Free The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page B

colour for a woman of her years. But when Riccardo looked into her round caper-green eyes with their short stubby lashes, and at the array of wrinkles radiating from them as she smiled, he felt oddly comforted. He took in the wide sympathetic mouth, the soft jaw below, saw the ample bosom and waist that her corsets could not hide. She was not handsome and likely never had been, but there was something essentially motherly about her. It was not at all what he thought he would feel in the presence of a duchess.
    Nor did he expect what she went on to say. In her gentle, Germanic accent she explained that the frescoes
showed good and bad government, that she wanted to bring back the happy, peaceful times and end the needless rivalries between contrade that ended in deaths like Vicenzo’s. She had seen him help the dying man during the race. She asked for his help.
    His refusal was gentle and civil, but decided. It was not that he didn’t agree with her. He did. She argued well, held her hands wide and told him that this place where he now stood, the Palazzo Pubblico, was and always had been the focus of the city – a civic, not a religious centre. She told him that the stony finger of the Torre del Mangia, which crowned the concave curve of the crenellations, was the highest tower in the land, that you could almost see it reaching into the sky with civic pride. Riccardo could see all this. But he had to refuse. She was an outsider. He didn’t doubt that she loved her adopted city. But Faustino, monster that he was, was Sienese born and bred. The Caprimulgo countenance was there before him in the very frescoes that she had shown him. He couldn’t take sides against a Sienese, against his own people.
    ‘I am sorry, Madam.’
    He bowed and took his leave before he could read the disappointment in her eyes.
     
     
    White for the day after.
    Pia, having revealed herself as a bird that wished to fly, had had her wings clipped. She was not allowed any of Vicenzo’s funeral wake-meats in the great hall. She had
been locked in her chamber all day. She dared not look in the garderobe at the dress that terrified her so much, but she knew it was there. Sometimes, in a trick of the draught, the beaded skirts would slither on the wood, or the hanger would knock on the door.
    She slept eventually, woke again, tried to recite her favourite verses or remember extracts of her favourite legends. It was not a cheering exercise. All her heroines – Guinevere, Iseult, or Cleopatra as conjured by William Shakespeare – made sorry ends. She determinedly tried not to recall her ancestor, the first Pia of the Tolomei, tragic heroine of Dante, who was freed from her tower only by her death at the hands of her jealous husband.
    During the night that followed, Pia tried to find hope. She tried to believe that her father, Civetta to the bone, would not wed her to an unknown groom of another contrada . But as the dawn paled, she knew that all hope was gone. It was White Dress Day.
    Perhaps she had misjudged Nello – perhaps the marks on her arm were an accident. Perhaps he was a kind man; perhaps someone who struggled under the affliction of such an appearance, under the daily shadow of an older, handsomer brother, would have developed a tender soul? At least he had not violated the twelve-year-old heiress of the Benedetti and led her to hang herself from a ham-hook.
    Chin high, Pia opened the door of the garderobe at last and, shaking, took out the white dress. She silently suffered the indignity of being stripped and dressed by Nicoletta. The maid then began to dress her hair, clucking
and smiling as if Pia were her own daughter, but pinning the pearls in a little too firmly so blood beaded on the girl’s forehead, and scraping the diamond combs across her tender scalp. When Nicoletta held up a looking-glass at last, Pia gazed on a face of beauteous perfection, and a stranger looked back at her. In defiance, she pulled Cleopatra’s coin from her