Rome

‘Help me, Englishman!’ shouted Accudi.

Swan couldn’t tell whether they were in play or in earnest – they’d drunk enough wine to float a Genoese galley. But he helped two brawny servants to separate them, and as he rose from kneeling on the floor he heard a most unfortunate sound from his hose, and Violette giggled.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘If I am to be your Queen of Love, you are not allowed to run away.’

He looked down into her remarkable eyes – slightly mismatched, large, liquid, of an indefinable colour between blue and purple.

‘And you might wish to place your back to the wall. Or just follow me to my room.’ She dropped her lashes.

His questing hand found that there was a rip in his hose as broad as four fingers. Someone’s knife or sword-point had scored. His arse was showing.

He smiled at her, and glanced at Di Brachio, who looked as if he was going to sleep. Only after a moment’s attention did Swan realise that the Venetian was bleeding heavily – that there was blood on his chair and on the floor. His head was lolling.

Violette was not the kind of girl who fainted. Instead, she waved to a slave. ‘Receiving room,’ she said. ‘No, kitchen. Get a doctor.’

Swan took a ducat from his purse. ‘Go to the Bishop of Ostia’s palazzo,’ he said, ‘and ask for Master Claudio. Run. All the way,’ He helped another slave hoist the wounded man, and Di Brachio let out an uncharacteristic groan. Swan ran with him all the way to the kitchen, where plainly clad women cleared the great work table by throwing everything – including a half-butchered lamb – on the floor.

Swan was covered in Di Brachio’s blood – his hands were sticky with it. But he got his friend on to the table, half-rolled him over, and used his dagger to cut the Venetian’s doublet off his body, an act for which he suspected Di Brachio wouldn’t thank him.

It was more than a gash. The blow had penetrated the skin, not between the ribs, as Swan had imagined, but below the ribs. The skin sagged open in a way Swan found a little obscene. It wasn’t like any other wound he’d ever seen, and it began to dawn on him that Di Brachio might really be badly hurt.

Violetta was not as shocked. ‘Hot water,’ she said, clapping her hands. Then she pulled her light linen chiton over her head. She twirled it once – and handed it to one of the kitchen women before taking a sponge full of warm water from the head cook.

‘It’s boiled,’ said the cook. ‘Looks bad,’ she added with apparent indifference to the wounded man and the naked woman.

Swan watched Violetta take the hot sponge to Di Brachio and conquered his own fear. He had to climb on to the table, but he took various rags handed to him by the kitchen staff and began to probe the wound. Violetta opened it with her fingers and looked at it carefully even as it filled with blood.

‘It’s not a death wound,’ she said. She was kneeling on the table, her thighs and lower legs already red. ‘No bubbles – not into the lung and whatever else is there. Unless he bleeds out. Stupid fuck. What did he do – run out and attack an army?’

Swan managed a smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. He remembered Master Claudio’s instructions, and he pressed the edges of the wound together and pushed down as hard as he thought he should. The rags began to turn red.

It occurred to Swan that all this had happened before – that the kitchen staff at Madame Lucrescia’s was highly skilled in dealing with sword wounds. He smiled across Di Brachio’s insensate body at Violetta. ‘You are beautiful, even covered in blood.’

‘It’s my fault,’ she said, and shrugged, and her breasts moved. Swan seldom got to watch naked women in good light. It had an artistic quality …

The cook began to use a small portion of the work surface to make mulled wine. It all had the air of comedy – the kitchen staff, now cleaning the floor; the naked beauty, the man, possibly dying. Swan bit his lip, trying to keep the edges of the wound steady. ‘Has someone sent for a doctor?’ he asked.

Violetta nodded. ‘Yes. Let me take some of that. Christ, that’s a lot of blood.’

‘How is it that you are so good at blood?’ Swan asked.

‘My mother was an army girl,’ Violetta said. She shrugged. ‘She followed armies until she got the cough and died. She protected me like a wolf – kept the men off me. I did laundry and sewed wounds to pay my way, but when she died’ – Violetta smiled at Swan, and the smile was as hard as steel and as comforting – ‘I sold – what I had. Eh?’

One of the cook’s boys appeared with needles and white linen thread. ‘Demoiselle?’ he said, as if he saw a magnificent naked woman every day. It occurred to Swan that perhaps he did.

‘And I still have a soft spot for soldiers,’ she said.

Swan felt the strength of her grip along the line of the wound and he moved his left hand, which had long since begun to cramp. ‘I’m not really a soldier,’ he said.

‘You are a great deal more like a soldier than most of the soft worms who come in my bed,’ she said.

There was a commotion in the back. The sound of horses.

‘Still want a fencing lesson?’ Swan asked. ‘I’m a good deal better than I was last time.’

She turned her head then, and met his eye steadily. ‘You don’t even intend these double entendres, do you?’ she asked coolly. ‘Of course I’d like a fencing lesson. And a hundred dagger lessons. I’d like to teach every girl in this house to handle a dagger well. And then …’ Her eyes sparkled.

Swan saw Di Brachio’s eyelids flutter. Violetta was all but kneeling on his chest. ‘Can he breathe?’ he asked.

Violetta moved. Di Brachio coughed. There was more blood.

The kitchen entrance filled with people, and one was Master Claudio. The bishop – their former employer – was only four palazzos away.

‘Swan,’ Claudio said. ‘Ah – Messire Di Brachio. Christ on the cross. Demoiselle Aphrodite, do not let go. Swan – you remembered my little class on pressure. What happened? No, I don’t need to know. He was in a fight and lost?’ Claudio’s hands were moving rapidly, at odds with his speech.

‘More rags,’ he said to the cook. ‘All boiled. You understand?’

The cook nodded. ‘We keep boiled linen,’ she said.

‘Good. How deep is it? Did you see?’ Claudio asked Swan.

Violetta answered. ‘Not to the lung, master. It cut an artery – I have one end in my hand. That’s all.’

Without any more talk, Claudio cast a loop over the artery that Violetta produced, a very small twist of rawhide covered in blood, or so it appeared to Swan.

‘Amazing that something so small makes so much blood, eh?’ he said. ‘Demoiselle Aphrodite, you are a superb nurse. Much better than this big Englishman.’

‘I had lots of practice,’ the girl said.

‘Where?’ Claudio asked.

‘Milan,’ she said. ‘The army.’

‘That’s why you know to strip,’ Claudio said with satisfaction. ‘Soldiers must love it.’

She shrugged. ‘Clothes cost money,’ she said. ‘White linen is never the same after blood.’

The bell rang for matins, and she kissed his nose. ‘Shall we go and check on our patient?’ she asked.

He didn’t leap out of bed. Naked, in a closed bed with a beautiful woman in Roman winter, he was as warm as anyone in the city, but out beyond the bed curtains, the temperature was roughly the same as it was outside the palazzo. Instead, he reached out to the shelf overhead and grabbed a fur-lined robe that the house apparently provided for male guests. He got his feet into his shoes, which were disgusting with dried blood.

The two of them had washed in a basin of steaming hot water. Now it was dark red and very cold. The washing had very quickly escalated. Even now his loins stirred.

He walked along the corridor in the growing light and found her behind him, muffled in a massive over-robe of familiar-looking English wool.

He found himself holding her hand.