “What!”
    “Exactly,” she said, pleased with her timing and effect. “Curio was one of Clodius’s friends who stayed in Rome. He’s on the rise, which is where Fulvia likes to catch them. He’s standing for Tribune of the People, and if he’s elected, he can’t leave Rome for two consecutive nights during his year in office, so she can’t very well leave Rome, can she?”
    “But what about her betrothal to Antonius?”
    “Neither of them is terribly serious about such things. They are two of a kind. Besides, Antonius is in Gaul while Curio is here. That makes a difference.”
    I knew Antonius well, and I knew that, if news of losing Fulvia to another man bothered him at all, he’d just console himself by taking another Gallic woman into his tent, to join the five or six who were already there.
    “Did you learn anything about her brother, Fulvius?”
    “She said that, at home, he’d been a layabout who accomplished nothing. He’d written her some time ago that he intended to come to Rome to become Clodius’s client, but Clodius was killed and Fulvius stayed in Baiae. Apparently, if he couldn’t get a great man to be his patron, he didn’t think he had much chance of rising in Roman politics.”
    “So why did he come here?”
    “She said that a few months ago he wrote her, said he was coming after all, and hinted that he now had powerful patronage.”
    “But he wouldn’t say who it was?”
    “He said that she’d learn soon enough. After he moved here hecalled on her a few times; but there was little affection between them, and he didn’t talk about anything important.”
    “Where was he living?”
    “He had a house near the Temple of Tellus,”