“Poison, Fortunato. Formulated by one of Rome’s best apothecaries to mimic a fever, slow and deadly. Put into place soon after you arrived as emissary and spoke your queen’s strong opposition to our Crusade. Sent to Normandy on one of Antonio’s ships, and delivered by a spy recruited from her guard by Iago. We may not have landed nobles, but he who rules the sea, rules trade, and he who rules trade, rules the world.”

“No,” said I, the truth of it burning through the haze of the potion and grief like a fire across my soul. Hate had awakened me. “No, Montressor!”

“Oh, yes. Go join your queen, Fortunato, and when you see her, tell her ’twas your words that killed her.” He scraped the trowel around the opening, then fit the last brick and tamped it into place, plunging me into darkness as the water rose around my knees.

“For the love of God, Montressor! For the love of God!”

But the tapping had ceased and my last call on the senator’s conscience was drowned by his laughter, which faded, and was gone.

Three: A Spot of Bother

THREE

A Spot of Bother

A spot of bother, innit: walled up and chained in the lightless, lonesome cold, seawater rising to my ribs, silence except for my own breath and a steady drip somewhere above my head. Then a slight scraping from the other side of the new wall. Perhaps Brabantio gathering his tools.

“Brabantio, thou treacherous coal-souled wank-weasel!” said I.

Was that cackling I heard beyond the wall, or just the fading echo of my own voice? The chamber had to be connected to the lagoon, somehow, but I could not hear even a distant lapping of waves. The darkness was so complete that I could see only the phantoms that populate the back of the eyelid, like oil on black water—“cracks in the soul,” Mother Basil used to tell me before she would lock me in the cupboard at the abbey at Dog Snogging, where I was raised. “In the dark may you contemplate the cracks in your soul wherein leaks wickedness, Pocket.” Sometimes I would pass days contemplating the cracks in my soul until the dark and I made peace. Friends.

Recently I had thought I might make a friend of Death as well, meet its feathery oblivion with a soft embrace. My sweet Cordelia’s death had cleansed me of fear, of self-regard, and after weeks of drinking, of anger and control over most of my fluids. But now I was wide awake with both anger and anguish that my actions might have brought an end to my queen.

“Thou wretched pillar of syphilitic pheasant-fuck!” said I, in case the Montressor was still listening.