The Daughter of Siena: A Novel

by Marina Fiorato

  When the note was ash Francesco Maria Conti fixed his glasses to his nose and dropped the musket balls into the crucible. While he waited for the lead to blister and bubble, he decided to look through the fine brass and wood telescope that protruded from the window of his high tower atop the Giraffa palazzo. The scope itself, which had once belonged to Galileo, poked out of the high casement, giving the tower, in the twilight, the silhouette of a giraffe.

  Conti was pleased by the symmetry of ideas and remembered a tale he had once heard of the giraffe that Lorenzo de’ Medici once procured from the sultan of Egypt, in return for Medici alliance against the Ottomans. The giraffe was an immediate sensation when it arrived in Florence but shortly after its arrival its head became stuck in the beams of its stable and it broke its neck and died. Francesco Maria Conti, despite his scientific pretensions, held the deep-seated belief in omens shared by all Sienese. For this reason he had arranged for a donkey to be cast over the Camollia gate. And for this reason, he smiled when he remembered the story of the Medici giraffe. He hoped it was a harbinger of the family’s doom.

  On her first evening in the castle of the Eagles in the Maremma, Pia of the Tolomei felt confident enough to go down to the stables to visit Guinevere.

  That she was not, it seemed, to be a prisoner had much to do with her father-in-law, who had arrived in time for dinner. That fate that she had most feared – to be locked in a dripping cell with no light nor company but the spectre of death like the first Pia – was not to be hers.

  In fact Faustino seemed almost pleased with her; she had played her part admirably and he was very satisfied with the way the day had gone. He seemed not at all put out that Pia knew he had engineered for Nello to catch her with Signor Bruni, and his benign smile seemed to be protecting her from Nello’s wrath. Her husband ate nothing, the corrosive hatred in his belly clearly allowing no appetite nor room for food. He drank, though, heavily and in silence.

  She was not even afraid in her father-in-law’s company, merely sorry. She was not sorry for the kiss, for if she was never kissed like that again, it had been worth it. But she was so sorry that they had been foolish enough to dance to Faustino’s tune, and even sorrier that her lessons with Signor Bruni were now over. They could take her tutor away, but they could not erase what he had taught her – she could now ride, far and fast. But she did need a mount if she was to escape as she had planned. Nello, she noted, was not to be sharing her chamber for now, and she suspected that she had been right about him: that he would not do so until after the Palio was safely won. He would keep whatever malign essences lived within his body – his anger, his lusts – locked up inside him to pour into the Titans’ race.

  Almost as heartening was the fact that Nicoletta had been left in Siena. This was fortunate, for she would never have been able to escape under her maid’s beady eye. And escape was now her only option: after the Palio, she must be gone, or be claimed by Nello.

  Before this week, she would have felt no sorrow at the prospect of running away. Then, there had been nothing in the city that she would miss. Now, there was. And yet to stay would be hopeless too. That kiss could not be a beginning, so it must be an end. And so, taking a hurricane lamp, Pia trod quietly down to the stables.

  As she lifted the latch she saw Guinevere’s dappled hindquarters almost at once in the warm circle of light.

  She laid her hands on the little horse and was rewarded with a whinny of recognition. She hung the lamp on a curled iron hook and moved to the palfrey’s head. She stroked and kissed the horse tenderly, wrapping her arms around the pretty head, resting her cheek on the warm, silky neck. Guinevere seemed so warm and solid and reassuring, and also the nearest thing in this world to Signor Bruni.

  A shuffle and a snort from the next stall alerted her to the fact that Guinevere had company. In the next four stalls were four well-matched, handsome greys, calmly munching on oats. Four horses, the same size, eating oats to fatten them for a journey, thought Pia, who had learned more about horses in a fortnight with Signor Bruni than she would have done in a lifetime of common schooling. Carriage horses.

  She turned around, holding the torch high. There, looming out of the dark corner, was the Eagles’ carriage, lacquered and well sprung, with the Eagles’ flag painted on the door in yellow and black. Pia knew that Faustino had readied his coach and four for the trip to San Galgano and the hermitage of Montesiepi the next night. Her father-in-law suffered from gout and rarely rode.

  Another whinny of recognition came from behind her and she turned again to the stalls. There, shifting his weight and swishing his ragged tail, with the nervous energy of a winner, was Nello’s black stallion. She looked at the sheer size of him, a good few hands taller than Guinevere, and took a step back. But his eye was kind and he blew at her in a friendly enough fashion. She took heart and approached quietly, putting her hand to his neck. A fragment of memory came and went in the blink of an eye as he breathed on her neck and nibbled her ear. Encouraged, she bent to look at the leg he had hurt as he jumped the wall. She chattered all the time, reassuring him, hoping he was not hurt. She ran her hand down the stallion’s injured limb as she had seen Signor Bruni do. She need not have worried: the horses in the household of Aquila were treated better than the humans; the wound was properly dressed with a poultice strapped to it neatly and firmly. Nello, she knew, would regret this injury that the horse, his great Palio hope, had sustained when he had collected his faithless wife. She was sure he would blame her for it. And punish her too? She shivered.

  ‘You’ll be all right, boy,’ she said. ‘But what about me?’

  Riccardo Bruni was edgy and impatient and could find no peace. Each morning, before the sun got hot and high, he took Leocorno out into the Maremma and, with the grasses whispering underhoof and the salt breeze in his nostrils, rode over the salt marshes. Sometimes he got as close to Pia’s prison as he dared. Sometimes he imagined he saw her dark head at the casement. But he was always too far away to be sure. Once, he saw Nello in the distance, like a child’s lead soldier on the horizon, racing like shot fired from a pistol. Riccardo swallowed. Nello looked as if he could not be beaten.

  In the city, sweltering under the shimmering haze of high summer, the heat lay like a blanket on the old stones. Children skipped from shadow to shadow to save their unshod feet. Riccardo helped his father when he could but, as the Palio neared and Domenico’s spirits soared, Riccardo found the older man’s increased chatter unbearable. He sought out the duchess, the one person he could talk to about Pia.

  He climbed the Torre del Mangia, closer to the sun but into the breeze and out of the oven of hot stone, and from thence she would take him to the cool of the library, where there was the smell of books, the muffled silence of the volumes piled high on each wall, and a cool respite from the searing heat of the day. She would read to him, always from the Morte d’Arthur, translating as she went. Sometimes Riccardo would think, in awe, of the quiet intelligence that must be required to read one language and speak another. Mostly, he would just listen, with his head resting on his arms on the map-table as round as the one in Camelot, sometimes listening to the tales she told, sometimes hearing no words but just the calm rhythm of her speech. Violante’s words soothed him, and he let them run over his head like a cooling brook. Sometimes he closed his eyes. Sometimes he even slept.

  Violante de’ Medici did not care why Riccardo came to her; she found balm in his company. Under her eye in the library, he seemed younger to her. She could not believe now that he had ridden like a boyar, leaped from his horse in vain to save Vicenzo and put himself in Faustino’s sights. Today he represented a welcome distraction from the inexorable approach of that fateful meeting at San Galgano, and then the Palio, and then – what? He had taken to coming every day, and she had taken to expecting him, and knew how much she would miss him if he stopped.

  But these quiet sessions had another purpose too. Violante could see that Riccardo was dangerously drawn to Pia
and was suffering the agonies of her absence. So the readings had an ulterior motive. She was reading him a cautionary tale, a private sermon of a boy who would become a mighty and jealous king, who would smite a favoured knight for stealing his queen.

  Riccardo’s dark head, resting on his arms, was still; Violante could not be sure if he slept or no. She smiled. It did not matter. She suspected he did not sleep much, rising early to train his new mount and twisting on his pallet at night, eating out his heart for his lady.

  ‘So when he came to the churchyard, Sir Arthur alighted and tied his horse to the stile, and so he went to the tent, and found no knights there, for they were at the jousting. And so he handled the sword by the handles, and lightly and fiercely pulled it out of the stone, and took his horse and rode his way until he came to his brother Sir Kay, and delivered him the sword …’

  The doors flew open and a breathless Gretchen entered. Riccardo’s head rose – then he had heard – and he made to get up. Gretchen held up a hand.

  ‘Stay. Your Grace, we have had an odd delivery. Will you come?’

  Violante followed Gretchen down the stairs, Riccardo behind them at a distance. In the cool courtyard by the trade entrance to the palace, the gates were open and a carter was unpacking his load: brooms, perhaps a hundred or more, collecting like a spiky bonfire in the centre of the court. Gretchen began to berate the carter at once.

  ‘Have you cloth for ears? Did I not say that we have no need of these brooms? And if we did, we would buy them single soldiers, not in battalions!’

  The carter, who had the measure of Gretchen, nonetheless took off his cap when he saw Violante and sketched a bow.

  ‘Madam, I was given orders to bring them here as a gift for you. I was told you was in need of them.’ He screwed up his face, remembering. ‘For the reason that you was cleaning up the city.’

  Violante’s heart speeded up as her skin chilled. ‘Who told you this?’ Faustino? Would he have the gall? ‘Begin at the beginning.’

  ‘Well, I was going up the hill to Montepulciano to take the brooms to market. They are the finest, madam, besom and gorse, with a olive-wood handle, you won’t get better this side of Florence.’

  Mistress and servant exchanged a look. ‘Never mind your merchandise,’ snapped Gretchen. ‘Get to the burden of the tale.’

  ‘Anyway I was whipping the mule up the hill, and this great gold coach near on run us down. The driver stopped and a great fat fellow leaned out and chucked me a purse. He bought the whole lot of the brooms and told me to turn around and bring ’em to you, miss. Er, madam.’ The carter flicked his eyes to Violante, then dropped his gaze to the ground.

  Violante was puzzled. She knew no portly gentleman, nor one who would send such a gift. She tired, abruptly, of the whole business.

  ‘Then take them away again,’ she said testily. ‘You have your coin. Remove your brooms and take them to market. Sell them again, I give you leave.’

  The carter shifted his weight from one foot to the other, but did not move.

  ‘Well … that’s tricky, madam.’

  Violante assumed her best air of froideur. ‘Why? I am governess here. My word is the law.’

  The carter did not quite meet her eyes. ‘Yes, madam. ’Tis just that—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, he said to bring them here ahead of him, he said he was coming here himself. He said he was the heir to the dukedom.’

  Violante and Gretchen exchanged another glance.

  ‘Gian Gastone,’ they said, as one.

  12

  The Vale of the Ram

  Gian Gastone de’ Medici, only surviving son of Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici and heir to the grand duchy of Tuscany, was more than a little surprised to receive a letter from his sister-in-law Violante, the only woman he had ever liked.

  Gian Gastone’s dislike of the female sex did not proceed from a single event but from years of neglect. A lonely boy in a great palace, ignored by his family as the second son of the house, he began to develop what was to become a lifelong preference for the company of those below stairs – to be blunt, the lowlife. So it was the servants who told Gian Gastone that when his mother Marguerite was pregnant with him, she had tried to starve herself in the hope she would miscarry, and that when Gian Gastone was born against all odds, Marguerite had refused to nurse him, convincing everyone at court that she was dying of cancer of the breast. They told him, too, that when Gian Gastone was four, and just beginning to register that he did, in fact, have a mother, she had disappeared to France, never to return. Abandoned by Marguerite, Gian Gastone took a great liking to his personal squire, a boy of his own age called Giuliano Dami: a tall, pale, beautiful youth with strange purple eyes the colour of grapes. From Dami he learned the major lesson of his life. The squire took his young master’s virginity and taught him what pleasures could be due to men without recourse to the female form. Dami quickly identified his lover’s appetite for idle talk and accordingly honed his natural ability to fish for gossip, trawling the great household for the silvery flitting fishes of scandal, filleting them and serving them to his master. It suited Dami to separate Gian Gastone even further from his family, to isolate him, to bring him closer under his own influence. Dami was a young man of great ambition, who had no intention of remaining a body squire to a minor Medici for the rest of his days.

  Gian Gastone’s sister Anna Maria Luisa was the second woman to fail him. Anna Maria Luisa mistook haughteur for noblesse and Gian Gastone could not, however hard he racked his considerable brains, ever remember having seen his sister smile. After years of indifference to him, it was she who had delivered Gian Gastone the harshest blow of all and had precipitated the event that would allow her brother’s hatred of women to blossom into full-blown bloom. For it was his sister who had persuaded their father that Gian Gastone should take a wife and had in fact proposed the very woman who now tortured his existence: Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg, the wealthy widow of Count Palatine Philip of Neuberg. Franziska’s chief accomplishment seemed to be that her overbearing behaviour had driven her husband to drink himself to death in three short years.

  Meek, as he was, under his father’s eye, Gian Gastone obediently married and headed into dreary exile in Bavaria through the same Bohemian forests that had been such a comfort to Violante. His spirits sank permanently on his arrival at Franziska’s ramshackle wooden castle of Ploskovice, where his new wife proceeded to torture him with her peevish moods.

  Mother, sister, wife: all had played their part in turning Gian Gastone against the female sex. And that is how Violante Beatrix de’ Medici, his brother’s wife and widow, had – fairly easily, it must be said – climbed to the top of his order of women. He had met her only three times, but her kindness and sweet nature recommended her; and besides, he owed her more than she could ever know. Gian Gastone called for Dami, his constant companion, and waved Violante’s letter at him.

  Giuliano Dami was his salvation. In Dami he had found the companion, brother and soulmate he had never had. Dami understood the extent of his gluttony and helped Gian Gastone to understand the seemingly limitless depths of his own sexual depravity. Dami was not stupid enough to be jealous or to expect Gian Gastone to be his exclusive lover; he quickly saw the advantages of being a pander – of boys, of food, of alcohol, of whatever his master desired. This proceeded not just from a healthy slice of self-interest but also from a genuine affection for his handsome and increasingly rotund young master. With his soft sibilant voice, Dami would whisper in his master’s ears a constant stream of almost hypnotic reassurance: that one day Gian Gastone would be the grand duke, a fate that became more and more likely with each misfortune that befell his master’s siblings. And now that the duchy was threatened with insurrection in Tuscany, Gian Gastone realized that his sister-in-law’s letter was a document of passage. Even his bullying wife could not gainsay an expedition at such a time.

  ‘Dami,’ he said, ‘pack my trunks. We’re going to Sien
a.’

  Dami bowed, smoothly and obediently, and just quickly enough to hide the look of horror in his strange purple eyes.

  Gian Gastone’s golden carriage, with the Medici cognizance on the doors, sped through Siena’s Piazza del Campo. Pigeons and starlings rose before the wheels, dodging certain death, and women and children fled from the carriage’s path. Violante and Gretchen stood back as the great gold coach crammed through the gateway of the Palazzo Popolo. The team of six bays, frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling, dug in their hooves, slipping on the greasy pavings, sending the ridiculous bonfire of brooms flying. The carter’s unfortunate mule, which in one day had been to Montepulciano and back, now seemed doomed to die beneath the hooves of his more exalted brethren. Riccardo calmed the cowering creature, then caught the reins of the bolting team, stopping the coach and speaking softly into the ears of one, then another, till all half-dozen stood still as stone.

  Violante, Gretchen, Riccardo and the carter watched, spellbound, as four young fellows swarmed down from the roof and racks of the coach, wrenched open the door with its insignia and began, in a practised way, to prise the occupant of the carriage loose from his confines. Giuliano Dami, whom Violante recalled as Gian Gastone’s constant shadow, sprang down from the other door of the carriage, bowed to her most correctly and went to help his master retain as much dignity in his descent as he could. Violante felt a chill pass through her. She had never liked Dami, and the glance of his purple eyes, and the sibilance of his speech, awakened a painful memory in her.

  In little under a minute, dishevelled, jugbitten and enormously obese, the heir of Tuscany stood before his open-mouthed sister-in-law. As if waking from a dream, Violante stepped forward and kissed Gian Gastone on both his sweating cheeks. She could not believe that this was the same person as the handsome slim scholar who had helped her most kindly when she had suffered her shattering loss, who had arranged for her twins to be laid to rest when she had been crippled by grief. This service he had rendered her had bound her forever in his debt, and for this reason she proceeded, as she had done all her life, to take refuge in etiquette and good form. She did not, in manner or look, rebuke her brother-in-law for descending upon her without notice. Instead she reminded herself that she had written to him, she had bidden him come.