The Daughter of Siena: A Novel

by Marina Fiorato

  ‘What happened to your hair?’

  Pia, having undertaken to tell the truth, did not hesitate. ‘My husband cut it off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A man smiled at me.’

  The nun nodded, her eyes suddenly the sheen of glass. She reached up and unbound her headdress. Under the white wimple was a bald, livid scalp: a desert of burned, healed flesh, stretched taut and webbed with scar tissue. Pia stared.

  ‘Aye,’ said Sister Concetta, ‘my husband did not use the shears but the firebrand.’ She tied her headdress on again, and placed her hands, with great dignity, in her lap. ‘Now, what would you like me to tell you?’

  The Castel di Pietra rose out of the day like a jagged tooth.

  Pia did not know what she had expected of the Eagles’ stronghold – perhaps a modern house or a summer palace, with all the attendant creature comforts. But this place was like a castle of legend – murky, medieval, pricked out with arrow slits.

  She and Signor Bruni had ridden out for the best part of the morning. Pia had galloped once, far and fast, just as she’d wanted, the wind in her hair, the salty air splintering past her face. Whatever else happened to her, Signor Bruni had given her a great gift: she would always love riding, now and for ever. She was committed and, for the first time, she felt truly Sienese. Signor Bruni had given her so much without ever asking for anything back or acting with anything less than absolute propriety. And because he had behaved this way, because of all the men in her life he had asked nothing of her, today she had something to bestow on him. Two somethings.

  But the time had to be right, and the place. They were nearly there.

  They had been in full flow, racing together, Signor Bruni tempering Leocorno’s extraordinary speed so that they could be shoulder to shoulder, until the Castel di Pietra had risen from the friendly horizon like a pirate’s ship and stopped her in her tracks. The sun was high, and the Eagles’ castle offered a welcome shadow, but neither rider was eager to get any closer. An evil miasma seemed to rise from the place, shimmering in the heat haze, like a cloud of hornets from their nest.

  At length Pia kicked Guinevere to ride up to the stone edifice, taking the palfrey right under the cool shadow of the curtain wall. As she touched the walls of the ancient place they crumbled under her fingers, the stone black and crystalline, like muscovado sugar. They looked up to the windows. The building was so ancient that even to see glass in the leads was a surprise. Silently, they circled the entire fortress. There was a huge heavy door studded with iron, and a small sliding panel set within. Pia urged Guinevere to climb the incline behind the castle, and Signor Bruni followed, curious. But Pia had not yet found what she was looking for, so went on, unspeaking, pushing through a dark thicket of thistle and mandrake. At the western corner stood the dark finger of a single tower. Pia stopped.

  ‘It was here,’ she said. ‘Here that the first Pia of the Tolomei was imprisoned, for dishonouring her husband. Here she died.’

  Signor Bruni watched her, wary. She bent her ear to the wall of the tower, as if she could hear screams across the centuries. She had thought the first Pia was a literary cipher. Now, here, before this dank stronghold, she knew Pia was real, her imprisonment no less dire, her death no less painful because she’d been immortalized in Dante.

  The first Pia was a living, breathing woman who had been murdered by her husband, and in the very same castle that had passed down, hand-to-hand, through the Sienese signori, until the deeds rested in the hands of Faustino Caprimulgo.

  The citadel and its portents terrified Pia. She pulled Guinevere’s reins and backed the palfrey away. ‘Not me,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘It will not be me.’

  Signor Bruni sought to reassure her. ‘Of course it will not,’ he said. ‘Times are different now.’

  Pia turned Guinevere away from the tower, as if she had not heard him, but she had registered the kindness once again and knew what she was about to do was right.

  ‘If the castle is here,’ she said, again to herself, ‘then this way must be …’ She trailed off as she rode away. Out of the portentous shadow of the castle Pia suddenly felt sure. Her heart thumped against her ribs. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I know of a special place.’

  Signor Bruni followed her willingly as she led him through a thick overhang of trees into the forest behind the castle. Pia was blinded by the sudden blackness after the burning day, but it seemed as if she did indeed see in the dark like Minerva. Behind her, Leocorno slipped on the tussocks of marshgrass and samphire but Guinevere, guided by her rider, placed her feet neatly; Signor Bruni was the pupil now, Pia the master. She turned in the dark closeness of the forest and laughed at him, the first time she’d laughed in weeks. She rode on fast, as she’d always wanted, pushing herself, wanting to tire her muscles and quicken her breath.

  At last Pia could feel Guinevere tending down a slope and heard the run and rush of water. They were at a stream, arched across by a beautiful stone bridge, as old as the castle above. Pia slid from her horse and knotted Guinevere’s reins to a low branch. Signor Bruni slid from Leocorno’s back and dropped the reins, while the horse bent his head to crop the salty grass.

  Pia led Signor Bruni over the bridge and at the height of the arch she stopped and leaned on the parapet, looking down into the dappled rushing torrent.

  ‘I wanted you to see this place,’ she said. ‘It is called Pia’s bridge. Her bridge. The first Pia, the one in Dante. She was held prisoner in this castle, the castle Faustino owns. When I was a child my father told me all about this place. He showed me the castle, the bridge. He wanted to make me afraid, keep me obedient. But he told me something else, which never had a meaning for me until I met you.’ She pointed down, almost shyly. ‘This is the river Bruni. Your river. Do you see? Do you know now why I started at your name, when you told it me in the confessional? This place is where you and I meet.’

  He looked at the river, at the bridge, at her. His beautiful face was serious. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  It was time. ‘I wanted to give you two things. Firstly, because of your kindness, I received the book of Arthur. In return, I know where the Nine will meet in two days’ time.’

  He looked surprised, as if he’d expected her to say something else.

  ‘I read the book from cover to cover, searching for all the references to churches or chapels. There are many, as you can imagine. But it was not the many references to churches that were significant. Do you remember you spoke of the duchess’s conclusions? She mentioned King Arthur’s sword, and that the Goose contrada alone have the right to wear their swords at all times. The duchess suggested the Nine would perhaps meet in the church of the Oca contrada. In this she was quite wrong, but she was quite right to centre her deductions on the sword.’

  ‘Excalibur?’

  ‘Yes. But it is not Excalibur itself, but rather the location of it that is the clue.’

  Signor Bruni was struggling to remember the fate of Arthur’s sword. He looked down at the water rushing below. ‘In the lake?’

  Pia smiled. ‘No – in the stone. Remember, Excalibur was found in the stone, and none but Arthur could draw it out?’

  She turned to look at him.

  ‘They will meet at the hermitage at Montesiepi in the hills above the city, just above the abbey of San Galgano. They will want to meet away from the city, if they have this exalted visitor. It is the perfect place. A ruin, in a dense forest, remote, yet but a few hours’ ride from the city.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘Because of the legend of San Galgano.When Galgano renounced his old life he plunged his sword into the stone of what was to become his hermitage. It is still there, a little round church was built around it, and to this day no one has been able to take it out.’

  ‘Truly? There’s a sword in a stone here in these hills?’

  ‘Yes. And not only that. Many think it is the sword, the very same sword, Excalibur. That it was recovered fro
m Britain and brought across the map by a succession of godly knights over the centuries, the last of these was—’

  ‘San Galgano,’ he finished.

  ‘To rest here, in these hills.’

  ‘So when the captain of the Goose contrada broke jest about the Once and Future King, he played upon a double meaning – Arthur and Galgano.’

  ‘Triple meaning. Nello too.’ Her husband’s name all but choked her. ‘The king to come.’

  ‘Then there it is,’ Signor Bruni concluded. ‘Two days’ time – at the round church of Montesiepi above the abbey of San Galgano. And that is where Romulus will reveal himself.’

  She smiled again, as if smiling was a habit that formed more strongly with each hour she spent away from her contrada. She felt proud that she had helped him link together two legends, a little local knowledge and some wrought-iron horse tethers on an Eagle’s palace. Perhaps Minerva had assisted her after all. She touched the owl token around her neck.

  But he was clever too. ‘And what was the second thing?’

  She drew a breath. ‘This.’

  She took his hand and carried it to her chest, where she pressed it against her pendant, her breastbone, her heart. And then she kissed him, taking his face in her hands and pressing her mouth to his. She reeled as the fire burned in her veins but he held her, crushing her slim frame, pushing his hands into that thick, blunt hair: the hair of an Egyptian queen. The hardness of his stubble, the softness of his mouth, the hardness of his teeth, the softness of his tongue, all were part of the rushing of her pulses above and the rushing of the waters below. The torrent was so great she did not hear the rustling in the bushes, or see the glinting pink eyes of the watcher in the shadows.

  In the end she had to pull away, for she did not trust herself. Weakened, she held on to the parapet but the horseman took her by the shoulders and turned her round, almost roughly.

  ‘Let me lie with you,’ he said urgently. ‘Now, here.’

  Pia looked deep in his eyes, and saw there joy and pain and yearning all at once. She had not known that you could not give one kiss, alone, of itself. She had wanted to thank him for his kindness – no, more: she had wanted him to know how she had come to feel about him. As the Palio approached, there were not many days left to them. But she had succeeded in making things worse. She had been an innocent, a fool. She did not have the wisdom of Minerva; she did not have even the wisdom of a schoolgirl. But how could she have known? She had never before felt the fire that he had lit in her, that she had lit in him.

  She understood now and was sorry for the pain she had visited on him. A kiss was not an end in itself. It was the start of something. But having begun, she could not continue. He knew, even before she spoke the words.

  ‘I would dishonour him in a heartbeat.’ Gently, she took his hands from her shoulders. ‘But I won’t dishonour you, or myself.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  Like a player hearing his cue, Nello Caprimulgo stepped from the trees on the castle side of the river. The lovers sprang apart. Nello walked to them, and took Pia hard and possessively by the arm.

  ‘Signor Bruni,’ he hissed, ‘I thank you for your tuition of my wife. My lord father told me you might be riding here today. I will take over from here. Your lessons are done.’

  Nello turned and led his wife back over the bridge, his fingers like a vice on her upper arm, bruising her in the places he’d hurt the day they met. Pia dared to turn once and shoot an agonized glance over her shoulder at the horseman, who stood frozen and horrified, straining her eyes to burn an image of him into her brain.

  Once they reached the thicket, Nello bundled her on to his huge black horse and sprang up behind her. Without a word he kicked the horse and it thundered through the trees, the branches whipping at her face. She had expected him to take her back to the city but he headed in the opposite direction. He jumped the stallion over an ancient retaining wall, far too high for a beast carrying one rider, let alone two, and the horse knocked his left hock painfully on the topstones. Then Pia knew where Nello was taking her, and that by nightfall she would be locked in the tower she had feared so much, destined to relive the fate of her long-dead ancestor.

  Violante watched the sunset from the palace. Darkness had fallen completely when Gretchen came to her and told her that the view from the torre was particularly beautiful this evening. Violante nodded and entered the tower through the library door. She began to climb, higher and higher, until she saw Riccardo waiting for her at the dark summit, looking, in the arc of bright moonlight, ever more like the avenging angel. Relief washed over her that he was here, living, not yet struck dead by Nello’s sword or pistol, but as she regarded him more closely, she could see a strange look in his eyes.

  ‘Did Pia tell you anything?’ she asked without preamble.

  ‘Yes.’

  She could not read his expression. It was as if joy and despair had combined. ‘And?’

  ‘The Nine meet at San Galgano. There is a sword thrust into the stone there – it is the root of Orsa’s sally about King Arthur.’

  ‘San Galgano,’ she breathed. ‘I have heard of it. But it is ruined, no?’

  ‘The abbey is, yes. But there is a hermitage there, a round church where the sword is buried. The Nine meet there tomorrow, at nine o’clock.’ He seemed almost indifferent.

  ‘Well done,’ said Violante warmly. She recounted her failure to recruit Egidio’s father, yet under the bright moon, huge in its midsummer waxing, she still felt optimistic, despite the fat clouds gathering and scudding across its friendly face.

  Riccardo said nothing. And then he looked her in the eye. ‘She kissed me.’

  ‘Oh, Riccardo.’ The very thing Violante had dreaded had come to pass.

  He turned his back to the city. ‘Nello saw us. He’s taken her to the Eagles’ castle.’

  Riccardo did not hear her sigh as it was expelled and snatched by the wind, nor hear the whisper of her purple skirts as she turned away to look over the city, to hide from him the dismay in her face. He could not tell her the rest – that they’d been fools, that Faustino had given them leave to ride into the Maremma, that they’d ridden straight into a trap, giddy as children, only for Nello to spring the mechanism and catch them red-handed.

  He asked, suddenly needing to know: ‘Lancelot, Guinevere, Arthur: what happened to them all? Pia reads, you know; she has read the legends too.’

  Violante hesitated for a moment, not wanting to tell him. Then she touched his scarlet shoulder, so softly he hardly felt it. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  The duchess led the horseman from the tower down the stair into the library. She sat him down, took out the book and sat beside him. Then Violante Beatrix de’ Medici, who had never had the chance to read to her own child, began to read from the Morte d’Arthur, translating as she went.

  ‘And when matins and the first mass was done, there was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone; and in midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters there were written in gold about the sword that said thus: – Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king …’

  Riccardo heard her without a sound. At length she could see, from her eye’s corner, his dark curls sink lower and lower. The boy had ridden to the Maremma and back, and courted a married woman in between. Violante stopped her reading and watched as the heavy head sank to his crossed forearms, there to rest. He was asleep. She watched him for a moment, regarding his angel’s face at peace, the flare of the nostrils, the generous curve of the parted lips. Then she crept to the door and called softly for Gretchen to bring a coverlet. She laid the fur around Riccardo’s shoulders and left him be.

  11

  The Giraffe

  At the top of a high tower in his palazzo in the Giraffa contrada, someone else had his head in a book. Francesco Maria
Conti, cousin to the pope himself and Violante’s chief councillor, was engaged in doing something rather less than statesmanlike. He was poring over his scientific journals, journals by scientific luminaries such as Newton and Galileo. Luckily he was already interested in such things; gravitation, weight ratios, the behaviour of the spheres, magnetism and the interaction of materials were his pet hobbies. Today he was using these lofty theories to lowly ends: he was finding out how to cheat. His task was both simple and fiendishly complicated – he was attempting to rig the horse draw.

  The ten horses and riders for the Palios of Siena were chosen by the falling of black-and-white balls through a wooden mechanism. The weight and diameter of all the balls, with the riders chalked or written on them, were usually exactly the same. This time they must be different. He had to match certain riders to certain horses or else all was lost. Francesco Maria Conti was not worried, though. He was a confident and accomplished man. He also had a certain advantage. He had a prototype. His cousin, Pope Innocent XIII, had sent a runner from Rome with a velvet bag; within was a collection of balls with which the conclave voted for their college of cardinals. At the last election Pope Innocent, formerly known as the more common-or-garden Michelangelo Conti, had had these election balls made and specifically weighted in order to keep out the cardinals of his hated rival faction, the Farnese, to whom the Conti had lost vital papal states in the recent Wars of Succession. It had worked; the Farnese were a spent force. For now at least.

  Francesco Maria Conti shook the little balls on to the table and lined up his callipers, paints, polishes and wood-shaving tools. He readied a pile of small lead musket balls for the crucible. He lit his burner but before he began to melt the lead, he used the flame to burn the note that had come with the velvet bag. He read the words as the flame darkened, then consumed them.

  ‘Cousin, I will send one of my trusted cardinals to your colloquy Friday next, at nine of the clock. He will be bearing my ring. M.C.’