The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Read Free Book Online Page A

what he was dealing with when he swiped his whip across Vicenzo’s face in the heat of the race, who had not known that, when he unhorsed Vicenzo at the San Martino corner, the stroke of the whip was the stroke of a pen upon his own death warrant. No fresco could ever re-create such suffering. Riccardo could not look in the Panther’s stillopen eyes, for to do so would be to look into the pit of hell itself.
    He did not ask why he had been shown this man. He understood. ‘ This is war,’ he said, simply.

    ‘Yes.’
    Faustino’s yellow eyes were calm and unrepentant. He had started a fire and he did not care. He had taken the life of another young man, the same age as his son, and he did not care. Another father would grieve and bury his child. And he did not care. There was no attendant torturer, no guard in the dim dungeon, no companion for the Panther’s last moments, and Riccardo knew, in that instant, that Faustino had done this himself.
    Suddenly unable to stay, Riccardo walked up the stone stair and out of the great doors into the day. The new light was already sinful, already tainted by what had passed. He sensed rather than saw the captain follow him and, when he turned in the sunlit street and paused to look back into the gloomy hall, he was in time to see Faustino return to his coffin-side vigil. But something had changed. Now two carpenters in Eagle colours lifted a coffin lid between them and waited for a nod from their capitano . Faustino craned to gaze his last upon his heir, then dipped his head. The heavy lid was lowered into place, causing a shadow to fall across legs, breast and finally the face of the young body: a shroud of perpetual darkness. Faustino’s head stayed low, as if he could never raise it again. Unable to countenance a man who felt such agony of loss over one young man while he tortured another to death in his dungeons, Riccardo could remain there no longer. He turned to go without taking his leave, his footsteps on the stone punctuated by the hammering of the coffin nails.
    As he walked away a scream followed him down the alleys from the coffin’s side: ‘Vicenzo!’ Faustino could
utter the name at last, this one final time. Head down, striding as fast as he could away from this house of death, Riccardo did not notice that someone in the upper windows was watching him go.
     
     
    Black for tomorrow.
    Pia, her eyes shadowed from sleeplessness, dressed herself in the black gown as she’d been told. She eased the tight sleeves carefully to her shoulders, wincing as she noted five black fingermarks on each slim white upper arm. Pia looked at the marks dispassionately. Abuse seemed commonplace to her now. She peered, straining her head over each shoulder, trying to determine whether Nello or his cousin had hurt her more. Nello had it by a whisker – his bruising, on reflection, was more defined. She caught herself in the middle of this exercise and wondered if she was losing her wits.
    The maid came to do her hair before the great window of her prison, smiling and talking all the time, friendly, garrulous and utterly malicious. Pia knew by the cruel pull of the sausage-like fingers on her hair that the spill of the oil lamp the previous night had been no accident.
    From her eyrie she saw the horseman – the man she had noted yesterday, the fellow who had leaped to Vicenzo’s aid – enter the house at the stroke of six. Why was he here, a man of the Torre? She leaned forward a fraction, as if to call out a warning, placing her outspread hand on the window. But the maid pulled her back by her ringlets, the poker around which she turned her hair
threatening to singe her ear. Pia registered the warning. She watched her handprint vanish from the cool glass, leaving just five smoky fingerprints. They looked like the marks on her arms.
    Half an hour later, when the maid had gone, the horseman emerged again, walking freely from the place as Pia had wished to do the previous night. This