The Daughter of Siena: A Novel

by Marina Fiorato

  ‘I will free Dami.’

  His face collapsed in relief.

  ‘If,’ she said, ‘you will write to your sister Anna Maria Luisa. We need an armed force in the city; she has the Palatinate army billeted at Florence. You have little time.’ She knew how he hated his sister, who had married him to a wife he detested and exiled him from his beloved Florence, but she did not care.

  ‘Then send me a scribe, dear sister.’ He was wheedling now.

  ‘In your own hand, with your own seal.’ She thought better of it. ‘In fact, take off your signet ring and packet it up with the letter.’

  Gian Gastone, his chins quivering with emotion, twisted the Medici ring on his sausage-like finger. ‘But, sister, I am not sure it will come off.’

  Violante planted both hands on the writing table and leaned in to him. ‘It will,’ she said, barely recognizing the strength of her own voice, ‘even if we have to cut it off.’

  Letter in hand, Violante headed to the courtyard to seek out her fastest galloper. As she passed through the Hall of the Nine she saw again, staring out from the fresco of good government, the lady who held the hourglass, the sands of time running through her fingers. Violante quickened her steps. She must be swift; the Palio was tomorrow and Florence was a good few hours’ ride away.

  In the shadowy courtyard, where she had first greeted her brother-in-law, she called for her ostler. She commanded the old fellow, an ancient of the Dragon contrada, to find the fastest horse in the city to take an urgent missive to Florence. What about the horse Berio, she asked in a rush of inspiration, the big bay who had won the July Palio? The star horse had been missing from this month’s horse draw, so was not needed for tomorrow’s race. But the old ostler told her that after the July Palio, Berio had disappeared and had not been seen since.

  Crestfallen, Violante gave her orders and climbed the stairs to her chamber. She gazed from her windows at the Torre contrada. Already the citizens of the Torre were decorating the streets with flags and streamers in the blue and burgundy of their colours. Somewhere, somewhere down there, Riccardo lived with a man who was not his father. She had been right to conceal Dami’s confession from Gian Gastone. If Riccardo’s existence was revealed, his life would not be worth a straw. Word had come from Florence that the old Grand Duke Cosimo was still in a deep malaise, his end expected at any day. Gian Gastone was within touching distance of his rule.

  Violante grasped the windowsill until her knuckles were white. She wanted to scream, and cry, and laugh, and tear at her skin, and run down to the Torre contrada, to wait in the stable, if need be, for Riccardo and Leocorno to come home. Even after she retired to her bed, she could not sleep, her flesh burning, her heart racing, knowing that tomorrow she would meet her son.

  That night, for the first time in twenty years, she did not have the dream of the twins. She thought of them, though, wakeful and wondering. She went over and over her short acquaintance with the boys. She remembered so vividly the differences between them: the twin who suckled strongly, the gentler quieter baby who held back. Which one was Riccardo? She recalled well that the babies had been given names, in the bogus christening – funeral stage-managed by Gian Gastone: empty names for empty caskets. She remembered Ferdinando sitting on the birthbed – deathbed, telling her what the boys had been named.

  As the dawn, at last, crept across the sky, she wondered which twin she was about to meet – Gastone or Cosimo. She could not countenance that her son would share a name with his would-be murderer, so she decided, then and there, that Cosimo de’ Medici had lived. The auguries were good; Cosimo would bring back the glory days of the Medici, the days of the first Cosimo the Great, who’d ruled Florence through her golden age.

  Violante squeezed her eyes tight shut, daring sleep to come. She hoped Riccardo Bruni had slept the night well, for what she would tell him this day would change his world and his future, and all the days in the life of Cosimo Ferdinando de’ Medici.

  At six in the morning on the day of the Palio, Riccardo Bruni was already up, currying and grooming Leocorno until the white horse shone. Today the stallion was to be blessed in the Tower church and later he was to run the race of his life.

  Riccardo ran his hand under his own tight collar. The sun beat on his head and heat rose from the stones. He was dressed in his fantino regalia, in the burgundy and blue of the Torre contrade, with the kerchief of the elephant and castle around his neck. Whatever else happened today, he would at least see Pia again. He was jangling with nerves and fidgeted with Leocorno’s tack, fiddling unnecessarily, repeating little tasks over again. Leocorno, in sympathy, twitched his ear and lifted and replaced his hooves. It was a relief to both of them when Zebra appeared in the yard.

  ‘You’re early,’ muttered Riccardo ungraciously, for he had agreed to let Zebra help to lead the horse to the Torre church for the blessing. For this day only, Zebra found his partiality for Riccardo and the Tower contrada difficult to conceal. Zebra looked about him.

  ‘Inside,’ he said briefly.

  Riccardo, curious, dropped Leocorno’s head rein and followed Zebra into the cool, hay-scented dark of the stable. Leocorno nosily hooked his head over the half-door to listen to their council.

  Zebra vaulted up on to a haybale and licked his lips. ‘I was down at the horse fair at Asciano yesterday and I talked to Boli, you know, the horse dealer?’

  Riccardo flapped his hands impatiently. ‘I know who he is. Had he heard of Leocorno?’

  ‘Heard of him?’ The boy gave a pony’s snort. ‘He sold him to Faustino. Apparently all the traders know of him and no one will touch him. Boli got him at a card game with the other dealers.’

  Riccardo was intrigued. ‘He won him at cards?’

  Zebra shook his head slowly. ‘He lost his hand and had to take him.’

  Riccardo looked at Leocorno’s beautiful head hanging over the half-door, blowing and snorting as if he wished to join in the conversation.

  ‘Why?’

  Zebra lowered his voice as if the horse could understand them. ‘Because he’s a murderer. Killed three people in the last six months.’

  Riccardo’s eyes widened with shock. ‘Are you sure?’

  This time Zebra nodded. ‘Sure. Boli told me himself. Ah yes, the Unicorn, he said. He crossed himself every time he said his name.’

  Riccardo cleared his throat, then lowered his voice too. ‘How did he kill them?’

  ‘Threw two of ’em. Crushed another against a wall.’

  ‘But why? He’s a good bloodline, surely? You can see that just by looking at him.’ Riccardo gazed across at the stallion’s noble profile in the half-dark.

  ‘None better,’ agreed Zebra, looking too. ‘Pure-bred Lipizzan, from Styria by way of the Spanish Riding School, just as your dad said. Schooled for the Spanish army as an officer’s mount and became a general’s horse an’ all. But they say he was in a battle and it turned him funny in the head. Practically stood on a cannon, which turned him deaf. Threw his general off – fellow called Alvarez y Leon – killed him. After that he wouldn’t have anyone else on his back.’

  Alvarez y Leon. Riccardo went cold. He remembered the general, with his marauding Spaniards and their firebrands. So Leocorno had been at Milazzo, just like him, had seen what he had seen.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Boli kept him for a bit. He’d sell him, then the horse would kill his rider, and the family would give him back – didn’t want the horse around to remind them, didn’t even want the money back. Word got round that he was possessed by the Devil.’ Now it was Zebra’s turn to cross himself.

  Riccardo, looking into Leocorno’s liquid eye, didn’t think it was the Devil who was in the horse. He’d been in a war, and knew that it was not demons but man who created that particular earthbound hell, but he said nothing. Zebra went on, ‘Boli sold him three times and there were three deaths. Boli thought it was Christmastide – that the horse was a real moneyspinner – he could sell him over and o
ver. Then the last family, of the fellow that got crushed against a wall, got a bit upset and told Boli he should have the horse destroyed. But by then, Boli had another buyer.’

  ‘Faustino Caprimulgo?’

  ‘Faustino Caprimulgo.’

  ‘So he does want to kill me,’ Riccardo said.

  Zebra shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘I’m not so sure. I just think he knows you can’t win on him. You can’t race a horse you can’t ride.’

  ‘But I can ride him. I have ridden him.’

  ‘I might be wrong. But I tell you what I’d do,’ Zebra said with a wisdom beyond his years. ‘I’d get to the church before anyone and tether him to the altar so he sees only you. And after, I’d wait until everyone goes before you lead him out. And I wouldn’t put him through the rest of the horse trials today either.’ For the final trials took place on the very day of the Palio. ‘I’m just not sure how he’ll take to a crowd.’

  Riccardo nodded. He rose and went to the horse, stroking the stallion’s white nose. Leocorno whickered with pleasure.

  Zebra, catching sight of the scar on the horse’s forehead, stood too, reluctantly.

  ‘And there’s something else. This scar.’ He ran his small fingers over the little star of raised tissue. ‘I asked Boli why they named him Unicorn. He said he used to have a Lipizzan name – Neopolitano something – but they called him Unicorn because of something that happened on the last day of the battle.’

  Riccardo, still stroking, waited.

  ‘He took a bayonet to the forehead. Went clean through the skull. Apparently he was running around the cavalry lines with this great thing sticking out of his head, with everyone laughing at him and calling him a unicorn. But he was so mad by then, and dangerous with it, no one dared pull it out. He killed a sapper that tried, kicked him in the head; the boy had a perfect horseshoe on his face. No one would go near him after that. Finally they caught him and a medico yanked out the bayonet. But a bit of the blade stayed in there. That’s what caused the bump – the skin healed over the fragment of blade. Boli reckons that’s why he’s so crazy – sees ghosts and everything.’ Zebra looked sideways at Riccardo. ‘Boli also reckons the blade’ll work its way in and kill him in the end.’

  Riccardo started at Zebra, stricken, and back at the horse. For a moment he couldn’t speak. He stroked the horse a little harder and pulled the white ears. He was now even more determined to win: not for the duchess, but for the Unicorn. Trying to keep his voice steady, he said, ‘Come on, anyway. We’d better get going if we’re to be first into church. And Zebra, get you to the church of Aquila, to see how Pia does.’

  He had no need to articulate to Zebra the world of meaning that that one word anyway covered. But as he and Zebra led Leocorno from the Tower’s stableyard, Riccardo had the distinct feeling that his world was being turned upside down, bit by bit. He didn’t know that the process had only just begun.

  Across the city to the west, Pia of the Tolomei was sitting in the church of the Eagles. Allowed out from her cell for appearances’ sake, she had been bullied and bathed and dressed by Nicoletta. She sat in a gown of black and yellow, the colours of the Eagle, for the Palio. She reflected that last month she had had her final outing in the Civetta colours. This would be her last outing in the plumage of the Eagles. She sat on her hard pew regarding the world through a veil of black lace, a hooded falcon.

  The church door opened from within and she could see Nello framed by the daylight in the doorway, leading his big black stallion. Latecomers eased past him touching his yellow-and-black sleeve for luck, the children with eyes as round and bright as coins as they goggled at him. Pia could see his lips tighten a little in an unaccustomed smile: a vestigial smear of a thing, communicating not warmth but pride. She thought he was happy. He had got what he wanted: he was in his brother’s place – he had recognition, which he would transform later in the day to adulation.

  Nello led his horse into the incense-laden velvet dark, the horse’s new shoes clopping on the marble. As the doors closed behind him, Pia’s eyes adjusted in the light of a thousand candles, and looked round at the pews packed with yellow and black. Cheers and stamping drummed in her ears, an audible shock after her days spent in a dank cell. At the altar Nello handed the head-collar to the priest and sat in the front pew next to Pia. She felt his thigh, hard from riding, lying along hers and steeled herself not to ease away.

  Pia listened to the prayers in an agony of impatience. She wanted the race to begin, could not countenance the hours between now and seven this night, could not wait that long to see Riccardo again. She had barely slept last night, curled in the corner of her cell. Come what may, she would at least set eyes on Riccardo today and she was in a ferment until then.

  Now, in the church, she sat just beyond a rough black flank as Nello’s horse stood, stock-still and patient, waiting for his blessing as if he knew the form. Idly she fixed her eyes on the stallion’s hindquarters, waiting, like the rest of the congregation, for the horse to defecate – a sign of good luck. Her eyes wandered down the left hock, just above the cannon bone, to check the wound that the horse had received when he’d jumped the castle wall. When she’d gone to the stables to pet her palfrey, the stallion had been gentle with her and let her stroke his rough flank. She craned forward. The wound had healed well and the hair was beginning to grow back. Pia peered closer and for a moment her breathing stopped.

  The hair, growing back over the white scar, was a copper colour beside the rough black.

  The horse was a bay.

  Her heart began to thud and images gathered in her head like roosting starlings. Nello, his white hair dyed black by her own hand. The little bottle of pigment from the Goose contrada, the ward of the city that was the province of the dyers’ guild. The horse’s rough black coat, brittle under the hand and never gaining any condition, no matter how much he was curried and groomed. The mane and tail chopped about and hacked bluntly to make the horse appear different.

  As if in a dream, Pia stood as the priest blessed the horse and took one velvet ear to cup to her mouth as she had seen Riccardo do. The hair tickled her lips.

  ‘Berio?’

  Tuscany’s fastest horse answered with a low whicker, tossed his head once and began to nibble the lobe of Pia’s ear, just as he had greeted her when she had gentled him at the deadly San Martino corner, last month when Vicenzo had crumpled and died. Then, she had placed a hand on the white star on Berio’s forehead. And there it was, once a white star, now dark grey: the white hair – lighter than the bay coat – that the rough black dye could not quite cover.

  Nello shot her a glance. She took her hand away.

  ‘For luck,’ she said, and smiled her best, dimpled smile.

  He nodded once, shortly, and turned to lead the horse into the day, dodging the showers of holy water shaken over them from the myrtle branches held by the congregation. Attempting to gather together her fragments of shattered thought, Pia could almost feel the collective will of the people of the Eagle contrada. She looked at Nello to see how this was affecting him. He seemed satisfied, but ultimately unmoved. A more devout man, in this holy place, might have felt the weight of expectation that Christ felt when, under the breeze of a thousand waving palms, he entered Jerusalem. But Nello was no Messiah, thought Pia, and this was no donkey.

  This was Berio.

  Pia scanned the crowd for the little black-and-white figure that she sought. She spied the pied messenger and collared him, hurriedly, before her jailer could emerge from the church.

  ‘Please, tell Signor Bruni that Nello’s horse is Berio.’

  The boy’s eyes widened. She flapped her hands impatiently.

  ‘Berio. Go!’

  Zebra trotted back in the direction of the Tower, as Nicoletta’s grip closed on her arm.

  In the Tower contrada, Violante waited for Riccardo outside the church of the Torre. She was the only silent and still figure in the jubilant crowd. She waited for the blessing to be
over, anxious to tell Riccardo what she must. For some reason he’d kept his horse inside until the crowd had dispersed, instead of leading the contrada out as tradition dictated. Riccardo saw her there, and something in her eyes must have spoken to him, for he gave the reins of his white horse to Domenico at once. She then led him back into the empty church, and sat him down in the front pew beneath the altar. It felt like the right place. She thought of the hours and days she had spent before the figure of the Madonna del Latte, and closed her eyes.

  ‘In the name of Mary, Mother of God,’ she said, ‘I swear that what I am about to tell you is the truth.’

  He sat still and silent till she had finished, twisting his kerchief over and over in his hands. Only once did he raise his eyes to hers, when she told of the twin brother, Gastone, who had died at birth. When she had done he was silent.

  ‘You are my mother?’

  It was as if, for a moment, he was once again that little boy whose childhood she had missed. She had to bite her lip before she could answer.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And my father? My … real father?’

  She cast about to say something good about Ferdinando. The man she had loved so much, hated so much. She pleated her violet skirt between her fingers: the colour she still wore for him.

  ‘He was a great man, a man of letters and of music.’

  She could see doubt written in his face and she wanted, so much, to hold him in her arms. Instead, she said gently: ‘Do you know what this means? You are the heir to the duchy, and when Cosimo de’ Medici, your grandfather, dies, you will be the duke of Tuscany.’

  ‘But what of Pia, of the Palio?’

  ‘You must ride, or you will not have a city to inherit. And Pia will be there at the Palio, I am sure of it.’