Free Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part One: Castillon by Christian Cameron Page A

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