Alessandro glared.
Giannis, Swan, Ramone and Giorgos dragged each corpse into the wood. It was hard work, and disgusting. Ramone put a knife into each corpse’s neck under the chin, just to be ‘sure’, and searched the corpses for cash.
Peter picked up the count’s sword.
‘Leave it,’ Alessandro said.
‘It’s a fine weapon,’ Peter said, putting a touch of ‘v’ into the ‘w’ of weapon. A vine veapon.
‘It could get us all beheaded,’ Alessandro said.
Swan noted that the capitano spoke to Peter almost as a peer.
Peter nodded the way a man nods when he disagrees utterly. He dropped the sword in the grass.
In twenty minutes, they were done.
‘Put fire to the wood,’ Alessandro said.
The soldiers got a fire going, and spread it. The summer woods caught very fast.
‘Let’s go,’ Alessandro said.
Paris was dull after the road. Alessandro’s ankle cut was worse than it had looked in the field, and he had to go to a surgeon to be bled. The cardinal had apartments in the Louvre, but the rest of them were housed in the Convent of the Ursilines, and the cardinal introduced Swan to the King’s Librarian. He was shocked to be given the run of the Royal Library. Days passed very quickly while he read. He did little but read.
That was good, because every night he dreamed. He dreamed of the four men on the road, of the count’s one remaining eye, of the blood. Every night. Sometimes in the day.
He fantasised about every young nun in the convent, went out with the notaries and drank too much on the silver of the men he’d killed, and diced and played cards until he felt tired enough to sleep without dreams.
It never worked.
After they’d been in Paris a week, the cardinal summoned him. A servant fetched him from Aristotle, and he walked up through the labyrinth of halls to the cardinal’s apartment.
He bowed, was summoned forward, and kissed the cardinal’s ring.
‘Your Eminence,’ he said.
Bessarion smiled. He looked strained. ‘I am about to trade you,’ he said. ‘I believe you said you were worth a thousand florins?’
Swan noted that Alessandro was lying on the cardinal’s bed. He waved an idle salute.
Swan twitched. ‘As to that . . .’ he said, smiling apologetically.
‘Half that?’ the cardinal said. He was already writing. ‘I’m trading you to the King’s Librarian. He wants you as his prisoner. He’ll use you in the library until your father arranges your release.’ He paused. ‘Of course, we’ll need your father’s name.’ He looked at Alessandro. ‘I’m sorry for this, young man. I had thought of releasing you without ransom after your daring on the road, but the truth is . . . we’ve had a disaster.’ Bessarion, the very model of decorum, or Roman-style gravitas, had a catch in his voice.
Swan realised the man was on the edge of tears.
‘A . . . disaster?’ Swan asked.
Alessandro rose on his elbow. ‘Constantinople fell to the Turks. In May.’
Bessarion buried his head in his hands. ‘My city.’
Swan was at a loss. Constantinople was a name redolent with magic – a wonderful place, a schismatic, heretical place, a palace of wonders. Babylon. He had to imagine that the flesh-and-blood Bessarion thought of the great city as . . . as home. Home, like London.
Bessarion raised his head. Now Swan could see that he had aged. His lips were thin, his hair greyer. ‘Suddenly I am cut off from revenue. So I’m afraid I must sell your ransom, young man.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’
Swan shrugged.
‘Tell him,’ Alessandro said suddenly. ‘There’s no point in pretence, boy. Tell him.’
‘What’s this?’ Bessarion asked.
Alessandro shook his head. ‘He’s not worth a sou of ransom. He’s someone’s bastard, that’s all.’
Bessarion continued to look at Swan. ‘Is this true? Do you know this to be true?’ he asked.
Swan was frozen. But if he said his father’s name, it would all become instantly clear, anyway.
Cardinal Bessarion nodded. ‘Ah. Of course. What nobly born boy speaks Greek?’ He looked at Swan. ‘Tell us, boy.’
‘My father is dead,’ he said. He shrugged his shrug. ‘He was a cardinal. He wanted me educated for the Church.’
‘Kemp?’ asked the cardinal, his voice sharp. ‘Kemp had a mistress?’
Swan lowered his eyes. ‘Cardinal Beaufort, Eminence.’
Alessandro whistled from the bed. ‘You’re a bastard of that bastard?’ He snorted.
Bessarion pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. ‘You aren’t worth a sou.’
Alessandro laughed aloud. ‘So – you were a royal page!’
Swan spread his hands. ‘Not for long,’ he admitted. ‘I . . . played a prank.’
Bessarion shook his head. Raised his eyes from his hands and looked at his capitano. ‘I can sell the Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘It will get us the money to go to Rome.’
Alessandro nodded.
Bessarion looked at Swan. ‘You did me good service, young man. Despite your lies. Ahh – spare me. A lie is a lie. Go – I’ll see to it you get a safe conduct.’
Swan sighed. Greatly daring, he met the cardinal’s eye. Then he looked at Alessandro. And shifted his glance back to the cardinal. ‘I’d rather have a job,’ he said. ‘If it’s all the same to you. There’s . . . nothing for me in England.’
Bessarion shook his head. But he laughed. ‘I’m not sure I have what would be required to save your soul,’ he said.
Alessandro nodded. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. ‘He has a weak stomach for the killing, but I’ll take him.’
‘At least he can read Greek,’ Bessarion said. ‘And Cesare likes him.’
The news that Swan was going to accompany them to Rome didn’t seem to be the thunderbolt that Swan had expected it to be. He told Giovanni at the convent, and the lawyer clasped his hand, kissed him on one cheek, and laughed. ‘Welcome to the very gates of heavan,’ he said.
‘The gates of the inferno is more like it.’ Cesare was a large man, and Paris in midsummer was hot, smelly and stifling. ‘You are not the missing Prince of Wales after all, eh?’
Swan bit his lip.
‘We had a joke about you in the early days,’ Giovanni said. ‘You were either an impostor, a peasant playing at being a lord, or the other way round – a great lord playing at being a lesser light. But we could never guess which.’
‘You were too easy with the servants,’ Cesare said. He shrugged. ‘The way I am. I grew up – as a servant, eh?’
Swan nodded. ‘My mother owns a tavern,’ he said. ‘I waited tables as soon as I was old enough to carry the cups.’
Giovanni laughed. ‘But your Latin is impeccable!’
Cesare grunted.
‘Oh, my father had me educated,’ Swan said. He shrugged. ‘I even did a little jousting,’ he added.
The lawyers shook their heads.
‘You’ll be happy in Italy,’ Cesare predicted. ‘Here in the north, the idiots think birth matters. In Italy – we’re making a new world. Where a man is what he is.’
Giovanni looked down his long nose at his friend. ‘Birth is birth,’ he said, and then relented. ‘But it’s true. We’re not hunting dogs. Cesare proves that anyone can go to university and emerge a man of letters.’ He ducked a thrown inkwell, which splattered against the whitewashed wall. ‘You just made some young novice very unhappy, my friend.’
‘I’ll just imagine her on her knees—’
‘None of your impiety, you blasphemer—’
‘Working her little heart out—’
‘Stop!’
Swan left them to it.
He walked to his own cell – a tiny room the size of a blanket chest, which is what his bed seemed to be. As he expected, Peter was sitting on it, reading the psalms. Copybooks – short tracts, meticulously written out by copyists – were quite cheap in Paris.