Read Online The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato - Free Book Online

dreadful violent assault against love and nature – she knew he would not do it again. Cruellest of all, her breasts were engorged with milk, full and hard to the touch, mapped with blue veins, and leaking day and night. Months later, when she at last ventured out in the street in a litter, any babe crying in the square was enough to cause the vicious pinching in her nipples. Her treacherous breasts began to leak the milk that would never again nourish those tiny searching mouths that she had fed but once. Her heart ached for the lips that had mouthed at her flesh, for the twin pairs of eyes that had looked at her so calmly. The littlest eyes but filled with such love , love only for her, a love she had never been offered before or since.
    Ferdinando never came near her again, and in time Violante knew that his confession on the birthing bed had come to naught; she was not infected with his malady. As the days and weeks crawled by in their relentless agony of loss, she realized, appalled, that she had no symptoms of syphilis, no blood in her waters, no imagined scars upon her face. The only scars that criss-crossed her flesh were the marks that had silvered her skin where her belly had distended with child. In her confinement she had refused to anoint them with oil of olives as her ladies had urged her, for she had been as proud of them as a veteran of his battle scars. Now they were as painful to her as the forty scourgings of Christ.
    Her broken heart was caged in a healthy body. She was to be given no early release from this prison. She remained healthy and knew her sons would have been too. She
never visited their graves in that huge marble mausoleum. Such a place had nothing to do with her twins, so warm and small and living; it had nothing to do with the moment they had shared, that one short moment of communion, of pure love given and received, with no thought or agenda. She marked every birthday, without fail, as the years went by, relived that first and last look they had shared, felt the sweet kiss of those tiny mouths at her breast.
    When Violante saw Ferdinando die, slowly and terribly, she was glad. She knew that, in the moment she came face to face with his sons, she had ceased to love him, and in the moment he had confessed to her, their bond was inexorably broken. Three years later, when her father-in-law Grand Duke Cosimo offered her the governorship of Siena, she took it. She knew she was running away from Florence, but it was no use. The dream followed her here and would not let her go. When she entered the city gates as a new widow, the first thing she had seen was a statue of the city’s emblem, a she-wolf suckling boy twins. In a dreadful irony the image was everywhere, ever present, even on the frescoed walls of her new home, the Palazza Pubblico. There was no escape.
    Her rule had been a disaster. Her fragile hold on the city was slipping, and yesterday another son was lost, another heir doomed never to come to his inheritance. Vicenzo Caprimulgo had been taken. The age-old rivalries that had bubbled and seethed in this city for hundreds of years had surfaced. That foolish Panther had
taken a life and she knew that Faustino would not let that rest.
    Violante jumped from the bed and padded to the window, throwing open the casement as she had done the night before. The patch of blood at the San Martino corner was still there, despite the efforts of the comune ’s servants. She could no longer take her eyes away from it. It looked as if the city had been bruised. Siena was bleeding internally, just below the skin.
    She must take action.
    She looked carefully at the nine divisions of the campo. The Nine. An idea began to bubble to the surface of her consciousness. She heard the bells of the mourning Eagle palazzo – the Caprimulgo house – telling the contrada it was six. Daybreak. It was time to act.
    She cast about for a robe to throw around her shoulders. Without her corsets she was depressingly