The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page A

bed. The shape was shuddering, as if the dame laughed. Violante could have laughed too, her heart bursting with joy.
    ‘Where are the boys?’ she asked.
    The nurse turned around and Violante saw her face was silver in the twilight, shimmering with tears.
    At that moment, she knew.
    Violante began to shake her head, tried to sit, but could not. The midwife ran from the room, shivering with sobs, as another dark shape entered. A priest unknown to her. Violante knew what he would say before he uttered. His face was half in shadow – she could not see his lips, but heard the words well enough.
    ‘They are gone, mistress.’
    ‘No.’ It was a whisper.
    ‘They are with God, mistress.’
    ‘No.’ It was a cry.
    ‘ Only the righteous are taken into the arms of the Lord .’
    ‘NO.’ It was a shout. ‘No no no no no!’
    Now she had the strength to rise but still could not – and she knew they had foreseen this and had strapped her to the bed. She pulled at her bindings till the straps cut, raved and foamed and near pulled her arms from their sockets.
    ‘Where are they? I want to see them. I want to see my sons!’
    She could not believe the priest – she wanted, she needed to hold her babies again, knew that if she could just hold them to her breast they would open their little eyes once more and everything would be all right.

    The priest took a step back. ‘We buried them, mistress. With full honours. They lie in the family tomb.’
    The family tomb. With all the other dead Medici.
    She screamed then, and would not stop: animal, primal screams. Soon the room was full. Shady figures held her arms, a cloth was pressed to her nose, a leecher bled her thrashing arm above a china bowl, the blood pooled black in the twilight. She breathed in the sickly, heavy smell of laudanum.
    She woke in the darkened room a few times over the next few days. Someone attended her at all times, always a dark figure sat upon the end of the bed. The nurse that had been sent to tend her, the one who had cried, the one in whose tears she had seen her sons’ deaths written, was there constantly.
    One time, when she woke, the nursemaid had turned into her husband. Ferdinando had left off, for once, his lustrous dark wig. He lifted his head and she saw that he, too, wept. Today he was not the heir to a dukedom, but an ordinary man. He turned away, as if he could not face her while he told her what he must.
    ‘His name was Bambagia. A pricking-boy I met in Venice – you recall – when I went with Scarlatti in 1701?’ He did not wait for a reply. ‘He was nothing. A carnival plaything. He never removed his mask, even when we fucked.’
    The brutal words did not penetrate her fog of grief. She was numb with pain. Why was he telling her this? He had had lovers for years – there was one who rarely left his side. She could not care about this further betrayal. All she cared about were her little boys, now lost to her.
    ‘If he’d taken off his mask I would have seen – I never would have done it.’ He dropped his head. ‘He had syphilis. And now I do too. You might also.’

    Syphilis. She knew of the creeping evil disease, flesh eating, the maggots of pestilence that buried themselves in the brain and drove one mad. To feel that now this curse may have been laid upon her, that she might be hirpling to her grave, made her glad. She wanted to die.
    ‘Why are you telling me this?’ They were the first words she had spoken since she had raved at the priest. Her voice was hoarse with screaming.
    ‘Because the doctors tell me that syphilis causes stillbirth. I wanted you to know … I wanted to tell you … I didn’t want you to think it was your fault. It was my fault. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.’
    It was the first time he had ever apologized to her for all of his transgressions and it touched her not at all. None of it mattered now. She wanted to protest, to say that the twins had been alive, that they had cried, and fed,