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 bestowals 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.”