The Daughter of Siena Read Online Free PDF Page A

personified to blow her to shore on an azure wave.
    Today, watching the Palio that had ended so horribly, Violante had seen a woman on the Eagle family benches: young and beautiful, with her dark hair piled high, her red-and-white gown pinched in at her tiny waist and her porcelain cheeks touched with a hint of pink on the cheekbones. Rising above the sea of flags and banners, she had seemed as calm and serene as the goddess herself. Seeing her so youthful and beautiful, the Venus of this scallop, Violante had felt a keen thrill of envy. But then, Violante had seen her leaning on the dead man’s horse, and she had realized that the beauty was the dead man’s betrothed, and further enquiry told her they’d been due to marry today. Her heart ached for the girl, and she felt the guilty aftertaste of her envy. She sent a purse to assuage her feelings. Violante knew the emptiness, the agony of loss, for she too had lost. Ferdinando – she had not meant to think of him tonight.

    Violante pulled her head inside the palace, retreating inside her cool shell, hiding. She closed the window and her mind against the blood outside. She did not want to know. Her emotions were exhausted by the sudden remembrance of her dead husband and she had no compassion to spare. She walked across the room to her looking-glass, a full-length Parisian mirror; and even its dim antique reflection, so forgiving of a multitude of sins, offered her no comfort. She saw a middle-aged woman, not even a little handsome, even though she had the finest powdered wigs from Montmartre and wore a gown of lavender silk woven by the Huguenots of Spitalfields. She fingered the stuff of her skirt and saw, in the sunlight, that the age spots on her hands were beginning to freckle through the lead paste she had applied not one hour ago. The ugliness of her hands next to the beauteous mauve silk depressed her still further.
    She wore purple, or one of that colour’s close cousins, every day of her life, and all because of a chance remark from her now-dead husband. Ferdinando had once, in the days of courtship when he had still taken the trouble to be kind, told her that the colour was becoming to her; perhaps because the word viola , purple, was so close to her name Violante. It was an aside, a play on words, a thoughtless sally, and served to compliment his own linguistic acuity rather than her beauty. But it was one of the only times that he had paid her person or her name even the tiniest amount of attention. She clung to it, through the years of dismissal, of isolation, of casual or calculated cruelty in the face of his lovers. She held fast to that tiny
comment and had dutifully worn violet, mauve, lavender or porphyry every day since, in the vain hope that he would, some day, notice her once again.
    She clung to it, despite the fact that the jest Ferdinando should have made is that her name was closer kin to another word: violare – to break, to violate or even to rape; words that aptly described, in turn, his treatment of her spirit, their marriage and the one and only time they had lain together. And yet now that he was dead and she was free, Violante continued to wear violet.
    She turned from the mirror, suddenly deathly tired. Ferdinando . Once she had started to think of him she could not stop. She did not call for her women but laid herself down on the coverlet just as she was, in her silly violet dress, and gave herself up to it. Ferdinando . Her remembrances of him flooded her. She was wallowing and she did not care. Tears sealed her eyes, and she slept at last.
     
     
    Pia was taken back to the house of the Eagles as the twilight thickened. The two kinsmen of Aquila had held her, firmly, in a bruising grip high on each of her arms. Their grasp was an insult, but she was becoming inured to this new, tactile, brutal world. She disengaged her mind from her body and began to think. She walked with them. She did not struggle now. She knew if she were to get