Today’s procession was a little different from yesterday’s. This time they walked, not to the Eagles’ church, but up the stony streets to the basilica, the bells bawling out across the towers. The formidable Nicoletta, in her best fustian, was Pia’s bridesmaid, and behind her straggled a company of minstrels, actors and jugglers in bright motley. Tuneless trumpets and accordions anticipated the discord to come as they followed her up the Via del Capitano.
In the Piazza del Duomo, huddled in the sheltering shadow cast by the vast black-and-white building, a crowd gathered. All contrade, in their different colours, had come to witness this strange mixed marriage: an Owlet wed to an Eagle.
Inside, in the dimness of plainsong and frankincense, the families of the Civetta and the Aquila flanked the nave. Pia’s father, standing at the altar, could spare her a nod, but not a smile, as he took her hand for the fasting. Salvatore had found himself a shaft of light to stand in, but he shared it with another – Nello Caprimulgo – her intended, turned to a wraith of light. His pale hair and skin glowed, he wore silks as white as her malign dress, but his red eyes were demonic. Pia’s fantasy of a kindly man crumbled. Salvatore put her hand into Nello’s, and the Eagles’ heir grasped it as brutally as he had held her arm after the Palio. Those bruises were fading to yellow under the sleeve of her white dress, but there would be more.
Pia listened to the marriage mass as if it were happening to someone else. Unable to look at her groom, she slid her dry eyes east to the facciatone, the huge unfinished wall of the nave, begun in the days of the Nine and abandoned when they ran out of money. It was a monument to waste, built in stone. She herself was the human embodiment of waste. Nineteen years of promise, reared and schooled and protected as the daughter of the Civetta, ended here, unfinished, on the day of the white dress.
She began to panic. Trembling, she kept her lips tight for all the responses. And when it came to the vows, she refused to speak. A dreadful scene ensued, her father and Nicoletta cajoling, threatening, trying to prise her lips apart with fingers and nails, as the spittle ran down her chin, as if she were an animal.
Finally, Nello leaned close and whispered in her ear, his breath warming her as his brother’s had. ‘Vicenzo said you were frighted by the story of the Benedetto slut.’
She was so shocked, she stilled herself to listen. The girl had not been thirteen years old.
‘I cannot besmirch his memory. It was I who hung her from the butcher’s hook. We shared everything, you see, Vicenzo and I. Everything.’
Pia lurched backwards and searched his awful eyes for a jest. But he merely nodded.
‘Ah yes, you understand me now, don’t you? We could not have her blabbing, you see. But there is a time to stay silent, and a time to speak.’
After that Pia did as she was bidden. She let Nello put his ring upon her finger: an eagle bearing a bloody jewel in his mouth. She suffered his kiss, for the applauding congregation. She threw coins for the cheering crowds in the square. She even took her new husband’s hand as they walked back to the Caprimulgo house.
She was given leave to return to her chamber to prepare for the feast, and there she collapsed. Her knees buckled and sobs racked her, shook her to the very core, frightening her with their violence. After a time she pressed her hands to her mouth, calming herself. She sought the looking-glass. If she appeared dishevelled at dinner she knew she would suffer for it. But Nicoletta had taken the mirror, perhaps in case her mistress smashed the glass and damaged herself with the shards. This gave Pia an idea.
Before she went to dinner, she took a pearl pin from her hair and drove it, again and again, into her wrist. She was not attempting to take her own life – she was both too brave and too cowardly for that – but she’d grown resourceful in the last few days. Holding her wrist away from her gown, she spread dark smears of blood on the lawn sheet where her hips would have rested last night, in an imitation of how her bedding looked at the appointed time each month.
The first time it had happened, when she had just turned thirteen, she’d thought she was dying, with no mother to tell her otherwise. Too well bred to swap such confidences with the maids, she’d prayed for four days while the bleeding lasted, until it had gone away, only to return the next month. Older now, Pia turned this curse into a blessing and she sopped the rest of the blood for good measure with a bandage ripped from her shift. When the bleeding had stopped, she placed the bandage and shift in the soiling chest for the laundress. She knew Nicoletta would see; she saw everything. Pray God it was enough to keep Nello from her bed.
She put the guilty pin, encrusted with blood, back in her hair, and lifted the latch of her chamber, wincing at the pain in her arm. Her prison was now her chamber. There were no longer any keys. She was wed, and could not escape the bars that enclosed her now. Not knowing what else to do, she went down to dinner, thinking that she knew what to expect.
It was dusk, and Riccardo Bruni was attending, as he had been bidden, a sumptuous feast in the palace of the Eagles. He had thought it a wake for Vicenzo, but as he mounted the stairwell to the piano nobile he heard the tinkle of crystal and laughter, and when he entered the great salon, the dining table was crowded with candles and flowers, and fruit piled in pyramids like the great prisms of Egypt. The diners, in their snowy wigs and shining buckled shoes, wore clothes of such bright colours that mourning seemed out of the question. It looked more like a wedding.
To his right sat Faustino, an honour for Riccardo indeed. The capitano alone was wearing full mourning, a black suit and breeches, black shoes with square buckles and a white wig tied with a black ribbon.
Opposite him sat Nello, the scarce-remembered younger brother and now heir of the Eagle contrada: his features a bad copy of Vicenzo’s as if a pupil had tried to imitate the work of a master. Riccardo knew now why this second son had been kept in the shadows. What man, let alone one of Faustino’s sensibilities, would parade a son with skin leeched of colour like a corpse, eyes of a strange reddish-pink, and hair of pure white like his sire’s?
And, next to Nello, the most beautiful woman Riccardo had ever seen.
Faustino, alert as ever, caught him looking and made the introduction.
‘May I present Pia of the Caprimulgo, formerly Pia of the Tolomei, daughter of the Civetta contrada, and wife to my son Nello?’
Pia of the Tolomei.
She sent a tiny nod in his direction, an almost imperceptible raising and lowering of her perfect chin. Riccardo’s condolences died on his lips; she had, in the space of a day, changed one husband for another. And yet congratulations did not seem appropriate either. She did not speak, and Riccardo, who could read humans with only a little less success than he could horses, knew that it was not grief that restrained her: she seemed hostile. Chastened, he took his seat opposite her, assuming her hauteur to be a natural attitude for a married woman of note to take towards the son of a lowly farrier.
Riccardo ate little and said less, but he was an observant man and sensed the undercurrents of emotion as the sumptuous Sienese fare was paraded before him. Even at a time of mourning, the wealth of the contrada was on display for all to see. Each course was wonderful: hare pappardelle, scottiglia fried meats, and ribollita bean stew, followed by sweet cavallucci biscuits – sophisticated versions of the dishes that he ate every feast-day, dishes that were the scent and taste of home to him. Each delicacy was placed on a polished pewter dish, which he picked at dutifully with a two-pronged silver fork with a handle of elephant’s tooth. But he had no appetite. His eyes kept straying, inexorably, to Pia. He felt an intense pleasure just being in the same room as such a woman; but at the same time he could not forget that dreadful meathouse below the palazzo’s foundations, where the dead son of the Panther contrada lay stretched out like a butchered swine.
Riccardo reached for the jug of Chianti at the same time as Faustino, and realized, as he did so, that the white-haired capitano was getting steadily drunk. The son Nello was conducting a self-i
mportant, increasingly one-sided conversation with his father about horses, designed, Riccardo suspected, to display his knowledge to him, not to his sire. Something strange underlay the young man’s demeanour, not grief, nor resentment, but something else. Riccardo caught a flicker in Nello’s eyes, no more than an instant in the candlelight, but it came to him in a jolt. Nello was happy.
Meanwhile, Pia, Nello’s new wife, kept her eyes on her plate, crumbling bread between nervous fingers into little piles on the cloth. Below her snowy cuff, Riccardo noticed a series of cuts on her wrist. They looked fresh. To her left her father – Salvatore Tolomei, a round, smooth barrel of a man – was speaking to his deputies about grain quotas, ignoring his daughter and whatever troubled her.
The Civetta delegation had been invited because Salvatore had, against all tradition, allied his daughter to the Eagles. Riccardo was less certain why he himself was there. Faustino had thanked him that morning, so what more did the Eagles owe him? He wondered what they wanted of him. He was offered no clues throughout the dinner. Faustino’s conversation never touched on the Palio and Vicenzo, nor even the hasty marriage of his widow, but only the city: homilies delivered with a pointing finger, a leaning shoulder and wine-soaked breath.
‘Saint Bernardino,’ he mumbled, ‘our very own saint, said: “Leave your contrade, unite under my symbol and the banner of Christ.” You can see it there on the duomo.’ He waved uncertainly towards the window. ‘That green medallion, spikes like sunrays. But they didn’t even finish the duomo, didn’t finish it, built one wall and let be.
‘See,’ Faustino went on, breathing heavily, jabbing his finger into Riccardo’s shoulder, ‘God never had a chance in this city. It is the contrade to the end.’
He struck Riccardo as a man who usually had a very tight grip on his person and his humours, but the events of the last day had been too much for him and had cracked his resolve. His son had been taken and somewhere in the fog of Faustino’s drink-addled mind, he felt the need to grip on tight with his eagle’s yellow talons to everything about him. Despite the horrors of that morning, Riccardo suddenly had to fight a wholly unwanted pang of sympathy for the man.
The capitano continued, his words blunted by drink, ‘We say no. The Nine said no. The Nine said: “Unite in your communities. You shall each have your own symbol, your own church. You shall not show your family banners nor carve your arms and your mottoes into the stone of your lintels. You will be loyal to your contrada, for that is everything.” And more. For if we have friends, if we have alliances, we can take this city back from the corrupt dukes and have it as she was under those noble fellows, our ancestors.’
Faustino was moved almost to tears. Riccardo reflected that he had heard the same sentiments from two mouths today: a good woman and an interloper, a bad man and a native. Faustino, eerily, almost seemed to follow his train of thought.
‘Saint Bernardino,’ he said. ‘Aye, he knew what he was about. His own symbol, the name of Christ and the sunrays, is on the Palazzo Pubblico too. They didn’t finish the cathedral. Not God’s house. Left it uninhabitable. No, they finished the palazzo. The home of the Nine. The very place where that Medici bitch dwells.’
With this, Faustino turned back to his remaining son. Riccardo, released from the gaze of these raptor’s eyes, took a pull from his glass goblet and found the courage to set about amusing the lady of the house. She looked white and drawn – shattered by her loss, or her gain: he could not tell. Like him, she was an outsider in the house of Aquila, but unlike him she was its captive. She sat between the backs of her future husband and her father, ignored by both, useless now the alliance was secure, required only to stay quiet and produce an heir with the winter.
Riccardo pushed his beans around his plate, arranging them, placing them with his fork. He flicked his eyes up once to see her draw down her dark brows in a questioning look. With a flourish, he turned his plate around to face her, smiling at her, inviting her to look. He had made a white horse of beans, constructed artfully and exactly, with the arched neck and high tail of a stallion of Araby. The pale borlotti beans gleamed from the polished pewter, a steed crossing the face of the moon. She looked down at his plate, and he could have sworn that, on another day, she would have smiled back. Instead, her eyelids lifted and she looked him full in the face for the first time.
She was exquisite.
He knew – everybody knew – that the Tolomei were descended from Egyptian royalty. Salvatore Tolomei, and all the Civetta capitani before him, never stopped telling people of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the famous queen Cleopatra from whom he was directly descended. But beyond that well-worn history Riccardo had known little of the Owlet, Salvatore’s only child and heir. Before he had gone to fight in Milazzo, he had been vaguely aware of Pia as a silent dark girl with black plaits like ropes. She was little worth his notice then as he chased more obvious fare: older, blonder, knowing girls, girls from his contrada. Now Pia was a woman and the most beautiful he had ever seen.
Her skin was white as asses’ milk with the tiniest bloom high on each cheek like the delicate pink of a spring blossom. She was the sum of thousands of years of Ptolemaic beauty; what was long-dead was now living, breathing, elemental. Her great eyes were so dark, so fathomless, as to defy the viewer to divine where the radius of the pupil began and ended. Above, the lids and lashes were described in one heartbreaking sweep, as if God had turned artist and taken a tiny brush along the top of her lashes, continuing the line at the edge of her eyes.
She wore no wig, no patches and powder as other ladies did. Her lustrous hair, blackest black varnished gold by the lamplight, was half piled high with a constellation of pearls and diamonds pinned into her inky locks, half down with ringlets left loose to fall over her milky bosom. Her throat was encircled by pearls that could not rival her skin, and one golden coin rested on a pendant between her perfect breasts. The waterfall of diamonds that adorned her bodice could not match the glitter of her eyes, nor could the white silk of her wedding gown match the glossy sheen of her hair.
She was Cleopatra brought to life, taken from her sarcophagus living and now beautiful, with full rose lips and blush cheeks. But she was sad, so sad, and when Nello leaned across, took his new wife’s hand in his and squeezed it cruelly, Riccardo wanted to kill him.
He did not know whether Pia had loved the man who had bled to death in his arms yesterday, but he sensed she had no love at all for her new husband. Heedless of Nello’s presence, Riccardo drank in Pia’s beauty until it filled him up, and what remained of his small appetite departed. He felt that he must speak to her, say something, but his brain was a blank page. He looked down at the horse he had made on his plate and trotted out the only question that he could think of: ‘Can you ride?’
His insides shrivelled as he spoke – what a way to interrogate this queen of a girl! She shook her head slightly, and her ringlets fell about her bosom, glimmering in the candlelight. He thought for a moment that she would not answer, but she said, ‘No. I never learned.’
She said it as if such a pastime was beneath her and dropped her gaze, snubbing him. It seemed to Riccardo as if the whole table was listening, and he wondered if she drew glances wherever she went.
Faustino, well into his cups by now, leaned across. ‘Perhaps you can teach her?’ he said loudly, digging Riccardo in the ribs. ‘Eh?’ He turned to his remaining son. ‘Eh, Nello?’
Nello’s face was suddenly still with impotent anger – he could not gainsay his father, but his skin grew paler still and his pink eyes glowed with fury. There was no way to answer the captain without offending at least half the company, so Riccardo stayed silent. Pia dropped her amazing eyes, and the moment seemed to stretch out as thin and taut as the string of a harpsichord. It was broken only when Faustino began to rise unsteadily to his feet. As Riccardo awkwardly tried to help him, he realized that the capitano was going to address the company, and sat down again, balling his fists under the table with discomfort.
Pia’s rotund father was looking straight at Faustino, his dark brows drawn together in a question, not sure where this tale tended.
‘The Hill of Bad Meals. Your family, Salva, the Tolomei, had a feast there once to reconcile with the Salimbeni. Both houses came to table but here is the meat of the matter – or rather, the lack of it.’ He laughed alone. ‘There were not thrushes enough for the company. Capite? Not enough birds to eat.’ The table was silent. ‘And the families quarrelled again. And your family, Salva, killed one and twenty Salimbeni and so named the hill to be known ever since as the Hill of Bad Meals.’
He paused, nodding repeatedly, weaving where he stood.
‘Now. Here we mourn the passing of my son, but we also unite our two contrade in marriage. Now we have a pact – our son and daughter joined in matrimony – the thrushes are plentiful, and there will be no bad blood between our two families. Welcome, all, to this strange meeting – a wake and a wedding all at once.’
He waved an expansive arm to encompass the assembled, nearly sweeping aside a candelabrum as he did so.
‘Welcome, Pia.’ He waved the other arm to his daughter-in-law. ‘I regret that you changed one son for the other.’ Riccardo held his breath and dared not look at Nello. ‘But welcome, Pia, and your father likewise. Our alliances are well, and good for this house. Welcome to the Torre too.’ Faustino’s hand descended on Riccardo’s shoulder like a blow. ‘Here. This noble fellow from the Tower contrada, a good man. Riccardo. A good man. Didn’t mind the hooves or the blood. Tried to save him.’
The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 7