The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page B

home to him. Each delicacy was placed on a polished pewter dish, which he picked at dutifully with a two-pronged silver fork with a handle of elephant’s tooth. But he had no appetite. His eyes kept straying, inexorably, to Pia. He felt an intense pleasure just being in the same room as such a woman; but at the same time he could not forget that dreadful meathouse below the palazzo ’s foundations, where the dead son of the Panther contrada lay stretched out like a butchered swine.
    Riccardo reached for the jug of Chianti at the same time as Faustino, and realized, as he did so, that the white-haired capitano was getting steadily drunk. The son Nello was conducting a self-important, increasingly one-sided conversation with his father about horses, designed, Riccardo suspected, to display his knowledge to him, not to his sire. Something strange underlay the young man’s demeanour, not grief, nor resentment, but something else. Riccardo caught a flicker in Nello’s eyes, no more
than an instant in the candlelight, but it came to him in a jolt. Nello was happy.
    Meanwhile, Pia, Nello’s new wife, kept her eyes on her plate, crumbling bread between nervous fingers into little piles on the cloth. Below her snowy cuff, Riccardo noticed a series of cuts on her wrist. They looked fresh. To her left her father – Salvatore Tolomei, a round, smooth barrel of a man – was speaking to his deputies about grain quotas, ignoring his daughter and whatever troubled her.
    The Civetta delegation had been invited because Salvatore had, against all tradition, allied his daughter to the Eagles. Riccardo was less certain why he himself was there. Faustino had thanked him that morning, so what more did the Eagles owe him? He wondered what they wanted of him. He was offered no clues throughout the dinner. Faustino’s conversation never touched on the Palio and Vicenzo, nor even the hasty marriage of his widow, but only the city: homilies delivered with a pointing finger, a leaning shoulder and wine-soaked breath.
    ‘Saint Bernardino,’ he mumbled, ‘our very own saint, said: “Leave your contrade , unite under my symbol and the banner of Christ.” You can see it there on the duomo.’ He waved uncertainly towards the window. ‘That green medallion, spikes like sunrays. But they didn’t even finish the duomo, didn’t finish it, built one wall and let be.
    ‘See,’ Faustino went on, breathing heavily, jabbing his finger into Riccardo’s shoulder, ‘God never had a chance in this city. It is the contrade to the end.’

    He struck Riccardo as a man who usually had a very tight grip on his person and his humours, but the events of the last day had been too much for him and had cracked his resolve. His son had been taken and somewhere in the fog of Faustino’s drink-addled mind, he felt the need to grip on tight with his eagle’s yellow talons to everything about him. Despite the horrors of that morning, Riccardo suddenly had to fight a wholly unwanted pang of sympathy for the man.
    The capitano continued, his words blunted by drink, ‘We say no . The Nine said no . The Nine said: “Unite in your communities . You shall each have your own symbol, your own church. You shall not show your family banners nor carve your arms and your mottoes into the stone of your lintels. You will be loyal to your contrada, for that is everything.” And more. For if we have friends, if we have alliances, we can take this city back from the corrupt dukes and have it as she was under those noble fellows, our ancestors.’
    Faustino was moved almost to tears. Riccardo reflected that he had heard the same sentiments from two mouths today: a good woman and an interloper, a bad man and a native. Faustino, eerily, almost seemed to follow his train of thought.
    ‘Saint Bernardino,’ he said. ‘Aye, he knew what he was about. His own symbol, the name of Christ and the sunrays, is on the Palazzo Pubblico too. They didn’t finish the cathedral. Not God’s