“The maid knows, but the master does not? I tell you, Rodrigo, women are a devious lot. Bed them if you must, but take their oaths but as cobwebs spun across a stable door, breaking with scant resistance to the next stallion to pass by.”

“But, good Iago, do you not have a wife yourself ? The fair Emilia?”

“Thus I know of what I speak. A bundle of deceit in a pleasant package is she, are they all. Woe to the man who thinks different and enables them with trust.” Iago thrust his dagger in its sheath as if dirking Caesar. “Come, Rodrigo, we will rouse Senator Brabantio and see if we can loose deadly anger on the Moor before the full tale is told. Have men with weapons ready. Brabantio is old and will have his killing done by others.”

Roused from my gentle slumber on the foyer floor of Othello’s house, where I had landed after taking a tumble down the stairs, to settle in what appeared to be a puddle of my own sick, I went to the door to address whatever gang of reprobates was shouting and pounding and generally adding a rather grating edge to my newborn hangover.

“What?” I opened the door, expecting sunlight to drive spikes of regret into my forehead, but instead, in the night, stood Brabantio, and behind him perhaps two dozen men with torches, a few carrying swords.

“Montressor?” said I.

“Fortunato?” said the Montressor. “What are you doing here?”

“Confronting a bloody mob, evidently. What are you doing here?”

“We’ve come to seize the Moor, who has taken my daughter Desdemona and holds her under his heathen enchantment!”

A shout came from the rear of the crowd. “Even now the black ram is tupping his white ewe!”

“The Moor and Desdemona even now make the beast with two backs!” came another shout.

“Even now he doth do bold and saucy wrongs upon her!” shouted another.

“There’s no spell,” said I. “The Moor and your daughter are married. And your mob has no pitchforks. I’ve seen a crashing fuck-bushel of blokes dragged into the street by mobs, and you need pitchforks.”

“But we have no horses,” said a less enthusiastic voice.

“Nor cows, neither,” said another.

“No need to shovel hay nor manure,” whined a third.

“I could fetch a boat hook,” suggested yet another knave.

“Send out the Moor!” demanded Brabantio.

“Montressor, your mob is shit,” said I. “Come back when you’ve proper pitchforks and some coherent slogans. ‘Beast with two backs’? What did you do, just go from house to house asking for illiterate nitwits to come help drag the high commander of the most powerful military force in the land from his house without so much as a sharp stick? Shoddy fucking planning, Montressor.” I slammed the door in his face and threw the bolt.