The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page B

survive. At last, his fury spent, he yanked her to her feet. He stood her in front of the window, turned into a looking-glass by the lamplight inside and the darkness without.
    She regarded herself dispassionately – as strangely detached as she’d been the day he’d laid bruises on her arm. She looked quite different: her hair now about her ears and forehead, and her face smeared with her own blood. Behind her face Nello’s floated, sated and gloating. She understood that she was lucky. With a wisdom well beyond her own innocence, she knew that if he had not cut her hair he would have raped her, even if she bled.
    ‘There,’ he hissed in triumph. ‘Let’s see if he’ll smile at you now.’

    When he’d gone Pia picked up the shears from the floor. She brushed her own hair from the blades and noticed, as if they belonged to someone else, that her hands were shaking terribly. She looked at her reflection in the window again and, consciously steadying her hands, tried to neaten her hair until the sides fell evenly and the black slab of her new fringe lay straight across her forehead. She saw that huge tears were swelling in her eyes and falling down her face unchecked. So she was to be punished for the actions of others as well as her own. While she cut, she damned the horseman again. Because he’d smiled at her and asked her a question, she’d paid a high price for his caprice. And yet his smile had been the one bright moment in a terrible day. He’d been the only man to address her, to question her, as if he cared about the answer.
    Can you ride?
    An idea began to form slowly in her numbed brain. If she could ride, far and fast, she could get away from Nello. There was no escape from this city, isolated in the hills, without a horse. She must order her thoughts. Think, think .
    Pia stooped to tuck the shears into her laced boot. She would not be unarmed in the presence of her husband again. As she bent, Cleopatra’s coin fell from her bosom and hit her smartly in the teeth, swinging, winking, on its chain. As she straightened up, Pia of the Tolomei caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. The candlelight was just bright enough for her to see how much she resembled the long-dead queen.

6
    The Forest

    W hen Violante Beatrix de’ Medici was a little girl, and used to gaze from the windows of her father’s Bavarian castle, she did not see the expensive glazing, nor the fine leaden quarrel-panes, but looked past and through them to the forest. She loved the trees, the way they whispered reassuringly at night, the way they stretched out and closed around the castle like friendly arms reaching to embrace. When, on occasion, she could persuade her nurse to take her for a walk – a battle, for fresh air was not deemed to be healthy for the young princess – she loved the darkness, the deepness of the cover, even on sunny days. She felt safe in the forest, and more at home than she did in the airy, gilded rooms of the palace.
    Walking further one day than she ever had, she met the woodsmen with their axes, hacking at the trunks, their blades biting white wounds into the wood, chips flying to land on the dark mossy ground like snow. She stopped in her tracks, and
the woodsmen stopped too in her presence, pulling their caps from sweaty crowns, spitting the deer gristle that they chewed to the forest floor to lie with the sawdust. Violante turned and the tears spilled from her eyes. The nurse, trudging back to the palace in the princess’s wake, tried to explain: trees had to be felled to make the chairs in her father’s palace, the houses of the poor, even the books that she so loved to read. For that moment Violante didn’t care. She wanted the forest to be left alone.
    Six short years later, she was sitting in the great salon of her new home, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, holding the hand of her new groom. She had been married that day in Florence’s great duomo, had endured three hours of