The Daughter of Siena Read Online Free PDF

out of this, it would be by stealth.
    Why did her father, after years of hoping and waiting and negotiating with the best Civetta families, suddenly
want to ally her with the Eagles, at all cost? It went against all sense, against the hundreds of years of tradition in which the contrada was everything: identity, family, locality. Could it really be true that, before Vicenzo’s body was cold, her father was negotiating a marriage contract with the dead man’s brother? She stole a sideways glance at the man who held her left arm. She could not remember seeing him before today and his looks suggested why he might have been hidden. He was a strange, freakish fellow, his features an indifferent copy of Vicenzo’s, but it was his colouring that set him apart. His hair was as white as his father’s, his skin as pale as whey, and his eyes, under their light lashes, pink.
    As darkness fell Pia found herself in streets she did not recognize – but the design of the sconces holding the guttering flambeaux and the fluttering banners of black and gold told her she was in Eagle territory. A palace loomed out from the dark and she was half lifted over the threshold. Her consorts left her in a flagged stone hall, while they followed the menfolk and the body. A beefy maid approached, her waist bristling with a chatelaine of keys. She spoke in a Sienese dialect so thick that Pia could scarcely understand her, but she understood her nod to a nearby stairwell. She was to follow.
    Instead, hardly knowing what she was doing, Pia turned and walked straight back out of the palace door. Once, she’d marched from her own house, to seek sanctuary from her betrothal. Now, she’d do anything to be back there, to be away from this dark palazzo , away from these alien streets: to be home. Two crossed pikes came
together with a singing of metal song an inch from her nose. She turned to see the beefy maid smiling. She wagged a great finger in front of Pia’s face, as close as the pikes had come and just as threatening. With her other forefinger she tinkled the ring of keys.
    ‘Up you come, amore . Don’t be frighted. Pretty frocks for ’un, above stairs.’
    There was an obscenity in the kindness, the waving of the keys like a trinket. It was the temptation of the Devil: come here, little girl. I’ve got some pretty dresses to show you, if you’ll just follow me up the stair . Pia had no choice.
    The stair was dark and winding and damp. At the top of it was a chamber, tall-ceilinged, oddly shaped, with chapel-like windows, their panes still hot from the day, ruby-paned with the fire of the old sun. One oil lamp burned, its flame puny in the glory of the sunset.
    There was a bed and a rug, a jug and a basin. Pia swallowed.
    The maid, smiling still, clicked her tongue. ‘Now there, amore . No blubberin’. Master says be sweetly faced for domani . Look there in the gardyrobe – be gowns and stuffs for ye.’
    Pia opened the door of a great garderobe in the corner of a room. The action reminded her of home with a swift and stifling blow. Her mother, dead on Pia’s childbed, had lived on for her daughter only in the gowns she had left behind. Pia’s father – whether from a rare flare of finer feeling, from grief, or from sheer forgetfulness – had never cleared the gowns away. As a child and then a woman, Pia had gone into her mother’s garderobe every
day, walking among the gowns – the velvets, the fustians, the samites – speaking to her, singing to her, playing games with her, hiding behind her skirts. Pia tried to conjure the woman she had never known, the woman who might have made her life different. Friendly gowns, they were: the crimson of good burgundy for feast days, the yellow of an egg’s yolk, the green of the olive’s leaf. A garde-corps too: a supple dress of tan leather for riding.
    Here, in her new garderobe two gowns hung on hooks: one black, one white. Both were magnificent, stiff with jewels and embroidery, the richest