‘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.