“A Purple flogging their hard-won heredity?” I replied with an incredulous sniff. “Ridiculous. Besides, they’d never do anything to risk losing authority.”
“Do they really bring you up so naive in the hub?” he said. “There’s a whole world out there behind the Rules, if only you look. In any event, Carlos will bend your ear about any suitably rich Purples you might know. If you want to drive the Ford or be shown around the gyrobike, play along.”
It would take me a while to get used to how rude Tommo could be—not just his flippancy, but divulging other people’s perceptions. It was the height of bad manners.
“How did you know I sold my own granny?”
“I didn’t. I was trying to be funny.”
“Ah. Listen, when you get to Rusty Hill, will you bring me back a pair of Male Outdoor Casuals?” He showed me his shoes, which were actually not shoes at all, but scraps of well-shined leather tied to the top of his feet.
“Okay.”
“Size nines.”
“Size nines it is.”
“See that guy over there?” He was indicating a handsome man, probably in his early thirties. “Ben Azzuro. Nice guy and a fine all-arounder, but nearly caused a riot in the henhouse by declaring himself.
Personally, I’d like to see more like him in the village.”
“You’ll be declaring?”
“No. It would just tip the marriage market more in my favor. The way I figure it, if six more moved across, I might actually end up with someone quite pleasant. This might come as a huge surprise to you, but I’m not considered much of a catch.”
“Whyever not?”
“Careful of the sarcasm, sunshine. That’s the local salt lick over there. The woman behind the counter is Mrs. Crimson.”
He was pointing at the tearoom, always the busiest establishment in any village. It was called the Fallen Man, which was an unusual name, given that most tearooms were called Mrs. Cranston’s . I looked at the faded-to-monochrome painting on the board above the front door. It depicted a man sitting in a leather armchair while plummeting past some fluffy clouds, his tie flapping upward.
“Odd name,” I said, indicating the sign.
“Not for here,” he said cheerfully. “The other tearoom is called the Singing Coathanger. They both refer to local legends: the Fallen Man to someone who fell to earth quite near here, and the Singing Coathanger to a, well, a coathanger that started to sing.”
I’d heard about pieces of metal giving off a tinny noise that sounded like speech or song, but had never witnessed the phenomenon myself.
“Singing bits of wire and fallen men are all we’ve got in the legend department,” added Tommo. “What about you?”
“We have the Lapper Venus ,” I explained, “though it’s more unexplained artifacture than folklore, to be honest. But,” I added, “there was the Night of the Great Noise. The elderly still talk about how in the morning everything was covered with something resembling cobwebs, and all the ladders were missing.”
“I’m almost sorry I asked. That’s Daisy Crimson,” he added, indicating a young woman who was walking past. “Nice girl and from a good family, if a little low-hued. Her father runs the village’s heat exchangers . Some say Daisy giggles too much and her nose is a little too pointy, but it’s never troubled me—or her, come to that.”
We had arrived at the flak tower, which was entirely typical in its construction. Square in plan but with a slight taper to the apex, where flat-lobed projections stuck out on all corners. The bronze doors had been removed long ago for scrap, and the unchecked Perpetulite had grown across the aperture, so all that remained was a vertical scar and a rough dimpling, like on unbaked bread. Another couple of hundred years and there wouldn’t even be that.
Tommo walked to the side where a series of bronze pitons was clear evidence of how the crackletrap builders had managed to get to the top. At chest height someone had left a length of steel piping no thicker than a man’s fist in what had once been a window. Tommo placed sandwiches in the pipe, followed by an apple, while I stared at him, confused.
“Sandwiches,” he explained, “for Ulrika of the Flak. I think she’s Riffraff.”
“You mean there’s—”
“Shh!” he said. “You don’t want to frighten her.”
When he wasdone, he beckoned me away, and inanswer to my doubtless quizzical expression, said, “What’s your problem?”
“How did she get in there?”
He shrugged.
“Then how do you know she’s Ulrika? Or a woman? Or even Riffraff, for that matter?”
“Eddie,” he said, pulling me closer, “if I want to have a pet Riffraff called Ulrika who lives in the flak tower and gets fed through a pipe, then I will, and no low-end, slow-end rabbit watcher is going to tell me otherwise. Do you understand?”
I said that I totally understood—now—but didn’t mention that I too had an imaginary friend who needed feeding. I called him Perkins Muffleberry, and he lived in a hollow beech at the edge of the village. I know it sounds childish, but the food was always gone by morning.
Pickled Onions and Custard
2.6.21.01.066: Dinner may be taken privately, but shall also be available from the communal kitchens, as long as Head Cook is informed before 4:00 p.m., and an attendance chit is obtained.
We were supposed to have dinner at seven. Dad hadn’t appeared by the time the meal was ready, so Jane threatened to throw the supper out the window if he wasn’t at the table in five minutes flat.
“Really?” he said when I dashed over to the Colorium to inform him of this, and I assured him she probably meant it, too.
His work could just as easily be done at home, so he locked the swatch safe and we walked back across the square together.
“I’ll need to fill out the order to National Color,” he said. “You can help me.”
This wasn’t good news. I had been hoping Dad would fill out the requisition on his own so I’d have a very good reason not to double-order the Lincoln for Tommo and Courtland.
“Right,” I replied uneasily, “love to.”
I had earlier received an assurance from Jane that nothing unpleasant had been added to the food. In fact, although a bit sharp, this evening she seemed vaguely pleasant. I asked her why, and she replied with a shrug that my father had “shown compassion,” which I took to mean his stance on bed rest for the sniffles and Mr. G-67’s early retirement. To somehow ingratiate myself into her confidence, I almost asked her out for tea at the Fallen Man, but my nerve failed me, and the moment passed.
“Why don’t you join us?” Dad asked Jane as soon as she had laid the dinner out on the sideboard.
She looked around to see whom he was talking to, then realized it was her. I don’t think she’d supped at a Chromatic table before. “Thank you, sir, but there’s not enough.”
“Not enough?” he exclaimed, pointing to the steaming pot of broth. “There’s enough here for four people!”
Before Jane could answer, the door swung open, and the Apocryphal man walked in. He was wearing nothing but a grubby string vest.
“I could have been a contender,” he mumbled to himself, “and before this decade is out, we aim to land a man and open the box or take the money.”
He then picked up the tureen and was out again before we could blink. We wouldn’t have minded so much, except that we hadn’t helped ourselves yet.
“No one just ate our dinner,” said Dad with a sigh. “Is there anything else in the house?”
Jane bobbed and went to have a look while I answered the doorbell. It was Red Prefect Yewberry.
“We were just sitting down to dinner,” I explained, and Yewberry, mistaking my comment for an invitation to a free meal, gratefully accepted.
“Smells excellent,” he said, for the aroma of the broth had lingered, even if the broth itself hadn’t.