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dabbed with the brush, then leaned back. ‘I’m sorry,
ma chérie
,’ he spoke to the image of Mary that he was painting onto the ceiling, ‘you’re not allowed to have tits and now you’ve lost your toes, but they’ll come back.’
    ‘They will?’ Thomas asked.
    ‘The plaster’s dry,’ the painter snarled as though the answer was obvious, ‘and if you paint over a fresco when it’s dry then that paint will peel off like a whore’s scabs. It will take a few years, but her heretical toes will reappear, but the Dominicans don’t know that because they are damned fools.’ He switched into his native Italian and screamed insults at his two assistants, who were using a giant pestle to mix fresh plaster in a barrel. ‘They are also fools,’ he added to Thomas.
    ‘You have to paint on wet plaster?’ Thomas asked.
    ‘You came here to have a lesson in how to paint? You damned well pay me. Who are you?’
    ‘My name is d’Evecque,’ Thomas said. He had no wish to be known by his real name in Avignon. He had enemies enough in the church, and Avignon was the home of the Pope, which meant the town was packed with priests, monks and friars. He had come here because the disagreeable woman in Mouthoumet had assured him that the mysterious Father Calade had come to Avignon, but Thomas now had a sinking feeling that his time was being wasted. He had enquired of a dozen priests if they knew of a Father Calade, and none had recognised the name, but equally no one had recognised Thomas either or knew he had been excommunicated. He was a heretic now, outside the church’s grace, a man to be hunted and burned, yet he could not resist visiting the great fortress-palace of the Papacy. There was a Pope in Rome too, because of the schism in the church, but Avignon held the power, and Thomas was astonished by the riches displayed in the vast building.
    ‘From your voice,’ the painter said, ‘I’d guess you’re a Norman? Or perhaps an Englishman, eh?’
    ‘A Norman,’ Thomas said.
    ‘So what is a Norman doing so far from home?’
    ‘I wish to see the Holy Father.’
    ‘Of course you damned well do. But what are you doing here? In the Salle des Herses?’
    The Salle des Herses was a room that opened from the great audience chamber of the Papal palace, and it had once contained the mechanism that lowered the portcullis in the palace gate, though that winch and pulley system had long been taken out
so that, evidently, the room could become another chapel. Thomas hesitated before answering, then told the truth. ‘I wanted somewhere to piss.’
    ‘That corner,’ the painter gestured with his brush, ‘in that hole beneath the picture of Saint Joseph. It’s where the rats get in, so do me a favour and drown some of the bastards. So what do you want of the Holy Father? Sins remitted? A free pass to heaven? One of the choirboys?’
    ‘Just a blessing,’ Thomas said.
    ‘You ask for so little, Norman. Ask for much, then you might get a little. Or you might get nothing. This Holy Father is not susceptible to bribes.’ The painter scrambled down from the scaffold, grimaced at his new work, then went to a table covered with small pots of precious pigments. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not English! The Holy Father doesn’t like the English.’
    Thomas buttoned up his breeches. ‘He doesn’t?’
    ‘He does not,’ the painter said, ‘and how do I know? Because I know everything. I paint and they ignore me because they can’t see me! I am Giacomo on the scaffold and they are talking beneath me. Not in here,’ he spat, as if the chamber he decorated was not worth the effort, ‘but I am also painting over the angels’ naked tits in the Conclave Chamber, and that’s where they talk. Chatter, chatter, chatter! They’re like birds, their heads together, twittering, and Giacomo is busy hiding tits on the scaffold above and so they forget I am up there.’
    ‘So what does the Holy Father say about the English?’
    ‘You want my knowledge? You pay.’
    ‘You want me to throw paint on your ceiling?’
    Giacomo laughed. ‘I hear, Norman, that the Holy Father wants the French to defeat the English. There are three French cardinals here now, all yammering in his ear, but he doesn’t need their encouragement. He’s told Burgundy to fight alongside France. He has sent messages to Toulouse, to Provence, to the Dauphiné, even to Gascony, telling men it is their duty to resist England. The Holy Father is a