The Daughter of Siena: A Novel by Marina Fiorato

Author:Marina Fiorato
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781429968720
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

‘There – Siena.’ Signor Bruni spread his arms wide, like a showman, as if he had conjured the city, revealing the vista below.

Pia sat on her little palfrey, with Signor Bruni holding the leading rein. From her high seat she marvelled at the scene – in the morning sun she saw her city as she had never seen it before. A silvery mist lay low in the valleys and far, far away the low red roofs and the tall towers were gilded with the morning sun. Starlings wheeled around the Torre del Mangia, and the squat striped duomo crouched above the city like a sleeping tiger. Pia’s mouth dropped open and she just gazed.

She’d had a dozen lessons, and fallen a dozen times. She’d made no fuss, she had not cried: she’d simply clambered back on. Pia was now accustomed to pain and the management of those sensations, and had driven herself onward. On the second morning her thigh muscles were screaming with every step, her fingers and forearms throbbing, her back aching, as her body woke up to the muscles it did not know it had. By the third morning she’d begun to show aptitude; she was beginning to sit easily, beginning to feel the horse through her hands. She knew she was a good pupil, but her only fault was that she wanted to go faster, learn more. Far and fast, was her litany. Far and fast.

For the first two days in the courtyard, Signor Bruni had taught her to ride without reins, to hold on with her knees and control the palfrey with the merest pressure of her legs. But soon she wanted to go further, faster, swifter. She was driven by the clandestine agenda that she would not yet share with him. He’d bent to her will; she could now trot a little, he’d taught her to rise and fall with the exacting rhythm of the horse’s steps, yet by sheer determination she’d mastered the basics of this most difficult of speeds in one session. And, since the courtyard of the Eagles’ palace was a little small to canter,

Signor Bruni had taken Pia out into the hills where he used to ride as a boy, to show her his favourite western aspect of the city.

His stallion, ever at his shoulder, trotted behind them, seemingly quite happy to be in Signor Bruni’s company. But Pia wondered why he never mounted the horse, and wondered too at the relationship between Signor Bruni and his benefactor. Ever mindful of propriety, Pia knew that Signor Bruni had asked Faustino’s permission to take his tuition outside the city walls and that Faustino had given his consent. If she was right about her father-in-law’s motive to give his son a spur to beat the Tower horseman in the Palio, Faustino would give them any licence to become as close and as free as they liked.

They’d made their way through Siena, Pia riding and Signor Bruni leading his horse, the shadows still cool in the early morning.

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