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

time Pia did not lean forward, nor place her hands against the window. Her mistrust of men, planted by her father, given libation by Vicenzo, was brought into full bloom by this man. Why had he jumped to save Vicenzo? How could he walk in and out of this place, a palace of a rival contrada , as if he were kin? Because he was complicit, in the pocket of the Eagles like her father, all of them boiling in the same stew. Pia placed her fingers into her own prints on the pane, carefully, precisely. Before she had got to the thumb, he was gone.
    She ate the plain pastry that had been left on a tray and drank all the ewe’s milk. She knew that she must stay strong, not get ill. Today there would be a laying-out and a burial, no more. She must remain strong, keep her wits. It was not the black-dress day she feared, it was the white.
    She was summoned downstairs and covered her head, processing behind the black-clad family as the body was churched and interred in the Eagles’ chapel across the square, in the Eagles’ crypt. She stayed quiet and small, but was made to stand, ominously, between Vicenzo’s white-haired father and white-haired brother. She mumbled the creed and kept her head bowed.

    At the end of the mass she hung back in the church doorway, until the family had gone. When the last black figure had gone into the house, she lifted her heavy skirts and ran, flitting from shadow to shadow, deep dark slices of merciful shade in the bright new day, friendly shadows that would hide well a slim woman in a black dress. Her heart was bursting. One more street and she would be in the Dragon contrada . The Dragons were friends to the Owlets; they would shelter her. She almost laughed. She’d been right, so right to wait, to be docile, to seize her chance. One more courtyard and then she could laugh, laugh at her father’s plans, laugh at the great fat maid, laugh at the white dress she’d never have to wear.
    A shadow blocked her way. It was all right – shadows were her friends. But it was not all right.
    ‘Now, my pet, you’ve lost your way and no mistake. But Nicoletta’ll help you, have nay fear.’
    The maid’s grip on her upper arms deepened the bruising of yesterday.
     
     
    Riccardo had known for a long time that something was rotten at the heart of his beloved Siena. It was why he had left. Now he knew what ailed the city and he could give the pestilence a name.
    Faustino Caprimulgo.
    Riccardo walked the golden streets back to his father’s house, thinking of the next day and the next night to come, of the invitation he could not refuse. He opened the door of the Torre stable: the boy Zebra was gone
from his bed and the horse too. At daybreak his father would have led the stallion out, and walked him gently back to his owners in the Maremma.
    Riccardo squatted and took a handful of the straw, cold now, letting it fall through his fingers. He said the horse’s name: Taccola. Jackdaw. He remembered another time and place, when he was no older than Zebra, the day he had seen the eagle and the daw, the daw he had brought home and kept here in this very stable till it died. It seemed an innocent, golden time – before Milazzo, before this new war he was embroiled in – and with all his heart he wished himself back there. It was this, not anything else he had seen that morning, nor anything he would encounter the next night, that made him want to cry.

4
    The Wave

    ‘ O ne more push, my lady.’
    Violante was soaked with sweat, the contractions pulling her from the birthing bed till she was almost sitting upright. She thought she would die, had never known such pain. But she welcomed every spasm, embraced the agony, enjoyed it. For she knew she was doing her duty. All of Florence waited outside the palace and her contractions beat time with the jubilant bells of the duomo. A few more pains – for there could not be many more, surely? – and the longed-for Medici heir would be in the world. Her tiring maids