“You’ll want to paddle in this way, mate,” I called to him. “Before she comes back.” He leaned into his oar and the gondola shot toward us.

I looked around, caught Shylock’s eye. “Drool will help you wash the blood off your gold and carry it home.”

I turned to look for Jessica and saw Bassanio, hiding his face in Portia’s shoulder as she embraced him. I went by him, squeezed his shoulder. “He loved you, lad. Truly. He was a bloody villain, but that was the one true bit about him.”

The crowd gave me a wide berth for some reason, and I moved through them until I spotted Jessica, sneering at me from under the boy’s hat she was wearing to hide her hair.

“Bit gaudy, innit? I suppose that wet and shiny type has a tawdry appeal to certain lowlifes.” She grinned.

Iago could hear another prisoner down the corridor moaning and shouted for him to shut up.

They’d put him in one of the cells in the Bridge of Sighs, which linked the doge’s palace to the prison, three stories above the canal. He was chained to the wall, but by only one leg iron, the chain long enough to allow him to pace his entire cell. The chain was unnecessary, he thought. There was only one small window above the level of his head, too small for a man to fit through, and then a cupola with four vent windows at the center of the arched ceiling, large enough for a prisoner to fit through, but entirely too high for even an unfettered man standing on another’s shoulders to reach.

When, on his third day of incarceration, the guard announced that he had a visitor, he half-expected it to be Othello, there to curse him in person, perhaps even one of the men of his barracks, but when a pretty dark-haired woman appeared outside the cell, her green silk gown a respite for the eye in this gray stone world, he was taken aback.

She carried a basket, the neck of a bottle of wine protruded from a nest of linen, and the smell of freshly baked bread was tall in the air.

“I know you,” said Iago. “You were at Belmont the day they found Brabantio in the cellar.”

“You remembered,” Nerissa smiled. “I had been seeing your friend, Rodrigo.”

“Oh yes, of course. Nerissa.” Iago’s mind was a blaze looking for fuel. How could he use this to his advantage?

“I do not know you, signor,” said Nerissa. “But Rodrigo always spoke highly of you, and how you had helped and advised him.”

“Ah, Rodrigo, a good mate. He is missed.”

“Well, I thought I would bring you some food, comforts from the outside. And because of Portia’s favor with the doge, they allowed it.”