She put a hand on his arm. ‘Surely, as you are a prince of mighty England and I am a princess of decadent Rome, we may call each other by our names. I am Theodora.’

‘I am Tommaso,’ he said. He could feel where her fingers had touched the back of his hand as if she’d struck him.

The other women giggled.

The knights fidgeted.

‘I shall not be able to sleep, so anxiously will I look forward to tomorrow’s entertainment,’ Swan said.

‘Ah, please sleep,’ Theodora said. ‘You will want to be well rested.’

With that, she smiled to herself and sat, and the other women gathered around her. And the Lord of Eressos walked them down the great staircase, and accompanied them silently to the door, where he bowed.

Outside, in the perfumed air of a Lesbian night, Swan sighed.

Fra Tommaso shook his head. ‘Shall I name you a penance before you commit the sin? You are like an oarsman …’ He sighed. ‘With better taste.’

Fra Domenico shook his head. ‘You are married, young man. And in the service of the order.’

Swan sighed heavily, a young man set upon by older men. He thought of stinging comments like We’re not really married, and I’m not proposing to murder a boatload of Islamic pilgrims. In fact, he thought of such responses all the way down the hill to the great gates, and then all the way to the taverna, where a Greek man was singing and wine was being served.

And Fra Tommaso handed him a cup of wine, and said, ‘Hard as it may be to believe, we were young, once.’

Fra Domenico laughed – head thrown back – the first uncalculated thing Swan had seen the man do. He laughed, and the ring on his finger caught the light from the oil lamps and winked. Fra Tommaso laughed so hard he had to stand up, and in the end, Swan had to laugh himself.

Swan attempted to sleep late. He wanted to sleep late. He’d drunk wine with the two older men until it was quite late, and they’d swapped tales, and Fra Tommaso’s friend the Greek priest had joined them – three old men and one young one.

But he had lost the habit of indolence. His eyes opened with the change in the sound of the wind, and he got up and pissed in a pot and went back to his narrow bed. Fra Tommaso snored a few feet away, and despite his cacophony of barnyard noises, Swan went straight back to sleep, but when the soft pink fingers of rosy-handed dawn crept across the horizon and brushed his eyelids, they snapped open, and he was awake.

No ship. No pitching deck, no orders to give, no tiller under his hand. No masts to examine. Very little wind.

He let his mind wander – to Violetta, to Khatun Bengül, to Tilda and any other woman he could imagine, but what came to him instead were the sound of an assassin’s footsteps in an alley in Venice and the feeling of a skull popping under his weight.

‘Christ,’ he cursed, now fully awake. He sat up and shivered in the pre-dawn cold.

He got up and found his writing kit, and carried it down to the beachfront littered in tables and chairs, and sat in the dawn and wrote a letter to Violetta. It was only the second letter he could remember writing, on his own, and it took him quite some time to compose – he wanted it to sound witty.

He was not altogether pleased with the result, and one paragraph in particular sounded the wrong note. He’d tried to explain about fighting – about how he felt when he fought. It sounded … foolish.

He took his sharp quill knife and cut the parchment. Then he rummaged again in his writing kit, looking for a scrap of parchment to glue on for a better paragraph, and instead found Cyriaco of Ancona’s little book.

He had forgotten about it altogether.

He opened the book to Mytilini, and sure enough, there were four names, with addresses and amounts of money. None of them, he noted, were women, and for a moment he wondered how he could write a letter to Violetta while contemplating finding a nice warm …

He smiled and sighed.

He found the four houses easily enough. The nearest was in the street immediately behind the taverna – the farthest was all the way on the other side of the fortress, just a ten-minute walk. The air was pleasant and the Greeks greeted him as if he, too, lived there, despite his sword and dagger and Italian clothes, and he responded in kind, with the saint’s day and the local benison.

When he came to the most distant house, a man was sitting in a chair by his front doorstep, mending a net.

‘Khairete!’ Swan greeted the man.

The man frowned and went back to his net.

‘You fish?’ Swan asked.

‘No, I use this to catch demons, and to imprison rude fellows who ask impertinent questions.’ The man raised his eyes and smiled. He was fifty or more years old, and he had the eyes and nose of a heavy drinker. He shrugged. ‘Eh, and sometimes I catch fish. You? You kill people, eh?’

Swan shook his head. ‘Only when they annoy me,’ he said, hoping he had the tone of the conversation right. ‘Do you know Cyriaco? The Italian?’

The man on the chair raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps.’ He affected indifference. ‘There are many Italians named Cyriaco,’ he said.

‘De’ Pizzicolli?’ Swan asked. ‘From Ancona?’ He reached into his purse and extracted a good coin – a Venetian soldino which he’d kept because it was new minted, shiny, and the relief was excellent.

The old drunk eyed the coin for a moment. ‘I don’t sell wine,’ he said. ‘And a Venetian coin on a Genoese island is a hard thing to spend. Eh?’ He got up and went inside.

Walking away, Swan realised that he might have played that game better – he might have had a small payment ready in the form of a gift – or even a jug of wine. He might have spoken to the man in a more private place. He might have done many things, but he hadn’t, and he’d only make a fool of himself trying to get the man back.

And he wondered how the Gattelusi would feel about his quest for informants. He began to watch the streets around him the way he would have done if it had been Venice. Or Rome.

After a breakfast of stale bread and wine, he tried again, at the third address. This time, he watched the house for an hour from the steps of the nearest Greek church – watched the owner turn a key in his door, and walk off towards the harbour with a bag on his back. Swan followed him into the main market in the middle of the town, where the man hooked curtains over the bare poles of` a stall, hauled a table from a nearby shed, and began to lay out wares.

Swan wandered over. The man was a silversmith, and Swan examined his wares and chose a set of twenty buttons, equally useful to a rich Greek or a prosperous Italian, with the head of the Virgin on each one.

He took the last six ducats from his purse and counted down two for the buttons. And then two more.

‘Cyriaco of Ancona sends his greetings,’ he said as casually as he could manage.

The man’s hand hovered over the gold coins.

Swan’s gut tightened.

And then the hand pounced like a cat on a rat. ‘I have missed our chats,’ the Greek said. ‘I sent a letter,’ he whispered. ‘I never got a reply.’

Swan nodded. ‘All I want is for you to continue writing letters,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a cup of wine?’ he added, motioning to where a small taverna was just opening, the owner blinking in the new sunlight.

The Greek man’s smile tightened.

Inside his own head, Swan kicked himself. ‘Ah – of course. Perhaps we might meet …’ Swan struggled for some way they might appear together in public – a Greek and a Frank.

‘Cyriaco sometimes liked to visit the old ruins,’ the Greek said. ‘I can hire donkeys and horses – if you have time. Perhaps tomorrow?’

Swan bowed. ‘I would like that of all things,’ he said. ‘Might we visit the temples near Kalloni?’

The Greek sniffed slightly, as if detecting a foul smell. ‘That is … very far. The baths at Thermi? A quick trip.’