Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Two: Venice

Book 0: Tom Swan and the Head of St George

by Christian Cameron

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Venice: part two of a fast-paced serialised novel set in the turbulent Europe of the fifteenth century. A young Englishman, Tom Swan, travels to Italy in the bodyguard of a Cardinal. He finds it a different world. Food is delicious, women are beautiful, men are quick to make friends and quick to draw knives. Swan likes it, and dives into the politics and the plotting, the art and the fashion - and the bordellos - of Renaissance Italy. He's not a professional soldier. He's really a merchant and a scholar looking for remnants of Ancient Greece and Rome - temples, graves, pottery, fabulous animals, unicorn horns. But he also has a real talent for ending up in the midst of violence when he didn't mean to. Having used his wits to escape execution in part one, he begins a series of adventures that take him to street duels in Italy, meetings with remarkable men - from the pope and Hunyadi János to Sultan Mehmet II - and from the intrigues of Rome to the Siege of Belgrade.

Release date: September 20, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 108

Sample

Tom Swan – Part Two: Venice

Italy was a different world. The air was different. Farms were different. Food was delicious, women were beautiful, they flirted harder and they hit harder when offended. Men were quick to make friends and quick to draw knives.

Swan liked it.

They paused for a week in Florence, where Bessarion had relatives. Swan was enough part of the cardinal’s household that he had come to understand that the cardinal had an extensive network of informants and special friends who provided him with the essential information that allowed him to remain important and powerful – while impoverished.

Florence was . . . incredible. Swan went from one building to the next, from one magnificent vista to the next, from one Tuscan vintage to the next. One evening, he threw his arms around Giovanni Accudi and demanded to be made an Italian.

‘An Italianate Englishman is the devil come to earth,’ Cesare said, and laughed.

Two weeks later they were in Rome. Bessarion had a place – a magnificent set of apartments in an old palazzo, the whole decorated in statues pulled from the Forum, with paintings from many of the artists.

Swan had never seen so much wealth in his life. He’d been in the English palaces. They had carvings, old oak, blue and gilt ceilings . . .

They were like merchant’s homes in Cheapside compared to this. Every ceiling was painted with a scene – the resurrection of Christ, the birth of Venus, the crucifixion, the rending of Adonis by Artemis’s hunting dogs. Swan walked from room to room, his neck strained, watching the scenes go by and bumping into furniture.

Alessandro laughed at him. So did the lawyers, who, home at last, wanted to show off their adoptive city. ‘Come out with us!’ Giovanni said. ‘Meet the most beautiful women!’

‘Play cards with them,’ Cesare said.

‘Bed them,’ Giovanni said.

‘If you can pay,’ said Cesare, and he frowned. ‘Do you have any silver?’

Swan made a face. ‘Take me to a pawn shop,’ he said, ‘and I might have a little silver.’

Most of the cardinal’s entourage had their own homes, but the lawyers had rooms in the old palazzo and Giannis, the only one of the regular guards to be unmarried, also lived in the villa. Cesare pounded on his door. ‘Wear a clean doublet – we’re going to visit Aphrodite!’ he called.

Giannis opened the door. He had plainly been asleep. On the road, the guards – among whom he might have been numbered, at least by a casual observer – had been awake a great deal, even in safe towns in northern Italy. In the palazzo, they slept. Contrarily, the lawyers, who’d scarcely ever been employed on the road, were now expected to write all day.

Cesare looked Swan over in the courtyard of the palazzo. ‘You look like a very young assassin, or perhaps a peasant in the borrowed clothes of a relative,’ he said.

Indeed, Swan hadn’t bought a rag since Paris, and his one suit of doublet and hose had been slept in, fought in, and oft mended. Even clean, the doublet was threadbare.

Cesare, by contrast, looked like a different man. Instead of the long gown of his profession, or the travelling gown he’d worn on the road, he had a short doublet and very, very tight wool hose. As he was a big man, edging on to a life of having a roll of fat at his waist, he shook his head. ‘I’d lend you clothes,’ he said sadly. ‘But there’s nothing about you that’s the same size as me.’

The same was true of Accudi, who stood over six feet tall in his stockings and was as thin as a spear.

‘I’m not sure I can be seen in public with him,’ Giovanni said when he came down. His fine brocaded wool doublet contrasted perfectly with his hose and his matching shoes. Even his dagger belt matched, and had gold fittings that looked, to Swan, like real gold. ‘I’m not going to take him to Donna Lucrescia’s house. We’ll be mocked.’

‘I’m more afraid we’ll be killed,’ Cesare amended.

Swan began to be annoyed. ‘Go, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay home.’

‘Are you too poor to buy clothes?’ Cesare asked. ‘Good clothes can be had cheaply, if second hand. A good cutter can resew them in an hour.’

‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ Swan complained. ‘We have clothes in London, too.’

Giannis came down in a pierced leather doublet and particoloured hose. He looked at Swan. ‘He can’t go out dressed like that. None of the girls will even look at him. He looks like somebody’s country cousin.’

Cesare guffawed, and Swan boiled over. ‘Very funny, you bastards!’

Giannis put a hand on the Englishman’s arm. ‘Never, ever say that in Italian. It is a mortal insult. Swords in the moonlight. Yes? You understand?’ He grinned.

‘Fine. Let’s go to a pawnbroker’s. I’ll get a little cash, and then we’ll get some clothes. If you popinjays are then satisfied, we can go to dinner.’ He glared around at the two Italians and the Greek. They all smiled tolerantly back.

‘So young,’ Cesare said, and reached out to pinch his cheek. Swan’s hand whipped out and caught the Brescian’s. ‘And so touchy.’

The pawnbroker’s was nothing like a similar booth in Cheapside. First, the shop was in the front of a very old building of brick and stone near the ancient Forum. The street was broader than any street in London or Paris. The shop – if it was a shop – displayed few wares – a painting, some helmets of Milanese make, and a single, beautiful golden rose.

Swan looked hard at the rose. ‘Is that a papal rose?’ he asked.

Giovannni barely gave it a glance. ‘Yes. No doubt Frederico has a dozen of them. As soon as men get them they pawn them.’

Swan shook his head, shocked. ‘The highest award in Christendom?’

Cesare laughed and pounded his fist on the counter. ‘House!’ he called. ‘Customers!’

‘Hush,’ said Giovanni. ‘They’ll take us for peasants.’

A middle-aged man emerged from the back in the cap and gown of a rich merchant or a senior scholar – or perhaps a priest. ‘Ah – messires. A pleasure. I hope that you gentlemen had a pleasant trip north.’

‘Pleasant?’ Cesare said. ‘Frederico, you know better than that.’

The shop-owner, if he was such, shrugged expressively. ‘I hear things. The treaty died in a battle. Constantinople fell to the Turks.’ He shrugged again. ‘These are hard times. How may I help you gentlemen?’

‘My young friend has come into the possession . . . of items—’ Cesare smiled. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what he has. But I assured him that this house was the right house in which to sell them. Or leave them and borrow a little money.’

‘You may tell your friend to step in, then. Is he shy? Waiting in the street? Admiring antiquities in the Forum?’ The man in the cap walked out from behind his counter.

‘This young man right here,’ Giovanni said, pointing graciously to Swan with a sweep of his hand.



‘A servant? My dear friends, I do not lend money to servants.’ The man’s face closed. ‘Are you making game of me?’

Swan wavered between anger and amusement, but amusement won out. He bowed deeply. ‘Messire is mistaken if he thinks me a servant,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps not. I am, in fact, a poorly dressed Englishman. I serve God and my own interest – in that way I’m a servant.’

Frederico returned the bow. He smiled. ‘Ah! Your pardon, messire. A man can be judged only on clothes until he opens his mouth.’

‘And sometimes after,’ Swan said. ‘My clothes are against me, and it is to remedy this important shortcoming that I have come—’ He smiled and coughed. ‘Ahem.’

‘Just so!’ Frederico said.

‘Might we do this in private?’ Swan said.

The other three smiled and withdrew to the front step.

Swan opened his purse. ‘I have these,’ he said, withdrawing three ivory crucifixes. Each had the image of Christ in carefully carved and dyed ivory on a cross of ivory, about the size of a woman’s hand. All three were set in silver.

The banker – he was clearly no pawnbroker – put spectacles on his nose and bent over the ivories. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Paris work. May I ask how you came to own them?’

Swan set his mouth, considered blank refusal, and then smiled. ‘Spoils of war,’ he said.

‘Ah!’ said the banker. ‘The owner is . . . dead?’

Swan was surprised by the direction of the conversation. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

‘Ah,’ the banker said. ‘Good. Do you wish a loan, or a sale?’

‘How much are we talking?’ Swan asked.

‘I never bargain,’ said the banker. He shrugged. ‘I never intended to be in this business and I despise haggling.’

Swan tried not to smile. In this case, he had heard it all before.

‘Twenty Venetian ducats for the good one, and ten each for the others,’ the banker said.

‘As a loan, you mean,’ Swan said.

‘No, that was my final price,’ said the banker.

Swan pursed his lips. ‘You know, my friends are in a hurry,’ he said. ‘But I am not in quite such a hurry as that.’ He picked them up and dropped them back in his wallet.

The banker plucked the spectacles off his nose. ‘What did you expect? A hundred ducats?’

‘More like four hundred,’ Swan said. He shrugged. ‘Good day.’

‘You’re mad!’ said the banker.

‘You mistook me for a servant, and then you mistook me for a mark.’ Swan smiled. ‘Would you like to start again?’

‘No,’ said the banker.

Now it was Swan’s turn to s. . .