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Hagen, Bethany Jubilee Manor ISBN 13 : 9780803739499

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9780803739499: Jubilee Manor
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It was the shouts that caught my attention.

I had been looking over the menu for tonight’s dinner—roast goose and lobster—when I heard the noise come from outside, where the gardeners had been rolling heavy solar heaters into place and shoveling snow off the wide gravel walks. Curious, I went through the ballroom to the patio doors, hoping to find the source of the commotion.

For the first time in the month since I’d stood up to my father at Liberty Park, the estate bustled with activity. On my way through the ballroom, I passed servants carrying fresh bundles of flowers, neatly pressed linens, crates of long white candles for the candelabras and chandeliers. I made a quick mental note of the progress as I walked, trying to calculate how much more still needed to be done. The dinner my uncle and I were hosting tonight was to welcome the Rootless and the gentry together, to try to demonstrate goodwill on both sides. How well the Rootless would adapt to sharing a table with their oppressors remained to be seen, but I felt hopeful that tonight would be a turning point.

Tonight was important.

The men were gesturing emphatically to one another, and I could hear them arguing even before I opened the glass doors that led outside. A rush of cold damp air hit me, cutting through the filmy silk dress I wore. “What’s going on?” The frigid air made my voice unusually sharp. I took a breath and changed my tone to something softer, more polite. “I heard the shouts. Is everything okay?”

One of the men, the head gardener, touched his hat respectfully. “Good afternoon, Miss Landry. There’s really nothing going on here, just an unexpected complication.”

But I’d already stepped out onto the patio, shivering, snow soaking through my thin slippers, and now I could see what the men were concerned about: an ugly red stain in the snow, right on top of where the platinum atomic symbol was inlaid into the stone.

“We were clearing off the patio,” he said, “and we noticed a heap of snow in the middle. We started shoveling and found this.”

“It looks like blood,” someone said.

“It looks like a lot of blood,” another added.

I came forward to examine the stain more closely. It did indeed look like blood, a vivid crimson that eerily matched the color of my hair. Darker in the middle and surrounded by bright splatters, the stain was large and deep. When a gardener used his shovel to scrape away a section, the snowmelt lingered in scarlet puddles on the patio.

The wind picked up again, ruffling my hair, and the scent of something metallic and salty blew with it. “Do you think this means that someone is hurt? Have any of the servants reported injuries?” I asked.

The head gardener shook his head. “None of the staff has been hurt. And it would be difficult to hide a wound that produced that much blood.”

“Could it have been an animal?” I asked. “Maybe a fox or a wild dog cornered something.” I felt a flutter of fear as I thought of my cat, Morgana, who habitually wandered outside.

“But then where’s the rest of it? No carcass, no bones. Not even a trail showing where it had been dragged off.” The gardener shook his head, and I relaxed a little. “No. Whatever bled here was carried off and then great pains were taken to cover the blood back up. A person did this, Miss Landry.”

I took quick stock of the patio. Four gardeners, two solar heaters, and assorted shovels, spades, and ice picks. Muddy bootprints were everywhere, mostly leading from the south side of the property where they’d been clearing the garden, and one leading from the east side, where the gardening shed abutted the carriage house. Ignoring the head gardener’s noise of protest, I walked around the blood and down the steps, the snow scraping against my bare legs as I sank in up to my knees. At the bottom, I could see no footprints other than those that clearly belonged to the gardeners. There was no disturbed snow on the lawn, no trace of blood anywhere else. It was as if whatever—no, whomever—had bled into the snow had then simply vanished.

I trudged back up to the gardeners. “How long since the patio’s last been cleared?” I asked.

“The night of your debut,” the head gardener said.

That made sense. That was the night before I’d confronted Father and everything had changed. “So it’s been a month,” I said. “Could this have been here since then and no one noticed?”

He shook his head. “Someone would have seen it, surely. And besides, it snowed last night, and the snow piled on top of the stain was freshly disturbed. It must have happened today.”

The thought made me intensely uncomfortable. Mere hours ago, someone had spilled what appeared to be torrents of blood right outside the ballroom of the most important estate in the entire city, and no one had noticed. Had someone been mutilated? Killed?

Please let no one have been hurt, I begged the fading sky. Please, please, please, no more, no more blood, no more pain.

I thought back to my father, bloodied and hands knotting in pain, when he’d been rescued from the Rootless mob at Liberty Park.

And along with the thought came a stab of fear—a rapier prick of fear really—sharp and small and gone in an instant.

“Should we tell your uncle?” the gardener asked.

I shook off the images of violence and savagery that crowded at the edges of my mind. “I’ll get him,” I said. I left the gardeners shuffling uncomfortably and went back inside to find my uncle, my slippers leaving wet footprints on the floor.

I hated having to disturb Jack with anything tonight. The events at Liberty Park, along with the shocking and painful revelation that Jack was actually my father’s assumed-dead brother, had left the city in chaos and had naturally left the gentry uneasy. There was so much work to be done and tonight was a new beginning. He needed to focus and prepare as much as possible.

And, if I admitted it to myself, there was another reason I felt reluctant to tell him about the mysterious discovery. Something had been different about him in the past four weeks, a fanaticism that nestled inside his rumbling words. It made me wary, but we were so close to achieving all that we’d worked for, so close to actual change, that I felt reluctant to give the small anxieties in my mind any credence.

Jack was in my father’s study when I found him. He was reading, as he often did these days, having been deprived of access to books when he lived in the Rootless ghetto. He snapped the book shut when he saw me. “Madeline. How are the preparations for the dinner coming along?”

For a moment, his resemblance to Father was overwhelming, and something tightened in my chest. “There’s something on the patio you need to see,” I said.

He got to his feet, leaving his cane leaning against the desk. We walked back through the ballroom, where servants rolled tables laden with fresh flowers and empty silver platters in from the kitchen elevator. Savory scents and sweet smells wafted up from downstairs, and already Crawford, the butler, was laying out bottles of wine from the cellar. The sun was dipping low outside. I would have to go upstairs soon to change and have Elinor fix my hair.

Jack opened the doors and we both stepped outside, me wishing that I would have thought to get a cloak and him showing no sign that he even noticed the cold. The creases in his face deepened as his eyes lit upon the blood, and they grew deeper and deeper as he interviewed the gardeners, listening to the same answers I had heard not five minutes ago.

“Should we alert the constables?” I asked when he finished.

He stared at the western horizon, where oranges and pinks and purples mingled together and glanced off the sparkling snow. “The guests will be here in a couple of hours. And we’re not even sure that a crime has been committed.”

“But surely the police could identify it as blood for certain? And maybe there’s somebody in the city who’s been hurt and the constables are looking for any possible leads, and—”

Jack held up a hand. “I’m not ignoring this, Madeline. But we have important work to do here tonight and I don’t want it interrupted by something that’s probably inconsequential.”

“They could come and take a couple of pictures, maybe a sample and then leave,” I insisted. “In and out before the party even starts.”

Jack met my gaze, determined gray eyes on determined gray eyes, and I managed to keep the eye contact until he finally exhaled and shrugged. “Fine. We’ll call the constables. But I will make it clear that they need to be quick. My people will not take kindly to seeing the police roaming the estate, not after all the violence of the past year.”

“I understand,” I said. “And thank you.”

He nodded at me. “Finish clearing everything else,” he told the men. “But save the patio until after the constables have looked at it.” He looked at me one last time before leaving. One by one, the men filed off the patio, grabbing their shovels and picks.

I stood there for a minute longer, my breath steaming, absorbed by the bloody snow. It seemed like a portent, like a warning out of a fairy tale, but for what? Things couldn’t be better right now. The Rootless and the gentry would meet tonight, converse and mingle and actually learn about one another. My father had been removed from power. And David—my cheeks warmed as I thought of Captain David Dana and his bright blue eyes and sharp smile.

And I had David. Things were good.

I went upstairs, where I found Morgana curled into a silver ball on my bed. I rubbed behind her ears for a moment, glad to see her alive and clearly unharmed, and then started to change for dinner.

Elinor had already laid out my gown, a flowing chiffon of mint green with a wide sash and a short train. I wanted something understated, something that wouldn’t seem too opulent to the Rootless, but also something that wouldn’t seem cheap or boring to the gentry, who already didn’t trust me after what happened in Liberty Park. I wanted to show them that I was still a Landry, that I still had a foot in their world, and that trying to help the Rootless didn’t negate any of that.

As Elinor pinned up my hair, sliding antique hairpins into the mass of waves with almost unnerving focus, I watched the blue lights of the constables’ cars flash across the windows. I wondered what they would make of the stain, and if they would try to analyze the blood or search for someone who was missing or hurt, and if they could find any other clues as to who did it.

I tried to shake the worries and fears out of my thoughts, but they clung to me like wet leaves, cold and unwelcome. What if someone was truly hurt? What if they were still hurting?

Stop, I told myself. I was overreacting, on edge from the violent events this winter. Jack seemed to think it was nothing, and if that wasn’t the case, then the constables would be able to help. I had to focus on making tonight a success.

With a murmured thanks to Elinor, I rose from my vanity and went downstairs. The evening was beginning, whether I was ready for it or not.

Jack and I stood in the foyer to welcome the guests, my gown affording very little protection from the gusts of freezing air that circled through the house whenever the front doors opened. The Rootless contingent was the first to arrive, and I felt some dismay at their small number—less than twenty in all.

“So few,” I murmured to Jack as they filed in through the door, looking uncomfortable and wary. “Did we invite more?”

“I invited them all,” Jack said. He licked his lips as he looked down at the floor. “I am sure the reasons for refusal are varied.”

There was something he wasn’t saying. Rather than ask, I waited—a tactic I’d learned from my father.

“Many of them feel that we should not move forward with a formalized agreement with the gentry,” Jack finally said, and his quiet voice made it plain that this was a difficult admission for him. “Only a handful see the wisdom in working together. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that I’ve had a gentry agenda all along, being both a Landry and a son of the Uprisen.”

The Uprisen was the small influential group within the gentry that set legal policy and government agendas behind the scenes; only the oldest and wealthiest families counted themselves members. My ancestor Jacob Landry had been the founder of the Uprisen, and my entire life I’d been groomed to take a seat at the table with the other eleven families. So had Jack—before he’d faked his own death and forged a new place for himself among the Rootless.

“Things were easier when my identity was unknown,” he said.

“I can imagine.”

The group finished coming in, and we greeted them, me signaling to the servants to circulate among the guests with hors d’oeuvres and small flutes of champagne, which the Rootless seemed reluctant to take. Instead, they clustered together at the far end of the foyer, looking to Jack for reassurance.

A scowling man with slouching shoulders and darting eyes hung near the back. I was surprised to see him: Smith, the angry revolutionary who had once yanked me through a window by my hair. Jack had helped the other Rootless find gentry-style clothes, tuxedos for the men and gowns for the women, but Smith had refused. He still defiantly wore his Rootless clothes, patched brown pants and a tattered gray shirt.

He, of all the Rootless, was the most resistant to working with the gentry. Why had he even come?

Eyeing Smith, I moved across the marble floor to speak with the Rootless, to encourage them to make themselves at home. Most of them smiled at me, most of them shook my hand and thanked me for standing up for them in Liberty Park, but not him. He moved right past me as if I didn’t even exist.

“I thought there was going to be dinner,” Smith said to Jack, glancing around the foyer with barely contained revulsion.

“It’s traditional for guests to mill in the foyer before dinner starts,” Jack said pleasantly. “It gives a chance for conversation.” What Jack didn’t mention was that he didn’t want anybody to see the constables packing up their things and leaving the patio. Better to keep the guests safely ensconced until he was certain that they had gone.

Smith walked closer, but he didn’t bother lowering his voice. “You’re turning into one of them,” he said. “Why are we even here? Alexander Landry has been driven out and you have control. Can’t you force the Uprisen to change?”

“Not without a fight,” I broke in. “If you push them, there will be more violence, maybe even war—”

“A war that we would win,” Smith said over me.

“—And that war would only hurt your own people and your own cause,” I continued.

“She’s right,” Jack said. “After all, without Alexander to lead them, the gentry may feel it’s in their best interest to negotiate. We have our proposals, our demands. We will ask for the gentry to switch to a safer power source—wind or solar—and they will see the irrefutable logic in that.” His voice did not ring with confidence, and Smith’s curling lip indicated that he noticed this.

“At the very least,” Jack amended, “we try this f...

Revue de presse :
Praise for Jubilee Manor:

“ The thrilling conclusion to this postapocalyptic duology with a Downton Abbey twist will satisfy fans of dystopians with a romantic bent.” —SLJ

Praise for Landry Park:

"Gone with the Wind meets The Hunger Games." —VOYA

"A mélange of sci-fi inventions, well-written characters, and classic literary allusions." —The Christian Science Monitor

"This is a terrific mash-up of a Regency period romance with a dystopian tale that will intrigue teen readers, and introduce some important questions about the structure of modern society." —SLJ Teen Review

"Hagen’s debut is filled with luxurious language, swoon-worthy love interests, and exceptional world-building...this first book in a trilogy will appeal to fans of Diana Peterfreund’s For Darkness Shows the Stars and Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron." —School Library Journal

"Heated debates and similarly heated kisses fuel Madeline and David’s will-they/won’t-they relationship, tempering the social commentary with a bit of romantic drama." —BCCB

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  • ÉditeurDial Books
  • Date d'édition2015
  • ISBN 10 0803739494
  • ISBN 13 9780803739499
  • ReliureRelié
  • Nombre de pages400
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