He had some wisdom, did our Spaniard.
Marc-Antonio lived behind the ground floor loggia: that is to say, he lived in a room without heat, which stank of dead fish and canal water. He bowed when I entered.
‘Christ on the cross,’ I said without thinking.
Marc-Antonio made a face. ‘I’m used to it, my lord. But I am sorry.’
I frowned. ‘Do you want to be my servant?’ I asked.
Marc-Antonio looked at the ground, and he flushed. ‘No!’ he spat. More softly, he said, ‘But I’ll take any road out of this fish-shit hole.’
‘Boys used to call me Judas Iscariot,’ I said.
‘That’s nice,’ he muttered. Then he brightened. He was very young. ‘You are truly English?’
I must have grinned, because he grinned back. ‘As English as Kent and London can make,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘The astrologer – he was here a week ago! He told me an Englishman would make my fortune.’
Well, that was news. ‘He may mean another Englishman,’ I said. I was looking at the cuff of my jupon, which needed some work. ‘Can you sew?’ I asked.
‘No, my lord,’ he admitted. ‘That’s women’s work,’ he added with the reckless ignorance of the young.
‘Do leatherwork?’ I asked.
He all but spat. ‘For tradesmen.’
‘Can you cook?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘No. I can toast bread on a fork. I can carve meat.’
‘Start a fire?’ I asked.
He sneered. ‘Get a servant for that,’ he said.
‘Ride a horse?’ I asked.
Marc-Antonio sighed. ‘I would very much like to learn to ride,’ he admitted. ‘I was on a horse once.’
I paused. And watched him, from all the maturity of my twenty-four years.
‘I can wrestle!’ he said. ‘And I can row a boat. I know it’s not genteel, but I can row and cast a net.’ He knew he was failing. ‘Why do I have to know all those peasant things? Cooking? Sewing?’
I sighed. ‘I’m a soldier,’ I said. ‘Those are the skills a soldier has. A page needs to know all of them, and in addition how to look after his own horse and his master’s.’ I thought, not for the first time nor the last, of Perkin, dead in a pointless skirmish. The best squire who ever lived.
‘Know anything about armour?’ I asked.
‘It’s metal,’ Marc-Antonio said with affected disdain.
‘Know how to use a sword?’
‘Yes!’ he said.
‘Really? Ever had lessons?’
‘No!’ he said, louder. He was growing angry.
‘Shoot a bow?’
‘No! No, I don’t know anything except how to read and write and count money, understand, my lord?’ He stood and glared at me.
He was several stone overweight, and he didn’t know how to ride.
I liked his defiance, but it seemed an odd virtue for a servant, much less for forming a squire.