Gian Gastone seemed both mortally wounded and insistent that she should go. Violante had no wish to listen to the pleadings of a man she feared, but at the appointed time she crossed the piazza to the jail, with Gretchen in tow. At the gates the obsequious governor met her. She knew, of course, he informed her silkily, that Sienese law stated that she must enter the cell alone?
The place was cold and dank. The jailer set a stool for her on the damp rushes. She sat and waited, Dami’s purple eyes glinting at her from the dark. The rest of him was an obscure, hunched shadow. His stare gave her a shiver, and recalled to her the darkest days of her life. She uttered a single word: ‘Well?’
‘They are going to kill me,’ said the shadow, in the sibilant accents that had always chilled her flesh.
‘I know.’
‘Set me free.’
Here in this dark place, with no light, they could be themselves. There was no dissembling, no wigs, costumes, or patches.
‘Why should I?’
The harshness of her own voice, echoing back to her from the dripping walls, surprised her. The echo died and she waited for the answer. She could not have dreamed of what he would say.
‘Because I have never been righteous.’ He leaned forward to give weight to this odd statement, so she could see the meaningful glint of his purple eyes. ‘Only the righteous are taken into the arms of the Lord.’
Then she knew. She was back twenty years, lying on her childbed, listening to the words of another shadow. An unknown priest. The purple eyes, the sibilant accents, the fragment of scripture. She could not breathe.
‘Set me free,’ said Giuliano Dami, ‘and I will give you back your child.’
Domenico Bruni was concerned about his son. There were only seven days to the Palio and he did not seem to want to work his horse, nor even care for him. It was Domenico himself who curried Leocorno’s silky white coat and who picked and cleaned his hooves. He could not ride him because the stallion would let only Riccardo on his back, and so he was getting little exercise. Riccardo would not even ride Leocorno in the horse trials, ridden by the contrade jockeys and their appointed horses, around the track in the great Piazza del Campo. It was as if he didn’t care.
Since the visit of the stranger a month ago, Domenico had lived in fear. Now he clung to that which was dearest to him, as if he might, at any day, lose Riccardo. Now, with Dami in jail, his fears were different. He felt that Riccardo was lost to him already.
The sole person Riccardo wanted to see was Zebra, who came to the Tower contrada with daily reports of Pia. The horseman could not live with himself, could not bear to be inside his own skin, nor the kiss of the sun, nor the sound of the starlings. Everything hurt him: every sound was too loud, every sight too bright for his eyes. He slept long hours in the stable, and only a consuming desire to stay alive to see Pia once more kept him from running to Faustino’s palace and tearing down the doors.
It was Zebra who made the suggestion. On the second night of this malaise, he tapped Riccardo on the shoulder. Riccardo woke to see the familiar hazel eyes of his young friend.
‘Go and see her,’ said the boy.
‘How?’
‘How did you get the Panther out of there? You could get back in.’
In the velvet night, on the eve of the Palio, Riccardo crossed the piazza to the Fonte Gaia. He lifted the well-remembered paving and plunged into the bottini tunnels beneath the city. He walked the earthen ways by the glassy-green pools until his fingers found the outline of the stone door through which he had carried Egidio Albani those many weeks ago. At the end of the subterranean passageways he came to the stone door and pushed it, knowing that if there was a guard within, he was ending his own life, too. But he did not care. It was over anyway.
By the time he came to her, Pia couldn’t believe it was him.
Afraid and alone in the dank darkness, her mind had become so confused that when the wall with the eagle on it began to move she thought she was dreaming. In her reverie, Lancelot had come to save her from the dragon’s breath. When a figure had come through the wall she almost greeted him with the knight’s name.
But he took her in his arms at once. And then she was afraid of waking as he kissed her, hard and silently, feeling that she could spend the rest of her life in this fetid and bloodied place if she could just spend it in his arms. She felt his fingers numbering her ribs, knew she was so thin now that her Eagle wedding ring nearly slipped off into his hair. Soon it would not matter.
He took her arm to lead her out of the door and she suddenly knew it was not a dream. It was Riccardo and he was going to get her out of here. But she shook her head.
‘Sit,’ she said.
‘But we must go.’
‘Where? Think, Riccardo. We would have to run for ever.’ She took his hand in her cold fingers, warming them, and looked in his eyes. ‘And what kind of city would we leave behind? One run by Faustino? And what would happen to the duchess, who has to be got out of the way, and the Padovani heiress aged thirteen who is stuffed with coin? You have to ride the Palio. You have to beat them that way. They will not act against me before then. I am to be in the crowd. They cannot afford to anger my father before the design is complete.’
‘And after that?’
She dropped her great eyes. ‘Take this,’ she said, unhooking Cleopatra’s owlet pendant from around her neck. ‘Take it as a pledge of my faith, and ride as my champion.’ She’d once dreamed of having a handsome champion – how skewed and strange that dream had become.
‘Pia.’ He took her hands, clasping Cleopatra’s coin within, hard, hurting her. ‘What is to happen?’
She would not look at him. ‘I will be condemned to die, by law, after the Palio. Nello will marry again – his bride is already chosen. They made a mistake with me, but they still need my father for a few days more.’
She took a breath – now she could finish it, the quotation she’d begun the day she’d been with him in the confessional, complete the prophecy.
‘Ah, when you have returned to the world, and rested from the long journey, remember me, the one who is Pia; Siena made me, Maremma undid me: he knows it, the one who first encircled my finger with his jewel, when he married me.’
Riccardo looked at the ring on her finger and the owl in his hands, at the golden eyes that winked at him conspiratorially in the torchlight. She could see he was fearful, so fearful for her that he could not bear it.
‘I cannot do it. You don’t know me. I am a craven coward. I am responsible for many deaths, because I was afraid.’
Faltering, Riccardo choked out a dreadful story: of a church in Milazzo, of a young mother and a burning building. Pia listened with horror and pity, not only for those innocents, but also for him and these spectres that he had carried with him for so long.
Now she understood. She took his face in both hands.
‘You were a child yourself,’ she said. ‘And if you’d stayed, you would have died that day and not lived to see this. You tried to save Vicenzo and now you have a chance to save more lives. Take it.’
He looked in her eyes and nodded once. She forced herself to speak again.
‘And now I must ask you something much harder, and beside this, to win the race is nothing.’
‘What is it?’
She uttered the most terrible sentence she’d ever had to say. ‘You must leave me here. Promise.’
‘You have to get me out of here. Promise.’
Violante’s heart was thudding in her ears, so hard that she could barely hear Dami. ‘Tell me.’
‘You’ll free me?’
And she forgot Pia. ‘Yes.’
Dami let out a long breath, and began to tell a story that was twenty years old. He had never repeated it to anyone else, not even Gian Gastone, and even now he knew he could not tell the worst of it, lest this woman kill him dead right here with her own hands. He would tell the light, not the shadow, the white, not the black.
For Giulia
no Dami had committed the worst and the best acts of his life twenty years ago. When, on Gian Gastone’s orders, he had dressed as a priest to take Violante’s twins from her and murder them, he had thought he was equal to the task. He had directed that Violante should be drugged before the abduction and when he entered the birthing chamber he could see that it had been a wise precaution. Even in sleep, she had an arm around each tiny babe as each suckled away at a full, blue-veined breast. Violante’s face, as she slumbered under the heavy coverlet of laudanum, was a picture of serenity and happiness. But Dami felt no misgivings as he took each child from the breast, both dribbling a little warm milk from their mouths as they released Violante’s nipples with tiny twin pops. Even this did not touch Dami’s heart. He took the keening babes in his black robes to the next chamber.
There, in that dark room, he consigned his soul to hell, only to have it redeemed. He had never killed a child before, but thought it would be no great matter, for a babe so newly born could be easily dispatched and sent back to the void with only a momentary glimpse of the world he was never meant to inhabit. He laid one boy on the bed and held the other in his arms, in a horrible imitative pantomime of the way Violante had cradled the babes. He considered clasping his hand around the little folds of its neck, but found it difficult to get purchase on a throat so small. He cast about for a pillow to smother the child, but they had all been taken next door in the service of the new mother. In the end he pushed his forefinger down into the tiny mouth.
What happened next gave him a glimpse of the abyss down which he was to fall, for the babe, having been taken from its mother’s teat, closed its warm wet lips around Dami’s finger and began to suckle. Dami felt a shock of tenderness through his body, a dread so sharp that he reacted violently, forcing the finger further and further in, until the baby began to thrash around and then, at last, stop.
The other boy lay calmly on the bed, watching murder done. He followed Dami with caper-green eyes as he laid his dead brother on the bed next to him. As the purple eyes met the open gaze, Dami knew he would rather die himself than commit such an act again. And so, Giuliano Dami’s damned soul flew from the closing jaws of hell just as the flames and demons snatched at his heels. He had killed one of the twins as he had been ordered by his master and lover. The other, he would save.
He wrapped both children, the dead and the live together, and took them down the back stair unobserved. By the banks of the Arno he took the living babe from the cloth, replaced him with three great stones and wrapped the bundle again. He heaved the other tiny body into the river, turning away before he even heard the splash. Then he picked up the living child and headed back to the palazzo.
By the great gates he found a fellow untying his horse. He knew the man slightly, a master farrier from Siena, known as the best in all Tuscany, come to tend to the duke’s favourite horse. The man was on his way home, he said, and would ride from the city tonight, likely never to return. Siena was not far away, but it was far enough. Dami gave the child to the man to take away from Florence, telling him that he was to raise the child as his own on the grand duke’s orders. He could see that the fellow was softened by the baby’s eyes and the minute hand that reached up from the swaddling cloths. But the deciding factor was the purse that Dami proffered. It was almost as heavy as the child itself.
His soul by turns heavy and light, Dami went straight to his master, who was sitting, waiting patiently in a chamber as dark as the one where he had done murder.
‘It is done,’ he said. ‘You are now the heir to Tuscany.’ Gian Gastone nodded once, and Dami turned from him, loving him a little less than he had done before. Only when he closed the door behind him did Dami begin to shake.
And so Domenico Bruni, crippled by grief at the loss of his young wife, but buoyed by his commission to Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, unknowingly took the Medici princeling home to Siena.
Giuliano Dami, now facing his own death, did not want to take a chance on whether or not his act of murder or his act of salvation would weigh more heavily in the scales on Judgment Day. He just knew that he had a card to play, and he played it to save his own sorry skin.
He had feared Violante because he had wronged her so much, and she was nothing but a source of terror to him. How Satan himself must have laughed that she now held his life in her hands. Dami did not, of course, tell Violante the whole story. Even in extremis he was clever enough to know that if he confessed to the murder of one of her twins, she would never release him.
He diluted the tale thus: one of the twins had died, and been cast into the Arno; the other was to be murdered on the orders of Gian Gastone. He, Dami, had saved the child by giving it to Domenico Bruni. He realized he would be burning his bridges with his master, but could see no other way out of the noose.
Violante, shattered, sat for a long, long moment in silence, the chill of the jail freezing her hands and feet, her heart burning with the sun and shade of joy and loss. Joy that she had a son, and what a son! A man she already loved, with a love to which she could now give free rein. She felt again the aching loss of the boy who had died, whose little bones lay bleached at the bottom of the Arno, with three stones for his bedfellows, one for each hour he had lived. She felt loss, too, that she had missed twenty years of her living son’s life, his first smile, his first tooth, his first communion. But then joy again that she had been given this gift of a truly good, a truly brave, a truly caring young man. She could take no credit for his manners or his bearing. She might have attributed his gifts to heredity, for Ferdinando had once been the finest of young men, Gian Gastone, too. But both had given their love to boys and men, and reduced their wives to misery; and one had stooped to infanticide to clear his path to the dukedom. What inheritance was that?
Violante stumbled from the dark cell into the blinding sunlight, pausing only to tell the jailer that Dami should spend one more night in prayer and penance and would be freed on the morrow with the dispensation of the Palio.
As Violante crossed the square, Gretchen had to hold her up. Violante was grateful for Gretchen’s support and silence. She could not have recounted the tale, for she could barely make sense of her own thoughts. She only knew, as she entered her own dark door, that she had finally realized why Riccardo had always seemed so familiar, why she had recognized him on the first day they met, why she had warmed to him at first sight. He had recalled to her mind the young Ferdinando, his father. And the final joy and loss was felt as she passed the Torre del Mangia. For she might have found her son, but he had gone, angered, from her sight.
Violante could not face Gian Gastone yet. She knew he would be waiting in her presence chamber, pacing, awaiting the outcome of the interview with Dami. She wondered if he would still want Dami free if he knew what he had confessed to her. With a strength she had not known she possessed, she determined to conceal what she knew. She would use Dami as a bargaining counter in this chess game between herself and her brother-in-law.
She sent Gretchen to find Zebra, and when the boy arrived she took his hand and looked at the nine-year-old’s bitten nails. What she would have given to have known Riccardo at this age. She smiled especially sweetly at Zebra today and asked him gently if he knew where Riccardo Bruni might be.
‘As for today, Duchess, I do not know,’ he replied, ‘for he rode Leocorno out of the gates this morning, early. He’s training hard, mistress.’
Zebra did not say that it was Riccardo’s visit to Pia that had changed him, inspiring him to ride again, to win, to kiss his abandoned horse’s white nose and ask for forgiveness. Zebra had seen it all, at daybreak, as Riccardo vaulted on to Leocorno’s back and rode him into the hills, the westward way that they always took, to see the western aspect of the city. There, the boy knew, they would ride circuit after circuit, against the backdrop of Siena, training to win. Zebra said nothing of all this; for much as he liked the kindly duchess, he kept his information to be parcelled up for coin. He squinted up at her plain,
troubled face and relented.
‘But I can tell you for sure where he will be tomorrow morning.’
‘Where?’
‘Why, in the church of the Torre. At the blessing of his horse.’
Of course. On the morning of the Palio, each contrada blessed their horse in their own church. The Palio was to be run tomorrow. Violante forced herself to focus on the implications of this. Riccardo Bruni, her son, the finest rider in the city, was to ride in the Palio for the Torre party. The woman he loved was imprisoned by the Eagle’s captain, whose son Nello was destined to win the Palio. Riccardo, the only rider with the skill to threaten the plan, had been given a horse by Faustino, a horse bred to lose the race. Nello was going to win and fulfil the expectations of a betting syndicate who would then bankroll the Nine. Siena, her city, would be taken from her. No, she thought with a shock, Riccardo’s city would be taken from him. The peasant that Gian Gastone had pronounced below his notice now outranked him. Violante had, at last, fulfilled her destiny. Tuscany had an heir.
Violante had a moment of sudden clarity. If Riccardo could win the Palio, the Nine would be beggared, and her son would still have a city. And according to Zebra, he was trying, and training, desperately to win. As for the threat of Romulus, whoever he was, and whatever higher power that threatened the city: well, Gian Gastone would have to step in. She must treat with this murderer. He had to atone for his crimes.
The duchess went upstairs to her presence chamber and turned the handle. Gian Gastone was there, waiting, and turned to her. She looked into his fat anxious face, the concealment of her revulsion the hardest dissembling she had ever done. He, and he alone, was responsible for the twenty lost years with Riccardo. She went to the ivory box below her window and drew out the statute that she’d hidden there. She handed it to her brother-in-law.
The Daughter of Siena: A Novel Page 24