Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Two by Christian Cameron EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Christian Cameron
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Italian Fiction
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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.
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