by Mike Ashley
Blind Justice
Michael Kurland
Michael Kurland (b. 1938) has been writing for nearly forty years and has established himself in the fields of fantasy and science fiction as well as mystery and horror. His other mystery novels include A Plague of Spies (1969), which received an Edgar Allan Poe Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America, Too Soon Dead (1997) and The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (1998). He has also written novels featuring Sherlock Holmes’s arch-adversary, Moriarty, in The Infernal Device (1979), Death by Gaslight (1982) and The Great Game (2001) as well as continuing Randall Garrett’s series about the wonderful magician-cum-detective, Lord Darcy, in Ten Little Wizards (1988) and A Study in Sorcery (1989). As if that is not enough he has also written a forensic handbook, How to Solve a Murder (1995) and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries (2000).
In the following story we meet Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (AD c35–95). He was one of the most distinguished and respected rhetoricians of Imperial Rome. His Institutiones Oratoriae (Education of an Orator) gave such good advice on the principles of educating children that sections of it are quoted, sometimes unknowingly, to this day. The story told here is based on a possibly apocryphal description of one of his cases.
My name is Plautus Maximilianus Aureus. I shall soon be twenty-two years old, and I have accomplished nothing in my life. When Alexander the Great was my age, he had conquered all Persia. When Cicero was my age, he had tried and won his first cases before a Roman jury. But I – I have a stammer and a slight limp from a childhood illness that twisted my spine and left me just crippled enough to be useless in battle and unattractive to women. I am commonly known as “Max the Scribbler”, or sometimes just “Scribbler” for the way I write down everything said by my patron and mentor, the great teacher, jurist and orator Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. I carry about a great supply of wax tablets in a canvas sack for that purpose.
The instance I am relating occurred but a few months ago, in the spring of the second year of the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. It was then that, with many misgivings, Quintilian agreed to defend a youth named Rufus Abracius against the charge that he had murdered his own father. This was not a popular case to take on, as you can imagine: the grumbling in the Forum was that banishment was insufficient and death, unless it were a particularly lingering and painful death, was too lenient a punishment for such a crime. The fact that the accused lad was blind made the crime somehow even worse, as was the fact that his own stepmother was his accuser, and it was she who was bringing the case to trial.
The commission was brought to Quintilian by his friend Titus, the shipowner, who had known Quintilian since they were boys together in the sunny hillsides of Spain. I assume Spain has sunny hillsides, why shouldn’t it? The two of them sat together on the bench under the single fig tree growing in the courtyard of Quintilian’s villa, which is on the outskirts of Rome by the Via Sculpa. The kitchen girl brought out a pitcher of heated wine and three goblets, and the two old friends talked over the events of the week; Quintilian waiting patiently for Titus to bring up whatever had brought him along the dusty road in his sedan chair so early in the day. I sat on a stool by Quintilian’s feet, ready with tablet and stylus in case Quintilian said anything worthy of recording.
“Rufus Abracius needs an advocate,” Titus said, after hemming and hawing through his first goblet of wine and refilling the vessel.
“The lad accused of killing his own father?”
Titus nodded. “I’m afraid there’ll be little glory in this for you,” he said, an understatement if I’ve ever heard one, “but at least you’ll get paid. I’ll guarantee your fee.”
Quintilian scowled into his goblet. “This is not a good time,” he said. “I am devoting much of my energy to preparing notes for a book on the teaching of rhetoric and oratory to the young.”
“In addition,” I added from my place on a small stool at the foot of the bench, “to actually teaching rhetoric to eleven youths and three advanced students. That takes up much of the week.”
They both turned to glower at me. “They would come to the trial and watch and listen,” Quintilian said. “They would learn much from seeing for themselves how it should be done.”
“Watching the master in action is worth many hours of classroom instruction,” Titus agreed firmly.
“Silly me,” I said. “I abase myself.”
Quintilian turned to Titus. “Tell me about it,” he said.
Rufus Abracius, as Titus told Quintilian, was the son of Marcus Vexianus Abracius, a grain merchant, who had shipped many cargoes from the wheat fields of Egypt in tub-hulled vessels owned by Titus. There had been no bad blood between father and son until the father had remarried. Indeed, some five years before, Rufus had saved his father’s life in a fire, and had been blinded when he went back in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue his mother.
According to Titus, Rufus had erected a shrine to his dead mother in a corner of his room and spent most of every day lying on his bed, weeping. Although such abject mourning was certainly unmanly, it was at least understandable, as the boy had been very close to his mother and blamed himself for her death.
The rift between Rufus and his father had grown since the father took Lucella Collesta, a dark-haired Syracusan beauty a full two decades younger than himself, to be his new wife. The lad refused to attend the wedding and, although outwardly civil to his stepmother, had as little to do with her or his father as possible from that moment onwards; going so far as to move to a room in a distant part of the house beyond the kitchens. Two servants’ rooms were combined to provide him with his new quarters.
On the second day of Parentalia in February – the solemn festival for honouring dead parents – Rufus had walked more than a mile out of the city along the Via Appia to the family mausoleum where his mother’s ashes lay. He had chosen to go by himself and had scorned the use of a sedan chair or the company of his body slave, although it was a chill and drizzly day and the road was rough and dangerous, even for the sighted. He had spent the night at the mausoleum, wrapped in his woollen cloak, with his head resting on a convenient slab of marble.
When he returned, his stepmother had discovered a vial of poison in his shoulder bag. Whether he intended to take his own life, or attempt the life of either his father or stepmother cannot be known. The vial was taken away from him, and after that he seldom left his room.
Titus refilled his cup. “As to the murder itself,” he went on, “Marcus was stabbed right through the heart while he slept, one clean blow, and his son’s bloody hand prints were discovered on the wall of the corridor –”
“That’s very interesting,” Quintilian interrupted. “Stabbed with what?” Then he raised his hand. “Wait, don’t go on. If I am to take this case I must at least gather the facts second-hand and not third-hand. We must go to the home of Marcus Vexianus Abracius and see for ourselves what there is to be seen and listen to what there is to be told.”
“Then you’ll take the case?” Titus asked.
“First tell me why you’re so willing to defend the lad,” Quintilian said. “If we lose the case Rufus cannot inherit and will be penniless. Why are you willing to support him to the extent of guaranteeing my exorbitant fee?”
Titus thought about it for a minute and then shrugged. “I like the lad,” he said. “Black as the case against him seems, I cannot believe he killed his own father. It’s not in his character, as I know it, to do so.”
“Then I will look into it,” Quintilian told him. “Whether or not I’ll appear in court for the lad depends on what I find.”
The next day we journeyed across Rome to the home of Rufus and his stepmother, Quintilian walking briskly the whole way and I scurrying along behind as best I could. Over Quirinal Hill and Viminal Hill we went without pausing. Even the two slaves we brought along as bodyguards, great, hulking Celts from the Islands of the Mists, had trouble keeping up with him. There was a brief respite before we climbed Esquilin
e Hill, but only because a senator recognized Quintilian and bade him stop and answer a brief question regarding the proper raising of the senator’s young nephews. Quintilian loved to walk in all weathers, claiming he could think better as he strode along. For my part, I had all I could do to breathe, and had little energy left for thinking at all.
When we arrived at the home of the deceased Marcus Vexianus Abracius, the bier that had held his body still stood in the atrium, although Marcus himself had been cremated several days before and his ashes now rested with those of his first wife in the family mausoleum outside the gates of the city. It was during the procession to the funeral pyre that the grieving widow, while rending various garments in her agony, had declared her intention of having the son tried for murdering his father.
Quintilian began by interviewing Rufus in his windowless room beyond the kitchen, where the lad would remain, with a pair of guards at the door, until the trial. Quintilian sent a slave for a burning rush to light the two oil lamps in the room, since Rufus, naturally enough, was sitting in the dark.
The room was starkly furnished: nothing but a simple pallet, a stool, a chest for clothing, and a small altar in the corner holding a miniature portrait of a strikingly good-looking woman and some items of jewellery. The boy was about nineteen and handsome enough except for some small scars about his ears and neck. It wasn’t until he turned his face towards you that you got an eerie feeling of strange thoughts at work behind those white, sightless eyes. Or at least I did.
“You must cooperate with me and tell me the truth if I am to defend you,” Quintilian told the lad.
“It hardly matters,” Rufus answered listlessly, sitting cross-legged on his pallet by the back wall. “Whether I live or die is of little importance.”
“Did you kill your father?”
“Of course not!” Rufus turned his sightless eyes toward Quintilian. “I would not do such a thing. I honour – honoured – my father.”
“But you loved your mother?”
“I did.” He turned his face towards the small altar in the corner. “I do.”
“You disapproved of your father’s remarriage?”
“He did not seek my approval, nor would it have been my place to give it. He is paterfamilias – head of the family. I was his son.”
“Yet parricide is not unheard of in Rome,” Quintilian mused. “That’s why there is a name for it. Under Roman law children are unable to marry or conduct business without their father’s consent as long as he is alive, no matter what their age. Sons with a cruel or overbearing father, or merely anxious for their inheritance can be severely tempted to perform rash acts. It is among the most severely punished of crimes, yet it is not even uncommon.”
“I have no interest in marrying,” Rufus said, “and I conduct no business.”
“You dislike your stepmother?”
The lad shrugged. “I neither like nor dislike Madam.”
“What can you tell me of the night of the murder?”
“I slept through the night. I was awakened by rough hands grabbing at my body and Madam’s voice in the background yelling curses and imprecations. I do not know what happened or who was to blame.”
“Have you any conjectures?”
“None. My father was well liked. He did not involve himself with politics. Most murders, I believe, are political.”
“Most murders are for gain,” Quintilian told him. “Did anyone stand to gain from your father’s death?”
Rufus thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I inherit,” he said. “But father always gave me anything I asked for, so I had no need to kill him. Likewise, my stepmother gets the widow’s portion, but father never denied her requests. So, if anything, she loses by his death, since I inherit most of the estate and she cannot expect me to be so generous.”
“Well thought out,” Quintilian commended. “Then it is a mystery, isn’t it? We must continue our examination. I will get back to you.”
“As you will,” the lad agreed listlessly.
We left the room and walked down the narrow corridor which bypassed the kitchen and led directly to the inner courtyard, with one door towards the end giving into the father’s bedroom. The bloody prints of the young man’s hand – well, of someone’s hand – could be seen on the wall by the flickering light of the oil lamp. “Who uses this corridor?” Quintilian asked the young household slave who was lighting our way.
“Nobody,” she told him. “The young master used to use it to go sit in the courtyard and have the old Greek read to him. But now he doesn’t leave his room.”
“Even before he was confined to his room by the guards, he stayed there?”
“Oh, yes. He didn’t leave that room for anything. Except every evening he went down this very corridor to ask his father how the day went and whether he needed anything. His father would always say the day went well, and no, thank you, and the young master would go back to his room. He stayed in the dark. Sometimes we’d hear him talking.”
“Talking?”
“Reciting, like. ‘Tempus erat quo prima –’ ”
“Oh, yes. Virgil. From The Aeneid.” Quintilian recited in his sonorous voice: “ ‘It was the hour when the first sleep of suffering mortality begins, and, by the grace of heaven, steals on its sweetest errand of mercy.’ Schoolboy memorization, but some of it may be comforting to him.”
“That damn poem!” came a woman’s voice from behind the door to the master bedroom. The door swung open and a woman stood, one hand on her hip, the other leaning against the door, glaring at us. She was young, with long black hair and a heavily made-up face in the Greek fashion: dark-rimmed eyes and rouged cheeks, and heavy gold earrings. Too much for my taste, but beautiful nonetheless. She stared at us for a long minute, and then demanded, “Who are you?”
“Marcus Fabius Quintilianus,” Quintilian told her. “And this is my associate, Plautus Maximilianus Aureus. You must be Lucella Abracius, widow of Marcus.”
“I must,” she agreed. Then she shuddered. “Widow. I hate that word.”
He took her hand. “Madam, I regret interrupting your grief, but there are a few questions I must ask you.”
“Of course,” she said.
He did not release her hand immediately, and she did not seem eager for him to. She squeezed his hand and then put her palm up so that she was, ever so slightly, clutching his thumb. It was an erotic gesture, and she was clearly a woman who was created for erotic gestures. She couldn’t help it, it was her nature. Even I felt – well, no matter what I felt.
Quintilian looked at her hand, as though suddenly becoming aware that he had been holding it, and then released it. “You have accused your stepson of murdering your husband,” he said. “Do you have direct knowledge that he did so? Did you see him commit the murder?”
“No,” she said. “Though I slept at my husband’s side, I slept through whatever happened.” She shuddered again and backed into the room, dropping on to the bed. “You’d think that the gods would have awakened me so that I could have put my own body between Marcus and the downthrust sword.”
“Then it was a sword that killed him?”
“Yes: a military short sword. It was still in his body.”
“Was it from the house?”
“I don’t think so. I’d never seen it before.”
Quintilian entered the room after her and looked around. There were two doors, one to the corridor we had just quit and one to the courtyard. A large window, its shutters swung open, provided light and air. “I know it will be difficult for you, but if you could tell me just what happened that day, it would help.”
She sat up, her posture changing from one of invitation to one of defiance. “Help him, you mean,” she said. “I know who you are and what you are doing here.”
“Of course you do,” Quintilian told her.
She paused for a second and then shook her head. “But I suppose . . . if you could find a way to show that the boy didn’t do it,
you would please the shade of my dead husband. He always liked the boy, may the gods forgive him!”
“Just tell me what happened,” Quintilian insisted softly.
“Someone – and if it wasn’t the boy I don’t see who it could have been – came into the room while we slept and drove the sword through my husband’s heart.”
“He didn’t cry out or make a sound?”
“I’m a heavy sleeper, but not that heavy. I heard nothing.”
“There was no sign of a struggle?”
“None.”
“And then?”
“And then I awoke and rose and opened the shutters. And by the morning light coming in the window I saw my husband lying dead in the bed beside where I had slept. I screamed and ran into the corridor.”
“In this very bed?”
She shook her head. “I had the bed destroyed on which the murder took place. There was too much blood.”
“So you ran into the corridor?”
“And I saw there, by the light through the open door, a bloody print of a hand on the wall. So I suppose I screamed again, and kept screaming until a couple of the slaves came. Big, brawny men who work in the garden. They had been guarding the front door that night. I had them fetch a light and we followed the hand prints back down the corridor to Rufus’s room. Then I called the city guard.”
“And you think your stepson committed this deed – murdered his father?” Quintilian asked.
The woman stared at him blankly. “What else is there to think?” she replied.
“And you’re determined to prosecute him for murder?”
“What else is there to do?”
“What indeed?” Quintilian took an oil lamp from the table and went back into the corridor to look at the hand prints. He had the slave girl hold her lamp on one side of each hand print while he held his on the other, and he peered closely at each one, making his way slowly back down the corridor. There were seven of them along the right-hand wall, where someone might have put his hand on the wall for support as he blindly staggered back to his room. Seven very well delineated prints of the same right hand – all clear and heavy with blood and pointing inexorably towards the blind boy’s room.
