Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

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.’

‘So you think Marigold finally had enough.’

‘I think she had too good a chance to miss! She found out about the costume, somehow, and suddenly there was her opportunity — to get rid of her bastard of a husband and get all the money she could ever need, in one go!’

I frowned. ‘Angry told me he thought she was pregnant. Would she really kill her child’s father?’

Butterfly laughed.

‘Only a man would ask that!’

The shower did not last long. The sky was brightening already by the time Butterfly had finished speaking, and a few shafts of sunlight were falling on the cloth over the doorway, converting its darkness into a dirty mottled brown.

She got up and glanced through the doorway. ‘It’s stopping.’

I could still hear tapping and creaking sounds from above me. I wondered how well made the roof was, although a brief, anxious look up at it showed no suspicious cracks or bulges. I tried to remember whether any trees had spread their branches directly overhead, to take over shedding water when the clouds had finished.

‘You may as well go.’ She tried to sound regretful even as she reinforced her words by crossing the room to look out of the street entrance. ‘I doubt if Skinny will be back today at all. He was meant to be going to Tlatelolco market, but he said something about seeing some friends in Amantlan as well.’

I was tempted to argue, but there seemed little point. I had a lot of questions, some of whose answers, I thought, must lie in this house, but I could see I was not going to get them by pestering Skinny’s wife. I believed practically nothing she had told me. I was convinced that the key to everything — the whereabouts of the costume, the identity of Idle’s killer and whatever had become of my son — lay in the room across thecourtyard. If she was not going to show me what was in there then I would have to find out for myself.

All the same, I could not help admiring her, not just for the elegant silhouette she made as I watched her in the doorway but for her command of herself. There was no way I was going to get her to tell me anything she had not already decided I should know.

Besides, those curious, alarming sounds were still coming from the roof. They were not loud and the woman seemed too intent on ushering me quickly out of her house to notice them, but they were undeniably real. I wondered whether the moisture had got into the beams and swollen them, or whether there was some other explanation.

As I left the house, I looked around me quickly. Directly to my front, running alongside the path I stood on, ran a narrow canal. At its end I saw the labourers I had noticed when I had first come here, still toiling over the plot whose edges they were reinforcing. They had finished their joyful, rhythmic hurling of hammerheads against wooden piles and were were now silently engaged in the back-breaking work of heaving rocks and tumbling them into place to form the foundations of their artificial island.

Skinny’s house abutted straight on to the deserted property on its right-hand side, a poor-looking thatched hovel surrounded by tall, dripping weeds. Around the corner on the other side was a little open space. A stumpy-looking willow grew there, one or two of its polled branches ending just short of the edge of the roof, so that I could see they had not been dripping on it.

After a quick glance in both directions I decided to go for the willow.

Keeping my back pressed against the outside wall of the house, I edged towards it, slithering around the corner like asnake winding itself around a rock. I put myself between the house and the willow’s trunk and looked up.

A branch made a fork in the wood right over my head. It was perfectly placed, and so was I. When I heard the scraping noise from the roof I moved without even waiting for the foot to appear.

I leapt upward and had the ankle in my grasp before whoever was up there had got so much as a toehold on the branch. I did not need to pull. I just let my weight drag us both down, and with a shocked howl my victim tumbled from his perch and crashed in a heap at my feet.

He was up in an instant, snarling at me like a cornered ocelot, too furious for a moment even to think about running away. This was just as well as I could see straight away that he was a youngster and I would have had trouble catching him. I took the opportunity to lunge towards him, to seize him by the arm or the hair and get him on the ground and subdued, but two things made me stop with my arm hanging in midair.

The first was that the fight went out of him. As he stared at his assailant I saw his eyes widen and his jaw drop and his hands, which were raised and clawed for self-defence, fell limply to his side. An instant later he was on his knees in the mud with his head bowed, whimpering with fright. It took me a moment to realize what had happened and then I nearly ruined it by laughing. Probably for the last time, my pathetic disguise had worked, and the fake aura of a priest had overcome him.