“I’m sure that in the fullness of time we will come to regard each other with—”
“That’s a no, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I replied with a sigh. “She needs the Red, and my family need the social standing.”
“How awesomely romantic! Have you told her? It would put the union on a business footing, and you’d save a small fortune in flowers, chocolates and poets.”
“She knows. It’s just a game, really. Besides, the old-color Roger Maroon is the odds-on favorite—despite his lack of Red, intelligence, charm and looks. Here,” I said, handing her a letter I had been drafting, “you may like to use this as a basis.”
“Drivel,” she said, scanning the words quickly. “Were you really going to send that?”
“The bit regarding the Caravaggio was okay,” I replied a bit stupidly, “and I thought it important to mention the queuing. Should I scrub the paragraph about the rabbit?”
“It’s all sheep and no shepherd,” she remarked and started to write on the back of my letter as we walked. She scribbled, crossed out and then wrote again, a bit like an artist trying to capture a likeness.
She looked quite lovely, and it wasn’t just her nose. The hair that wasn’t tucked into her ponytail dropped in front of her eyes several times, and she pushed it out of the way behind her ear, where it would stay for perhaps twenty seconds or so before making its way out again. I could have watched her for several circuits of the village, and fervently hoped she was a slow poet. Unfortunately, she wasn’t.
“There,” she said a minute later, and handed over the finished product.
Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny, Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy, Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation, Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation.
“That’s . . . beautiful,” I murmured.
Although the meaning wasn’t at first obvious, it seemed to have the right sort of words in it. Fairly long and not used that often. It also sounded intelligent, and had a lot of string references, which would go down well with Constance’s mother. More important still, it was a lot better than I could do. “Should I place it at the beginning or the end of the letter?”
“This is the letter, numbskull. You just put Tim or Peter or whatever your name is at the end. No Xs, no kisses and none of that ‘My heart yearns for you, poopsie’ nonsense.”
“It’s ‘honey bear,’ actually.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. What do I owe you for the poetry?”
“You can have Constance on me. All I need is a favor.”
I looked across at her. “I have a feeling it’s probably not to scratch your back or put up some shelves.”
“No. What do you know about this Matthew Gloss character?”
“You mean His Colorfulness? Not very much.”
“But he’s kin, living in your house, and you called him Matthew in public. You wouldn’t have done that unless he’d allowed you to.”
“We’re getting along okay,” I conceded.
“I’d like to know what he’s doing here.”
“A Magenta feed-pipe leakage, he told me.”
“I heard that, too. But we’re not on the grid. He’s been invited to conduct the Ishihara, but that’s not for three days. I want to know what he’s really doing here.”
“ You want me to spy on a National Color operative? Someone Colorful? ”
“Wow,” she said, “you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.”
“I can’t spy on my fourth cousin!”
“Of course you can. And you will.”
“You seem very confident about this.”
She leaned forward. “You’ll do this for me, Red, because despite Constance, you’re in love with me.”
And there it was. She’d said it. If I’d wanted to deny it, there was a half-second window in which to do so. But I paused too long, and all hope of believabilitywasgone forever. “Oh, sure,” I said inan unconvincing manner, “I’m on a half promise to an Oxblood, and I let myself fall for a Grey girl who not only despises me but is up for Reboot in under a week. Does that sound remotely sensible to you?”
“Love isn’t sensible, Red. I think that’s the point.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and thought hard for a moment. “You want to know what the Colorman is doing here?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see what I can find out. But you have to stop threatening to kill me and punching me in the eye and stuff.”
“This is the new me,” she said, and gave me another smile. I was being used, but then I didn’t mind—and I didn’t actually have to do as she asked. In under a week she’d be pacing the yard at Reboot.
We turned the corner into the main square and came across a small crowd outside the town hall. It looked like an allocation ceremony, so we wandered over to dutifully offer our best wishes.
I had been nine at the time of my own allocating, and up until then I’d carried a nondescript BS3 code from the open pool that was held by the prefects. With the increased importance of family and inheritance, a loophole had been drafted to allow residents to transfer a relative’s postcode to a junior member of the same family. The RG6 7GD code that was now scarred into my chest had been my grandfather’s. I’d have liked any child of mine to have had my mother’s old code, but that had been reallocated to someone named Holland Claret, and I’d never liked him because of it. The Oxbloods had elderly relatives in abundance, so any children of Constance would almost certainly carry an SW3—Oxblood through and through.
We were standing at the back of the crowd of perhaps fifty or so people. DeMauve was conducting the ceremony, and it seemed that young Penelope Gamboge was having her allocation on the last day possible—her twelfth birthday, which lent a double sense of occasion to the proceedings. Old Man Magenta back in Jade-under-Lime treated allocation as the formfillery it was, but at least deMauve was making an effort. The whole Gamboge clan, which numbered eight as far as I could see, were beaming happily and even shedding a tear or two, which I never thought Yellows could do.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” whispered Jane. “A new life to an old postcode. A connection to our past, and to the future.”
“You can be quite sarcastic sometimes, can’t you?”
“It’s more than sometimes.”
“How did you get to Rusty Hill this morning?”
It was a daring question, but she had promised not to thump me. As it turned out, her answer was as matter-of-fact as it was impenetrable.
“The highway obeys my every wish.”
“What?”
She ignored me, and the ceremony came to an end.
“Aren’t you going to give a donation?”
I wasn’t planning to, but said I would so as not to appear cheap. I placed the smallest coin I had in the jar marked PENELOPE DAFFODIL GAMBOGE, TO3 4RF, which I noted was already half full of low-denomination coins, and quite a few buttons.
“There,” I said, “happy?” But I was talking to myself. Jane had slipped away in the crowd, her job completed. I looked at the poem again. It was the best I’d seen, and I wished she had written it to me, and not for me.
I stopped off at the telegraph office to send Jane’s poem to Constance. Mrs. Blood was impressed and congratulated me on the quality of my words. “You’re smarter than you look, young man. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say your Constance is a lucky woman, she might conceivably do worse.”
“You’re very kind,” I replied. “I just needed to get into my groove.”