“We’ve just left the harbor,” said the Venetian. “I am Lovichio, senator of the fifth district, cousin to the general’s wife. Othello is ordered back to Venice and I am to appoint Michael Cassio provisional governor of Corsica.”

“Cassio? Governor?”

“Yes, governor. Do you know where we can find him?”

“I think, signors, you need to follow me to the Citadel.”

As he led the Venetians to the Citadel, Iago thought that this might be the best way of all to find his place at the head of an army: stand with a senator and his attendants to look on the Moor, his dead wife’s perfume still fading on his hands, crazed jealousy still in his mad-dog eyes. Iago would take command, make the arrest, in witness of a senator, and take his prize without even having to plead before the council. Had not the Moor found his own position by turning the Genoan fleet? So he, Iago, would turn the man who had turned the fleet.

But as they entered the castle wing where Othello kept his private quarters, Iago’s own wife, Emilia, rushed out of the great double doors, screeching, her hands and the front of her gown painted in blood.

“Thou pernicious evil devil! This is your doing, you cur, you knave! Your lies have done this!” She held her bloodstained hands like palsied claws, trembling them under his face. “You have spilled this noble blood with your lies!”

“Go home, wife,” said Iago.

“I will not! Go, look upon what you have done. Yonder lies my lady, strangled by her lord, Othello, who did stab himself in the heart while still kneeling over her. This blood is on them both, on you!” She leapt at him and wiped her bloody hands down the front of his shirt. Iago grabbed her wrists, threw her aside, and drew his dagger.

“You would draw your blade on a woman?” The senator and his attendants had backed away from the screaming woman into a bunch, forming a phalanx of dread from which they had been watching. “This is your wife?”

“Aye!” said Emilia. “But whatever evil I did to deserve a curse such as this, only heaven would know. Cursed!”

“Signors,” said Iago, awkwardly trying to pretend that he had not raised his dagger over his wife’s breast and instead had somehow accidentally found it in his hand: a foreign thing magically appeared. Forward with the plan. “Othello has been wronged, and although luck has favored him on the battlefield, he is not the master of his temper.”

“He’s bloody dead, you git!” said Emilia. “And he would have never harmed a hair on my lady’s head, even spoken an unkind word to her, had he not been driven by your lies.”

“What of this?” said the senator, emboldened now by Emilia’s complete lack of fear in the face of her husband’s dagger.