“Well, quite right, as a metaphor, the size of the bird really doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

“Since you were lying outrageously anyway,” she provided.

“Well, you may choose whichever guilt fowl you would like strung around your neck, but mine is a crashing-huge swan—with an eye patch.”

“Fine, you’ll have to book passage. I’ll give you money.”

“And Lorenzo said you are to disguise yourself as a boy,” said I. “Cover your hair and, you know, your bits.” I gestured to her more obvious bits.

“Well, as long as my Lorenzo will be in Corsica, so will I.” She rolled her eyes and hugged herself in that dreamy, girlish way that lifted and accentuated her more obvious bits, and I felt the sudden weight of a one-eyed guilt swan for having to deceive her.

“Come here, sit,” said she. “That knife wound won’t heal if left open like that. It needs cleaning and some stitches.”

“You can do that?”

“I can.”

And so she had.

When she was readying to tie off the last stitch, she said, “Not much I can do for the puncture wounds on your sides. Clean and bandage them.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, then,” said I. “They’ll probably just poison my blood with madness and I’ll die.”

“Those are like the wounds on your bottom when I found you, aren’t they?”

“Pish-posh, not at all, are you daft?” said I, as I tried to formulate some credible explanation for the claw marks. But alas, I was spared . . .

“Jessica!” came Shylock’s voice from outside the door, the latch rattling.

“You may not be long for this world anyway,” Jessica whispered to me as she went to unlatch the door, leaving needle and thread hanging from my ribs.

Shylock came through the door with great vigor and enthusiasm for a man of his years. Great vigor and enthusiasm.

“What? What? What? What? What?” said he, with what I really suppose, honestly, was more anger than enthusiasm.

“I sense a question coming—” said I.

“You! You! You! You! You!” said the Jew, waving a finger under my nose.

“And there is the answer,” I replied.

“What are you? What kind of creature? What foul villain? You would eat of my food, live under my roof, and then you would steal from me? You—you—you— you—”

“And there he goes—”

“Philistine!” Shylock paused, trembled, his index finger doing a palsied anger twitch under my nose.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked Jessica, who had returned to my side on the bench where she’d been knotting the last stitch. She shook her head and looked back to her task.

“So, no, then,” said I.

“You-you-you—Philistines are the ancient enemies of the Hebrew people. Goliath was a Philistine!”

“Oh, so they’re tall?” said I. “Smashing!”

“No! Not smashing. Goliath was an enemy, a scourge on the Hebrew people, an evil giant!”