The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 3

  2

  The Tortoise

  Duchess Violante Beatrix de’ Medici was born in Bavaria, the home of the modern fairy tale. She did not hear her first story in the crook of her mother’s arm, but in the schoolroom as a grammatical exercise. Soon after Violante’s marriage contracts with the Medici were settled when she reached the age of twelve, her mother decided she should know a little of the language of her future home. Violante was duly set to learn an Italian folk tale called La lepre e la tartaruga:

  One day a hare saw a tortoise walking slowly along and began to laugh and mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race and the tortoise accepted. They agreed on a route and started off the race. The hare shot ahead and ran briskly for some time. Then, seeing that he was far ahead of the tortoise, he thought he’d sit under a tree for a while and relax before continuing the race. He sat under the tree and soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him and won the race.

  Thus Violante’s mother told her a fairy tale by proxy.

  Violante Beatrix of Bavaria, widow of Ferdinando de’ Medici, princess of Tuscany and governess of Siena, threw open the casement of her chamber. She had been in the city for ten years and her chamber still did not feel like her chamber, just as her palace did not feel like her palace. In fact, the ducal palace where she now stood, her grand and accustomed residence, was still known, by every single Sienese, as the Palazzo Pubblico. The ancient building only served to remind Violante how young the Medici dukedom was; that Siena had ruled herself for centuries before her, and would get along well enough for centuries after. Nominally, she ruled here – she was governess, duchess, regent. But her rule was a façade.

  No one knew that she was still, at fifty, the same frightened little girl at her father’s court who chilled inside when her mother bade her play the dulcimer for their guests. No one suspected that the daughter of Ferdinand Maria, Elector of Bavaria, and Adelaida, princess of Savoy, was shy in company, loved music more than conversation, and had a dread of public speaking that she struggled to hide. No one understood that she had loved Ferdinando de’ Medici every single day, though he had died without ever once loving her in return. And no one guessed her most secret sorrow: that she mourned daily for her stillborn twins, had lit a candle for their birthday for nineteen summers, and could have told you, if you’d asked, exactly how many years, months, days and hours old they would have been now, if they had lived. And, thanks to her failure to provide an heir for the grand dukes of Tuscany, the ailing, youthful dukedom might well die like a sickly child. She was an aberration, a placeholder. The ancient city would wait her out.

  Violante was not given to fancy or superstition, but could not help returning to a conference she had had the previous evening with her chief councillor, Francesco Maria Conti. The haughty statesman, whose sense of selfimportance proceeded from being cousin to the pope himself, had come to her presence chamber with an unsettling piece of news. In his accustomed black coat and fingering his silver-topped cane, he had not quite met her eyes as he had told her that two men in the Porcupine contrada had found a dead ass cast over the Camollia gate. She had not understood the message until he told her, in his accustomed tones of contempt veiled in courtesy, that when the Florentines besieged Siena in the thirteenth century, they cast dead donkeys over the walls to bring disease and pestilence to the city. Baldly speaking, said Conti, the ass was a signal that Siena was about to fall. Violante had a chilling feeling that Vicenzo Caprimulgo’s death was the beginning of something, perhaps the beginning of the end.

  From her open window, Violante saw the servants of the comune clearing the piazza and scrubbing at the dark patch of blood at the San Martino corner. She moved her eyes determinedly away from the blood and concentrated on the things that had not changed. The starlings screeched, the evening air smelled fresh and cool, as the setting sun varnished the square below. She admired the golden palaces standing sentinel to the old day and the nine divisions of the great square, radiating out from the fountain to give it its scallop appearance. She remembered she had once seen a painting in one of Cosimo de’ Medici’s summer palaces, a painting of a woman of great beauty, with flowing red hair, rising naked from a great scallop shell floating on a blue sea, the kindly winds personified to blow her to shore on an azure wave.

  Today, watching the Palio that had ended so horribly, Violante had seen a woman on the Eagle family benches: young and beautiful, with her dark hair piled high, her red-and-white gown pinched in at her tiny waist and her porcelain cheeks touched with a hint of pink on the cheekbones. Rising above the sea of flags and banners, she had seemed as calm and serene as the goddess herself. Seeing her so youthful and beautiful, the Venus of this scallop, Violante had felt a keen thrill of envy. But then, Violante had seen her leaning on the dead man’s horse, and she had realized that the beauty was the dead man’s betrothed, and further enquiry told her they’d been due to marry today. Her heart ached for the girl, and she felt the guilty aftertaste of her envy. She sent a purse to assuage her feelings. Violante knew the emptiness, the agony of loss, for she too had lost. Ferdinando – she had not meant to think of him tonight.

  Violante pulled her head inside the palace, retreating inside her cool shell, hiding. She closed the window and her mind against the blood outside. She did not want to know. Her emotions were exhausted by the sudden remembrance of her dead husband and she had no compassion to spare. She walked across the room to her looking-glass, a full-length Parisian mirror; and even its dim antique reflection, so forgiving of a multitude of sins, offered her no comfort. She saw a middle-aged woman, not even a little handsome, even though she had the finest powdered wigs from Montmartre and wore a gown of lavender silk woven by the Huguenots of Spitalfields. She fingered the stuff of her skirt and saw, in the sunlight, that the age spots on her hands were beginning to freckle through the lead paste she had applied not one hour ago. The ugliness of her hands next to the beauteous mauve silk depressed her still further.

  She wore purple, or one of that colour’s close cousins, every day of her life, and all because of a chance remark from her now-dead husband. Ferdinando had once, in the days of courtship when he had still taken the trouble to be kind, told her that the colour was becoming to her; perhaps because the word viola, purple, was so close to her name Violante. It was an aside, a play on words, a thoughtless sally, and served to compliment his own linguistic acuity rather than her beauty. But it was one of the only times that he had paid her person or her name even the tiniest amount of attention. She clung to it, through the years of dismissal, of isolation, of casual or calculated cruelty in the face of his lovers. She held fast to that tiny comment and had dutifully worn violet, mauve, lavender or porphyry every day since, in the vain hope that he would, some day, notice her once again.

  She clung to it, despite the fact that the jest Ferdinando should have made is that her name was closer kin to another word: violare – to break, to violate or even to rape; words that aptly described, in turn, his treatment of her spirit, their marriage and the one and only time they had lain together. And yet now that he was dead and she was free, Violante continued to wear violet.

  She turned from the mirror, suddenly deathly tired. Ferdinando. Once she had started to think of him she could not stop. She did not call for her women but laid herself down on the coverlet just as she was, in her silly violet dress, and gave herself up to it. Ferdinando. Her remembrances of him flooded her. She was wallowing and she did not care. Tears sealed her eyes, and she slept at last.

  Pia was taken back to the house of the Eagles as the twilight thickened. The two kinsmen of Aquila had held her, firmly, in a bruising grip high on each of her arms. Their grasp was an insult, but she was becoming inured to this new, tactile, brutal world. She disengaged her mind from her body and began to think. She walked with them. She did not struggle now. She knew if she were to get out of this, it would be by stealth.

  Why did her father, after years of hoping and waiti
ng and negotiating with the best Civetta families, suddenly want to ally her with the Eagles, at all cost? It went against all sense, against the hundreds of years of tradition in which the contrada was everything: identity, family, locality. Could it really be true that, before Vicenzo’s body was cold, her father was negotiating a marriage contract with the dead man’s brother? She stole a sideways glance at the man who held her left arm. She could not remember seeing him before today and his looks suggested why he might have been hidden. He was a strange, freakish fellow, his features an indifferent copy of Vicenzo’s, but it was his colouring that set him apart. His hair was as white as his father’s, his skin as pale as whey, and his eyes, under their light lashes, pink.

  As darkness fell Pia found herself in streets she did not recognize – but the design of the sconces holding the guttering flambeaux and the fluttering banners of black and gold told her she was in Eagle territory. A palace loomed out from the dark and she was half lifted over the threshold. Her consorts left her in a flagged stone hall, while they followed the menfolk and the body. A beefy maid approached, her waist bristling with a chatelaine of keys. She spoke in a Sienese dialect so thick that Pia could scarcely understand her, but she understood her nod to a nearby stairwell. She was to follow.

  Instead, hardly knowing what she was doing, Pia turned and walked straight back out of the palace door. Once, she’d marched from her own house, to seek sanctuary from her betrothal. Now, she’d do anything to be back there, to be away from this dark palazzo, away from these alien streets: to be home. Two crossed pikes came together with a singing of metal song an inch from her nose. She turned to see the beefy maid smiling. She wagged a great finger in front of Pia’s face, as close as the pikes had come and just as threatening. With her other forefinger she tinkled the ring of keys.

  ‘Up you come, amore. Don’t be frighted. Pretty frocks for ’un, above stairs.’

  There was an obscenity in the kindness, the waving of the keys like a trinket. It was the temptation of the Devil: come here, little girl. I’ve got some pretty dresses to show you, if you’ll just follow me up the stair. Pia had no choice.

  The stair was dark and winding and damp. At the top of it was a chamber, tall-ceilinged, oddly shaped, with chapel-like windows, their panes still hot from the day, ruby-paned with the fire of the old sun. One oil lamp burned, its flame puny in the glory of the sunset.

  There was a bed and a rug, a jug and a basin. Pia swallowed.

  The maid, smiling still, clicked her tongue. ‘Now there, amore. No blubberin’. Master says be sweetly faced for domani. Look there in the gardyrobe – be gowns and stuffs for ye.’

  Pia opened the door of a great garderobe in the corner of a room. The action reminded her of home with a swift and stifling blow. Her mother, dead on Pia’s childbed, had lived on for her daughter only in the gowns she had left behind. Pia’s father – whether from a rare flare of finer feeling, from grief, or from sheer forgetfulness – had never cleared the gowns away. As a child and then a woman, Pia had gone into her mother’s garderobe every day, walking among the gowns – the velvets, the fustians, the samites – speaking to her, singing to her, playing games with her, hiding behind her skirts. Pia tried to conjure the woman she had never known, the woman who might have made her life different. Friendly gowns, they were: the crimson of good burgundy for feast days, the yellow of an egg’s yolk, the green of the olive’s leaf. A garde-corps too: a supple dress of tan leather for riding.

  Here, in her new garderobe two gowns hung on hooks: one black, one white. Both were magnificent, stiff with jewels and embroidery, the richest things she had seen in this dour house, the first manifestation she had seen of the Eagles’ great wealth.

  ‘Black for tomorrow,’ said the maid, ‘white t’day after.’

  She bustled to the door, knocking the oil lamp to the floor with her ample hips as she went. The flame hissed and died at once. The maid smiled and smiled. ‘Now rest ye. Much to do domani.’

  The door closed and a heartbeat later came the unmistakable turn of a key. To Pia, who had grown up with a morbid fear of being imprisoned, it was a dreadful sound. Perhaps it was because her famous ancestress, another Pia of the Tolomei, a woman who had been immortalized in Dante’s Purgatory, had spent her last days shut in a tower. Perhaps it was because Pia had grown up in a city encircled by walls and had barely left it, not even to see the sea. Either way, she had to clench her fists to stem the wave of panic and stuff one of them in her mouth to stop herself from crying out.

  Trying to be calm, Pia watched the day bleed to death outside her new chamber window. Alone except for the two gowns hanging in her wardrobe, their silks whispering a threat as they turned on their hooks. Black for tomorrow, white the day after.

  3

  The Eagle

  The horseman of Siena had ridden under the eye of an eagle once before.

  He was seven and was already obsessed with horses. He used to ride out at dawn, be gone for the day in the Tuscan hills, and come back at night to the Tower contrada for dinner, touched with sun, dropping in his saddle and covered in white tufa dust like a little ghost.

  One morning he saw an incredible thing in those hills. As the sun rose, an eagle blotted out the light and dived like a stone, taking a lamb from a grazing flock in his great talons. With a giant beat of wings that stirred the boy’s hair, he took off over the hills, disappearing over the pink and gold towers of the city with his bleating burden, like a Bible illustration. The boy was still staring, open-mouthed, when there was another flutter of wings from a nearby cypress. A smaller bird burst forth and, as if it had witnessed the capture of the lamb, landed on the back of the largest ram. There the foolish bird fluttered around with a whirr of wings, leaping and flapping and attempting to carry the ram off. Soon his claws became entangled in the ram’s wool and he could not free himself.

  Laughing at the spectacle, which had shifted from drama to comedy in one short moment, the little horseman slid from his saddle and ran to the ram. He arrived at the same time as the shepherd, who took his knife and cut the bird free from the greasy wool. Seeing the boy hovering close, he spread and cut the prime feathers, clipping the wings. He handed the bird to the little horseman, figuring, rightly, that the boy would not mind the black blood.

  ‘He’s yours,’ said the shepherd, in thick Sienese. ‘Take him home for a pet.’

  Boy and bird regarded each other, the boy’s eyes glittering with delight, the bird’s button eyes holding an expression that was at the same time foolish and free. The boy stroked the small blue-black head with nail-bitten fingers.

  ‘What kind of bird is he?’ he called, for the shepherd had already headed back down the hill to his flock, shaking his head over the loss of the lamb. The fellow turned at the question and half his mouth smiled.

  ‘To my certain knowledge he is a daw,’ he replied. ‘But he would like you to think him an eagle.’

  The horseman of the Tower contrada had been so shaken by the events of the Palio that he slept in his father’s stable with Taccola, the stallion he had ridden that day. He could not explain, even to himself, why he would feel more comforted here than in the house and he would have been better off in his bed, for in the warm close straw, hooves galloped through his dreams and the parched bedding, which tickled his nose, merely served to remind him of the racetrack and the flood of blood that had soaked the dust. The sweet-smelling warmth of the horse’s silky hide only brought back the events of a day he would rather forget. It was not the first time a man had died in his arms. But he had hoped that here, at home again after long years of absence, he would be spared such sights, such smells.

  When he was shaken awake he felt relief as he recognized the little face before him. It was Zebra, dressed in his familiar black-and-white garb. The boy was well known as a go-between, carrying messages for coin, crossing, without limit, the contrada lines in a way that others could not. This errand, so early in the day, must have been worth much; it was bar
ely light outside the stable door. The horseman sat and blew straw from his lips, rubbing the back of his neck.

  ‘Zebra. What is it?’

  Zebra spoke in the staccato rhythms of hoofbeats. ‘The Eagle. He wants you. At his house. Before daybreak.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  Zebra shrugged. He never needed details; his payment was reason enough.

  The horseman knew well who the Eagle was. Faustino Caprimulgo, alone among all the captains, not only represented but had somehow become the emblem of his contrada. Perhaps it was the hawklike appearance; perhaps it was the ruthless predator’s dispatch of those who crossed him. Perhaps it was that he could, from his own eyrie of the towers of his palazzo, see everything that passed in his city.

  The horseman considered, his brain as slow as if stuffed with straw, as golden motes of dust drifted before his eyes in the first light of day. To refuse such a summons, even from the captain of a rival contrada, would be a direct insult. But to walk into the house of a man whose son had died under his hands seemed nothing but the greatest folly. What if Faustino wished to punish him for Vicenzo’s death? What if he found him culpable in some way? Could the capitano think, as the horseman did himself (now he knew the terrible theme that had marched through his dream), that he could somehow have saved Vicenzo?

  The horseman eyed his messenger. Zebra had been no more than seven when the horseman had left two years ago, which made him no more than nine now. The boy looked as if he had had little sleep. The night of the Palio, even a tragic one such as yesterday’s, was his busiest night: missives from fantini or capitani to each other, payments to be made between syndicates, even messages between lovers of rival contrade. Zebra was dropping where he stood, his little beady eyes closing. The horseman hauled himself from his bed and pushed the boy down gently into the warm hollow of straw he had left. Zebra had barely bitten the coin the horseman proffered before he fell asleep, curled up like a babe. The horseman took the coin from the boy’s mouth and placed it in the warm little palm, before he set out in the pre-dawn.