The Daughter of Siena: A Novel

by Marina Fiorato

  Riccardo picked himself up, stroking Leocorno, kissing him. He looked in the horse’s frightened eyes and understood. The press of the horses, the thousands of gathered men, the heat, the baying crowd. Leocorno was back in Milazzo. Back in battle. Zebra’s words drifted back to Riccardo on the rumble of the gathering. I’m not sure how he’ll react to a crowd.

  Riccardo pressed his two hands to the sides of the white horse’s face. He closed his eyes and rested his own forehead on the animal’s scar. For a moment he was flooded with such love, such fellow feeling for this poor, damaged beast that he almost forgot Pia. He did not use his trickery, nor his whisperings; he just said over and over again, please, please, please. His voice a crescendo, shouting the word, so Leocorno could hear. He looked up into the horse’s eyes. Whites showing all around. Fearful.

  He had an inspiration. ‘Run,’ he shouted. ‘Run away from it. Seventy-five heartbeats and you’ll be away from here. You can be at peace. Just run. Run.’

  Leocorno blinked and he tossed his head. Riccardo, sensing his moment, mounted easily, and Leocorno stood stock-still. Riccardo called down blessings on him and edged him, very very gently, to the starting ropes.

  There was the customary confusion at the start, then finally, in a moment of almost unbearable tension, the horses lined and stilled as if bade by an invisible command. In a moment of eerie silence the unaccustomed tongue of the great bell Sunto sounded in the Torre del Mangia above Violante’s head. Silent from one Palio to the next, the bell’s song bawled out above the mêlée, to tell that the hour had come. All heads turned and all gazes swivelled up – to watch the bandierino weathervane on the Mangia Tower, which would turn in that last breath of wind to the quarter of the city that was to be favoured with victory. Unmoving in the heat, the weathervane did not budge, then slowly, slowly, it turned in a last-minute breath of breeze to the Tower contrada.

  Riccardo’s fingers tightened on the reins. Leocorno tossed his head high but was calmed by the silence. Time stretched, and Riccardo’s neck and thumbs began to prickle with his sixth sense. He realized, in a flash, that the trap was about to be sprung. It was as if he was on a castle wall, the sappers already beneath him with their explosives, or standing in a deertrap, waiting for the iron teeth to close.

  He understood at once the fiendishness of Faustino’s plan. There was no way Leocorno would be able to survive what followed the silence. The ear-splitting roar of the crowd, of those thousand souls at the beginning of the Palio, the boom of the mortaretto cannon, would take him back to the battlefield and he would be driven to frenzy.

  Riccardo almost smiled. Of course. Faustino had been so clever, so damned clever. It didn’t matter how much Riccardo schooled Leocorno in the wide spaces of the Maremma, or the peaceful stone courts of the city. It was this moment, now that counted, and this moment would be too much for the Unicorn. Faustino had known it, known it all. Riccardo’s card was marked.

  In a sudden determination not to be beaten, he took the colours from his throat, tore off the very kerchief he had so lately defended from Nello, the beloved burgundy and blue of the Tower, the colours that were home to him, that were his father, that were everything he had ever known and loved. He tore the kerchief in two at the horrified gasps of the crowd. He stuffed each half firmly into each of Leocorno’s ears, soothing and calming the stallion all the while.

  At that moment everything happened at once. At the stroke of seven, Sunto stopped ringing, the mortaretto cannon sounded at the starting rope with a deafening boom, and the gold coin of Cleopatra, revealed at Riccardo’s throat for all to see, caught the low evening sun and winked treacherously at Nello Caprimulgo.

  Zebra heard the Sunto bell high above the city begin to chime, and at the seventh stroke there was a great roar from the distant piazza as the Palio began. At this signal the Romans threw off their capes and advanced towards the palace, each in a livery of crossed keys.

  But before they could muster themselves, hoofbeats sounded in the silent streets to match those in the thunderous square, and the gathered men faltered and turned in their march, to see a lone woman riding into the city seated astride a white palfrey. She was tall and patrician with a noble nose and hooded eyes, and only her silver hair gave away her age, for her figure was slim and straight. She might have been a fireside dowager, except that over her blue riding coat she wore a silver breastplate, bearing a gold shield with a ring of red balls upon it. Behind her, soldiers wearing the blue of the Palatinate rode in their hundreds.

  She was the Electress Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici.

  Pia clasped her hands as she counted the bells, the tension mounting unbearably with each chime. At the seventh stroke, Sunto stopped ringing above the piazza, the mortaretto cannon sounded at the starting rope with a deafening boom, ten horses leaped forth from the entrone, and they were off.

  Impossible for anyone who had not been here, thought Pia, to know that blood-curdling roar of the crowd, to hear the thunder of the hooves shiver your very ribs, to smell the sweat and the straw in your nose and taste the tufa dust in your mouth. The horses went by in a whirlwind, their flanks gleaming and polished with sweat, their mouths flecked with foam. Past the palazzo, thundering up the curve to Casato.

  She could see the Tower colours – Riccardo was ahead, nudging shoulder to shoulder with Nello. Riccardo rode hard as if he were alone in the world, his body communing with Leocorno as if they were out in the salt and sand of the Maremma with not a soul in sight. They were together in their world, Leocorno streaking away from the crowd, pulling as far away from them and the other horses as he could, running away towards peace and freedom. Pia’s nails bit into her palms, leaving red crescents, as the leaders reached the Casato. As they passed the benches of the Aquila, something moved her. A change, a final breaking away from everything she’d ever known.

  Pia Tolomei got to her feet.

  She cheered and yelled, she screamed and shouted. Never had she forgotten the constraints of her class before to this extent, never had she let herself go, never had she raised her voice above the softest of feminine tones. But today her voice was so loud, he could surely hear her even above the mêlée. It was the voice of someone sick of their personal purgatory, the voice of someone who had nothing more to lose, and she wanted him to hear her. She had never used his given name directly to him before, but now she screamed it: Riccardo, Riccardo, Riccardo.

  She did not know if he heard her. But Nello did.

  Violante, from her balcony, saw it all. With an agonizing scream, Nello leaped from his horse, inviting death by crossing the path of the other riders. Riccardo, a heartbeat later, slid from Leocorno’s back and followed, likewise dodging swiping whips and flashing hooves. Before Pia had time to run, Nello had clambered over the benches and laid hold of her, dragging her with freakish strength into the marble entrance of the Torre del Mangia. Even from her distance, Violante could hear Pia screaming Riccardo’s name again but Riccardo was trapped by the crowd, hemmed in by the bobbing heads that separated him from Pia.

  Violante rose at once and hurried into the palace. She prayed, as she ran through the library to the tower stair, that she would be in time. She had no clear idea of what she was going to do, but she had a crystal-clear certainty of what Nello intended. As she passed through the library, Dante’s words, the words she had read earlier that day, soaked into her consciousness like water to a sponge.

  How did Pia of the Tolomei die?

  Her husband threw her from a tower.

  Blinded by the darkness as she was dragged upwards, tens, hundreds of steps, Pia wondered if the first Pia had felt this too, this dryness of her mouth so she could not even scream, this weakness in her legs so she could barely climb? Gaining, foot by foot, the height that would destroy her, climbing away from the earth step by step, to give her the momentum to fall back through all these hundreds of feet of space to her death?

  Pia could hear voices echoing around the tower, but whether above or be
low, male or female, she did not know. They sounded like sirens mocking her last moments. But in the dreadful echoes she could hear one voice, the voice she loved above all others, calling out as if his heart would break. ‘Pia!’

  Riccardo. He would not be in time.

  As they burst out into the light Pia was blinded again. She could not see, once in the dizzying sunlight, nor hear for the thundering toll of the Sunto bell.

  As she clung to the balustrade she thought the end had come but her last moments were to be prolonged. Nello half dragged, half carried Pia up to the crenellated white crown of the tower. If he had cast her over the balustrade she would already be dead, but he clearly wanted the entire city to see this execution, to notice him for once, and this bought Pia time. She realized that he planned to take her to the very top where the golden ball of the Medici crowned the tower. Pia looked her last on the far horizon and thought, irrelevantly, I will never, now, see the sea. She did not scream nor struggle any more but clung to him, as she never had before, terrified by the dizzying view, horrified by the drop. Weedy and undersized all his life, forever compared to his brother Vicenzo, Nello had assumed superhuman strength in this final act.

  Through tear-blurred eyes, Pia saw Riccardo, closely followed by a figure in purple – the duchess. Pia wanted to laugh. They were too far below her. She was doomed.

  Riccardo started to climb and Nello, a good deal higher, shouted down at his pursuer. ‘Stay back! You will not win this time. For once, for once, I shall have my way.’

  And Pia knew then it was down to her. She embraced Nello for the first time, and felt a sudden and wholly unwelcome pang of pity. Nello, unwanted, unmarked: included by his father only once his brother was dead, and then only to achieve the city. Below them, Riccardo was climbing. Slowly, stealthily. She had to buy him time, and the sole way to do it was to give Nello the attention he desired.

  She began to speak, gently, struggling to keep her voice level, soft, her lips as near to his ear and the rough black hair as she could bear.

  ‘Your father, he wanted you to win today. He designed the whole syndicate around you, around your skill, around his esteem for you. He gave you a wondrous horse, and the chance to win the city.’

  Pia could hardly have chosen a more disastrous gambit. Nello’s mouth fell open in a terrible, jackal laugh, while his pink eyes reddened further with tears of rage.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to win the race. I just want the prize.’

  Pia, fighting every desire to scream and struggle, looked him in his pink eyes as Riccardo edged upward. ‘The city will be yours by tonight. You know it. Romulus comes.’

  ‘The city?’ Nello spat the word. ‘The city is not the prize.’

  He shook Pia until her teeth rattled, and she screamed at last at the sickening, dizzying drop below.

  ‘You are the prize. And my father offered you to him, pandered for him, so you could ride and talk and … kiss.’ His face was a ruin. ‘He could not trust me to win for him, for the Eagles, or as a champion for a wife who might love me. He had to create a rival for me in him, but he had no need. You would have been enough. I wanted you, only you. I wanted you to look at me, just once, the way you look at him. But he shall not have you, if I cannot.’

  Gazing into those maddened eyes, Pia steeled herself to say the unsayable.

  ‘Then, come, my husband. Let us go home. For if I die tonight, I will never have had the chance to lie with you.’

  And she kissed him, full on the lips.

  In that dreadful moment when he held her tight, devouring her, she reached to her boot. As Nello’s tongue pushed into her mouth, she thrust the horse shears through his tunic with all her desperate strength, and felt the hot flood of blood on her hands. His lips slackened against hers, his grasp loosened and she clung to the battlements. Nello looked at her for the fraction of one heartbeat, a hurt, questioning look that she would remember for ever, a red ribbon of blood falling from his mouth.

  Then he fell, in the shape of a cross, down, down, plunging from purgatory to hell.

  Zebra marvelled at the practised speed and dispatch with which the Palatinate army followed and surrounded the papal troops. There was no bloodshed, just a calm and quiet understanding; the pope’s men knew when they were outnumbered and when to cut their losses. The fellows with the crossed keys laid down their arms, and were bound and led away by the infantry. Then the Palatinate cavalry, led by the Electress herself, rode quietly and without incident to the piazza, and the palace of her brother the heir of Tuscany, whose letter she had received.

  Gian Gastone de’ Medici was not concerned for Siena, for he knew his sister would be hard by with her cavalry. Whatever his opinion of Anna Maria Luisa, he knew that her loyalty to her family was beyond question, and that she was as jealous of the Medici dominions as he was; she would not stand by while the Nine took Siena.

  He idly watched the end of the race, only because every hoofbeat brought him closer to Dami’s freedom, for the statutes stipulated that the condemned man was freed when the winner was announced. He vaguely registered that this year’s winner was a handsome white horse without a rider. He ignored some sort of drama that was taking place on the tower above his head and made no note of the pointing, gasping crowd. He did not even turn his head.

  No, Gian Gastone de’ Medici had eyes only for his lover as he made his way across the piazza, a freed man. Giuliano Dami enjoyed perhaps a whole minute of his freedom, perhaps shared one glance and wave with his master, before a dark shadow grew around him like a stain as Nello Caprimulgo fell, with great precision, directly upon him.

  Riccardo stumbled into the light from the marble porticoes of the chapel at the bottom of the great tower, half carrying, half leading Pia, who clung to him as if she would never let him go. His instincts were to take her into the shadowy alleys of the Tower contrada to safety, but the delighted whicker of a horse halted him. Leocorno, who had valiantly won the race for him riderless, barged his way through the crowds, dodging a sea of patting hands, and trailing a collection of Torre children who were garlanding him with wreaths and ribbons of blue and burgundy.

  Riccardo strode towards the horse, and as he and Pia wrapped their arms around his white neck, Leocorno stumbled, as if the weight of the garlands or the love were too much for him. His knees folded and he staggered, then fell to the ground. Pia pulled the great head into her lap, not understanding.

  But Riccardo knew.

  He bent to the white ear for the last time.

  ‘You won,’ he shouted above the mêlée. ‘And now you are free.’

  The large liquid eye regarded him, then deadened; Riccardo could see only his own reflection now and knew Leocorno was gone. The fragment of spear in the Unicorn’s skull had freed him at last; the battle cries had ceased for him, and he was at peace.

  Pia’s tears fell on the white velvet cheek, and Violante, seeing it all from her vantage point, was visited by a memory. As she watched Pia cradle the huge white head, it was as though a virgin of old had, at last, found that creature of fable that she sought.

  17

  The Shell

  Violante had been married for one year. She went with Ferdinando to a party at one of his father Cosimo de’ Medici’s summer palaces, high on the hills above Florence. The palazzo was a beautiful long white house with ornamental gardens, dark spears of cypress trees piercing the sky and the scent of myrtle in the air. Violante was as happy on that day as she had ever been in her marriage; her disillusion not quite complete, her barrenness not yet a certainty.

  The heat in the gardens was fierce and she retreated inside the cool house. She wandered into a huge room and was drawn to the windows. In the gardens, musicians played and there was the tinkle of crystal and laughter drifting on the breeze that shifted the gauzy drapes. She could see Ferdinando, his head thrown back, laughing with his beloved sister Anna Maria Luisa, and her insides contracted with love. The older siblings ignored t
heir younger brother Gian Gastone, who stood a little apart. But Violante did not mark him; she looked instead at her husband, unable to believe her luck. Almost overwhelmed by her feelings, she turned and noticed for the first time a painting on the opposite wall.

  And what a painting. A huge poplar panel depicting a woman of great beauty, with flowing red hair, rising naked from a great scallop shell floating on a blue sea, the kindly winds personified to blow her to shore on an azure wave. Violante walked forward and looked that fortunate goddess right in her serene green eyes. She was so beautiful, so abundant; naked as the day she was born, with glowing skin the hue of an apricot, perfect breasts and long limbs. The other figures in the painting focused their attention entirely on the goddess, waiting, rapt, for her to speak or gesture. She was everything Violante had never been, never had. She wondered what it was like to feel the heat of everyone’s attention, to succeed in your own beauty, to be desired.

  She heard a step at the door and hoped it was Ferdinando, optimistic, for once, that she could borrow some of the goddess’s magic. But it was her father-in-law, Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, a man she had always found courteous, but frightening.

  He came to stand beside her.

  ‘It’s an allegory,’ he said, ‘about birth. The shell represents a cunt.’

  He turned and fixed her with his hooded Medici eyes, giving Violante his full attention.

  ‘And when, my dear, might you be going to conceive?’

  Domenico Bruni lit a candle and stole quietly past the door of his tiny parlour. As he passed the jamb he put his head into the room, and his goodnights died on his lips. The two young people within, sitting close on the settle, were lit gold by the fire. Pia Tolomei’s head lay on his son’s shoulder and her dark eyes, huge in the firelight, seemed utterly at peace. His son’s face wore the same expression, a completeness Domenico had never seen. Both of them looked as if they had come home.