‘Oh, no. Throw his own daughter out? What kind of father would do that? Especially one like Angry. He used to go around as if the air she breathed was perfumed. No, he wouldn’ t have thrown Idle and Marigold out. It was her idea: shetold her father the best thing for her and Idle was to get away. She persuaded him they should come back here. She said honest toil in the fields was what they needed — it was what Idle had been born to, it was what his father and grandfathers had done, and the only way of life for an Aztec was the one his ancestors had known, plying their trade or walking around up to his ankles in shit in their fields or whatever, and honouring their gods. Above all, honouring their bloody gods!’
I looked around at the statuettes peering down at us from their niches in the walls. ‘She was the devout one.’
‘Oh, wasn’t she just! It was never going to work, but try telling her that. Try telling her her husband didn’t know one end of a digging-stick from another and couldn’t care less anyway So they ended up here, with nothing to live on except what her father gave her as a parting gift, and no means of earning a living.’
‘So how come you and Skinny followed them?’
It took her a little while to answer. She frowned and looked away, as if she were nervous about the weather too. I waited.
Eventually she said: ‘All right. You wanted the truth. You know most of it anyway’
‘It had something to do with the costume?’ I prompted.
She sighed. ‘It was just before Idle and Marigold left. Skinny had disappeared. He slipped away, just before dawn, without telling anyone where he was going, and was gone all day I thought he’d gone on a binge, but Idle wasn’t with him, and when he did come back he was stone cold sober. Excited, though — almost feverish.
‘He told me what had happened that night. He’d been summoned before the Emperor himself! Montezuma had told him what he wanted, and asked him lots of questions about how he’d set about the work. I don’t think I’d ever seen Skinny so enthusiastic about anything — by the time he got home, he wasreally fired up. It was … well, you know what it was. The biggest thing he’d ever done — probably the biggest thing any featherworker ever did.
‘But it had to be kept secret. Montezuma told him nobody, especially the other featherworkers, was allowed to know about it. Not even Angry, although Skinny was working for him.’
‘So you left.’ It made sense: by returning to Atecocolecan Skinny could escape the prying eyes of his own employer and the rest of his fellow craftsmen. I doubted that the field hands and day-labourers of his home parish would take much notice of what he was up to. ‘And Skinny worked on the costume here, in the peace and quiet. All right, how did Kindly get hold of it?’
She laughed mirthlessly ‘How do you think? He stole it!’
I stared at her, speechless.
‘Your master lied to you, slave! He didn’t buy it from us. He must have got wind of it somehow — maybe Angry found out and let something slip — and thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.’
‘No,’ I protested, ‘that can’t be right! Remember, he sent me here to buy it back from you …’
‘Because someone stole it from him! Funny, isn’t it, a thief’s house getting burgled? But your coming here was the first we knew of where the costume had gone. Now can you understand why we weren’t exactly keen to talk about it?’
If what she said was true — that the work Montezuma had commissioned and sworn her husband to secrecy about had gone missing twice, once from his own house — then I had to agree that it was not something they would want the whole World to know.
‘What about Idle?’ I asked. ‘And his wife? He’s dead, and I know whoever has the costume is connected with that, andshe’s missing …’ I let my voice tail off as I worked out the answer to my own question.
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Butterfly sniffed. ‘He found out where it was and stole it from Kindly. Then Marigold killed him and fled. You want to find the raiment of the god? Find my sister-in-law!’
A peal of thunder sounded overhead. Tlaloc was making his presence felt.
I looked up at a sky that had turned the colour of slate. A large raindrop hit me in the eye. A moment later they were falling all around us. Little dark discs were forming and spreading in the dust at our feet and moisture was streaking and spattering the whitewashed walls.
‘Better go in,’ I muttered, rising and automatically heading for the nearest room, the one I had seen Butterfly and Skinny emerge from on my previous visit.
The woman was there before I was, barring the doorway
‘No! Not in there! The other room — go in the other room. Please.’
I froze, astonished.
She had turned her face up towards mine and was staring at me, her eyes still unblinking despite the rain whose stinging blows I could feel even through the hair on top of my head. Her cheeks glowed with something more than make-up and her breathing was suddenly quick and shallow. Her teeth were bared and her fists clenched and there was something in her voice I had not heard before, the kind of tremor you hear from the throat of a person fighting to master rage or terror.
‘Sorry,’ I said mildly. ‘The other room, then.’ I turned back, towards the room that led through to the street, and added, because I felt I ought to add something, ‘I didn’t know.’
I barely heard her let out a long breath, like a sigh of relief,and then she was by my side, hurrying as I was to get in out of the rain. ‘No, it’s my fault.’ Her tone had changed again. The moment of tension had gone now, releasing in its wake a flood of words as hasty as a small bird’s chirping. ‘It’s just that that room … well, it’s a terrible mess. Much worse than this courtyard. It was my brother-in-law’s room, the one he shared with Marigold. He never let us clean it, you see, and there are things in there I wouldn’t want anyone to see. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Um, yes,’ I said, with a quick glance over my shoulder. The already sodden cloth over the doorway flapped lethargically under the beating it was getting from the heavens. I did not understand what she meant, except that beyond that scrap of material lay something she would fight to keep me from seeing. Perhaps whatever Idle had kept in there was enough to spell disaster for the remaining members of his household if it were found. I was going to get to the bottom of that later, I decided, but I had other questions for now.
‘Tell me about Idle and Marigold.’ As we ducked into the shelter of the house’s front room, I had to raise my voice to make it heard over the rain hammering on the thin stucco roof. ‘What makes you so sure she’d have killed her husband?’
She rolled her eyes as if in despair at my ignorance. It was the kind of gesture I might have seen on the face of one of my teachers at the House of Tears while he explained to me, for the third time, that the plant for curing leeches was Amolli, not Yiamolli, which was good only for dandruff. ‘What do you think? It wasn’t just drink and mushrooms and gambling with him. He couldn’t keep his hands off the girls — or any other bit of him, for that matter! For some reason she managed to turn a blind eye to it. I suppose she was flattered when Idle started courting her and didn’t want to believe what she must have been able to see for herself. Getting married didn’tchange him — it never does. He tried it on with half the women in Angry’s household before he came here. Maybe that had something to do with why Marigold wanted to bring us all here, to get him away from temptation. If that was it, it didn’t work! Almost the first thing he did after we arrived was to proposition me!’ Her voice became shrill with outrage and she had to pause and take a couple of breaths before going on. ‘Of course, I told him what would happen if he didn’t behave himself.’
‘Naturally.’
‘But what I think is, Marigold caught him with some local lass. That wouldn’t have been so very difficult for him, you see. He’s been boasting so much about his connections with the featherworkers over the years that he’s made himself quite famous, in a pathetic, parochial sort of way And it’s not as if the men around here … Well,’ she concluded primly, ‘it’s a pretty rough sort of place.’