A shadow blocked her way. It was all right – shadows were her friends. But it was not all right.
‘Now, my pet, you’ve lost your way and no mistake. But Nicoletta’ll help you, have nay fear.’
The maid’s grip on her upper arms deepened the bruising of yesterday.
Riccardo had known for a long time that something was rotten at the heart of his beloved Siena. It was why he had left. Now he knew what ailed the city and he could give the pestilence a name.
Faustino Caprimulgo.
Riccardo walked the golden streets back to his father’s house, thinking of the next day and the next night to come, of the invitation he could not refuse. He opened the door of the Torre stable: the boy Zebra was gone from his bed and the horse too. At daybreak his father would have led the stallion out, and walked him gently back to his owners in the Maremma.
Riccardo squatted and took a handful of the straw, cold now, letting it fall through his fingers. He said the horse’s name: Taccola. Jackdaw. He remembered another time and place, when he was no older than Zebra, the day he had seen the eagle and the daw, the daw he had brought home and kept here in this very stable till it died. It seemed an innocent, golden time – before Milazzo, before this new war he was embroiled in – and with all his heart he wished himself back there. It was this, not anything else he had seen that morning, nor anything he would encounter the next night, that made him want to cry.
4
The Wave
‘One more push, my lady.’
Violante was soaked with sweat, the contractions pulling her from the birthing bed till she was almost sitting upright. She thought she would die, had never known such pain. But she welcomed every spasm, embraced the agony, enjoyed it. For she knew she was doing her duty. All of Florence waited outside the palace and her contractions beat time with the jubilant bells of the duomo. A few more pains – for there could not be many more, surely? – and the longed-for Medici heir would be in the world. Her tiring maids pressed cool cloths to her forehead, but Violante pushed them away – she had never felt more confident in her role. This, this was what she had been born for. This was her moment.
She had worried and fretted all the way through her confinement, found new confidence to ask for the best physicians from Vienna and the best leechers from Rome. Her father-in-law Cosimo de’ Medici, galvanized from his usual torpor by the prospect of a Medici heir at last, had granted her every boon.
Even her husband Ferdinando had spoken to her, these last nine months, with something approaching kindness. She had counted the weeks anxiously, for she knew that Ferdinando’s sister, that chilly countess Anna Maria Luisa, had miscarried six times, so many that the citizens had begun to whisper about the curse of the Medici, that a shadow was on the great house, that an heir would never come. Such talk did not assist Violante’s spirits, but she had carried her precious burden for a full term. She would bear a son for Ferdinando, and he would love her at last; for that, if not for herself.
She was supremely confident, strong and sure for the first time. She was thirty, so no green girl, and old to be brought to childbed. But only now did she feel she had grown into her womanhood at last and knew, as she laboured, that this was what she had been born to do. Suddenly there was a rush of waters upon the coverlet, an easing of the terrible pain below, and the midwife held up a tiny bundle slick with blood, with a knotted blue rope connecting mother and son. Mother. Violante was a mother.
She tried this new and wonderful word on her dry tongue, saying it over and over like a prayer. The dame took out a knife curved like a sickle and cut the cord but it did not matter. Violante knew she was connected to her son for ever now. She thought she could not be happier, but she was wrong, for her womb gave another great lurch and soon the midwife held up a second child, the exact copy of the first. Twins. It was the greatest and happiest surprise of her life. Not one, but two boys.
She held out her arms to her sons in a gesture of command she had never used before. The midwife understood and gave her the children at once. In contravention of every birthing convention for a high-born lady, Violante laid them, sticky as they were, on her chest. It was the most perfect moment of her life. As one, they ceased to cry and opened their eyes, looking at her with tiny beady orbs the colour and size of capers. Wondering, she returned their gaze, looking from one to the other, knowing that if she spent the rest of her life doing just this, she would be supremely happy. Violante melted in their quiet gaze, her lips curling, blinking away tears, for nothing should dim her sight of them. She was perfectly happy for the first time since she had herself been born. She knew, in that moment, unquestioningly, that they loved her.
She held them, gently but firmly; would not have them taken from her and cleaned. Her maids were scandalized – the children must be doused and swaddled properly and given to the wet-nurse, but Violante did not care. She asked the women to lay a balmcloth over them and leave them be. And at length, exhausted after two days of difficult labour, her eyes began to close. Her sons’ little heartbeats raced against her chest, their little mouths sought her nipples. She felt a tug as her breasts began to leak milk in her willingness to suckle the Medici heirs. She did not have to do a thing. She was a mother – her body knew what it had to do. The little princes fed. Violante, contented, slept.
She woke, cold, clean, in a white cotton nightshift and stiff clean sheets. Her sons were gone, but she knew that while she slept her women would have taken them, at last, to be cleaned, swaddled and dressed, to be given such rites as were fitting for the heirs to the grand duchy. She saw, in the dim twilight, a hunched shape of the midwife on the end of the bed. The shape was shuddering, as if the dame laughed. Violante could have laughed too, her heart bursting with joy.
‘Where are the boys?’ she asked.
The nurse turned around and Violante saw her face was silver in the twilight, shimmering with tears.
At that moment, she knew.
Violante began to shake her head, tried to sit, but could not. The midwife ran from the room, shivering with sobs, as another dark shape entered. A priest unknown to her. Violante knew what he would say before he uttered. His face was half in shadow – she could not see his lips, but heard the words well enough.
‘They are gone, mistress.’
‘No.’ It was a whisper.
‘They are with God, mistress.’
‘No.’ It was a cry.
‘Only the righteous are taken into the arms of the Lord.’
‘NO.’ It was a shout. ‘No no no no no!’
Now she had the strength to rise but still could not – and she knew they had foreseen this and had strapped her to the bed. She pulled at her bindings till the straps cut, raved and foamed and near pulled her arms from their sockets.
‘Where are they? I want to see them. I want to see my sons!’
She could not believe the priest – she wanted, she needed to hold her babies again, knew that if she could just hold them to her breast they would open their little eyes once more and everything would be all right.
The priest took a step back. ‘We buried them, mistress. With full honours. They lie in the family tomb.’
The family tomb. With all the other dead Medici.
She screamed then, and would not stop: animal, primal screams. Soon the room was full. Shady figures held her arms, a cloth was pressed to her nose, a leecher bled her thrashing arm above a china bowl, the blood pooled black in the twilight. She breathed in the sickly, heavy smell of laudanum.
She woke in the darkened room a few times over the next few days. Someone attended her at all times, always a dark figure sat upon the end of the bed. The nurse that had been sent to tend her, the one who had cried, the one in whose tears she had seen her sons’ deaths written, was there constantly.
One time, when she woke, the nursemaid had turned into her husband. Ferdinando had left off, for once, his lustrous dark wig. He lifted his head and she saw that he, too, wept. Today he was not
the heir to a dukedom, but an ordinary man. He turned away, as if he could not face her while he told her what he must.
‘His name was Bambagia. A pricking-boy I met in Venice – you recall – when I went with Scarlatti in 1701?’ He did not wait for a reply. ‘He was nothing. A carnival plaything. He never removed his mask, even when we fucked.’
The brutal words did not penetrate her fog of grief. She was numb with pain. Why was he telling her this? He had had lovers for years – there was one who rarely left his side. She could not care about this further betrayal. All she cared about were her little boys, now lost to her.
‘If he’d taken off his mask I would have seen – I never would have done it.’ He dropped his head. ‘He had syphilis. And now I do too. You might also.’
Syphilis. She knew of the creeping evil disease, flesh eating, the maggots of pestilence that buried themselves in the brain and drove one mad. To feel that now this curse may have been laid upon her, that she might be hirpling to her grave, made her glad. She wanted to die.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ They were the first words she had spoken since she had raved at the priest. Her voice was hoarse with screaming.
‘Because the doctors tell me that syphilis causes stillbirth. I wanted you to know … I wanted to tell you … I didn’t want you to think it was your fault. It was my fault. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.’
It was the first time he had ever apologized to her for all of his transgressions and it touched her not at all. None of it mattered now. She wanted to protest, to say that the twins had been alive, that they had cried, and fed, and looked her in the face. But the words would not come. She looked at him, this handsome florid man, this lover of music and art, this man the people loved as the ‘good Medici’, saviour of an ailing dukedom, and knew that he was doomed by disease. He had failed his father and his inheritance, and she could not pity him.
He moved to the head of the bed, sat gently beside her.
‘They were baptized. My brother did all, for I could not.’ His voice broke. ‘They were named Cosimo and Gastone de’ Medici.’
He held her hand for the first time since they had been hand-fasted in marriage, in the very duomo she could see from the casement. Only then did she begin to cry.
In the days that followed she was to learn that tears were infinite. She had thought that if she cried for days, weeks, months, eventually the well would run dry and she would begin to heal. But no. Her tears, once they began to flow, seemed an unstoppable stream; a great wave, which, undammed, swelled to an amplitude fit to drown her.
Violante always woke at the point in the dream when Ferdinando touched her hand. It was the last time he had touched her. Ferdinando, now gone too, had died lame, blind and raving from the syphilis. He was buried next to his sons. She envied him, wished she too was in that cold mausoleum in Florence, knew that if her remains mingled with her sons’ little bones, she could warm them again.
So many ghosts. She wished they would leave her be.
Always she woke with tears running into her ears, her heart pounding, and her breasts – even though she was nearly fifty – still aching, the nipples still pinching with the milk reflex. She had had the same dream, year in, year out, for nearly twenty years. She sat up in her bed, wiping her eyes, blinking in the pre-dawn gloom. She breathed in and out, heavily, then lit an oil lamp to chase away the dream and the memories too.
At first, she had thought the killing grief would drive her mad. She had not known that the pain she had felt, as an unloved child and an unloved wife, could be more acute, that her loneliness could be any keener. With bitter irony, Gretchen, her own wet-nurse, whom she had called from her father’s court in Bavaria to tend to the babies, arrived in Florence the day after the boys died. Gretchen never left, for one look at her little mistress told her that the duchess needed her now more than ever. But in truth, Violante had never felt so alone. After she had failed in her duty, her father-in-law Cosimo never spoke to her nor looked at her again. Her sister-in-law Anna Maria Luisa could barely conceal her joy. Her babes had been taken away; she could not have borne it if Violante’s sons had lived.
The only kindness in her life came from an unexpected quarter. Gian Gastone de’ Medici, Ferdinando’s younger brother, offered her a sympathy that seemed little to do with the fact that he was now the heir presumptive of the dukedom. Gian Gastone detested his own sister Anna Maria Luisa, and had shown her no sympathy or solicitude through her multiple miscarriages, also caused by the syphilis of a faithless husband, the Elector Palatine. But, for his sister-in-law Violante, nothing was too much. Gian Gastone took upon himself the baptism and funeral arrangements – so close, more cruelly close than nature intended. Such events, normally separated by a lifetime, were held apart by the span of a few mere hours. Not only did Gian Gastone visit Violante in person – though the slim, handsome libertine had much better claims on his time – he also sent remedies to her room: sweetmeats, tonics, iced fruit, and made sure that she had the care of his personal physicians. She had never forgotten Gian Gastone’s kindness.
Violante also remembered one of those doctors telling her that she could wait a twelvemonth and try again for another child. She laughed in his face. It had been trouble enough to bring Ferdinando to bed with her once – that dreadful violent assault against love and nature – she knew he would not do it again. Cruellest of all, her breasts were engorged with milk, full and hard to the touch, mapped with blue veins, and leaking day and night. Months later, when she at last ventured out in the street in a litter, any babe crying in the square was enough to cause the vicious pinching in her nipples. Her treacherous breasts began to leak the milk that would never again nourish those tiny searching mouths that she had fed but once. Her heart ached for the lips that had mouthed at her flesh, for the twin pairs of eyes that had looked at her so calmly. The littlest eyes but filled with such love, love only for her, a love she had never been offered before or since.
Ferdinando never came near her again, and in time Violante knew that his confession on the birthing bed had come to naught; she was not infected with his malady. As the days and weeks crawled by in their relentless agony of loss, she realized, appalled, that she had no symptoms of syphilis, no blood in her waters, no imagined scars upon her face. The only scars that criss-crossed her flesh were the marks that had silvered her skin where her belly had distended with child. In her confinement she had refused to anoint them with oil of olives as her ladies had urged her, for she had been as proud of them as a veteran of his battle scars. Now they were as painful to her as the forty scourgings of Christ.
Her broken heart was caged in a healthy body. She was to be given no early release from this prison. She remained healthy and knew her sons would have been too. She never visited their graves in that huge marble mausoleum. Such a place had nothing to do with her twins, so warm and small and living; it had nothing to do with the moment they had shared, that one short moment of communion, of pure love given and received, with no thought or agenda. She marked every birthday, without fail, as the years went by, relived that first and last look they had shared, felt the sweet kiss of those tiny mouths at her breast.
When Violante saw Ferdinando die, slowly and terribly, she was glad. She knew that, in the moment she came face to face with his sons, she had ceased to love him, and in the moment he had confessed to her, their bond was inexorably broken. Three years later, when her father-in-law Grand Duke Cosimo offered her the governorship of Siena, she took it. She knew she was running away from Florence, but it was no use. The dream followed her here and would not let her go. When she entered the city gates as a new widow, the first thing she had seen was a statue of the city’s emblem, a she-wolf suckling boy twins. In a dreadful irony the image was everywhere, ever present, even on the frescoed walls of her new home, the Palazza Pubblico. There was no escape.
Her rule had been a disaster. Her fragile hold on the city was slipping, and yesterday another son was lost
, another heir doomed never to come to his inheritance. Vicenzo Caprimulgo had been taken. The age-old rivalries that had bubbled and seethed in this city for hundreds of years had surfaced. That foolish Panther had taken a life and she knew that Faustino would not let that rest.
Violante jumped from the bed and padded to the window, throwing open the casement as she had done the night before. The patch of blood at the San Martino corner was still there, despite the efforts of the comune’s servants. She could no longer take her eyes away from it. It looked as if the city had been bruised. Siena was bleeding internally, just below the skin.
She must take action.
She looked carefully at the nine divisions of the campo. The Nine. An idea began to bubble to the surface of her consciousness. She heard the bells of the mourning Eagle palazzo – the Caprimulgo house – telling the contrada it was six. Daybreak. It was time to act.
She cast about for a robe to throw around her shoulders. Without her corsets she was depressingly rotund: too many comfits and sweetmeats nibbled out of unhappiness. But this morning she had no time to think of her vanity. She ran her hands through her cropped greying hair. She was suddenly in too much of a hurry to call her waiting women and begin her lengthy dressing process, too impatient to wait for the placing and powdering of her heavy wig. Instead she grabbed the great black-and-white banner of the Palio, which had been brought to her room from the piazza where she had dropped it. She suspected her household did not really know what to do with it. Technically the Eagle contrada had won; even though their horse Berio had crossed the finish line with no rider, the victory still held. But she could understand why the Eagles had neglected to collect their banner – there was no triumph to be had in such a win. Violante wrapped the heavy silk around herself like a robe. She put on a simple lace cap and tied it under her chin, took her oil lamp and crept barefoot down the stairs to the centre of Siena – the very heart of the palace and the city itself. She opened the heavy doors and reached her destination.
The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 5