An hour later I’d fed old Gobbo and on a series of fine paving stones by the dock had managed to hone a razor’s edge onto an old fish knife I’d nicked from Shylock’s kitchen. It was shit for throwing, with its thin blade and heavy oak handle, but it would thread through a man’s ribs in a pinch, open an artery if deftly flicked, and more important to my purpose, razor the seal off a letter with such subtlety that it could be replaced and leave the intrusion undetectable. I’d resealed Jessica’s letter with the tip of my blade heated on the food-seller’s brazier, leaving her seal still pristine in the wax, but its content still troubled me. There would be no time to craft clever speeches and complex plans to undo my foes. I would have to find revenge on the fly, make action my eloquence.

“Come, Lancelot Gobbo,” said Shylock, waving me out of the stripe of shade where I reclined against the front wall of his house. “I go to make a loan and secure the bond of the esteemed Antonio Donnola, merchant of Venice. Come, boy, carry my papers. Come and learn business.”

Into the very nest of vipers I’d only recently escaped. So be it.

I followed Shylock out into the afternoon, carrying a carved wooden box that held parchment, ink, and quills. As it turned out, with age Shylock had lost the close vision to read and write his own contracts, so had to have Jessica do it at home or pay a notary. My ability to read and write gave me value. I thought it best not to inform him that across the lagoon on the glass-making island of Murano, they had begun to make small lenses, called spectacles, that rested in a frame across the bridge of the nose, which might correct one’s reading vision.

We crossed the island through a narrow path, where the buildings were so close that they were buttressed over the alley on their upper floors with oak arches. It was cool in the alley, and the breeze off the Adriatic washed the city smell away, so stepping out into the sun on the city side of the alley, filled with the activity of boats and traders, was an assault on the senses. And I, disguised in the long dark gabardine, felt sweat blossom and stream down my back. The heat and humidity of the Venetian summer made me long for the green, rain-swept, sheep-flecked hills of England. At least there are no horses in Venice, and the sewage drops through the floors of homes and is washed away with the tides, so as salty and fish befouled as Venice can be, it is less odiferous than Paris or London on a summer’s day.