The Daughter of Siena Read Free

almost palpable, like a current of air or a haze of heat, but she felt completely outside of it. Pia had been born in Siena and had scarcely been outside the city. Tuscany had a coast but she had never seen the sea. Yet despite her hermetic existence in her contrada , her nineteen years bound by the city walls, today for the first time she felt that she did not belong. By reason of her betrothal she was no longer an Owlet but was not yet an Eagle; she was an odd, vestigial, avian genus. An aberration.
    In Siena every citizen was a product of their contrada . Their identity began with their ward and ended where the Dragon contrada became the She-Wolf, or the Unicorn became the Tower. Pia was familiar with the colours of each ward or contrada from the red-and-blue of the Panther to the yellow-and-green of the Caterpillar. And twice a year these divisions of geography and hue assumed an even greater significance.
    In a few short hours the bitterness of loss would settle like a pall over the losing contrada and delirious joy would infect every soul in the winning ward. Vicenzo, she knew, would give anything to win today. In the horse draw, which took place some days before the race, he had drawn Berio, a big, handsome bay whispered to be the fastest horse in Tuscany, the horse that every contrada prayed to draw. As Vicenzo was reputed to be the fastest
rider in the city, his chances were very good. And if he did win, thought Pia, how would his triumph manifest itself in their marriage chamber? Only this race, lasting three score and ten heartbeats, could prolong the life of her maidenhead. She shuddered.
    Pia sat forward in an attempt to engage herself in the spectacle below. She watched as the horses and riders circled the track, following the Civetta colours out of habit, when her eye was caught by a lone horseman. He was walking his mount slowly, and with complete control, through the Bocca del Casato gate, the arch of the architrave framing him like a painted angel.
    The horseman was a stranger to Pia. He was also the most beautiful living human she had ever seen. He had the olive skin of the region, a full mouth set in a stern and concentrated line but with the promise of softness. He had dark curling hair caught in the pigtail fashion of the day with a ribbon of the Torre colours of the Tower contrada. His eyes were dark and his features those of antique statuary – sculpted marble perfection. His form was well proportioned and muscular, his legs long and his hands gentle on the horse. But there was more too: he seemed noble. If nobility were to do with the new science of physiognomy rather than birth, reflected Pia, then he should be sitting on the palace balcony above her head, not the homely duchess.
    Pia had escaped into books for the whole of her childhood and despite Vicenzo’s violence yesterday she still believed in courtly love – perhaps now even more so. But she did not immediately cast the stranger in the role of all
the Tristans, Lancelots and Rolands of whom she had read. She was too much of a realist to imagine that anyone high-born loved where they married.
    She did, however, allow herself to wonder, just for a moment, how it would feel if she was betrothed to that unknown horseman and not Vicenzo. Better yet, if only he could ride for her as her champion, that courtly ideal of centuries ago, with none of the very real and physical threats that marriage promised. She would not have to touch him, nor even meet him. Touch, she now knew, was dangerous. To yearn at a blessed distance: that would be the thing. What would it be like, she wondered idly, to sit in her loge, watching that horseman ride for her , with perhaps some token of her favour hanging about his neck or twisted in his horse’s mane?
    When the unknown horseman dismounted with the other jockeys to pay the traditional tribute to the duchess, he stood next to Vicenzo. In an apt allegory for his contrada the horseman of the Torre towered over his