The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page A

She was not attempting to take her own life – she was both too brave and too cowardly for that – but she’d grown resourceful in the last few days. Holding her wrist away from her gown, she spread dark smears of blood on the lawn sheet where her hips would have rested last night, in an imitation of how her bedding looked at the appointed time each month.

    The first time it had happened, when she had just turned thirteen, she’d thought she was dying, with no mother to tell her otherwise. Too well bred to swap such confidences with the maids, she’d prayed for four days while the bleeding lasted, until it had gone away, only to return the next month. Older now, Pia turned this curse into a blessing and she sopped the rest of the blood for good measure with a bandage ripped from her shift. When the bleeding had stopped, she placed the bandage and shift in the soiling chest for the laundress. She knew Nicoletta would see; she saw everything. Pray God it was enough to keep Nello from her bed.
    She put the guilty pin, encrusted with blood, back in her hair, and lifted the latch of her chamber, wincing at the pain in her arm. Her prison was now her chamber. There were no longer any keys. She was wed, and could not escape the bars that enclosed her now. Not knowing what else to do, she went down to dinner, thinking that she knew what to expect.
     
     
    It was dusk, and Riccardo Bruni was attending, as he had been bidden, a sumptuous feast in the palace of the Eagles. He had thought it a wake for Vicenzo, but as he mounted the stairwell to the piano nobile he heard the tinkle of crystal and laughter, and when he entered the great salon, the dining table was crowded with candles and flowers, and fruit piled in pyramids like the great prisms of Egypt. The diners, in their snowy wigs and shining buckled shoes, wore clothes of such bright
colours that mourning seemed out of the question. It looked more like a wedding.
    To his right sat Faustino, an honour for Riccardo indeed. The capitano alone was wearing full mourning, a black suit and breeches, black shoes with square buckles and a white wig tied with a black ribbon.
    Opposite him sat Nello, the scarce-remembered younger brother and now heir of the Eagle contrada : his features a bad copy of Vicenzo’s as if a pupil had tried to imitate the work of a master. Riccardo knew now why this second son had been kept in the shadows. What man, let alone one of Faustino’s sensibilities, would parade a son with skin leeched of colour like a corpse, eyes of a strange reddish-pink, and hair of pure white like his sire’s?
    And, next to Nello, the most beautiful woman Riccardo had ever seen.
    Faustino, alert as ever, caught him looking and made the introduction.
    ‘May I present Pia of the Caprimulgo, formerly Pia of the Tolomei, daughter of the Civetta contrada , and wife to my son Nello?’
    Pia of the Tolomei.
    She sent a tiny nod in his direction, an almost imperceptible raising and lowering of her perfect chin. Riccardo’s condolences died on his lips; she had, in the space of a day, changed one husband for another. And yet congratulations did not seem appropriate either. She did not speak, and Riccardo, who could read humans with only a little less success than he could horses, knew that it was not grief that restrained her: she seemed hostile.
Chastened, he took his seat opposite her, assuming her hauteur to be a natural attitude for a married woman of note to take towards the son of a lowly farrier.
    Riccardo ate little and said less, but he was an observant man and sensed the undercurrents of emotion as the sumptuous Sienese fare was paraded before him. Even at a time of mourning, the wealth of the contrada was on display for all to see. Each course was wonderful: hare pappardelle, scottiglia fried meats, and ribollita bean stew, followed by sweet cavallucci biscuits – sophisticated versions of the dishes that he ate every feast-day, dishes that were the scent and taste of