Rome

‘Ah – you are the famous young Messer Swan,’ he said in Genoese Italian. He frowned. ‘I understand that after your last escapade, half my clerks were lamed by the Orsini, who chased them through the streets every day for a month.’

Swan tried to look apologetic.

The priest bit his thumbnail. ‘Household servants are paid on Thursday next.’ He made a note and smiled at Di Brachio. ‘Please return then,’ he said. He countersigned a ledger in red ink, and turned to the tall desk that dominated the room. He sat on a high stool and resumed writing.

Swan looked at Di Brachio, who had turned bright red. The Venetian cleared his throat.

‘You expected something more?’ asked the priest.

‘I am no man’s servant,’ Di Brachio said.

The priest shrugged. ‘Take it up with His Eminence, then,’ he said. ‘You thugs give us a bad name. I’m cutting expenses. Twenty-five ducats for each of you? My clerks can live a year on that much money.’

Swan thought, in the privacy of his head, that he had once been able to live five years on so much money.

Di Brachio pursed his lips. He drew his sword, and the clerks riffled like fowls in a farmyard. But he didn’t threaten. He simply threw the notched blade down on the work table.

‘See the blade?’ he said. ‘Ruined – fighting Turks. I can’t buy a new blade for twenty-five ducats.’

The priest shrugged. ‘That is between you and the cardinal,’ he said, and his voice had some of the whine of a cat’s. ‘I gather you are very … close.’

Di Brachio grew still for a moment. Then he picked up his sword. ‘Have you ever seen the bodies they pull out of the Tiber after three days?’ he said quietly, and the priest stepped back. Swan thought of Ser Marco’s admonition and moved between them. Besides, when the good father had opened a drawer to fetch out the ledger with its red-inked entries, Swan had seen a great deal of gold sitting in a bag.

‘Ah, Father, we have been too long on a ship. You are only doing your duty.’ He bowed, his right hand searching behind him, hidden, he hoped, in the folds of his cloak. His hand closed on the bag, and he bowed again. ‘I, for one, would be happy to take my twenty-five ducats and rejoice in them.’

The priest rubbed his wrists with his thumbs and wished for God to strike them dead, but after long seconds of inaction, he opened a small box on his tall desk and began to count out ducats.

Di Brachio followed him, holding his notched sword. ‘I wonder sometimes, Father,’ he said quietly.

The priest looked up.

‘I wonder if killing a priest feels any different from killing a Turk or a footpad,’ he said. ‘I am not a servant, nor am I a thug, nor can you make your puerile assertions about my relationship with the cardinal without immediate consequence. Do you understand me, Padre?’

The priest drew himself up. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said, but his voice indicated how unsure he was.

Di Brachio nodded. ‘Sometimes, men make mistakes about where they are powerful, and where they are weak. A few months ago, I foolishly acted as if I had power in Venice, and I was lucky not to be killed. But here in this house, Father, you are to me like a louse between my fingers.’ Di Brachio’s voice hissed slightly, and he placed the point of his sword against the priest’s belly. ‘If I did have a special relationship with His Eminence, what kind of fool would you be to twit me with it?’

The other clerks were frozen. Two of them tried to slip past Swan up the stairs, and he dissuaded them with a single roll of his shoulders.

‘You thought you could insult me to my face. There, now you know you are wrong. Here’s a choice, priest. Understand your place, and we can yet be friends. Or – try and take some action against me, and see. See what happens, my friend.’ The Venetian swished his blade through the air and lightly swatted the priest on the arse.

Swan would have laughed, except that he thought that Di Brachio was being foolish. It never ceased to amaze him how often the older man accused him of foolish behaviour, only to indulge in his own.

The priest finished counting out the money, his fingers trembling slightly, and Di Brachio stood like a predator denied his prey and glared at Swan, who had dropped the bag into the top of his right boot and then had to walk very carefully not to lose it.

‘You may,’ hissed the priest, ‘find that I, too, have friends.’

‘Friends? A creature like you?’ Di Brachio mocked.

Together they climbed the stairs from the clerks’ level to the main floor, and when they’d reached their rooms, Swan drew Di Brachio into his, opened the bag, and dumped it on the bed.

‘Greedy bastard,’ Swan said.

Di Brachio looked at the gold – almost a hundred French francs – and laughed. ‘You just stole money from your own employer,’ he said.

Swan shrugged. ‘It was right there,’ he said. ‘It’s the Church’s money – and thus it belongs to every Christian. You and I are Christians, and more than that, we just fought for the faith. These are our legitimate wages.’

‘By God, Swan, now I know your father really was a cardinal,’ Di Brachio said. He sat on Swan’s bed and counted the coins into two piles. ‘Di Brescia is about somewhere. Shall we find the lawyers and go out?’

‘Madame Lucrescia’s?’ asked Swan.

‘Violetta – if she is even still there – will cost you every ducat in that sack,’ said the Venetian.

Swan smiled. ‘As for that – I’ll wager she’s a Christian, too.’

‘Eh, dog-face, stop pushing your nose between her tits and listen to me,’ Giova

Swan’s attention was elsewhere because his evening had been made at the very outset when, at the very door of Madame Lucrescia’s, Violetta had wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He might know, inside his heart, that she was a courtesan – a whore – and that this greeting might be lavished on every paying customer, or perhaps just one an evening, but he treated her joy as real and she, in turn, lavished more of it on him, climbing on his lap at the first opportunity and glaring at Madame Lucrescia herself when she came to ask the blonde girl to use some discretion.

‘Violetta, dear, we are not that kind of house.’ She smiled at Swan. ‘I’m afraid she is quite smitten with you, my young Englishman. We hear also that you are now very rich.’

Swan laughed, rising and disentangling himself from Violetta, who was dressed diaphanously in something that had at least nodded in the direction of classical antiquity – a single layer of linen decorated with rosettes of silk ribbon. The linen hid neither the muscles of her body nor the sheer warmth she emitted on a winter’s day in Rome, and that warmth travelled through Swan’s hands and chest and penetrated his heart. So he squeezed her hand as he put her on her feet, and he gave Madame Lucrescia his best bow.

‘I am distressed, madame, to report that while I may have saved a fortune for another, none of it has – how can I say it? Stuck to me.’ He smiled at her from under his lashes.

‘Heroic and pe

She curtsied graciously. ‘Violetta, I grant you this gentleman as your own domain for the evening – the whole evening. You may be his Queen of Love. But mark me, my girl – we do not sit in laps in this house, nor engage in more than a blushing hand squeeze until we reach certain rooms.’

Violetta flushed, and for a moment Swan feared her revolt. But then she dipped her own straight-backed courtesy. ‘Yes, madame,’ she said meekly.