‘“Without pausing, Caterina also jumped out into the mud and slime, ruining her silken slippers, and screamed at the man to stop. He looked up and she saw he was one of those young nobles her father had wished her to marry. He, seeing the shield of the Petrucci on her coach door, ceased what he was doing and climbed back into his carriage.
‘“The girl squatted in the mud and held the torso of the filthy old beggar, but he was dying from his beating. Though such people must have been alive with parasites, stinking of mud and excrement, she held him in her arms as he died. The legend is that as she looked down into the exhausted, pain-racked face, smeared with mud and blood, she thought she saw the face of the dying Christ. Our old chronicler records that he whispered as he died, ‘Look after my people.’
‘“We will never know what really happened that day, for no eyewitnesses ever spoke of it. We just have the words of an old priest writing in a lonely m
onastic cell years later. But whatever happened, it changed her life. She went home and, in the courtyard of the palazzo, burned her entire wardrobe. She told her father she wished to renounce the world and enter a nunnery. He would have none of it and expressly forbade her.
‘“Defying his will, something unheard of in those days, she toured the nunneries and convents of the city seeking admission as a novice. But messengers from her father had gone ahead of her and she was refused by them all. They knew the residual power of the Petrucci.
‘“If her father thought that would stop her, he was wrong. She stole from the family treasury her very own dowry and, after negotiating secretly with a rival Monte, secured a long lease on a certain courtyard. It was not much; it belonged to and abutted the towering walls of the monastery of Santa Cecilia. The monks had no use for it: about twenty metres wide by thirty metres long, with a cloister running down one side and lying in the shadow of the high walls of stone.
‘“To ensure that separation would be total, the Father Superior installed a great timber door of oaken beams in the only arch that led from the monastery into the courtyard and sealed it with heavy bolts.
‘“In this yard the young woman set up a sort of refuge or sanctuary for the poor and the destitute of the streets and alleys. We would call it a soup kitchen today, but of course then there was no such thing. She cut off her long and lustrous hair and fashioned a simple shift of grey cotton, walking barefoot among the filth.
‘“In that yard the poorest of the poor, the outcasts of society, the halt and the lame, the beggars and the dispossessed, the evicted pregnant serving girls, the blind and even the diseased, most feared of them all, could find sanctuary from the hell of the streets.
‘“They lay in their filth, among excrement and rats, for they knew no different, and she swabbed and cleaned them, tended their wounds and sores, used her remaining dowry to buy food and then begged in the streets for money to keep going. Her family disowned her, of course.
‘“But after a year went by the city’s mood changed. People began to refer to her as Caterina della Misericordia, Catherine of Mercy. Anonymous donations began to arrive from the wealthy and the guilty. Her fame spread through the city and beyond the walls. Another young woman of good family gave up her wealth and came to join her. And then another, and another. By the third year all Tuscany had heard of her. More and worse, she came to the attention of the Church.
‘“You must understand, signore, that these were terrible times for the Holy Catholic Church. Even I must say so; it had grown venal and corrupt on too long a diet of privilege, power and wealth. Many princes of the Church, bishops, archbishops and cardinals, led lives of earthly princes, dedicated to pleasure, violence and all the temptations of the flesh.
‘“This had already created a reaction among the people, and they were finding new champions; it was a movement they called the Reformation. In northern Europe things were even worse. Luther had already preached his doctrine of heresy, the English king had broken with Rome. Here in Italy true faith was like a boiling cauldron. Just a few miles away in Florence the monk and preacher Savonarola had been burned at the stake after terrible tortures to make him recant, but even after his death the mutterings of rebellion went on.
‘“The Church needed reform but not schism, yet many in power could not see it that way. Among them was the Bishop of Siena, Ludovico. He had most to fear because he had turned his palace into a scandal of carnal pleasures and gluttony, corruption and vice. He sold indulgences and granted final absolution to the rich only in exchange for all their wealth. Yet here in his own city, almost beneath his walls, lived a young woman who by her example put him to shame and the people knew it. She did not preach, she did not incite, as Savonarola had done, but he began to fear her nonetheless.”’
From the judges’ stand in the Piazza del Campo the treasured Palio was ceremoniously handed down to the leaders of the winning Contrada and the banners bearing the device of the porcupine waved frantically in triumph as they prepared to chant their way to the Victory Banquet.
‘We’ve missed it all, honey,’ said the American wife as she tested her damaged ankle again and found it much better. ‘There’ll be nothing left to see.’
‘Just a tad longer. I promise we’ll see all the celebrations and the pageantry. It lasts till dawn. So what happened to her? What happened to Catherine of Mercy?’
‘“The bishop’s chance came the following year. It had been a summer of intense heat. The land parched, the streams ran dry, animal and human filth lay thick in the streets, the rats exploded in numbers. And then a plague came.
‘“It was another incidence of the dreaded Black Death, which we now know as bubonic or pneumonic plague. Thousands fell ill and died. Today we know that this disease was spread by the rats and the fleas that lived upon them. But then people thought it was the visitation upon the people of an angry God, and an angry God must be appeased with a sacrifice.
‘“By then, to distinguish herself and her three acolytes from other sisters in the city, Caterina had devised an insignia which all four wore on their habits: the cross of Jesus but with one broken arm to signify His grief for His people and the way they behaved to each other. We know about this because it was carefully described by the old father confessor who wrote down his memories years later.
‘“The bishop declared this design to be a heresy and fomented a mob, many of them paid with coin from his own coffers. The plague, he decreed, had come from that courtyard, spread by the mendicants who slept there but thronged the streets in the daytime. People wanted to believe that someone was to blame for their sickness. The mob descended on the courtyard.
‘“The old chronicler was not present, but he claims he heard what happened from many sources. Hearing the mob coming, the three acolytes threw ragged blankets over their shifts and fled for safety. Caterina stayed. The mob burst in, beating the men, women and children they found there, hounding them out beyond the city walls to live or die on the starving countryside.
‘“But they reserved their special rage for Caterina herself. She was almost certainly a virgin, but they held her down and violated her many times. Among them must have been soldiers of the bishop’s guard. When they had done with her, they crucified her on the timber door at the end of the yard and there she finally died.”
‘That was the story,’ said the faded man, ‘that Fra Domenico told me in the hotel coffee room seven years ago.’
‘That was it?’ asked the American. ‘There was no more that he had to say?’
‘There was some more,’ admitted the German.
‘Tell me, please tell me everything,’ asked the tourist.
‘Well, in the words of the old monk, this is what happened.
‘“The very night of the murder there came upon the city a terrible storm. Thunderheads rolled up at last beyond the mountains, so dark that the sun, then the moon and stars, were blotted out. Soon it began to rain. It was rain like no-one had ever seen. It had such a force and fury that it was as if all Siena were being subjected to a pressure hose. It went on all night and into the morning. Then the clouds rolled over and the sun came out.
‘“But Siena had been cleansed. All the accrued filth had been scoured from every crack and crevice and washed away. Torrents ran down the streets and out through the venting holes in the walls to cascade down the mountainsides. With the water went the filth and the rats, washed away as the sins of a bad man in the tears of Christ.