Castillon: Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part One

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.

He sat on the blanket box. He took the cardinal’s livery badge from his purse and put it on the box. ‘I’ve taken service with the cardinal,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve been very good to me. I think we’re . . . even. Eh?’

Peter smiled, slipped a strip of linen tape into his tract, and sat back. ‘I’m fired? Just like that? Just when I’ve figured out how to get the nuns to wash our shirts?’

Swan waggled his head nervously. ‘You’re a master archer. I’m a penniless git.’ He looked up. ‘I haven’t really got anything to pay you with.’

Peter folded his hands. ‘You mean, except for the carved ivories you have rolled up in your blanket? Or had you forgotten those?’

Swan rose from his seat as if he’d been pinched.

Peter laughed. ‘I thought you were saving them to pay your ransom,’ he said. He didn’t bother to hide his laugh. ‘They must be worth . . . a thousand florins? Maybe a thousand ducats.’

Swan shifted nervously. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He was becoming tired of getting caught. The adult world was much more complex that then world of pages.

Peter sat back. ‘So – maybe I’d like to stay with you. If you’ll have me.’ He grinned. ‘And maybe if the pay is good.’ Ant maybe iff te paiy iis gut.

Swan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Are you kidding?’

Peter shook his head. ‘No. I think maybe it is time to settle down.’ He nodded. ‘The war is over. That’s what they say in Paris. England has lost everything – except Calais. I could go home to Antwerp – and what? Full cloth?’ He smiled. ‘I’ll go to Rome. Pray in St Peter’s. If you and I don’t get along so well – then I’ll come home.’