Riccardo felt the eyes of all upon him, but looked only at Pia. Yesterday, with her gaze trained on Vicenzo as he died, had she known then that she would be forced to change one brother for another, that her alliance would stand? Faustino broke in on Riccardo’s thoughts, bringing his fist down on the table with a crash that made the plates and glasses jump and the candle flames leap high.
‘But I won’t let him go – his death won’t be in vain. We will make our friends know us, make our enemies know us. Eagles, owls and thrushes, the whole grim order of raptors. We may hunt the little birds together. And if you are on the side of Aquila, if you are with the Eagles, there will always be thrushes enough.’
Faustino sank down heavily to an appalled silence. Riccardo could not look at Nello’s face – his father’s meaning had been abundantly clear: ‘I regret that you changed one son for the other.’ He looked instead at Pia and read fear in her great eyes. She had registered the slight against her husband and Riccardo felt a sick twist in his gut, an unaccustomed pang of foreboding.
So this was fear.
He was not afraid for himself, but for her. He glanced sideways at the grim-faced Faustino. Something had just been announced, a gauntlet had been thrown down.
Into the silence Faustino’s handclaps sounded like twin thunderbolts, as a quartet of pages advanced into the room. All were garbed in Eagle colours of yellow and black. The first pair bore a great confection from the kitchens; the second bore the Palio banner itself, folded into a neat triangle between them. The dish was set on the table to a collective intake of breath, and the flag set before Faustino with no fewer gasps. Riccardo fixed his eyes on the great platter placed directly before him – Faustino’s pastry chefs had outdone themselves. The pudding was a wondrous and terrible thing: a great white sugar horse, prancing and arching on a celestial clouds of baked meringue. And on the horse’s back Death himself rode, with his face hooded and his evil scythe curved above his head. Death’s robe was not solidly black but pied in black and white like the Balzana flag of Siena. Unsteadily, Faustino reached forward, broke the end off the scythe and offered it to Riccardo. It was licorice, a strange enough sweetmeat for a funeral, but for a wedding the portents were disastrous.
Faustino took the Palio banner from the tablecloth and waved it under Riccardo’s nose, stroking the folded fabric in his hand as if he held a hobbled dove.
‘That barren bitch sent it me,’ Faustino mumbled. ‘The duchess. Sent it to me as condolence for my son.’ He exhaled a long breath. ‘It was a noble act. ’Tis such a shame.’
Riccardo’s senses prickled. ‘A shame?’
‘By the Palio dell’Assunta she’ll be gone. She’s got till the sixteenth day of August. Novus novem.’
Riccardo wondered exactly how much Faustino had had to drink. Was the duchess in danger? That little Latin tag at the end – Riccardo was not much schooled but it was close enough to Tuscan to guess that it was something about ‘nine’ and ‘new’. What was happening to him? Since when did he care about the fate of others? Why had his cold heart been touched twice today, by a young woman and an older one? And yesterday too, what had made him run back, through the flying hooves, to help Vicenzo? That gesture had brought him to this place tonight and to the palazzo and its chamber of horror earlier that day. It was better to have nothing to do with any of it. Riccardo got to his feet.
‘Nello!’ bawled Faustino.
His younger son stood to mirror Riccardo. Riccardo froze.
‘Take him. Show him,’ Faustino commanded and turned to his guest. ‘Signor Bruni. Riccardo. Goodnight.’
Riccardo wondered if Faustino had thought better of allowing him to live. His back prickled as he left the room after Nello. He could sense Pia’s eyes on him, but he dared not turn to look at her.
Riccardo and Nello walked down the panelled passages, an unlikely pairing. Riccardo knew Nello did not want him here, that he resented his reckless act of compassion for his older brother. But something was making him act with civility, something beyond his father’s directive. Nello needed him for some reason.
‘I hear it said that you will ride for the Tower next month in the Palio dell’Assunta?’ Nello’s gambit was a polite enquiry.
Riccardo was sure of it, but answered carefully, ‘If they elect me.’
Nello nodded. ‘You should know, then, that I am riding for the Eagles. And I will win.’
This was no challenge; Nello did not say it to provoke. It was said with complete confidence and more: satisfaction. Riccardo knew that his earlier instincts had been right – Nello was glad his brother was dead. He was now the Eagle’s champion, something that, throughout his freakish childhood, he must always have longed to be. Riccardo made no reply, as he followed the pale figure down the stone stair, his feet stumbling only a little as he realized where they were headed.
The Panther was still there, his beaten flesh beginning to stink and stretch on his bones in the summer heat. Nello began to unbind the body. With an increasing feeling of unreality, Riccardo began to help and felt the slippery ropes come away in his hands, jellied gouts of blood gathering like blackberries at the Panther’s wrists.
Nello laid out a long feed sack on the stony floor. Riccardo had no choice but to help Nello roll the body up in the sack. He took the legs as Nello took the head, but instead of turning up the stair again, Nello approached a blind wall with a stone eagle carved into it. As they moved closer, the torchlight carved deep shadows in the stony grooves, throwing the eagle’s single eye into relief. Nello pressed his thumb to the eye and the wall sprang back, not with the stony grating of a long-closed tomb, but quick and silent and well used.
‘Come on,’ he said.
The dark door closed behind them on some hidden spring and they entered a stony tunnel with torches burning in sconces placed a man’s length apart. This was one of the bottini, the underground network of aqueducts and sewers below the city that radiated out under the contrade to the hills. They carried the body carefully along the white stone walkways, skirting the green pools of stagnant water. Riccardo fixed his eyes on Nello ahead of him, his white hair gleaming in the torchlight.
Riccardo’s misgivings were a cold stone in his stomach.
‘Is he to be laid in some private mausoleum of the Panthers?’ His voice sounded forth into the black beyond and returned to chase behind them, as if spirits rose to moan at them from their necropolis.
Nello’s laugh, likewise, circled around the tunnels and back. ‘He’s to be laid in the most beautiful place in the world. None too private, though.’
The way was long and the grisly burden heavy but Riccardo did not mind if it meant the dead Panther would be given some small rite of passage. All the same, his arms were aching by the time Nello stopped and set down his end of the body on the walkway. Riccardo did likewise. Above them, a square of light, bleeding white, showed around the edges of a trapdoor. Nello stood tall and pushed, and with a grating of ancient stone a paving slid sideways to reveal a rectangle of sky pricked out with stars. Nello vaulted up until his head and shoulders were in the night air and looked around.
‘Clear,’ he said. ‘Push him out.’
This was no easy task. In the end Riccardo, being the stronger, had to clamber into the fresh air to yank the body from below. He had expected to emerge into some clandestine cemetery outside the city, where the body could be disposed of in secret, thus minimizing any reprisals from the Panther contrada. He could not have been more wrong.
He was right in the centre of the deserted Piazza del Campo, and the paving from which they had emerged formed the lowest balustrade of the fountain. He and Nello dragged the body out, under the noses of the stone wolves who spouted water, silvered by moonlight, into the bowl of the fountain, as if they gathered to feast on the carrion. They rolled the Panther out like a ham from a cloth, like Cleopatra from her carpet. Pia, thought Riccardo. She is part of this now.
Nello dragged the body to the very centre of the p
iazza’s shell. Riccardo helped him unwrap the body, but refused to help him place the arms wide in the position in which the Eagle contrada left all their dead – the knifed knave in the alleyway, the greedy prelate on his own altar. Everyone would know who had done this deed, and if the Aquila wanted to send a message, it was not Riccardo’s message to send. The dreadful flesh gleamed pale in the moonlight, angelic, not aquiline; in the cruciform almost Christ-like. Sickened, Riccardo turned away from the Panther’s ruined corpse and looked Nello in his eyes. In the moonlight he seemed almost normal – his white hair merely blond, his pink eyes darkened now to an amber hue. Hawk’s eyes, like his father and dead brother.
‘What now?’ Riccardo asked.
‘Now?’ said Nello, all pretence abandoned. ‘Now you go back where you belong.’ With that he vaulted nimbly down into the tunnel again, pulling the opening closed behind him.
The sound of stone on stone alerted two officers of the Watch, who had turned a corner into the piazza. Their tricornes were sharks’ fins in the moonlight, the barrels of their pistols gleaming.
Without hesitation Riccardo made straight for the Palazzo Pubblico for the second time that day, Saint Bernardino’s medallion, IHS, the name of Christ in the sunrays, leading him there like the star of the nativity. His step quickened faster and faster as if it was the ghost of the Panther rather than the Watch who pursued him, and despite the lateness of the hour he hammered fit to wake the dead on the great doors. Sure that no one inside had heeded him, he turned back to face the square: he could not evade the Watch now. But as he looked at the vast moonlit space, he felt the doors open at his back. His last thought as he plunged into the palace was that Nello had been right. It was the most beautiful place in the world.
Pia retired to her chamber as soon as she could, her head aching, reeling from the day she’d had to endure. The wedding feast had held a surprise for her, as if to taunt her further: the unknown horseman whom she had seen at the Palio, the one she had secretly named as her champion. The comparison between him and Nello was even more extreme than it had been between him and Vicenzo, but when she had watched the horseman leave the feast with her new husband, she’d known him for the Eagles’ creature and she damned all three of them in the same breath. Them – and all the men on the earth, including her father: he could burn too. There was no point remonstrating with Salvatore – it was too late for that – but she had begged him at the feast to send on her books and her mother’s clothes. He’d waved away her requests and turned from her to discuss grain quotas with the Eagle capitani. She suspected he had forgotten her words as soon as they were uttered.
She’d gone up to her chamber after the feast and sat there waiting as the moon rose, with a growing sense of dread. Her bedding had been changed, so Nicoletta would have told Nello that she was undergoing her woman’s courses. She prayed it would be enough to keep him away, even on their wedding night.
But he came. She heard his step on the stair: dreaded, expected and lighter than Nicoletta’s. When he entered the room, his hair was disarranged, his pink eyes glittering; he seemed excited. As he came towards her she saw something else glittering – something in his hand.
A pair of small horse shears.
Pia was sure she was going to die. She kept quite still, sitting on her bed, while he set about her. But instead of slicing her throat, he began grabbing great chunks of hair and shearing them off. Her beautiful locks fell about her in swags and hanks of blackness on the white coverlet. At first she held her hands over her scalp, trying to protect her hair, but when he sliced at her fingers too, as if he would cut them off, she moved her hands to cover her face instead. The blood from her fingertips seeped into her eyes but she did not care: anything was better than seeing the look on Nello’s face as he chopped at her in a frenzy. She went limp, letting him fling her about and turn her as he would, thinking that only by letting him wear himself out would she survive. At last, his fury spent, he yanked her to her feet. He stood her in front of the window, turned into a looking-glass by the lamplight inside and the darkness without.
She regarded herself dispassionately – as strangely detached as she’d been the day he’d laid bruises on her arm. She looked quite different: her hair now about her ears and forehead, and her face smeared with her own blood. Behind her face Nello’s floated, sated and gloating. She understood that she was lucky. With a wisdom well beyond her own innocence, she knew that if he had not cut her hair he would have raped her, even if she bled.
‘There,’ he hissed in triumph. ‘Let’s see if he’ll smile at you now.’
When he’d gone Pia picked up the shears from the floor. She brushed her own hair from the blades and noticed, as if they belonged to someone else, that her hands were shaking terribly. She looked at her reflection in the window again and, consciously steadying her hands, tried to neaten her hair until the sides fell evenly and the black slab of her new fringe lay straight across her forehead. She saw that huge tears were swelling in her eyes and falling down her face unchecked. So she was to be punished for the actions of others as well as her own. While she cut, she damned the horseman again. Because he’d smiled at her and asked her a question, she’d paid a high price for his caprice. And yet his smile had been the one bright moment in a terrible day. He’d been the only man to address her, to question her, as if he cared about the answer.
Can you ride?
An idea began to form slowly in her numbed brain. If she could ride, far and fast, she could get away from Nello. There was no escape from this city, isolated in the hills, without a horse. She must order her thoughts. Think, think.
Pia stooped to tuck the shears into her laced boot. She would not be unarmed in the presence of her husband again. As she bent, Cleopatra’s coin fell from her bosom and hit her smartly in the teeth, swinging, winking, on its chain. As she straightened up, Pia of the Tolomei caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. The candlelight was just bright enough for her to see how much she resembled the long-dead queen.
6
The Forest
When Violante Beatrix de’ Medici was a little girl, and used to gaze from the windows of her father’s Bavarian castle, she did not see the expensive glazing, nor the fine leaden quarrel-panes, but looked past and through them to the forest. She loved the trees, the way they whispered reassuringly at night, the way they stretched out and closed around the castle like friendly arms reaching to embrace. When, on occasion, she could persuade her nurse to take her for a walk – a battle, for fresh air was not deemed to be healthy for the young princess – she loved the darkness, the deepness of the cover, even on sunny days. She felt safe in the forest, and more at home than she did in the airy, gilded rooms of the palace.
Walking further one day than she ever had, she met the woodsmen with their axes, hacking at the trunks, their blades biting white wounds into the wood, chips flying to land on the dark mossy ground like snow. She stopped in her tracks, and the woodsmen stopped too in her presence, pulling their caps from sweaty crowns, spitting the deer gristle that they chewed to the forest floor to lie with the sawdust. Violante turned and the tears spilled from her eyes. The nurse, trudging back to the palace in the princess’s wake, tried to explain: trees had to be felled to make the chairs in her father’s palace, the houses of the poor, even the books that she so loved to read. For that moment Violante didn’t care. She wanted the forest to be left alone.
Six short years later, she was sitting in the great salon of her new home, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, holding the hand of her new groom. She had been married that day in Florence’s great duomo, had endured three hours of interminable feasting, and was now listening to a musical recital. She could barely concentrate on the music for her stomach was churning with the unbearable and thrilling expectation of her own wedding night, when Ferdinando, the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes on, would take her to bed. To compound her misgivings, she smelled that smell that had once made her so unhappy – wick wood, ne
wly cut and carved. She looked across the great chamber at the only new thing in this room of priceless antiques, the pianoforte.
Ferdinando credited himself with the invention of this instrument. In reality, he had been closeted for the last few months with the true inventor of the pianoforte. Bartolomeo Cristofori was a comely Paduan who had developed this strange hybrid from the harpsichord and the clavichord. It sat squat, newly carved and varnished, on four spindly legs. Violante had peeped beneath the lid, breathed in the sick smell of new wood, and gazed at the intricate arrangement within of strings and hammers. Shyly, she had struck a black key, then a white one, and listened to the resonant discord, a strange new note, thicker, cleaner and somehow more real than a harpsichord. She marvelled that something with such a beautiful exterior could be so complex on the inside.
Moved by a sudden association of ideas, she squeezed Ferdinando’s hand, but he did not mark her. He was watching intently, sitting poker upright, as a boy rose from his chair and approached the instrument. As Bartolomeo Cristofori himself played the accompaniment, the boy began to sing a motet in the clear chiming tones of a castrato. He was a beautiful youth with the blond curls of an angel and a voice to match. Violante felt tears start in her eyes, both for the forest of her childhood and the beauty of the sound. She turned to her new husband, whom she knew by repute to be a connoisseur of music. Ferdinando looked happy for the first time that day.
Only one man at the recital knew that Ferdinando was enraptured by the singer – the famous countertenor Cecchino – not the song. This man knew Ferdinando very well, for he was Gian Gastone de’ Medici, the groom’s younger brother. He felt sorry for the little Bavarian bird, for to his certain knowledge Ferdinand had sodomized the castrato the night before in scenes of quite astonishing debauchery, even to a libertine such as he. Gian Gastone was an accomplished gamer as well as a dedicated homosexual, and he knew that Violante had been dealt a marked card. He sensed, as he listened, that this would not be the last time that Cecchino made the little bride cry; and he made a bet of his own, just for fun, that Ferdinando would not lay a finger on his wife, that night or any other.
The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 8