Текст книги "Rome"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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‘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 penniless? By the Virgin, messire, we have plenty of you already in Italy. Why didn’t you stay in England?’ But she leaned over. ‘Bessarion is a friend of mine. I hear things.’

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.

When the owner disappeared into the crowd of papal courtiers, Violetta leaned against him. ‘She’s not so bad, but she’s the very princess of liars. If she’d married Sforza, her daughter would have had to be named Hypocritica.’

Di Brachio threw his head back and his laugh rang like a bell. ‘Demoiselle, you have more wit than many a fine lady I have known.’

Swan had no idea what they were on about.

‘The Duke of Milan’s daughter is Hypolita, like the Queen of the Amazons,’ Violetta said. ‘It all but ruins my little wit to have to explain myself.’

‘Leave the Englishman and marry me, demoiselle,’ said Di Brachio.

Violetta smiled and was very beautiful indeed. ‘What a wonderful compliment, messire! But surely you desire a very chaste and religious wife.’

‘I do?’ Di Brachio asked. ‘It seems unlikely.’

‘I fear that otherwise she might be very bored indeed,’ Violetta said. Her smile should have taken any sting out. And made the Venetian laugh again. But he did not, and he leaned towards her, hissing slightly as he did when angry.

‘Listen, my filly,’ he said, ‘I might surprise you.’

She lowered her lashes. ‘Messire, I can well imagine that you are a man full of surprises, and if I had a younger brother—’

Di Brescia stepped between them out of the air. ‘She means no harm,’ he said, gripping Di Brachio’s sword arm. Violetta was as white as the parchment of a fancy sword scabbard. Swan, who’d drunk too much wine, went from a vague jealousy that his best friend was flirting with his chosen girl to fear that she was about to be cut to ribbons before his eyes.

‘Oh, messire,’ Violetta said, hand to chest. ‘It is just wit. Poor wit.’

Di Brachio turned. ‘I disgust myself,’ he said. He bowed. ‘The demoiselle did nothing untoward. I am unfit for company.’ He turned and stomped off.

Swan looked at Violetta, and at Di Brachio’s back. Sobriety returned in a host of memories, and he pressed against her, just for a moment – to remember the feel of her body if he didn’t manage to return. ‘He’s my best friend,’ he said sourly, and walked away after the retreating back of the Venetian.

Di Brachio walked straight out the open door of the great hall and into the night, leaving his cloak and hat. He was well ahead of Swan, and Swan almost lost the young man in the first three turnings of the streets outside Madame Lucrescia’s house, but great houses had cressets burning outside, and Di Brachio’s bare head gleamed in the light as he wandered out into the Via dei Coronari.

Swan ran across a broad square littered with fallen remnants of ancient buildings and caught the Venetian as he climbed the steps of Ponte San Angelo. All the houses had been pulled down at the time of the papal jubilee, and there was a dangerous wilderness of rubble and unfinished work. It was not a place where any sane man walked alone.

Even as Swan approached from behind, shadows detached themselves from the muddy darkness under the bridge and ran, light footed, up the steps between him and his friend.

There were two lamps burning at the top of the steps by the statue of St Peter. Swan saw Di Brachio silhouetted against the left-hand lamp, and saw him turn as the men behind rushed him, and then Swan’s own head was down as he sprinted up the steps himself, sword and dagger in hand.

There was no pause, no demand for money – the men rushed the Venetian, and he stood his ground at the top of the steps and killed one, threw his body at the others, and then put his back against the lamp-post. The other five began to close in.

Then the rearmost man heard Swan’s feet and turned.

Di Brachio attacked, a great slashing blow from a high guard against the bridgeward men, and a sudden flickering lunge like the pounce of a cat to kill the man who had turned to face Swan.

Swan jumped up, climbing three steps in a leap, and got his own back to the bridge’s wall – bound a man’s sword with his own. The man was left handed, and he had a small shield, and Swan thrust his dagger into the man’s shield, cut him in the forearm over the rim, stomped on his extended foot, and muscled his dagger into the man’s bicep. The man’s defence collapsed and Swan hit him in the face with his sword-hilt, stepped behind him and, as he collapsed forward, kneed him in the face and threw him over his left leg and over the collapsed parapet into the water.

All that in the time it would take a monk to say the words ‘Pater noster qui est in coelus’.

Di Brachio fell at his feet, stretched full length on the timbers of the bridge, and Swan cut a great mezzano from right to left at head height, brushing the two immediate assailants back off his friend.

Di Brachio rolled to his feet, swearing like a sailor.

The survivors had used the moment’s pause to realise that there were only two of them left now, and they turned to run.

Di Brachio threw his sword – hard, and overarm, so that it made a torchlit pinwheel and slammed into the farther man’s neck. It wasn’t spectacular – the sword didn’t hit point first – but it had enough power and weight to make a great wound, and the fellow went sprawling on the planks, screaming, both arms reaching for the back of his head.

Swan cursed his tight scarlet hose and ran after the closer man, who was scrawny, short and partially bald. He ran with a limp, and Swan caught him in ten steps. The man turned – and fell to his knees.

‘Spare me, master!’ he said. His eyes gleamed dully, like old metal.

Behind Swan, the man who’d taken the sword in the back of his head screamed as his questing fingers discovered that there was a big piece of his skull missing and he was a dead man, and then his screams stopped abruptly as Di Brachio finished him.

‘I could serve you – I’d be a slave. Oh, God, messire, please …’

Swan thought a thousand things in a second – how he’d spared the young Turk, and how this man had intended to kill and then rob Di Brachio. What Christ intended. What he would think of himself tomorrow. Whether Violetta was yet available. The eyes that watched him were bereft of anything like innocence.

He ran the man through, and kicked him off his point. He felt neither joy nor horror. Killing street trash was no longer incident. It was a professional decision, and he left the corpse and ran back to Di Brachio, but the Venetian hadn’t taken a bad wound, merely a hard cut to the side below his dagger hand.

‘You are a fool,’ Swan said fondly.

‘Am I?’ Di Brachio said. ‘Sweet Christ, that hurts.’ He shrugged. ‘But I no longer feel like killing an innocent girl. That part is all better.’ He turned. ‘Did yours get away?’

‘No,’ Swan said.

They sat in the main room of Madame Lucrescia’s and debated how long Pope Nicholas would live and who might be Pope after him. Accudi thought that Bessarion would be Pope, and Di Brescia laughed him to scorn. Swan tried to listen while scanning the room for Violetta, but she was gone – riding another customer, no doubt. He found himself angry. It made no sense to be so angry – he’d made his choice and chased after Di Brachio – but there it was. He couldn’t listen to Di Brescia’s mock insults, or to Accudi’s ribald comments.

Like Di Brachio before him, he rose to leave.

‘You came back!’ Madame Lucrescia said, placing a hand on his chest. ‘I sent her to her room. She was going to make a scene.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you in love with your Venetian?’

Swan laughed. ‘Not that way,’ he said. He smiled, though.

She nodded. ‘I thought not. But – never mind. I will send a slave for Violetta, and you may resume your evening, although if these two gentlemen do not stop fighting …’ She swept past Swan to where Di Brescia was sitting on top of his much less martial peer.

‘Messires!’ she shouted.

Di Brescia raised his head. ‘Ah, che cosare! Let me write you a poem right after I shove this ink-stained cretin’s words down his throat.’

‘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.

Violetta’s odd and beautiful eyes met his. ‘I like you,’ she said quickly, and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. Considering how widely both of their mouths had travelled, it was curious how intimate this little gesture was.

They walked into the receiving room. Di Brachio was in bed. He had Master Claudio on one side of him, and Madame Lucrescia herself on the other. He was breathing.

They tiptoed out again.

In bed, their warmth had not dissipated, and they lay together, just being warm, for long enough that hands began to wander.

Eventually, Swan rolled off her and pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘When do the bailiffs come to throw me out? And when is the fencing lesson?’

She laughed. ‘I have days off,’ she said. ‘One a week, or six a month when my courses run.’

Swan had grown up in an inn. ‘Oh!’ he said, understanding. ‘Can you fence then?’

Violetta shrugged. ‘We’ll find out,’ she said.

Di Brachio was moved to the cardinal’s palazzo later that day. Swan had a word with the steward – a quiet word – about how he would feel if any harm came to the Venetian. Later that day, without any coordination, Giannis cornered the priest on much the same mission, as he reported, laughing, to Swan.

The Greeks desired to see Rome – Master Nikephorus from the standpoint of academic enquiry, and the others with the enthusiasm of visitors.

Two days later was one of Violetta’s days off, and he took her out with Di Brescia, Giannis, Irene and Andromache. The younger Apollinaris was in bed with a fever that didn’t promise well – Rome was notorious for such things – and Master Nikephorus was preparing to give a lecture on the head of St George and was practising his Latin and cursing all Franks.

‘You are all ignorant barbarians!’ he said to Swan, when Swan came to the suite allocated to the Greeks to collect his friends. The master was declaiming to an audience of two sleeping cats and three attractive young women.

‘The cardinal told him that his Latin pronunciation would be incomprehensible to the Italians,’ Irene said quietly.

‘I come from the city of New Rome, where the empire endured without change! Tribes of Goths and Lombards overran this worthless, ruined town while Constantinople had running water and a thousand poets and philosophers!’ The old man sputtered.

Giannis continued to watch the older scholar with something like worship, but Irene plucked at his kaftan. ‘Our Italians are going out – shopping,’ she said.

Irene and Violetta circled each other like swordsmen upon introduction. Irene threw back her head and Violetta stood taller and threw out her chest, and Swan had to fight the urge to laugh. It was cold in the cardinal’s garden and he realised that he had not thought this through well enough.

But half an hour of walking arm in arm with Irene and Andromache broke through Violetta’s reserve, and she became as animated as Swan had seen her, speaking her Milanese Italian quickly, laughing constantly, as she showed the two Greek girls the markets of Rome.

Swan’s errand was clothing, and he brought them to the used-clothing market.

Di Brescia laughed. ‘You are a Roman, now,’ he said.

Violetta was walking, cloaked, with a veil over her face, between two equally hidden Greek ladies. The clothing market was a masculine space – men changed their hose and codpieces at the tables – and there was some consternation.

The nearest girl – most tables were run by girls – turned to the veiled women. ‘You shouldn’t be here, and if you’re here on a wager, get lost. Not a place for nice girls, sweetie.’

Di Brescia bowed. ‘I will escort the demoiselles into the church,’ he said. ‘If you and Giannis wish to see to your sartorial splendours.’

All three veiled women were laughing as hard as women in veils could laugh with dignity as Di Brescia led them away across the square. Irene began to put on a show of offended modesty – she was, after all, an actress, thought Swan. Andromache and Violetta began to match her, and men in the market began to dress hurriedly, and to apologise under their breath. And curse.

The Englishman and the Greek went up an alley and found the shop – really a house with a table outside – where Swan had purchased his first suit. The old man laughed and took his hand.

‘By Saint Christopher, my boy – you are still alive! I must say I’m surprised.’

Swan opened the pilgrim’s scrip he’d carried through the whole walk and produced the suit of scarlet and the matching cloak. ‘Too small for me,’ he said ruefully.

The old man raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes – your shoulders are much bigger. And you are an inch taller. Well – I must say that you are the first customer to return this suit standing up,’ he said. ‘Look at this slash!’ he complained.

After some haggling and much poking through neatly piled clothes, Swan emerged with two good suits of brown wool; doublet, hose and gown all matching – almost clerical in their plainness, but the cloth was good and the stitching perfect.

‘A gentleman from the far north,’ the old man said, shaking his head. ‘Here one day, caught by footpads and killed. A pilgrim from Danemark.’

Swan also picked up a pair of silk hose, only slightly worn at the knees, and a not-quite-matching doublet in superb blue velvet with embroidery. It was the finest doublet he’d ever owned, and the knife-cut in the back went between the embroidered panels neatly and had been cunningly repaired. The bloodstain on the inside hadn’t reached the velvet.

‘I could have the lining unpicked and resewn if you’d rather,’ said the old man.

Giannis just rolled his eyes. He had a good leather jerkin, carefully tooled and sporting fine buttons like acorns, and he was uninterested in any colour beyond black.

The old man smiled. ‘Soldiers,’ he said. ‘Either they are popinjays, or they are not.’

The two young men dickered for what seemed an appropriate length of time and walked off, carrying their purchases. They retrieved their party from the Chapel of St Maurice. Then they walked down the perfumers’ street, and Swan gave way to impulse and purchased something exotic for Violetta, who smelled it and glowed at him. In the street of glovers he bought gloves – plain chamois, from Austria, for fighting, and another pair for her.

The three men spent money at a remarkable rate, in fact, and drew a small crowd of beggars and worse. In the street of swordsmiths, while Swan ordered Di Brachio’s war sword dismounted and a new blade added, the commotion around the Greeks became bad enough that four men in city colours came with truncheons and began beating the beggars away.

The smith’s apprentice shook his head. ‘Everyone knows the old Pope is dying,’ he said. ‘The nothings are getting ready to riot.’

Swan collected a pair of training swords – light arming swords with no edges – and emptied his purse on the counter.

They crossed the forum carefully. Because Swan was watching the beggars, he caught sight of the red and yellow of the Orsini well to the north, and Di Brescia led them south, down the ancient steps and across the palazzo.

‘Surely they are not after us,’ Giannis said.

Swan wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something bad – his most Italianate habit. ‘We spent too much money and made too much noise,’ he said.

South of the forum, they seemed to be alone. They approached a tavern owner – winter was off season for pilgrims – rented his courtyard and two tables, and sat comfortably, with jugs of hot wine, in the winter sun. The landlord served them hare and a spicy sausage dish.

Swan put two gold francs into the landlord’s hand. ‘I wish the courtyard to have no prying eyes. Yes?’

The innkeeper leered. ‘None at all!’ he said.

If he had a peephole, he was doomed to disappointment, unless he fancied watching three women and three men exchange the very rudiments of swordsmanship. If Swan had imagined that he would be the teacher, he quickly discovered that both Di Brescia and Giannis had as much – or more – to contribute. Giannis was soon the voice of instruction. He had experience training soldiers, and that experience was more valuable than Swan’s youthful passion or Di Brescia’s tempered training.

The whole might have been riotous, or salacious – perhaps both together – except that the three women were so very serious.

Irene was merely annoyed when a slap to her knuckles from Di Brescia’s sword drew blood. Violetta took a cut to her right calf that caused her to hobble in the cold air, and made her angry. Andromache avoided injury but was patently afraid of the weapons and yet as eager to learn.

They played in the courtyard until the light left the sky, by which time all three women could adequately hold a sword, slap an attack away, and respond – too slowly – with a counter. The men finished with some bouts, and except for one heart-stopping moment when Di Brescia’s new right leg lunge almost resulted in Swan taking a blade through his eye, the fighting was pretty and safe.

The women had all worn hose and heavy linen shirts under their kirtles and gowns. Now they made themselves respectable again, and the men gathered in a huddle and agreed that they should have dinner.

‘Can we dine with the ladies?’ Swan asked.

Di Brescia vanished and returned smiling. ‘With money, all things are possible,’ he said.

It was cold in the courtyard, and they moved into the tavern’s main room – low ceilinged, with rafters of ancient oak and hams and sausages everywhere, smelling of Eastern spices and male sweat. The ‘house’ had a pair of trulls, the lowest form of prostitutes except those who plied their trade against the churches – hard-faced young women from the country – and a pair of bruisers whose faces suggested they were from the same town. The only other people in the main room were some Florentines, a single French soldier and the fat innkeeper and his wife, both busy over-managing the handful of staff.

‘I’ve arranged dinner and some music,’ Di Brescia said.

The food was excellent, utterly belying the appearance of the place – and explaining the wealthy Florentine party’s presence. While they ate, one of the bruisers produced a lute and began to play. Di Brescia arranged things with the innkeeper, who waited on them in person, and Di Brescia introduced each dish – the cappelletti alla cortigiana, the panunto con provatura fresca, the fine sweet Barolo wine after four bottles of Tuscan sunshine. He took charge of dinner as effectively as Giannis had taken charge of the swordplay.

The bruiser played like Apollo come to earth, as the Greeks commented, and Violetta leaned against Swan. ‘It is like seeing gold appear from dung,’ she whispered.

The three women had their veils off to eat, and the French soldier was moved to cross to their table. But after an exchange with Giannis, he shrugged agreeably – perhaps convinced that the ladies had defenders – and went back to his wine.

After the table was cleared, the landlord brought them another pitcher of his heavy spiced wine, and Violetta clapped her hands together. ‘Let’s dance,’ she said.

Everyone in the tavern agreed to that. Even as Di Brescia had taken charge of the dinner, so Violetta was instantly the mistress of the dance, and she included the trulls, the innkeeper’s wife …

‘Let’s do a bassadura. Let’s do Damnes. It’s new!’ she said. And proceeded to teach them the latest dance at the court of Milan. The women – even the Greek women – knew the steps – ripresa, continenze, mezza volta and the rest of the international repertoire of dance steps. Now it was the men who were the students, and the women who taught, and it was obvious from their tone that the men had been pedantic and patronising about swordplay. Swan thought – and not for the first time – how similar dance was to swordsmanship, while Violetta bossed him unmercifully.

Despite which, in an hour, they were dancing merrily. The main figure was a woman dancing between two men, and the men took turns with the woman – Swan smiled a little bitterly as he shared Violetta with the French soldier and later with the tallest of the Florentines, but the dancing was done with goodwill.

The Florentine leaned against the wall – women were in short supply, which gave men a rest from time to time. ‘She’s a beauty, your girl,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had this good a time in a year. May I ask who you are?’

Swan bowed. ‘Thomas Swan, equerry to Cardinal Bessarion.’

The Florentine bowed. ‘Ah – we share a friend – Di Brachio of the Bembii of Venice. I am Giacomo Accucciulli.’

Even more remarkably, the Florentine spoke excellent Greek. He admitted to Giannis that he’d been born there. The Greeks greeted him like a long-lost brother. The party grew warmer.

The French soldier sat with Swan. So much wine had been drunk that Swan could scarcely see, and he was watching Violetta whirl and leap with the Florentine and with Di Brescia – the two best male dancers – without a qualm.

‘Come on, friend – you’re a soldier. You have soldier written all over you,’ the Frenchman said, his arm around Swan’s shoulder.