Shades of Grey

  About three-quarters of the way through the quarantine, Dad ran through the list of specifically Rot-like symptoms, such as accelerated nail growth, numb elbows and a certain brittleness of the ears. None of us had any of those, so we knew by then that we were clear. Mildew makes itself known within two hours of infection. Sometimes sooner, but never later.

  “I understand that you’re taking your Ishihara with us?” asked Fandango once the quarantine period was up and we were heading back to East Carmine.

  “It’s a huge honor,” I said, and meant it.

  “My daughter Imogen is being shown the spots this year as well,” he remarked. “She’ll be quite Violet—a recessive throwback to a very purple maternal grandmother, you know.”

  “Is that so?” I said, recalling Tommo’s accusation that Imogen was the product of purchased parentage at the Green Dragon. “You must be very proud.”

  “We are hugely proud, and want only the best for her. Speaking of which, you don’t know any Purples who are a bit slack-hued but rolling in moolah? I’ve had a bit of interest, but nothing terribly exciting—mostly Lilac lowbies wanting to pay in bouncing goats.”

  I thought of Bertie Magenta. His smarter, elder and Purpler sister would inherit Old Man Magenta’s Synthetic Pigment Enrichment Plant and the head prefecture. Bertie had scored a dismal 53 percent Purple on his Ishihara last year, and had a brain the size of a broad bean. Despite this and solely due to his hue, he would live a very comfortable life. If his sister married away and no higher Purple arrived, he might even make head prefect—which was a chilling thought right there all on its own.

  “Does he have to be at all smart?” I asked.

  “If he’s got the cash, I’m not bothered.”

  “I know this fellow,” I said, “not the sharpest banana in the bunch. In fact, some might say he has the mind of a clodworm. But his father is the head prefect.”

  “Totally perfect!” said Carlos with a grin. “Two percent finder’s fee, lad.”

  “How does Imogen feel about it?”

  “She’ll do what we think is best,” replied Fandango in a tone of voice that I didn’t much care for. “Besides, an engagement will bring closure to an unsuitable attachment. You could compose a telegram to your friend, speaking of Imogen’s dazzling attributes. You might like to mention that she’s willing to offer any serious purchaser an evening on appro. I’ll get a photograph and a list of her virtues to you just as soon as I can.”

  He took my silence as agreement and patted me on the shoulder. Although I couldn’t be sure, I thought he’d just offered to broker his own daughter for some youknow with Bertie, a slack-hued cash machine he knew nothing about. I shook my head. He couldn’t have. He must have meant a meal or something.

  “Twenty-nine miles,” Fandango announced sadly as we pulled up outside the stockwall gates to smarten ourselves up and put our spots back on. “If we pile on the mileage at this rate, the Ford will be worn out in less than two centuries.”

  Lucy, Violet and Daisy

  5.1.02.12.023: It is a condition of custodianship that all paintings, sculptures and other works of art must be shown to any resident on demand.

  The word that a Colorman had arrived swiftly got about, and by the time I escorted him to our house, a gaggle of inquisitive villagers had collected to stare. Not just at him, but the gears on his bicycle and his richly colorful coveralls. In the relative drabness of East Carmine, he shone like a beacon of hope—an example of how colorful the world could look, if only we could afford the pigment, and had time and opportunity to collect the scrap.

  “You’re very popular,” I said, showing him upstairs to his room.

  “It’s National Color they’re fascinated by,” he replied. “I’ve seen people commit unspeakable acts simply to secure a colored orchid. Do you have an interest in color, lad?”

  “My shade of mustard won best runner-up at Jollity Fair last year,” I said, honored to be given the opportunity to boast. “I went for a darker shade than the others: 33-71-67.”

  “Hmm,” said the Colorman, expertly visualizing the color in his head, “not bad. Tell me, what would we use to stain a primrose?”

  “62-62-98, sir.”

  “And a carrot?”

  “31-87-97.”

  He was impressed. “You know your colors.”

  “My mentor was a retired mixer,” I explained. “Greg Scarlet.”

  “I met him once or twice,” replied the Colorman thoughtfully. “Fine chap. Perhaps you and I should speak again. Undo my shoelaces and take off my boots, would you? Let me give you my laundry—and please, call me Matthew.”

  I delivered the painting as soon as I had dealt with the Colorman’s laundry and changed into more appropriate day clothes. Red Prefect Yewberry seemed happier than anyone I’d ever seen before when I handed over the Caravaggio.

  “We’ll lodge it with the Cochineals,” he announced, staring in admiration at the canvas. “They’ve already got a van Gogh and know how to look after these things. I may have it copied into a painting-by-numbers, and have it painted with synthetics so all may gaze upon its splendor.”

  “Our Mrs. Alder has The Shipwreck of the Minotaur on her upstairs landing,” I said, eager not to be outdone, “and Ruth G-9 has a Renoir.”

  “You should have a look at our Vermeer,” replied Yewberry. “It’s in the Greyzone, but you might persuade one of them to escort you in and out.”

  At a few minutes to one I wandered across to the town hall. The Rules didn’t state which meal was mandatory, but it was always lunch. Lucy Ochre was one of the few faces I recognized among the many who were milling about outside, chatting cross-hue before we were confined to our tables. Luckily, the presence of the Colorman seemed to have eclipsed the news about my run-in with the yateveo.

  “Hullo!” I said, but Lucy looked at me blankly.

  “It’s Eddie Russett.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I was miles away. Thanks for your help with the Lincoln this morning. I might have to ask for it back, though. Mummy will notice it’s gone.”

  “I destroyed it.” It was a lie, I know, but it was probably for the best.

  “I’ll tell her that Tommo stole it—I need a good reason to keep him out of the house.”

  I asked her in the most delicate way possible about her father, and she told me that he liked his Lincoln but never abused the Green Room.

  “I don’t know what he was doing in there,” she said, “but he didn’t misdiagnose—and he certainly wasn’t Chasing the Frog.”

  She fell into thoughtful silence, so I decided to change the subject. “I brought you this—as requested,” I remarked, handing her the spoon I had liberated from Rusty Hill. I’d wrapped it in an odd sock in case anyone saw. Given the value of spoons, an ugly custom had arisen whereby a spoon might be swapped for youknow, tarnishing the once romantic nature of spoon gifting. “Accepting a spoon” was now a pejorative term and an ugly slur on one’s integrity, which was why I had prefaced the gift with “as requested.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I nodded, and she told me I was a darling. “What can I do to repay you?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I assured her in case my intent was misconstrued. “It’s simply a gift.”

  “What’s going on here?” asked Tommo, who had suddenly appeared, and seemed to be taking issue with our talking to each other.

  “Eddie was giving me a spoon,” said Lucy in an innocent fashion.

  “What?!”

  “The utensil, Tommo.”

  “Oh,” he said, calming down, “right.”

  “Silly me,” said Lucy. “I must be more careful with my words.”

  We sat at the same red-hued table we had used at breakfast, and Lucy fell into conversation with a girl at the other end. I couldn’t hear what they said, but they pointed at me and giggled.

  “Listen here,” said Tommo, “you haven’t got a thing for Lucy, have you?”
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  “Absolutely not.”

  “Hmm,” he said, then: “Still got your eyes on Crazy Jane for a bit of slap and tickle?”

  “No—I think it would be mostly slap and very little tickle.”

  “In that I think you might be correct. How was Rusty Hill?”

  “Exciting,” I told him, and gave him a rundown of everything that had happened in the twenty-eight minutes I had spent there. The legion of the dead, the rotting fabric of the village, the Caravaggio, the color hydrant and the Colorman. I left out the bit about Jane, Zane and the Pooka, but it didn’t matter, since none of it interested him anyway.

  “Did you get me my size-nine boots?”

  “Here,” I said, handing him a paper bag that contained the shoes I had pulled from the dead prefect’s feet. “Sorry—I didn’t realize at the time how stinky they were.”

  “I see what you mean,” replied Tommo as he wrinkled his nose and plucked off a shriveled toe that was stuck to the insole. “Couldn’t you have swiped me a pair from his wardrobe?”

  “That would be stealing.”

  He leaned across and dropped the toe into the water jug. “You’re a bit odd, Eddie, did you know that?”

  Other Reds soon started arriving at the table, and they nodded politely as I was introduced. I didn’t know any of them, but they knew me well enough. I would have liked my fame to be somehow related to the retrieval of the Caravaggio or being distantly related to the Colorman—or even to seeing the Last Rabbit. But it wasn’t. I was the one who not only had risked my hide to help a Yellow, but was also “so stupid he nearly got himself eaten by a yateveo.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked Tommo as a severe-looking woman entered the room.

  “Mrs. deMauve. If I said she was a Pooka in human form, I would be doing all Pookas a grave injustice. Although not part of the village Council, she still wields a lot of power. But don’t let her airs fool you—she was born a Navy and is Purple by marriage only. The odious creature following her is their daughter, Violet deMauve. A frightful troublemaker, and confidently touted as the next head prefect. Don’t catch her eye.”

  It was too late. Violet saw Tommo and me talking, and she skipped over to us in an affected little-girl manner. She wore her hair in bunches, which made her look younger than she was, and although her face was tolerable, it was tipped into ordinariness by an inconsequential nose—all snub and hardly-there-at-all. Like Courtland, the Yellow prefect’s son, she had a large collection of merit badges pinned on her clothes.

  “You must be the Russett fellow,” she said in an almost accusatory fashion while running an eye down my badges and catching sight of the punishment badge. “You need humility, do you?”

  “So my Council believed.”

  “A thousand merits, eh?” she said, looking at the better half of my badge collection.

  “As you see.”

  “What ho, Violet,” Tommo remarked. “Strangled any small, furry woodland creatures recently?”

  She stared at him coldly for a moment before turning back to me. “I’m Violet,” she said, putting on her best smile and sitting between us, so we both had to shuffle aside to let her in. “Violet deMauve, and if you are very, very lucky, I might make you one of my friends—of which I have many. Some say, in fact, that I have more friends than anyone else in the village.”

  “I’m delighted at your good fortune,” I replied.

  “How nice of you! Let me see, now . . .” She took a notebook from the pocket in her pinafore, and flicked through the pages. “Since I already have the maximum friends permitted, I’m going to have to lose one to make room for you. Yes, Elizabeth Gold.”

  She put a line through Elizabeth’s name, and wrote mine in above. I hadn’t actually agreed to be her friend, and she hadn’t asked. Purples generally assumed stuff like that.

  “There!” she announced. “I never liked her sniveling anyway. Her feet splay outward, and she can barely tell a buttercup from a clover. Now, is it true you play the cello?”

  “Only as far as the third string. I’m due to start mastering the fourth this summer.”

  “Excellent! You shall be in the orchestra for Red Side Story. I shall not be able to play, for I shall be taking the lead role. It means playing a Green, but we dedicated thespians place art above personal ridicule.” She narrowed her eyes and stared at me. “You will not ridicule me, I trust?”

  “Not at all—I once played Nathan in Greys and Dolls.”

  “How hideously embarrassing,” she said with a laugh. “You must have felt a complete idiot. Now—do you see much red?”

  The question was a predictable one. Tommo had said Mrs. deMauve was a Navy, so Violet would be right at the blue end of purple. For the deMauves to stay at the top of the stack, she needed the reddest husband she could find to get her progeny back on hue.

  “Say no,” said Tommo in an unsubtle whisper.

  “Can it, Cinnabar. Well, Master Edward?”

  I thought of lying and telling her I saw very little, but on reflection I didn’t really feel I had to tell her simply because she asked. “I don’t have to answer that question, Miss deMauve.”

  “You’re mistaken,” she said in a petulant voice. “You do. Now, what about it?”

  We stared at each other for a moment or two, until Violet burst into laughter and pushed my shoulder playfully. “You Russetts! Always larking about. Don’t forget the orchestra. Wednesday afternoons straight after tea. Oh, and by the by—there seems to be a toe in your water jug.”

  Another girl had arrived on the scene. She was of slighter build than Violet, and looked as though she had been practicing hockeyball. I knew this because she was holding a hockeyball stick.

  “Well, well,” said Violet with a sneer, “Daisy Crimson. I hear you’re to audition for the part of Maria—don’t feel rejected when you fail to get it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Daisy, giving Violet a polite smile, “did you say something? I was thinking about sheep.”

  Violet smiled without any hint of joy and walked off, pushing against Daisy’s shoulder as she did so.

  “Well,” said Daisy, sitting down and, after seeing the toe in the water jug, helping herself to Tommo’s glass, “a hideous fate awaits anyone who marries that. Who’s the favorite at the moment?”

  “Your brother,” said Tommo, “on even money.”

  “I’ll have to take him to one side and have a word. Violet as my sister-in-law would be an unspeakable horror. Hello. I’m Daisy Crimson. You must be Edward.”

  Tommo nudged me, and I remembered that she and I were due to be married—according to Tommo’s fantasy marriage league, anyway.

  “Eddie,” I said, shaking her hand. “Friend?”

  “Friend.”

  She was actually rather pretty. She looked older than her years, with shoulder-length hair and a thin dappling of dark freckles across the bridge of her nose, which was, as Tommo had remarked, quite pointy.

  “Double hoorah on the Caravaggio retrieval,” she said. “Up until now the village has been a bit heavy on the Postimpressionists, and our Picasso is on loan to Yellowopolis, which is having a retrospective. Watch out for the deMauves, by the way—meddling with that bunch would be like eating a scorpion sandwich.”

  “That’s what I like about this village,” I observed. “Everybody is so nice to one another.”

  “She’s right about the scorpion sandwich,” Tommo put in. “That’s why I didn’t factor Violet into your marital-prospect rundown. Besides, Doug Crimson is our strongest Red—he’s the one who’s going to pull the short straw and have to slip the ring on her trotter.”

  “How does Doug feel about marrying into the deMauves?” I asked.

  “Fervently hoping he has less red than he thinks,” murmured Daisy, who undoubtedly had concerns for her brother.

  I knew what she meant. Although no one could cheat the Ishihara, and most people had a general idea of what they could see, there were often surprises as recessive bestowa
ls popped to the fore. Even children of longtime Greys could suddenly discover a perception they never knew they had. The yearly Ishihara tipped village politics on its head and kept the prefects on their toes—and relatively free from excess.

  “Master Edward?” said a voice nearby. I turned to find a small girl aged no more than twelve holding a clipboard. She was smartly turned out and had a Yellow Spot with several honor badges next to a shiny SENIOR JUNIOR MONITOR badge.

  “Hello,” I said in a friendly manner. “What can I help you with, little girl?”

  “You can help me by canning the patronizing backchat—unless you want my thumb jabbed in your eye.”

  My face dropped.

  “You couldn’t reach,” Tommo retorted. “We’re both here, so why don’t you just tick the stupid lunch register and toddle along?”

  “You have to say ‘Here’ after I’ve called your name. It’s the Rules. If you don’t want to do it my way I’ll simply report you for obstructing a monitor, and you can explain yourself to a prefect.”

  “Bog off, girlie,” he growled, “and when you’ve done that, bog off again—and then a third time, in case the first two were ineffective.”

  She narrowed her eyes, glowered for a moment and then walked off.

  “Penelope is the youngest Gamboge,” Tommo explained, “Courtland’s niece and the Yellow prefect’s granddaughter. She hasn’t got as much Yellow as those two, but enough to make her troublesome.”

  A few minutes later, Penelope returned with her Yellow prefect grandmother in tow.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded Mrs. Gamboge, and we all dutifully stood.

  “Thomas Cinnabar denied the protocol,” the odious child gushed self-righteously, “and then told me to bog off—three times.”

  “I’m proud to plead guilty to the bog-off thing,” Tommo said cheerfully, “but I’d like to apologize unreservedly to Miss Penelope under Article Forty-two and plead fair comment under Rule 6.3.22.02.044.”

  “Agreed,” replied Gamboge, who must also have thought Penelope something of a pest. “You will be penalized only five merits, for failing to respect the authority of a lunch register monitor. Do you even have any merits, Cinnabar?”