Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Four: Rome (10 page)

And he had a name – Antoine – just as Giannis had said. ‘I had another name,’ he said with his shrug. He shrugged almost every sentence. ‘Mostly, they call me Le Coq.’

‘The cock?’ Violetta asked. She was bundled like a painting of the Virgin Mary, nothing feminine about her but the slope of her smooth forehead. They were in a barn, wearing every item of clothing they owned, and the Frenchman was pressing Violetta as hard from her left as Swan did from the right. Deep in a pile of straw.

‘Ah, no, madame. That is, I think, your Italian or your innate woman’s lechery,’ Antoine said ‘In French, I am the cook.’

‘I thought you said you were a soldier?’ Swan said.

‘People respect soldiers more than cooks,’ Antoine answered.

Another night, Antoine asked – after some hesitation – ‘I mean no disrespect, monsieur and madame, but – if I understand the situation – will not the – ahem – esteemed owner of the house wherein Madame worked – will she not be very angry?’

Swan had been thinking that very thing himself.

Violetta shrugged and burrowed deeper into the musty hay. ‘We’d have to live through the night and go back to Roma for that to concern me much.’ Later, when the Frenchman was snoring, she leaned over and kissed Swan. ‘It’s fucking cold, my feet feel like the devil breathed on them, and my rump must be bruised, to say nothing of the insides of my thighs. I can’t imagine putting myself on that mule again tomorrow.’ She rubbed her nose on his. ‘Despite which, this is in every way superior to being a whore.’

Ancona was as cold as everywhere else, and the knight commanding the order’s galley of war,
Blessed Saint John
, was older than Pontius Pilate and far from ready for sea.

‘Cardinal Bessarion is not a sailor,’ the knight said. He wore the brown robe of the order all the time – something that the knights seldom did in Rome, where they wore their formal black robes with richly embroidered eight-pointed stars all the time. He read Bessarion’s letter and a short note from the Pope. They were sitting in a waterfront wine shop with a big central hearth and most of the town’s male population to add to the warmth. The Knight of St John had a table to himself.

He read the Pope’s note after crossing himself, kissed the seal when he was done, and nodded. ‘I see that His Holiness is not a sailor either,’ he noted.

Swan sat as demurely as he could manage.

‘Well, I’m bound for Rhodos, lad. But not until I get some sign of clear weather. Or a rumour that the Turk is at sea. Says here you are a Donat?’ he said.

Swan stiffened. ‘Yes, sir.’

The old man smiled, and the thousand folds of his face all became more pronounced. He was quite pleasant looking when he wasn’t cross. ‘Welcome aboard. I haven’t had a volunteer in – bah. Three years.’

‘I look forward to serving.’ Swan said piously.

The knight shrugged. ‘Do you care to save your immortal soul? Do you hate the Turk? Would you give your life to save another? Give your soul to see another man go to heaven? Care for the sick?’

Swan nodded. ‘Yes?’ he managed.

The old man all but choked on his wine, he laughed so hard.

‘Do you play chess?’ he asked.

Swan shook his head. ‘Not well,’ he said.

‘But you do play. Eh?’ The old man was reading again. ‘Why Monemvasia?’

‘I left a man there – in the hospital.’ Swan shrugged. ‘He’s my friend. His Eminence said he’d ask you to take me there.’

The old man pursed his lips. ‘All depends on weather, lad, but it’s good for me – I can drop some men for the town. You’ve been there?’

Swan nodded.

‘Met Fra Domenico?’ he asked.

Swan nodded again.

‘One of the order’s finest officers.’ The old man sat up straight on his stool. ‘Get yourself a place to stay and send your harness aboard and I’ll give you warning when I can sail. No one else is foolish enough to go to sea this time of year, so it’ll just be you and me in the cabin, and all the poor oarsmen under the awning. Your cardinal must need something from Genoa pretty badly.’

Genoa?
Swan thought.
I thought we were helping Genoa?

He rented four rooms in a gentleman’s house – rooms that had belonged to a young bachelor who had died in the taking of Constantinople. He installed his wife and arranged for two servants to wait on her.

‘You will die of boredom, and plant horns on my head before I’ve been gone a month,’ he said.

She kissed him. ‘I intend to go and work with the sisters of Saint Francis. They allow women to nurse. And even be doctors. That’s what I’ve heard.’ She kissed him again. ‘Imagine – I might be a doctor!’

In Ancona, everyone accepted that they were married, and they went to church, shopped and visited like young people of some family. Swan rather enjoyed it, although it scared him. He expected to be found a fraud every day, and it was like an extended prank. But the gentry assumed he was a gentleman, and the nobles treated him as a noble, and the merchants accepted him as one of their own. Ancona was a small town, and a very cosmopolitan one. Besides, his status as a volunteer with the order guaranteed his social rank in a way that nothing else – fine clothes, jewellery, the right accent – ever had.

Violetta was very good at playing a young lady. ‘In Milan, we practically lived at court while my mother’s protector was alive,’ she said. ‘That’s how I know all the dances.’

In fact, Swan found living ‘at home’ with two servants and a cook to be far more fun than he’d imagined. He arranged through the order to borrow books from the various convents and monasteries in the city, and he set about reading his way through Aquinas. And their first friends – the Anconan merchant who let them their wing of his house and his wife – loaned them a plain copy of Boccaccio, and Swan read the stories to Violetta every night.

He bought a new sword that, while beautiful, was nowhere near as good as the one Peter had retrieved for him from a stricken field in France. And an Anconan armourer altered a new Milanese breastplate to fit him, and he sold the same man his old breast and back.

Christmas was one of the happiest of Swan’s life. He and Violetta served a feast to their host and hostess and Fra Tommaso, the knight of the order, cooked by Antoine. Wine flowed, sweets were eaten, and they all went to mass and then came back to eat more – even the old knight. He leaned across after his sixth or seventh cup of wine and shook his head.

‘We have another in the cabin,’ he said. ‘A pompous bastard from Genoa. But we’ll get some chess in, nonetheless. Your wife is a beauty. You’re a fool to go to sea, lad. The sea is for bachelors. And monks.’

The next day they all danced in one of the palazzos even though it was as cold as the barns of Umbria. Dancing had become the household entertainment – Violetta loved to dance and some evenings they had hired musicians to play for them at home.

In the palazzo, men who’d heard that Swan was shipping for Rhodos asked him to carry letters. One man, older than the rest, stopped by Swan and waited until his circle had cleared. All the younger Anconans bowed to him. Eventually his host introduced him.

‘Cyriaco,’ he said. ‘One of our little town’s most famous men. He shares your love of Greece – eh, Cyriaco?’

Swan clasped hands with the older man, who leaned heavily on a stick. ‘I am told that you helped to save the head of St George,’ Cyriaco said.

Swan bowed.

‘How were you able to move about in Constantinople?’ Cyriaco asked. ‘Humour an old man – I know the city.’

Swan gave in all too easily to any opportunity to brag. ‘I got to know the cisterns and sewers,’ he said with a grin. ‘And I speak some Turkish.’

‘Do you really?’ the older man asked. ‘How amazing. Now go and dance with your naiad, young man. She is remarkable. Where did you find her?’ Cyriaco bowed. ‘Come and see me before you leave. I have letters for Rhodos. And Chios,’ he added, with a certain air.

Four days after Christmas, the sun rose and shone all day. A boy came in the evening and knocked at the door.

‘Ser Tommaso says we sail in the morning,’ said the boy.

A few moments later he received another small boy, who announced that Maestro Cyriaco invited him to drink a cup of wine.

Swan threw on a robe – he had become accustomed to the ease with which the uniform of the order could be used for every social occasion – kissed Violetta, and went to the door.

‘I had other notions of your last night on shore,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Wait up.’

He walked through Ancona to Cyriaco’s house. He was rich, and lived well. There was a train of servants and animals in the big, marble-paved courtyard. But the great man himself came down to greet Swan, and escorted him, hand on arm, up his broad staircase. ‘I wanted a word in private,’ he said. ‘I am an old friend of your cardinal, Bessarion. He opened many doors for me in the East.’ He paused on the marble steps. ‘You are English – do you know why Ancona is important?’ he asked.

Swan nodded. ‘It is one of the few ports on the east coast of Italy open to Genoese shipping,’ he said.

Maestro Cyriaco nodded. ‘I am about to introduce you to an old friend – Francesco Drappierro. One of the richest men in Europe. You two will be shipmates.’

‘A thousand thanks, Maestro,’ Swan said, bowing.

Cyriaco handed Swan a small book. ‘This is a list of some of my friends,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to go back – too broken hearted that Constantinople is lost. Too happy in Ancona. But you – you will continue some of my work, eh? I’ve listed what I paid them in the margins.’

Swan drew away, suddenly suspicious. ‘Maestro, this is … spying. I am merely a volunteer with the crusade—’

‘Living with a runaway whore from Madame Lucrescia’s?’ Cyriaco smiled. ‘And you stole the head of St George? You speak Turkish? My young Englishman, if you do not want to be thought of as a member of the noble confraternity of spies, you had best cover your tracks more effectively.’ He leaned down. ‘It takes one to know one. I won’t tell.’

Servants flung doors open, and the two men walked into the second-floor receiving room, hung with magnificent tapestries depicting classical scenes – Diana hunted in a diaphanous garment very like Violetta’s, and Aphrodite rose from some waves and did little to cover herself. The niches and shelves of Cyriaco’s house held a superb collection of marbles, busts and whole statues, and Swan would willingly have spent his hour there simply gawping.

‘The products of twenty years of refined looting,’ Cyriaco said. He bowed. ‘Francesco has all my best pieces.’

Swan was still reeling at the notion that Cyriaco knew that Violetta was a whore from Rome. The man seemed not to care. Swan tried to determine whether the rich Genoese knew, as well.

Drappierro took his offered hand with two fingers, and
just
touched it. ‘Your servant,’ he said, without turning his head or looking Swan in the eye. ‘What do you have that’s new, Cyriaco?’

The Anconan shook his head. ‘No time to play collector, my friend. Fra Tommaso wants your goods at the ship tonight, and he intends to sail—’

‘He can sail when I tell him to sail,’ Drappierro said. It was said with such a flat certainty of authority that Swan was tempted to stand straighter. ‘I have gifts for Mehmet – not the sort of shit the Pope sent him, either.’ Drappierro turned his back to Swan. ‘Now, show me what’s new.’

Cyriaco smiled an ingratiating smile, but his voice went up half an octave. ‘Fra Tommaso has men-at-arms for Monemvasia and for Kos, my friend. He will not welcome your gifts, and he’s had his yards crossed for a week. He plans to sail in the morning.’

‘More soldiers – provocations like that are bad for business.’ Drappierro pointed at Swan. ‘Will he report
everything
I say to the knights?’

Cyriaco’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He is a young volunteer, and a friend of friends of mine.’

‘Very well, Cyriaco. I’ve met him, I’m suitably impressed, and I have some issues to discuss with you. Send him home. I’ll find him something to make him some money when the time comes.’ Drappierro’s hand made a finger-flicking motion – a rude gesture of dismissal.

Cyriaco looked at Swan and he let out a sigh. ‘Francesco, your manners used to be a great deal better,’ he said.

The Genoese shrugged. ‘I was poorer then,’ he said. His eyes met Swan’s for the first time. ‘I’m not at my best when I travel,’ he added.

Swan bowed.

As he let himself out, he heard the Genoese say, ‘Really, Cyriaco. Another penniless waif?’

Swan got very little sleep.

At the door, in the cold, Violetta kissed him for the hundredth time. ‘You can’t take Antoine,’ she said. ‘I’m not a cook.’

He laughed. ‘You can eat gold. I left you all mine. I’ll be back in a few months.’

She kissed him again. ‘You are the best husband I’ve ever had,’ she said.

They laughed together, and she squeezed her body against his, and he considered missing his ship.

Later, he watched Ancona roll down over the horizon from the stern of the galley, while Fra Tommaso shouted at his timoneer and the new crew tangled their oars. When Ancona was gone, he walked forward, down the ladder, and entered the galley’s only cabin, which was as spartan as you would expect on a warship whose captain was sworn to poverty.

‘And who might you be?’ a man asked in Genoan Italian. The accent reminded Swan of Father Ridolpho. Rome seemed very far away.

‘I’m Thomas Swan,’ he said. He bowed as the ship rolled in the swell of the Adriatic. ‘Cyriaco introduced us last night.’

‘Did he?’ the man drawled. He looked up. ‘Ah – you. Get me some wine, will you?’

Swan put a hand on his hip, as he had learned when he was a royal page. ‘Words of courtesy would make me the more willing,’ he said. ‘I am not your servant.’

‘Are you not?’ asked Drappierro. He glanced at Swan. ‘Never mind, then.’ He read his document further and said, ‘Fetch me a servant, will you? There’s a good fellow.’

Swan went back on deck.

He wasn’t welcome forward, with the sailors, nor amidships, with the oarsmen. The cabin had just become a little too close.

He found a place to sit out of the wind where the stern cabin joined the rowing deck, pulled his heavy cloak around himself, and prepared for a long voyage.