The Daughter of Siena (6 page)

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Authors: Marina Fiorato

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

BOOK: The Daughter of Siena
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The Wave
‘
O
ne more push, my lady.’
Violante was soaked with sweat, the contractions pulling her from the birthing bed till she was almost sitting upright. She thought she would die, had never known such pain. But she welcomed every spasm, embraced the agony, enjoyed it. For she knew she was doing her duty. All of Florence waited outside the palace and her contractions beat time with the jubilant bells of the duomo. A few more pains – for there could not be many more, surely? – and the longed-for Medici heir would be in the world. Her tiring maids pressed cool cloths to her forehead, but Violante pushed them away – she had never felt more confident in her role. This,
this
was what she had been born for. This was her moment.
She had worried and fretted all the way through her confinement, found new confidence to ask for the best physicians from Vienna and the best leechers from Rome. Her father-in-law
Cosimo de’ Medici, galvanized from his usual torpor by the prospect of a Medici heir at last, had granted her every boon.
Even her husband Ferdinando had spoken to her, these last nine months, with something approaching kindness. She had counted the weeks anxiously, for she knew that Ferdinando’s sister, that chilly countess Anna Maria Luisa, had miscarried six times, so many that the citizens had begun to whisper about the curse of the Medici, that a shadow was on the great house, that an heir would never come. Such talk did not assist Violante’s spirits, but she had carried her precious burden for a full term. She would bear a son for Ferdinando, and he would love her at last; for that, if not for herself.
She was supremely confident, strong and sure for the first time. She was thirty, so no green girl, and old to be brought to childbed. But only now did she feel she had grown into her womanhood at last and knew, as she laboured, that this was what she had been born to do. Suddenly there was a rush of waters upon the coverlet, an easing of the terrible pain below, and the midwife held up a tiny bundle slick with blood, with a knotted blue rope connecting mother and son. Mother. Violante was a mother.
She tried this new and wonderful word on her dry tongue, saying it over and over like a prayer. The dame took out a knife curved like a sickle and cut the cord but it did not matter. Violante knew she was connected to her son for ever now. She thought she could not be happier, but she was wrong, for her womb gave another great lurch and soon the midwife held up a second child, the exact copy of the first. Twins. It was the greatest and happiest surprise of her life. Not one, but
two
boys.
She held out her arms to her sons in a gesture of command she had never used before. The midwife understood and gave her the children at once. In contravention of every birthing convention for a high-born lady, Violante laid them, sticky as they were, on her chest. It was the most perfect moment of her life. As one, they ceased to cry and opened their eyes, looking at her with tiny beady orbs the colour and size of capers. Wondering, she returned their gaze, looking from one to the other, knowing that if she spent the rest of her life doing just this, she would be supremely happy. Violante melted in their quiet gaze, her lips curling, blinking away tears, for nothing should dim her sight of them. She was perfectly happy for the first time since she had herself been born. She knew, in that moment, unquestioningly, that they loved her.
She held them, gently but firmly; would not have them taken from her and cleaned. Her maids were scandalized – the children must be doused and swaddled properly and given to the wet-nurse, but Violante did not care. She asked the women to lay a balmcloth over them and leave them be. And at length, exhausted after two days of difficult labour, her eyes began to close. Her sons’ little heartbeats raced against her chest, their little mouths sought her nipples. She felt a tug as her breasts began to leak milk in her willingness to suckle the Medici heirs. She did not have to do a thing. She was a mother – her body knew what it had to do. The little princes fed. Violante, contented, slept.
She woke, cold, clean, in a white cotton nightshift and stiff clean sheets. Her sons were gone, but she knew that while she slept her women would have taken them, at last, to be cleaned, swaddled and dressed, to be given such rites as were fitting for
the heirs to the grand duchy. She saw, in the dim twilight, a hunched shape of the midwife on the end of the 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, and looked her in the face. But the words would not come. She looked at him, this handsome florid man, this lover of music and art, this man the people loved as the ‘good Medici’, saviour of an ailing dukedom, and knew that he was doomed by disease. He had failed his father and his inheritance, and she could not pity him.
He moved to the head of the bed, sat gently beside her.
‘They were baptized. My brother did all, for I could not.’ His voice broke. ‘They were named Cosimo and Gastone de’ Medici.’
He held her hand for the first time since they had been hand-fasted in marriage, in the very duomo she could see from the casement. Only then did she begin to cry.
In the days that followed she was to learn that tears were infinite. She had thought that if she cried for days, weeks, months, eventually the well would run dry and she would begin
to heal. But no. Her tears, once they began to flow, seemed an unstoppable stream; a great wave, which, undammed, swelled to an amplitude fit to drown her.
 
 
Violante always woke at the point in the dream when Ferdinando touched her hand. It was the last time he had touched her. Ferdinando, now gone too, had died lame, blind and raving from the syphilis. He was buried next to his sons. She envied him, wished she too was in that cold mausoleum in Florence, knew that if her remains mingled with her sons’ little bones, she could warm them again.
So many ghosts. She wished they would leave her be.
Always she woke with tears running into her ears, her heart pounding, and her breasts – even though she was nearly fifty – still aching, the nipples still pinching with the milk reflex. She had had the same dream, year in, year out, for nearly twenty years. She sat up in her bed, wiping her eyes, blinking in the pre-dawn gloom. She breathed in and out, heavily, then lit an oil lamp to chase away the dream and the memories too.
At first, she had thought the killing grief would drive her mad. She had not known that the pain she had felt, as an unloved child and an unloved wife, could be more acute, that her loneliness could be any keener. With bitter irony, Gretchen, her own wet-nurse, whom she had called from her father’s court in Bavaria to tend to the babies, arrived in Florence the day after the boys died.
Gretchen never left, for one look at her little mistress told her that the duchess needed her now more than ever. But in truth, Violante had never felt so alone. After she had failed in her duty, her father-in-law Cosimo never spoke to her nor looked at her again. Her sister-in-law Anna Maria Luisa could barely conceal her joy. Her babes had been taken away; she could not have borne it if Violante’s sons had lived.
The only kindness in her life came from an unexpected quarter. Gian Gastone de’ Medici, Ferdinando’s younger brother, offered her a sympathy that seemed little to do with the fact that he was now the heir presumptive of the dukedom. Gian Gastone detested his own sister Anna Maria Luisa, and had shown her no sympathy or solicitude through her multiple miscarriages, also caused by the syphilis of a faithless husband, the Elector Palatine. But, for his sister-in-law Violante, nothing was too much. Gian Gastone took upon himself the baptism and funeral arrangements – so close, more cruelly close than nature intended. Such events, normally separated by a lifetime, were held apart by the span of a few mere hours. Not only did Gian Gastone visit Violante in person – though the slim, handsome libertine had much better claims on his time – he also sent remedies to her room: sweetmeats, tonics, iced fruit, and made sure that she had the care of his personal physicians. She had never forgotten Gian Gastone’s kindness.

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