The Last Cup

"Some deaths are announced by a thunderclap, and some by a spoon laid down very quietly on a silver plate."

The notary was summoned for the third hour of the following morning, and Servius Tullo did not live to see the second.

It was a bitter night, the coldest of that winter, with a hard dry wind driving down from the Apennines and rattling the shutters of the villa on the Palatine like the fingers of a beggar. The lamps in the long corridors burned low. The slaves, who had been dismissed early with a double ration of wine, had crept away to their pallets in the cellars and the attics, and the great house lay quiet around the sickroom like a held breath. Only one lamp burned in the great bedchamber, a small bronze one on the table by the bed, and by its light Claudia sat in her straight-backed chair with a cup in her hand and watched her husband not sleep.

He had been awake for hours. He lay on his back with his face turned toward the ceiling, breathing in short wet rasps, and the dead side of his body was as still as a heap of laundry. But the live eye moved. It travelled slowly from the lamp to the ceiling, from the ceiling to the shadows in the corner, from the shadows to her face, and rested there, and she could see in it the whole slow calculation of a man who has lived his life by terrifying others and has only just learned what it is to be afraid.

"The notary," he said. The words came thick and blurred. "At the third hour."

"Yes, Servius."

"You have... sent the... the message?"

"I wrote it myself. He will come with his tablets, and his seal, and two witnesses." She set her hands in her lap, quite calmly. "Decimus is to be told at breakfast. I thought it kinder that he should hear it from you."

"Kinder." The sagging mouth twitched. "You... are a... strange woman, Claudia."

"So you have often said."

"I never... never understood you."

"No," she said. "That was always your difficulty."

For a time they were silent. The wind moaned at the window. Somewhere in the depths of the house a door banged and was still, and the flame of the lamp bent in a draught and straightened again. Servius's eye followed the cup in her hand, and she saw his throat work, as if he were about to say something and had changed his mind. She waited. She had learned long ago that there was nothing in the world so useful as waiting.

"I'm cold," he said at last, in a smaller voice.

She rose, and brought the extra blanket from the chest, and tucked it about his shoulders with the same unhurried gentleness she had shown every night for four weeks. His breath smelled sour. Under her hands the old body felt light and flaccid and strange, like a sack that had been emptied of grain. She remembered those hands. She remembered them on her throat, in the candlelight of a bridal chamber, when she was sixteen years old. She remembered how heavy they had been.

"It will be over soon," she said softly.

His eye jerked round to her face.

"What... what will?"

"The cold. The pain." She smoothed the blanket. "Hermes says you should sleep. Here. It is the poppy, as usual. He mixed it himself this afternoon."

She held the cup to his lips.

It was a silver one, with a pair of handles shaped like dolphins, that he had brought back from Greece in his youth, and it held a few mouthfuls of warm milk and honey and the dark sweet juice of the opium poppy. He had drunk it every night since the stroke. It was the only thing that gave him rest. And as she lifted it, with the lamp's glow trembling on the rim, she saw his face go rigid with horror, and he made a thick animal sound in his throat, and his good hand flapped weakly at the coverlet.

"No."

"Servius."

"No... you... I'll not... I'll not..."

"You are afraid." She said it quite gently. "You think that I have put something in it."

He stared at her. The eye was enormous. In its depths, bright and naked, she saw all the terror of the cellar, the whips, the chains, the long dark years of the arena, as though the man who had made them had at last stepped inside his own machine. He tried to turn his head away. The effort shook him from head to foot.

"Look," Claudia said.

She raised the cup to her own lips and drank.

She drank a mouthful, and then another, slowly, her eyes on his. The warm sweetness slid over her tongue and down her throat, thick and cloying, with a dark bitter undertone. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. A faint dizziness rose in her head and receded. She held the cup out to him again, with a small, tired, patient smile.

"There. You see? It is only milk."

He looked at it for a long time.

Then, with a kind of sob, a dry shudder of surrender, he opened his mouth.

She fed him the rest of it by sips. He drank it all. When the cup was empty she set it carefully on the table beside the lamp and sat down again in her chair, and folded her hands, and watched his eye grow slowly heavy and dull and wandering. His breathing deepened. His fingers loosened on the blanket. He murmured something, a word or two, that she could not catch. Then, with the last flicker of consciousness, he turned his head upon the pillow and looked at her for the final time.

"You... mocked me," he whispered. "In the... cellar."

"I never mocked you, Servius."

"You... smiled."

"Yes," said Claudia. "I did."

The eye closed.

She sat on beside the bed, long after he had gone under, with her hands in her lap and the lamp ticking quietly at her elbow, listening to the wind and the slow uneven rasp of his breath, and she did not once look away. The hours crept by. The flame sank in the bowl. Somewhere near the fifth watch of the night she noticed that the sound had changed; that the long snore had grown shallow, then fainter, then dwindled to a flutter, and that between each breath there was a longer and longer silence, in which she could hear the beating of her own heart. She counted them. She had counted a great many things, in her life.

One. Two. Three.

When the silence went on, she rose, and stood over the bed, and laid two fingers against the side of the old man's throat.

There was nothing there.

The night wind rattled the shutters. The lamp, as if it had waited for this, guttered once and went out.

…

How many drops she had counted into the cup that night, no one ever knew.

Some said afterward that there had been none, that the old man's heart had simply burst, as hearts will, under the weight of fifty years of rage. The Greek physician swore it on the head of Aesculapius. He had examined the body himself, at first light, and had found the signs of a second apoplexy, the dark swollen face, the blue lips, the clenched fist, and had pronounced, in a voice quavering with relief, that death had been natural. Others, in the cellars and the kitchens, whispered a different story, behind their hands. They said that the lady had been alone with him all night. They said that she had given him the cup herself. They said that when the footman came in at dawn with the water for washing, he had found her sitting beside the bed in the cold, with her eyes open and a cup in her hand, as though she had not moved for a hundred years.

Whatever the truth, the sun rose on the Palatine to find the household in black.

It was Decimus Tullo who made the scene. He burst into the sickroom at the first alarm, half-dressed, with his face the colour of brick, and stood at the foot of the bed with his big hands clenched in front of him, staring at the corpse; and then he rounded on the woman in the chair, and began to shout.

"The notary!" he roared. "He was to come at the third hour! He was to change the will! And now… now… You were with him. You were alone with him all night. Do you think I'm a fool? Do you think I can't see?" He swung round on the physician. "Hermes! You! Tell me it was natural! Tell me you'd stake your life on it!"

"My lord, I… the signs are quite plain…"

"By Jove, I'll not be cheated!" Decimus's voice cracked. "I'll demand an inquiry! I'll bring it before the Praetor! The law says that if a master dies by violence in his own house, every slave under the roof must be questioned!" He wheeled again to Claudia, his handsome florid face working. "Every slave, madam! Every man and woman and child of them! On the rack! And your own maid, that old crone Lucrezia, first of all…"

"Decimus."

Claudia had risen.

She stood at the head of the bed, a slim straight figure in a robe of unrelieved black, with her hands folded at her waist. Her hair was unbound. Her face was dead white and entirely calm, and through the open shutters the new light fell upon her like the light on a statue. She did not raise her voice. She had not needed to, for twenty years. But the men in the room, who had been shouting a moment before, fell silent as though a door had been shut.

"You are grieving," she said. "I understand. We all are. But I think you have forgotten one thing."

"What?"

"The Senate."

She walked slowly round the bed, until she stood before him. She was a head shorter than he was. She looked up into his flushed furious face with large, brown, sorrowful eyes.

"You wish an inquiry," she said. "By all means. I shall welcome it. I will write at once to the Praetor, and to the Consul, and to the Prefect of the City, and request that the whole matter be examined in the most public way, before the entire Senate, with the physicians called and the slaves put to the question according to the Silanian decree. Every one of them. And I will ask that the witnesses include all those who visited this house in the last month." Her voice was soft. "General Marcus. Senator Lucius. Our old friend Pollio. The venerable Metellus. They all sat at his bedside. They all heard him speak. I am sure they would be glad to testify to the tenderness with which I tended him. And to the nature of the discussions you held with them, Decimus, in my atrium, in the weeks before his death, concerning the disposition of his property."

The colour drained out of Decimus's face.

"I am only a woman," said Claudia. "I do not understand the law. But I think it is generally held that the persons who stand to gain from a man's death are the ones whom a court most wishes to examine. Do you not think?"

There was a very long silence.

Decimus Tullo stood looking down at her with his mouth slightly open. She saw the exact moment at which the thought arrived: the scrolls in the library, the faces at the dinner table, the lowered eyes of the old men who would not meet his own. She saw him begin to understand how thoroughly he had been surrounded. He opened his mouth, closed it, and swallowed.

"I… I spoke in haste," he muttered. "Grief. You… forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"I shall… withdraw to the guest wing."

"As you wish."

He went out with his big shoulders hunched, like a bull that has walked into a net. Hermes, ashen, slid after him. The door closed.

Claudia stood a moment longer by the bed. She looked down at the face on the pillow, that bloated livid ruined face, with its mouth fallen open and its single eye shut. She touched it, once, with the tips of her fingers, as one touches the surface of a pond. Then she drew the sheet over it, with the same gentle, careful motion she had used a hundred times in the last month, and turned away.

…

The will that was read on the Nones of February was the old one.

It had been drawn up eighteen years before, in the first dizzy glory of Livia's birth, when Servius had stood in the atrium with the bleating infant held aloft like a trophy and sworn to all the gods that she should be the richest heiress in Rome. It left the whole of the Tullo estate, the villa and the farms and the ships and the slaves and the banking-houses in the Forum, to his beloved daughter Livia Tullia. And as guardian, until the girl should marry, and as executor of the estate, and as arbiter of her husband's choosing, it named his wife Claudia Marcellina. The notary, a small shrunken man with a quavering voice, read it out in the atrium to a hall of black-clad mourners. When he came to her name, Claudia lowered her eyes.

There was a murmur. Nobody looked at Decimus.

The funeral took place on a clear cold morning, and half of Rome came out to see it. The body lay in state for eight days in the atrium, on a bier of ivory, surrounded by lamps and cypress boughs. On the ninth, it was borne through the streets by torchlight, in a long procession of flute-players and mourners and hired weeping-women, down the Via Sacra to the Forum, where the funeral orations were said. There were no ancestral masks. That was remarked upon. A man of Servius's rank, in the old days, would have been followed by a long line of grave marble faces, the wax imagines of a hundred generations of consuls, carried by actors in the robes of the dead. But the Tullo family had come from nowhere. Servius had crawled up out of the mud of the Suburra with the stench of the tanneries still on his skin, and had no grandfather he cared to remember, and the one mask that walked behind his coffin was his own.

Livia wept.

She wept without restraint, in the open street, in a plain black tunic with her golden hair bound under a veil, clinging to Claudia's arm and sobbing like a child. She had loved him. It was an awful thing, and Claudia knew it, and she held the girl against her side and stroked her hair, and thought with a dull, distant ache that the old man had never once struck his daughter in all her life. He had given her sweets. He had set her on his knee. To Livia, who knew nothing, he had been simply her father, a fat kind loud man who smelled of wine and told wonderful stories. And she wept for him with a pure unstained grief that Claudia, walking beside her through the winter sunlight, found she could neither share nor despise.

At the Forum, she stood before the multitude on the Rostra and said the proper words. She spoke in a low sweet voice that carried to the farthest edge of the crowd, of the Senator's devotion to the Republic, his generosity, his piety, his love for his family, and the people listened in a hush. Her eyes were lowered. Her hands were clasped. And as she spoke, tears gathered on her lashes and ran, one after another, down her white cheeks, perfectly timed, perfectly modest, like drops of rain on marble.

It was a magnificent performance. The women in the crowd wept with her. Even Decimus, standing with his retinue at the foot of the rostrum, lowered his head.

Nobody saw the moment afterward, when she turned from the steps and passed behind the pillars of the Basilica, a little apart from the crowd, and for an instant stood alone in the shadow. She lifted a corner of her black veil to her face. She drew in a long slow breath of the cold clear air. And her eyes, in that moment, were as dry and cool and bright as river-stones, and there was nothing in them at all, neither grief nor triumph nor even relief, but a vast, calm, endless quiet, like a field after a battle when the last of the fighters have gone home.