When Desdemona received her first proposal, her father offered to introduce her to the suitor with that sideways ceiling twist of his eyes which meant he wanted her to say yes. Their house was tall and loud, full of the things her father had won and her mother had found. Desdemona climbed to the very top, where the stone balustrades opened over canals and she could lean out to watch the boats slide by. The farther you got from gravity the easier it was to breathe, or so her mother had once told her, which was why her mother’s resting chambers were at the top of the stony stairs. 

Desdemona poked through lacquered chests that smelled like myrrh and lavender. These little adventures always brought into her possession beautiful things once held in her mother’s warm two hands, like Cyprus silks and translucent shells from Crete that she could sometimes string together to make a necklace. There was no covering of dust, even though her mother had been dead two years now. Recipes were tucked in the margins of spare parchments in her bright scrawl, beside notes in butchered Latin that Desdemona could never understand. She didn’t remember much of her mother, except little sayings of hers that would always crinkle into her mind at the edge of sleep or reason. When Desdemona climbed into bed with bare feet fuming with youthful distaste for the things she had to do for men and women and patrician blood, it was her mother’s warm swirlings of hair that she tried to remember. That and the lessons she used to tell, like how honesty lay tucked in the steady crook of your neck, and kindness in your vertebra, and how it was always yours to find. 

This is a story about a girl who was young and kind and good; a girl who looked at darkness and saw beauty immediately, easily, who stood before senators and fathers and gods of the city, and still said: this is the man I choose. It is easy, later, to call her naive, like it is easy to call all women foolish. Desdemona liked to believe in things and people and prayers, liked to sit with her ankles crossed in the servants’ kitchen tasting berries until there was nothing left but streaks of color on her tongue. But belief, like goodwill, was for Desdemona a choice she made again and again and again. 

The first time she saw Othello, she was sixteen years old and lost, by other people's definitions of the word. She was not yet married. Her father was pacing in the hall inside fiddling with stacks of rejected proposals, and Desdemona had wandered into the evening garth, following noise and light until she drifted across the place where the lanterns’ orange glow pooled over bushes of ivy. The man she noticed was very tall, with skin dark as night and eyes a honey-brown colour that was smooth and warm, like her mother’s hands. She thought he looked like a very honest man; there was something steady living in the crook of his spine. Here was someone who had seen wars, walked across deserts, not only spoken of courage but borne it. She thought, here is someone who will not ask me to be a dowry. They talked a little that night. She listened intently to him speak. She had been told stories all her life, but none like his: places that swallowed men whole, fights fought in dust and thunder, a boy stolen away and made into a soldier before he was ever truly a man. He had a way of speaking that made sure she lived his adventures: leather stained with sweat, body shaking and shaking and pouring forth the stink of his exertions. Every word that tripped out of his nether lips was some rare foreign shimmer she wanted to touch. Only later would Desdemona realise that she had not once thought of whether he would make a good husband, or whether her father would approve, or what the city would say. She buried herself under pillows and blankets and scrubbed a hand across her cheek, scratching cream-blonde hair across skin. Then, she thought of her mother’s sayings – honesty, kindness, these bones of the body as secret keepers of truth – and she thought: he has them all.

Three days – they made love. Five, and they made escape.

“You cannot,” was her father’s ruling. Desdemona let herself feel the words clink into her chest like coins into a fountain, let herself feel the splash. “The heart is a frivolous thing,” he continued, “You are young. What you mistake for love is simply difference. You will tire of it.”

“I will not tire of him,” replied Desdemona unshaking, but she could not argue in her father’s language. She did not know much about his judiciary, only what she had seen in the steady slope of Othello’s shoulders, in the patience of his notes when he talked of Battle’s drums. “This here is a divided duty. But here is my husband, whom I owe and adore.”

Her father’s stare was an iron clamp on her skull. “I am trying to save you. All I am doing is helping.”

She looked up at the sky, open horizons forever and ever. She took a breath, pushed it out. Love meant courage, and she had plenty of that. People forget Desdemona’s strength because she dies so softly. They remember the white sheets, the whispered nobody; I myself, and they think her passive; here is defense against. 

“I don’t want that from you,” she said. “I know why you are doing it, Father. I know you love me. But it is kind to think about my loves, too, my wants. You do this because you love me, but this is still about you, Father.”

She jerked and shook through the rest of the senate, then went with her love to sit on the stairs to the garth she had first met him in. He was a good speaker, who had little charm but could change the tide with his frankness and noble nature. He was lovely at reassurance. Steady hands.

“You do not regret it?”

She thought his soul was sweet and boyish, despite his age. She liked it. The way he went rigid when he couldn’t quite feel like he deserved goodness. “I regret nothing but the way it hurts my father, but even he cannot ask me to unlove you.”

“You have left much behind…” He trailed off, thinking. His head was leaned against the tree bark and his thumbs were hooked together in his lap. His voice was thin and exhausted.

“They can call this what they like,” said Desdemona, a little spitefully because she was still young and virtue didn’t come natural to anyone. “I have not done wrong. This is not a revolt. This is living.”

His gaze found the curve of her hands. “You are seventeen. You don’t know what storms may come. My life has been made of nothing but storms.”

Desdemona smiled. A sweet pure thing with teeth. “Okay. Let me carry some.”

The first storm came at dawn, near the waters where the ships’ hulls flashed white as bone. They were to sail to Cyprus. True to her word, Desdemona learned the rhythm of the sea like a new language: the roll and dip of the vessel beneath her feet, the salt that burned her skin and broke through her hair, the sun bending gold across unfathomable blue. Her husband was in his element. He stood by the helm most days and came to her with armfuls of love he had nowhere to put, soaked through and windlashed, grinning ear to ear. He liked getting storms in his teeth. For the first few weeks, she clutched the rails, stomach hollowed, hair plastered to her cheeks by briny spray, and tried to smile anyway. It was different with him. She could bear discomfort if it meant being close to him. 

Their journey took weeks. At sea, Desdemona grew into courage, and in Cyprus, she grew into wanting to love Othello until the sun burned out. There were no nerves – just a swelling realisation of an invisible string tied from her rib to his. They kissed and found each other’s place in bed as custom to all husbands and wives, and he told her new stories, new adventures as he barrelled through them. He had new scars on him now, too, hard lines of muscle and a rigid spine, but he still wore the steady earnestness she’d first fallen in love with. She thought she could get used to this. 

It was summer, and men sat about in the shade with flies buzzing all around, doling out change or gossip not exchanged at the markets. There was heat everywhere, a dry and suffocating fog-like thing that burned in the air or in the eyes locked on her wherever she walked. “General’s whore,” someone said once, not knowing her ears were sharp and her pride even sharper. The words caved in like rocks under her lungs and avalanches in the curve of her belly. They were more difficult to walk past when Othello was not by her side.

“You must miss Venice,” a man said when he first met her in the corner of the street, “A gentlewoman like yourself… I mean, you must be so frightfully tired of the soldiers. If you ever need a hand, you know you can come to me.” He stuck out a hand, wide and white with long cunning fingers. He had a very agreeable smile that gave the impression that he had devoted all his attention to you for a short, irresistible moment. “My name is Iago. Such a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last.”

“Desdemona,” she returned his introduction with a polite smile. “Venice was never gentle to me. And I’m not so fragile.”

“But you are good,” said the man, like virtue meant weakness, like goodness did not take the most strength to uphold. “Be good.”

For a few days, she tried to be good to all whom she knew. Cassio’s favour was a promise she had made and would die to upkeep. Loyalty was a choice, too, and Desdemona made it the way she made all her choices: slowly, then all at once, without regret. She was the same in love as her husband was in war – she charged after what she wanted, a single soldier but people flocked in her wake. 

“Tomorrow night?” she asked, shoulders raised like hackles as she paced in front of her love. “Or Tuesday morning? Or Tuesday noon, or night? Wednesday? But don’t let it pass three days –”

“I can deny you nothing, my love.”

He held her to him with gentle arms, and she bathed in his care and felt she could face the whole world alone. 

“My husband is not like yours, nor my marriage,” said Emilia that night, folding Othello’s handkerchief in little squares to place in Desdemona’s drawer. “He likes the thrill of new things. I only do what I can to please his fantasies.”

“Fantasies?” Desdemona frowned, reaching across the table for a plum. The juice burst against her teeth, bright and tart. “Do you mean stories?”

“I mean illusions,” said Emilia, and she sounded tired. “He likes to feel important.”

Desdemona looked out of the window, where the molten light ran rushing across the stones of Cyprus. “I don’t understand.”

There was honesty tucked in the crook of your neck, and kindness in your vertebra, but where did self-importance live? Where did meanness, and where did infidelity? 

The change in Othello came slowly as wine mellowing in heat. His hands were not so steady – it was the first thing she noticed.

“You speak too often of Cassio,” he said. The circles under his eyes looked like they belonged there, like red wine stains on marble, like pits under your feet.

“I speak of fairness.” Every moment of disunity between them was a torment to her. When Desdemona finally got a good look at him, at the darkness in his eyes and the way he shook and shook and shook, she wanted to get scaffolding and try to hold their crumbling infrastructure up.

“I will not lie to you,” she continued, “I speak of Cassio because I believe in justice. Because he has no one else to speak for him.”

The week passed swiftly. Her husband had an odd little wheezy rumble in the back of his throat when he slept. Desdemona tried to pay attention to the way he breathed. It seemed important, to listen to how he filled himself up, emptied his lungs out. She began to count the seconds between breaths, how many heartbeats she could fit in between each two. His muscles could not forget battle even in sleep. They twitched and tensed and when he woke from nightmares it was she who soothed him back into oblivion. She was getting good at this, soothing him, placating him, praying for him and sometimes, very selfishly, for them both and their love. 

“Desdemona.”

Her body snapped to his call like cord. “Are you well?”

He was standing there like a ghost, sallow-faced and weak-kneed, shaking. She counted three dozen heartbeats before his next breath.

“Lend me your handkerchief.”

“Which?”

“The one I gave you.”

She felt for her pockets. Her hands came out empty. She felt the horror rush into her lungs and knock the breath out of them, felt it wash over her from head to toe until the world began to swim. 

“I don’t have it about me,” she whispered. 

“Lost?” said Othello, and he went cold as wet stone. He was ruthless when he wanted to be – she knew him well. She tried to shiver her way back to breathing.

“No – but what if it is?”

“Then you have given it away.”

“Othello – no! Never would I –”

He turned away before she could finish, one hand rising to his mouth the way a man might hold in a scream. She reached for him – reached, reached, still reaching – and for the first time since he kissed her in her father’s garth, he twisted away from her tender hold.

“You’re too good,” said Emilia, when she was alone in her chambers with nothing to hold onto but her own jagged will. “You are too good to see when you are being used.”

“I don’t understand,” said Desdemona.

“You don’t understand a lot of things yet,” Emilia pressed gently, “That man loves you like a soldier loves his sword. He needs it sharp and he needs it flawless. He cannot abide the thought that it might one day be taken from him.”

“That’s not love, then,” Desdemona said, trying to produce a smile but not quite being able to. “That’s fear, isn’t it?”

“Right,” replied Emilia carefully, “I am fond of you, my lady. I speak as a friend and a woman when I advise you to protect yourself. He is asking for you tonight. You are to prepare for bed.”

Desdemona waded into her nightgown as if wading into something viscous. “Please don’t say that. He might be lost now, but he’s lost not gone. Sometimes love goes bad. I know that, I do.”

“I don’t know,” said Emilia, “Maybe – he is not gone entirely, okay, sure. But he is still lost.”

"Do you really think so?" Desdemona said, digesting the way Emiliad had tried to make the 'sure' not curl over her tongue too obviously.

"I think I believe in starker lines than you do. Sometimes, when you lose things you don't ever get them back."

When Emilia left, she tried to brush out her hair the way her mother used to. She thought, suddenly and vividly, of the stone balustrades back in Venice, of the height, the dizzying drop to the canals, the way the wind always felt truer at the top of things. She had once believed that the farther you got from gravity, the easier it was to breathe. Then why did everything press down? There was a heavy feeling in the well of her stomach, a sense of alarm she registered and chose to hold. It was strange – she felt like she had reached the end of things, and there was nothing left now but waiting. Desdemona climbed into bed, tucked the white sheets around her carefully. She held honesty in the crook of her neck where her husband could see it, and kindness in her vertebra. 

Perhaps in another story, she could have run, but not this. Love meant you had to be there – be present and good and kind, even when it hurt and even when it broke you in the breaking. She clutched the sheets and thought, nobody; I myself, and squeezed her eyes tight shut.