“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?”

“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?”