The Daughter of Siena: A Novel

by Marina Fiorato

  Violante opened her eyes. Gretchen was leaning over her, shaking her shoulder, her long grey plait tickling her cheek. ‘Madam, there’s a young man to see you.’

  Violante blinked, as her dream fled with the shadows outside the warm circle of Gretchen’s lamp. The old woman said with emphasis: ‘The young man.’

  So Violante ended the day where she had begun it – in the Hall of the Nine. Riccardo Bruni stood alone in the great chamber, twisting his tricorne in his hands. His eyes moved around the great paintings restlessly. He looked hunted. Gretchen had told her mistress on the way down the staircase that she had turned the Watch from the doors, as they had come in pursuit of him, but it looked as if it was more than the Constables of the Watch that the young man feared.

  He spun round at her footstep, took a pace towards her, and for a moment she thought he might throw himself into her arms. Then: ‘I’ll help you.’ It was all said in a rush. He stopped. She looked in his eyes. That a man so tall, so well-favoured and self-assured, could look so haunted roused her vestigial maternal instincts. He needed to be fed. A blanket, a fire and some broth.

  ‘Gretchen,’ she said, ‘the kitchens.’

  Moments later, Riccardo Bruni was seated before the golden mouth of the kitchen fire that the servants kept burning late into the night lest the duchess need anything. He had a blanket round his shoulders and a cup of broth in his hands. Gretchen hovered in the shadows outside the firelight, an unobtrusive chaperone. Violante sat opposite Riccardo, on the other side of the flames, watching him closely. The smell of new wood burning on the fire, summer sap hissing, brought its own memories and she felt a terrible sense of foreboding. The young horseman, though, looked better, and she felt she could now ask.

  ‘Did something lead you to change your mind?’

  ‘Faustino Caprimulgo … He … took a life.’ Riccardo breathed out as he spoke. ‘No. More than that. He beat a man to death.’ He looked up. ‘The Panther, the one who knocked Vicenzo from his horse.’

  Violante shuddered, recalling the race and the way the hot-headed jockey of the Panthers had lashed out with his whip, not knowing that he struck the heir of the Eagles. She had expected reprisals from Faustino, but this? This was a shock.

  ‘His name is Egidio Albani, son of Raffaello Albani, captain of the Panther contrada.’ She had taken the trouble to find out and had sent a purse round to his house.

  ‘I helped carry him. I had no choice. He is outside.’

  Violante half rose. ‘Here?’

  ‘In the square. He is laid out, for all to see, in the Eagles’ cross. He is a message.’

  She looked down, considering. She had heard reports many times over her ten years’ rule of bodies found posed in that dreadful attitude. She spoke her first thought. ‘He should have a Christian burial.’ Her second thought surprised her. ‘Did the Watch see?’

  Riccardo shook his head. ‘No. They followed me instead. There was no one else in the piazza. Nello … I’m telling this all wrong.’ He brushed his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away the memory. ‘Faustino’s younger son, Nello, bid me help him carry the body. He left me to be found with it. It was a plan.’

  ‘Of Faustino’s?’ Violante’s eyes were gentle, her question sharp. She could see Riccardo thinking about the answer carefully, his face serious and golden in the firelight, his lashes casting spindly shadows on his cheek.

  ‘I don’t think so. He invited me to his son’s passing feast … and Nello’s wedding feast. I think he likes me.’ The words sounded childish and pulled at her heart.

  The question had nudged his remembrance. ‘Faustino said something strange, though. At the end of the feast he showed me that you had sent him the Palio banner.’

  Violante’s skin began to prickle. Her gambit, had it worked? Had Faustino seen the honour in her gesture?

  ‘He was grateful, but he said … he said that it was a shame that – forgive me – you would not be here to see the next Palio.’

  Now Violante’s flesh began to prickle with dread. The Palio dell’Assunta was a little over a month away. Her voice was a whisper. ‘What did he mean? That I would be dead, or gone from Siena?’

  Riccardo Bruni would not meet her eyes. ‘I do not know. Only that you have a month of your rule left to you. Until the sixteenth day of August. He said something else too, just as I was leaving the feast … something about the number nine.’

  ‘What did he say exactly?’ Violante’s voice was sharper than she had meant.

  Riccardo furrowed his brow, struggling to remember. ‘Noveschi novemi. No. Novus novem.’

  Violante sat up very straight. There had been nothing amiss with her schooling. ‘Novus novem? You’re sure?’

  He was. ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him and then at the flames, the burning, damned forest. Hot fire, hellfire.

  The New Nine.

  ‘He’s rebuilding the Nine. He’s going to take the city back.’ She rose abruptly. ‘Come with me.’

  She took him, by the light of Gretchen’s candle, to the map room. Every inch of the wall crawled with territories and cartographs, from the ancient to the modern. They stopped before a great plan of the city, gold in the candlelight, grey in the creeping dawn. The artist, unknown and long gone, had rendered the houses of the city both great and small, the civic buildings, the contrade with their churches and palaces, with the fine lines of his etching. All was complete and exact, and it looked to Violante like a plan of campaign, a battlefield. And crowning all, above the name of the city, two twin boys suckling at a she-wolf’s teats – the town’s very emblem: the she-wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus. According to legend, Siena had been founded by Senius, son of Remus. So both twins had founded great cities: Romulus created Rome, and Remus fathered a child to found Siena. Violante felt suddenly awake and alive. She paced and pointed as she spoke.

  ‘Here are the walls of the citadel. Here are the three thirds or tertieri of the city. Terzo di Camollia, Terzo di San Martino, and here, in the Terzo della Città, right in the heart of the city, sits Faustino, in the Eagle contrada. He needs eight conspirators to revive the Nine. Who are his allies? Not the Panther, that we know.’ ‘Civetta,’ said the young man, abruptly. ‘Salvatore Tolomei’s daughter was married to Nello before Vicenzo was cold.’

  Violante saw a light jump in his eyes. She recalled the young goddess she had seen at the Palio: betrothed, bereaved and now wed. Violante was too used to political alliance to find this strange.

  ‘Very well. And we may now, firmly, place the Panthers in opposition. But who are the other seven? We must understand Faustino’s alliances, his funding, his plan. How does the Palio connect to this? Why is that to be his endgame?’ She was reminded, once again, of chess.

  ‘Duchess,’ Riccardo diffidently interrupted her flow, ‘might we not, that is—’ He gestured between the three of them, joining them in an ineffectual triumvirate. ‘Might we not need … help?’

  Violante turned suddenly. ‘We do need allies. You are right. Here we are: an old lady, a middling one and a young man …’ She paced about. ‘But this very day I wrote to my brother-in-law, Gian Gastone de’ Medici, to assist me in this matter. He is a good man, and jealous of his inheritance; he would not let such an important part of his duchy secede from him. Nor would he wish to inherit a rotten city.’

  ‘You inherit the apple and the worm comes too,’ put in Gretchen grimly.

  Violante glanced out of the window. The city slept, but the dawn must be coming. ‘Go home, Riccardo Bruni,’ she said.

  He looked straight at her, and she answered the question in his eyes.

  ‘No. I am not giving up. But you are right. We need alliances. I shall think on it, and we will speak again.’

  He bowed and went to leave by the great doors. ‘Wait,’ she called, ‘it is better that you are not seen. Gretchen, lead Signor Bruni out through the kitchens.’

  She watched him hesitate, and thought that he would thank he
r, but his thoughts were elsewhere. ‘And Egidio? The Panther?’

  She liked him for his question and opened her mouth to say that she would send her sergeant-at-arms to recover the Panther’s body, that she would have him returned to his family directly with a pall for the funeral. But other words came.

  ‘Signor Bruni. Riccardo.’ She laid her fingertips on his arm. ‘I promise you that by nightfall he will be in the ground. But for a few more hours he must lie where he is.’

  When Riccardo had gone, Violante wandered back to the map room and looked again at the contrade of the city, divided into thirds, the thirds of the city bounded by walls, and the she-wolf and her boy twins presiding over all. One twin suckled and one looked straight out of the etching at her.

  She called for her riding cloak and set forth, alone, on a pilgrimage. In the grey light of dawn she passed through the silver city, a slip-shadow, hurrying east across the piazza. In the near-dark she could see a body lying in a cruciform shape by the fountain, but she averted her eyes and hurried past. She took the little streets to the Giraffa contrada, the ward of her chief councillor Francesco Maria Conti. She passed his palazzo, the hereditary seat of the Conti family, and wondered if Conti was watching her from behind his blank, black windows. She quickened her steps before her practical self assumed control once more. After all, Conti knew that she had come here. He knew why as well. Conti knew most things. She reached the Giraffa church of San Francesco, the plain, block frontage looming from the dark, laid her hand on the door and went within.

  Inside, there were candles burning, and an acolyte sweeping in readiness for morning mass. She smiled at the boy who stared, round-eyed. Violante walked forwards, the familiar length of the nave, to the icon that hung above the altar. She paused to genuflect, crossed her bosom. Then, with no disrespect but merely friendly familiarity, she smiled at her friend, the Madonna del Latte.

  Violante had first seen the painting when, as the new governess of the city, she had made it her business to visit every contrada and its attendant church. At mass, sitting in the prominent pews of the Conti family, she had laid eyes on the most wonderful representation of the Virgin she had ever seen. Violante had always been drawn to Mary, a woman who had known what it was to love a son and lose him and mourn him. Here before her, Mary fed the infant Jesus, holding her breast to his mouth, while the infant suckled hungrily.

  Before that mass and that day, Violante had been telling herself how well she was doing, throwing herself into her new position, learning about every family, every contrada, every trade and tradition of her new city. Then, looking at the Madonna feeding her son, both parties gazing only at each other, absorbed in this elemental bond, she had felt a physical pain in her breast. For the rest of the service she could neither speak nor sing.

  Afterwards, dining with Francesco Maria Conti at his house, she had asked about the painting, as casually as she could. Conti, with the pride due to his contrada, told his new mistress that the painting was by the Sienese master Sassetta, and told her defensively that the panel could not be moved into the palace. She would never have desired such a thing, knowing that the painting gave her such pain; but over the coming weeks she had been drawn back again and again to the quiet church, to commune with the mother and child. Gradually, the panel had begun to give her peace, not pain, and she had begun to share her problems with the Madonna.

  Today, in the grey dawn that would reveal the Panther’s body to the city, she told Mary that Egidio Albani had been slain and laid out like her own son Christ. Under the almond eye of the icon, she suddenly felt a terrible misgiving. How could she let Egidio’s mother find him like that, let the city talk of his torture, just to win allies against Faustino? Egidio was a boy of twenty. Twenty, Violante read in the Madonna’s eyes. The same age your twins would have been, had they lived.

  Violante ran from the church, hurrying in the grey, unpromising dawn light to the Piazza del Campo. She would instruct the Watch to gather up Egidio’s body, to wash him and box him and take him home to his mother. But as she reached the great shell-shaped campo she stopped, abruptly. A small knot of people gathered next to the fountain, over the Panther’s body.

  She was too late.

  7

  The She-Wolf

  The sorrowing sun was setting at the end of a battle-battered day in Milazzo when the young Riccardo Bruni was taken to be one of a scouting party in the hills. General Alvaraz y Leon, the notorious Spanish general, had been firing villages that had harboured the Austrians. Advance parties of Spanish had been rounding up villagers, ready for Alvarez y Leon’s men to ride through with their firebrands.

  In one village Riccardo’s troop came upon a little church with a stone cross, in which all the citizens had been trapped within, save one. A young woman tugged at a vast tree trunk that had been cast across the door. ‘I cannot move it by myself,’ she gasped, ‘and my son is within with his grandam. It is time for his feed.’ Riccardo could hear the shouts from within, overlaid with the high, keening cry of a baby. The men began to dismount but Riccardo reached her first. The woman turned to him. ‘Help me,’ she begged.

  She was fair, with the apricot skin of the South and pleading eyes as dark as pansies. As she grasped his arm in desperation, he could smell the sweet heat of her body. His eyes dropped from her gaze to where her breasts strained at the lacings of her bodice. What he saw there made him take a step back. A dark stain spread from each nipple into the open weave of the cambric. The thudding of his heart became the thudding of distant hooves: the captain laid his ear to the ground. ‘Above a hundred horse,’ he said, ‘heading this way. Let’s be gone.’ He did not need to explain; they were only five men. Riccardo, his knees giving way with fear, allowed himself to be dragged away.

  The woman screamed after them until they were almost out of sight and then turned back to the wooden trunk, clawing at it desperately. Riccardo rode with his eyes shut, as behind them Alvarez y Leon and his hundred horse swept into the village with their torches. He wished he could shut his ears too.

  That night on the cold hill he did not feel the heat of the fire nor hear the songs the men sang to cheer themselves. He turned his back to the blaze and watched instead the little church burning merrily in the valley below, the cross silhouetted black against the flame.

  In the morning they rode down the hill into an eerie blanket of silence. No birds sang. The church was charred rubble, with a hundred black skeletons within and one without, her hand outstretched to the door. ‘Aye,’ said the captain with grudging respect, kicking the skull of the single skeleton with his scuffed boot. ‘The she-wolf will stay with her cub even as it burns.’

  Riccardo threw up again and again into the ashes, and as he emptied his stomach on to the razed ground he vowed never to be afraid again.

  Riccardo awoke in the hay of the Tower stable, with his father shaking him by the shoulder. The skeletons disappeared, insubstantial as smoke. Riccardo raised himself up to a sitting position. He looked on his father’s stocky form and smiled, half relieved and half strangely sorry. It was morning, and outside an angry horse clopped and neighed on the cobbles. Domenico Bruni, squat and bearded, cocked his head to one side and smiled back at his son, his dolorous day in bed forgotten. He was back to work and, it seemed, happy about it.

  ‘Give me a hand, Dawdle Bones,’ he said, not without affection. His voice, unused for a whole day, was gruff. ‘I’ve a mighty tricky fellow in for shoeing.’

  Domenico thrust down his arm, to haul up his son. It was encircled with the leather bracelets of the farrier’s trade and smelled, like Domenico’s whole body, of horse. After his strange dream, after everything that had happened yesterday, Riccardo could not have imagined anything more comforting than his father’s arm. He grasped it and rose to his feet, draping his own arm over his father’s shoulders as they walked companionably to the street. The younger man, taller by a head, looked nothing like his father, but Domenico was the sum total of Riccardo’s fami
ly, and family was all.

  Riccardo followed him to the cobbles, where a black stallion danced and spun, its inky flanks shining wetly in the morning light. The song of the bells, the screech of the starlings, the smell of the fearful horse, all served to root him here. Of course he would not help the duchess. This was his contrada, the Torre, the Tower. These were his people. He was home.

  The waiting beast bucked and skittered, his eyes full of fear, rolling to show the whites. The ubiquitous Zebra, on one of his many disparate missions around the city, was making a gallant attempt to hold the head-rein. His little tricorne hat lay on the ground where it had been knocked; his nose was bloody where the creature had raised its head too fast. Riccardo rapidly tossed the boy a rag.

  ‘Stand clear,’ he said.

  Zebra did not need to be asked twice. Cheerfully enough, the boy went to sit on the mounting block to watch the drama, rolling the rag into two little nubbins, which he stuffed up his nose.

  Riccardo eyed the plunging horse. He could tell at once that the animal was not naturally bad tempered – horses rarely were. There was usually something frightening them and with this one it was clear what it was. The horse could see the farrier’s bench and his father’s instruments: the paring knife, the rasp and the hoof pick. Riccardo walked forward, talking all the time, of anything, of everything, of nothing. He took the huge, heavy velvet head in his hands, felt the warm nap of horsehair under his hands, and the massive skull beneath the skin. Riccardo cupped his palms behind the creature’s eyes, blinkering them, closing off the world, letting the creature see only forward. Only him.