The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Read online

  All about her she could feel the mounting excitement, almost palpable, like a current of air or a haze of heat, but she felt completely outside of it. Pia had been born in Siena and had scarcely been outside the city. Tuscany had a coast but she had never seen the sea. Yet despite her hermetic existence in her contrada, her nineteen years bound by the city walls, today for the first time she felt that she did not belong. By reason of her betrothal she was no longer an Owlet but was not yet an Eagle; she was an odd, vestigial, avian genus. An aberration.

  In Siena every citizen was a product of their contrada. Their identity began with their ward and ended where the Dragon contrada became the She-Wolf, or the Unicorn became the Tower. Pia was familiar with the colours of each ward or contrada from the red-and-blue of the Panther to the yellow-and-green of the Caterpillar. And twice a year these divisions of geography and hue assumed an even greater significance.

  In a few short hours the bitterness of loss would settle like a pall over the losing contrada and delirious joy would infect every soul in the winning ward. Vicenzo, she knew, would give anything to win today. In the horse draw, which took place some days before the race, he had drawn Berio, a big, handsome bay whispered to be the fastest horse in Tuscany, the horse that every contrada prayed to draw. As Vicenzo was reputed to be the fastest rider in the city, his chances were very good. And if he did win, thought Pia, how would his triumph manifest itself in their marriage chamber? Only this race, lasting three score and ten heartbeats, could prolong the life of her maidenhead. She shuddered.

  Pia sat forward in an attempt to engage herself in the spectacle below. She watched as the horses and riders circled the track, following the Civetta colours out of habit, when her eye was caught by a lone horseman. He was walking his mount slowly, and with complete control, through the Bocca del Casato gate, the arch of the architrave framing him like a painted angel.

  The horseman was a stranger to Pia. He was also the most beautiful living human she had ever seen. He had the olive skin of the region, a full mouth set in a stern and concentrated line but with the promise of softness. He had dark curling hair caught in the pigtail fashion of the day with a ribbon of the Torre colours of the Tower contrada. His eyes were dark and his features those of antique statuary – sculpted marble perfection. His form was well proportioned and muscular, his legs long and his hands gentle on the horse. But there was more too: he seemed noble. If nobility were to do with the new science of physiognomy rather than birth, reflected Pia, then he should be sitting on the palace balcony above her head, not the homely duchess.

  Pia had escaped into books for the whole of her childhood and despite Vicenzo’s violence yesterday she still believed in courtly love – perhaps now even more so. But she did not immediately cast the stranger in the role of all the Tristans, Lancelots and Rolands of whom she had read. She was too much of a realist to imagine that anyone high-born loved where they married.

  She did, however, allow herself to wonder, just for a moment, how it would feel if she was betrothed to that unknown horseman and not Vicenzo. Better yet, if only he could ride for her as her champion, that courtly ideal of centuries ago, with none of the very real and physical threats that marriage promised. She would not have to touch him, nor even meet him. Touch, she now knew, was dangerous. To yearn at a blessed distance: that would be the thing. What would it be like, she wondered idly, to sit in her loge, watching that horseman ride for her, with perhaps some token of her favour hanging about his neck or twisted in his horse’s mane?

  When the unknown horseman dismounted with the other jockeys to pay the traditional tribute to the duchess, he stood next to Vicenzo. In an apt allegory for his contrada the horseman of the Torre towered over his rival from the Eagle ward. Vicenzo did not, Pia reflected, compare well. The fantini, the jockeys, lined up below Duchess Violante’s balcony, each one eyeing her with matching insolence, in a pantomime of resistance to the Medici overlords that had been enacted for ten years now, ever since the duchess had come to the city.

  All save one.

  The unknown horseman alone of the pack slid his tricorne from his head and fixed his eyes to the ground with something akin to respect for the duchess’s sex, if not for her rank. Pia’s heart warmed a little, but chilled again when she turned her eyes on her betrothed. Vicenzo was peering up at the duchess with marked insolence. He had not removed his tricorne. How she hated him, Pia thought. This tiny thing, that he could not remove his hat for a lady – this elementary lack of good breeding – invited her contempt almost more than the outrages he had visited on her last night.

  Next to Vicenzo stood his father. Faustino Caprimulgo, captain of the Eagle contrada, was tall and wiry, dark and swarthy of feature but with the whitest hair curled in a close cap to his head. His high cheekbones, cavernous cheeks and long, hooked nose made him resemble nothing so much as the eagle of his banner. Faustino always stood drawn up to his full height, an eagle in his eyrie, with the confidence that came from being the head of the oldest family in Siena. Despite the pomp and posturing of the Medici, all of Siena knew that in reality it was the Caprimulgi who ruled the city. They had ruled it in the days of the Nine – the ruling council of the old republic – and ruled it in all but name still. The son stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, fixing the duchess with the same hawklike stare, a merlin beside a falcon, a smaller, meaner version of the sire.

  Pia watched as the war chariot of the Palio drew up alongside the palace, drawn by four milk-white oxen carrying the Palio itself – a vast black-and-white banner in the colours of the city, emblazoned with the figures of the Virgin and the pope. Attendants folded and handed the flag to last year’s victor, Ghiberti Conto, captain of the Snail contrada, who knocked three times and was admitted to the palace doors. Moments later he appeared on the balcony next to the duchess and gave up the banner to her. The duchess took it with a nod – custodian for a few short moments before she would give it to this year’s victor. Pia, without feeling the slightest disloyalty, reached for the coin of the Owlet where it hung around her neck and prayed that the winner would be the unknown horseman and not Vicenzo.

  Pia sat forward and searched for the horseman in the Tower colours among the other jockeys below at the canapi starting ropes, all detachment gone. She saw the fantini whisper to each other from the sides of their mouths, last-minute threats or promises, as their bright silks whispered too. At this moment pacts were being made or broken as vast amounts of money changed hands. The other horses were circling and bumping shoulders; one reared and threw its rider – the green-and-white Oca colours of the Goose contrada, she noted, not he.

  She realized that the stranger must have been drawn as the di rincorsa rider in the outside position at the ropes, and so it proved. He rode to the cord later than the others, but seemed to have no interest in the benefits of his good fortune. Usually the di rincorsa position was used to an unscrupulous jockey’s advantage, to jostle rival contrade into a bad position at the start. But Pia saw him, seated absolutely still on his horse’s bare back, speaking to no one, his eyes seeing far into the distance, making no attempt to jostle or harry. His stallion also stood unmoving amid the mêlée, the pair resembling in their stillness the bronzes of the mounted Cosimo the Great that she had seen on her one and only trip to Florence. Pia willed him to beat Vicenzo with a violence that surprised her, her eyes boring into his broad back, staring so hard at the blue-and-burgundy silks that they blurred.

  There was the customary confusion at the start of the race. As the horses circled and reared, the mossiere or starter judge called false start after false start. Then finally, in a moment of almost unbearable tension, the horses lined up and stilled as if bade by an invisible command. The yells and screams of the crowd abated for one eerie, silent second, and the unaccustomed tongue of the great bell Sunto sounded in the Torre del Mangia above Pia’s head. Silent from one Palio to the next, the bell’s song bawled out above the city, to tell that the hour had come. All heads
turned and all gazes swivelled up – for it was said that the bandierino weathervane on the Mangia Tower would turn in that last breath of wind to the quarter of the city that was to be favoured with victory. The bronze arrow quivered toward the duomo in the Eagle contrada, and the cheers from that ward almost drowned the last chimes of the bell. Pia swallowed, sickened at the omen. But the time for reflection was up. At the stroke of seven, Sunto stopped ringing and the little mortaretto firecracker cannon sounded at the starting rope; ten horses leaped forth from the entrone, and they were off.

  It was impossible for anyone who had not been here, thought Pia, to know that blood-curdling roar of the crowd, to feel the thunder of the hooves shiver your very ribs, to smell the sweat and the straw in your nose and taste the tufa dust in your mouth. The horses went by in a whirlwind, their flanks gleaming and polished with sweat, their mouths flecked with foam, past the palazzo, thundering up the curve to the Bocca del Casato. She could see the Tower colours – her champion was ahead, nudging shoulder to shoulder with Vicenzo.

  By the second lap Vicenzo had pulled clear by three, four horses and was past the deadly San Martino corner – a treacherous slope truncated by the sharp stone buttress of a sturdy palazzo – but there Vicenzo’s horse was barged by the horse of the Panther party, while the Panther jockey’s whip dealt Vicenzo a stinging swipe across the face. Taking advantage of this, the unknown horseman swept into the lead, while the heir to the Eagles was flung back in his saddle as his horse faltered and checked. Then, as if time had slowed, Vicenzo cart-wheeled over the reins, crashed into the San Martino corner and fell in a heap. At the collective gasp of the crowd, the unknown horseman glanced back over his shoulder and, without a moment’s pause, threw his legs over his horse’s neck and vaulted off, landing on the dust and straw.

  Pia leaned forward, her heart in her throat. For a horrible instant she thought that she had made this happen. She had wished that Vicenzo would be killed, but had not imagined it would look like this. From where she was sitting it looked as if Vicenzo had turned blackamoor on one whole side of his body – yet the dust of the track was white. Her own thudding pulses told her in an instant that this colour was blood. To the music of the screaming throng, the unknown horseman dodged the oncoming hooves and ran to help, picking up the crumpled man.

  Vicenzo’s head was at an angle that was never meant by nature, and his rescuer, doused in spraying blood, was desperately fumbling for the fractured artery. Locating the source of that dreadful fount of blood, he planted his hands firmly on Vicenzo’s spurting throat. Both men were covered in gore and the dust of the track darkened beneath them like their shared shadow. As Pia looked on desperately she saw Vicenzo’s bay horse Berio pass the little black-and-white bandierino flag that marked the finish line – prancing with glee at his victory, as if he knew that a horse could win the Palio scosso – without a rider.

  For the second time that day the crowd was eerily silent. By now a knot of people in the Eagle colours had gathered around the fallen rider – Faustino’s white head among them – joined soon by judges and marshals, an apothecary, a physician. At last the unknown horseman stood and shook his head.

  Pia rose to her feet and willed herself to join that dreadful party. She stepped past her new relatives heading down to the track. Feeling, numbly, that it was somehow her duty to be with her dead betrothed, she made her way through the crowd. She was bumped and jostled and once thrown to the ground. Her brain felt slow and stupid, her limbs as heavy as if moving through dunes of sand.

  She had spent nineteen years in a hothouse, a rare orchid untouched by human hand. She had been nurtured and raised and cherished as a marriage prize, and now the glass of the hothouse had been broken by her betrothal and she was exposed to the violence of the elements. As of today she lived in a physical world, a world of brutality. A world where yesterday her intended could push her down and violate her, a world where today strangers shoved her to the ground. At that moment she did not know which offence against her person was worse.

  A fellow in the crowd – her father’s ostler – recognized her and the red sea parted. She straightened and called upon her dignity, feeling a fraud as the people moved aside for her, knowing her for the fallen man’s betrothed, anticipating and respecting a distress that she did not feel. She saw her father Salvatore on the fringe of people skirting the body. He did not reach out to her, but was deep in conference with Vicenzo’s brother, a pale and strange creature – Nello, was it? As if in a dream she walked past them, right to the centre of the knot of folk, and saw her first corpse.

  Pia gazed down on Vicenzo’s body. She saw the broken flesh at the throat, the bone piercing through, the blood black on the dust and the foam-flecked mouth, open a little to the flies. Only yesterday that mouth had spoken in her ear with the whisper of threat, with a promise. Then, last night, he’d made good on that threat, fulfilled the promise. That mouth had fastened itself on hers, that mouth had breathed wine-stale breath into the hair at the back of her neck, as he had tried to force himself into her. Breathed and breathed until his hot gasps distilled into sour spittle and ran into her hair. Could it be true, wonderfully, terribly true, that it would never breathe again? It seemed impossible. Her forehead grew cold and her stomach lurched. Feeling as though she would faint she reached out to a solid shape for support.

  It was the horse Berio. Victor and murderer. The fastest in Tuscany, the horse who’d made Vicenzo punch the air with joy when he’d drawn him in the lots. She buried her hands in Berio’s black mane and lowered her clammy forehead on to the velvet bay of his neck. The horse stood under her hand, bemused, unsure; as if puzzled that no one was garlanding him with flowers, thrusting sweetmeats in his mouth. He looked curiously forlorn, shaking his head repeatedly as if bothered by a fly, looking down at Vicenzo’s still body. Pia’s eyes began to flood.

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault, it was mine,’ she whispered. ‘I willed it.’

  As if comforted, the great bay stood still at her shoulder, whickering and nibbling the lobe of her ear. Pia, weighed down by her guilt, felt the great coil of her hair escaping in a cascade of hairpins as the horse nuzzled her; her black hair and his black mane mingled, tangled, became one. Her smart black-and-red hat slithered from her head to be trodden by Berio’s great feet.

  Through Berio’s black mane she saw the Eagle Faustino stagger to his feet with his child in his arms. She saw the unknown horseman place a hand for an instant on the captain’s shoulder, and Faustino turn to leave with his awful burden, followed by his contrada. The Eagles filed from the square silent as a wake, forgetting all about the banner that was theirs. Not for them the joyous victor’s Te Deum in the basilica, nor a wedding; but a laying-out, a mourning and a burial. Pia felt Berio being taken from under her hand by a groom – her hair being disentangled from the long black mane by the ostler. It was as if anyone could touch her now.

  As the sorry procession left, Pia felt a great burden lifted from her. She breathed out the death and the day; and relief, sweet and clean, rushed into her lungs. Abruptly freed from her contract, she did not know what to do. Her careful upbringing, all those lessons in the etiquette of her class, had not prepared her for this. Then she knew. She could go home. She turned to go back to her family, to the Civetta, to her hearth, but the barrel-like form of her father blocked her way. She reached out to Salvatore, feeling, now that she was touchable, that it was the day for a rare embrace.

  Instead her father took her by the shoulders, turned her determinedly round and whispered fiercely in her nape, just exactly where Vicenzo had breathed into her. ‘The Eagle still has an heir,’ he hissed. ‘There is a son yet living, so play your hand right.’

  He propelled her, with a little push, firmly in the direction of the Eagle cortège. Her treacherous sinews gave way then, and her knees buckled, and she was caught by two men of Eagle colours. One, she knew, was Vicenzo’s brother, Nello; the other, a cousin of the same blood.
They grasped her by her upper arms and, in a semblance of support, marched her forth, her feet stumbling and her fancy boots dragging and scuffing in the dust. She was captive.

  Pia struggled. She heard herself saying no, no, no, repeatedly. The crowd, witnessing all, began to seethe and bubble like a cauldron with a muted hubbub of enquiry and answer, but all contrade, for once, were united in respect for the grief they saw before them. The poor dame couldn’t accept that her betrothed was gone. She was swooning and babbling with grief. The Eagles would look after her.

  In a desperate appeal Pia twisted her head round to seek the unknown horseman, but he did not mark her. Standing in the blood, as if the dark stain was now a shadow snipped from his heels, he was wiping his hands and face with his own scarf. The gore left the scarlet of his neckerchief unaltered. But everything else was changed.

  As Pia was carried under the Bocca del Casato gate, the one through which the horseman had entered the arena, she felt a tug at her sleeve. Hopeful of salvation, she looked down and saw only the little water-carrier Zebra. He held something out to her in his hand, trotting to keep up with her. It was a black velvet pouch with the gold Medici arms stamped upon it, a purse of mourning alms from the duchess.

  As her captors snatched the purse without a word of thanks, Pia looked back one last time, far over the heads of the multitude, to the palace balcony. She might have imagined it, but she thought the duchess had raised a hand to her – a gesture of greeting, sympathy, what? – before the shadow of the architrave swallowed her.

  High above the piazza, Duchess Violante Beatrix de’ Medici watched as the struggling girl disappeared from view. She rose, at last, to her feet. And the black-and-white Palio banner, unmarked, fell from her hand over the balustrade in a graceful fluttering arc, to rest in the blood and the dust.