My daggers in place, I was on to the next door, opening it to stream the yellow lamplight through the gap to fall upon the face of beauty, but masked in satin. Portia lay under the canopy of a high-poster bed, nested in rich silks and brocade. I slipped in and pushed the door shut behind me, leaving the room bathed in pale blue moonlight.

“I see you found your daggers,” came a woman’s voice from behind me. I jumped, straight up, about sixty feet, and came down turned toward the voice, my fillet knife in hand.

She lay back on a fainting lounge, in the shadows, just a silhouette against the wall. I looked over my shoulder at Portia, who snored softly on.

“Oh, don’t worry about her,” said the woman in the dark. “She puts beeswax in her ears and wears a sleeping mask. You could bang a bloody drum in here and she wouldn’t wake.”

“Who are you?” said I.

“I am called Nerissa,” said she. “I’m the one that found your daggers, brought them up to the Montressor’s study. You’re the fool, right? The Englishman?”

“Possibly,” said I, thinking that she really should be quite a bit more frightened, being as I was the very vision of a murderous nightmare creeping in the night to slit the throat of her mistress and whatnot.

“Were you the one in the dungeon, the one that did that to him?”

“Did what? I heard he was eaten by rats.”

“He was torn apart, and not by rats. Pieces of him were gone—great bloody hunks of him—his buttocks were missing. I saw. I was called down there by a kitchen boy who was afraid to investigate the smell. Did you do that?”

I looked back at the sleeping Portia, then to the lady in the dark. “If you think I would do such a thing, why have you not called out?”

The shadow shrugged. “The Montressor was a right cruel old bastard, wasn’t he? Deserved what he got, didn’t he?”

“And what of what I am doing here, now?”

“Are you going to hurt me?”

“No.” I remembered her now, through the haze of wine-soaked nights before my fall from grace. The dark-haired maid who attended Portia. Fit, she was, and quick of wit, I recalled.

“Then do what you will do,” said she, throwing off her covers and rising from the couch. She moved to the door, slipped halfway out, then stopped. “Not wearing your cracking big codpiece anymore, then?”

“It was stolen,” said I, somewhat bewildered. I was holding a knife, you know?

“Pity,” she said. “There you go, love. Get on with it. Do what needs doing.” And she slipped out the door.