The Daughter of Siena Read Online Free Page B

accepted. They agreed on a route and started off the race. The hare shot ahead and ran briskly for some time. Then, seeing that he was far ahead of the tortoise, he thought he’d sit under a tree for a while and relax before continuing the race. He sat under the tree and
soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him and won the race.
    Thus Violante’s mother told her a fairy tale by proxy.
     
     
    Violante Beatrix of Bavaria, widow of Ferdinando de’ Medici, princess of Tuscany and governess of Siena, threw open the casement of her chamber. She had been in the city for ten years and her chamber still did not feel like her chamber, just as her palace did not feel like her palace. In fact, the ducal palace where she now stood, her grand and accustomed residence, was still known, by every single Sienese, as the Palazzo Pubblico. The ancient building only served to remind Violante how young the Medici dukedom was; that Siena had ruled herself for centuries before her, and would get along well enough for centuries after. Nominally, she ruled here – she was governess, duchess, regent. But her rule was a façade.
    No one knew that she was still, at fifty, the same frightened little girl at her father’s court who chilled inside when her mother bade her play the dulcimer for their guests. No one suspected that the daughter of Ferdinand Maria, Elector of Bavaria, and Adelaida, princess of Savoy, was shy in company, loved music more than conversation, and had a dread of public speaking that she struggled to hide. No one understood that she had loved Ferdinando de’ Medici every single day, though he had died without ever once loving her in return. And no one guessed her most secret sorrow: that she mourned daily
for her stillborn twins, had lit a candle for their birthday for nineteen summers, and could have told you, if you’d asked, exactly how many years, months, days and hours old they would have been now, if they had lived. And, thanks to her failure to provide an heir for the grand dukes of Tuscany, the ailing, youthful dukedom might well die like a sickly child. She was an aberration, a placeholder. The ancient city would wait her out.
    Violante was not given to fancy or superstition, but could not help returning to a conference she had had the previous evening with her chief councillor, Francesco Maria Conti. The haughty statesman, whose sense of selfimportance proceeded from being cousin to the pope himself, had come to her presence chamber with an unsettling piece of news. In his accustomed black coat and fingering his silver-topped cane, he had not quite met her eyes as he had told her that two men in the Porcupine contrada had found a dead ass cast over the Camollia gate. She had not understood the message until he told her, in his accustomed tones of contempt veiled in courtesy, that when the Florentines besieged Siena in the thirteenth century, they cast dead donkeys over the walls to bring disease and pestilence to the city. Baldly speaking, said Conti, the ass was a signal that Siena was about to fall. Violante had a chilling feeling that Vicenzo Caprimulgo’s death was the beginning of something, perhaps the beginning of the end.
    From her open window, Violante saw the servants of the comune clearing the piazza and scrubbing at the dark patch of blood at the San Martino corner. She moved
her eyes determinedly away from the blood and concentrated on the things that had not changed. The starlings screeched, the evening air smelled fresh and cool, as the setting sun varnished the square below. She admired the golden palaces standing sentinel to the old day and the nine divisions of the great square, radiating out from the fountain to give it its scallop appearance. She remembered she had once seen a painting in one of Cosimo de’ Medici’s summer palaces, a painting of a woman of great beauty, with flowing red hair, rising naked from a great scallop shell floating on a blue sea, the kindly winds