I had never heard a Rootless so well spoken. Father always talked about them like they were brutes, barely above the level of animal communication. Something about his height and vivid hair seemed familiar. With a flush, I realized that he changed the charges at Landry Park. He’d been on my estate several times a year, and I’d never thought to say hello or even to ask him his name.
Jamie finished hooking an IV line to a bag that would collect my blood. “It is my experience that ladies are uncomfortable with needles. I try to be accommodating of this.”
The man snorted. “Ladies don’t need special treatment.”
Jamie bristled a little at this. “Gentlemen believe otherwise, sir.”
“Gentlemen do, but real men don’t.” The man settled in a nearby chair and started rolling up his sleeves. “Take this girl over here. She’s here giving blood, even though she’s clearly gentry and clearly doesn’t belong here. But she’s brave enough to do it anyway. Would you call that weak?”
“That is not what I was implying.”
“And the women in my part of town—they work alongside of us carrying charges or sorting them. Some of the strongest are even packers. And today, when your police came and burned our houses and beat us, claiming to look for Cara Westoff’s attacker, our women fought alongside us. Would you call them weak?”
Jamie sighed. “No.”
The man flexed his arm. “I’m ready, doctor.”
Jamie moved over with another needle and bag.
The man turned and looked at me. “In my part of town, women are equals. We don’t put them on pedestals, and we don’t make them do our laundry or wash our dishes. We think of them as partners. Not princesses.”
His gaze was intense, a wash of heat and conviction. Goose bumps prickled on my arms as I realized that I wanted someone in my life to think of me that way. To think that I was strong.
“Madeline is not a princess,” Jamie defended me as he tied a tourniquet. “But she will run her family’s estate someday.”
“Maybe,” I mumbled, thinking of the university.
“Maybe,” Jamie conceded, and hung a bag from a pole. The man’s blood dripped in.
“What does that mean?”
“It means my father won’t let me inherit if I go to the university,” I explained. “I don’t know what will happen.”
The man rolled his eyes. “Such problems.”
“Be respectful, Ewan, or I’ll have to ask you to leave,” Jamie warned.
“I’m not being disrespectful,” Ewan said. “Look, all I’m saying is that she doesn’t need her father’s approval to live her life.” He looked at me again. “Be strong. Go do what needs to be done.”
“But without my estate . . .”
He shrugged. “I don’t have an estate and I’m still alive. And what about this gentlemanly doctor before us? He doesn’t have one either, and he seems happy enough chastising fellows like me.”
The funny thing was, I could almost believe it. Right now, talking with Ewan, I could believe in a life without an estate, without money, without gold necklaces and corsets. Life without the orchards, filled with fluttering petals in the breeze, without the white marble floors that were cold even in the summer.
“Will you come with me to tell my father, then?” I asked, only half joking.
Ewan laughed a deep laugh that could fill a tavern. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”
My bag was full. I stood—too quickly—and felt faint.
“Steady now,” Ewan said. “You should probably eat something first.”
Jamie looked around the room. “I’ll see if I can find something,” he said, and hurried out.
Ewan pulled a wrapped package out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“I can’t take that.”
“It’s not radioactive, I promise. Just got it from the ration station before the raid.”
“No, not that. I meant I can’t take it because it’s yours. Your food.” I stopped. It seemed rude to imply directly to a Rootless that I knew they were starving. Especially when he had seen where I lived.
He held it out to me insistently. “Eat it. Your blood sugar is low, and I doubt the gentleman will find anything of better quality here. It’s all gelatin desserts and oatmeal.”
“Are you sure?” I did feel faint tingling waves at the base of my skull. My voice sounded further and further away.
“Just take it already.”
I took the package and opened the plastic wrapping. Inside was a bar of compressed fruit, meat, and fat.
“Pemmican,” Ewan said, and leaned back. “It’s softer if you stew it. But somehow I think the doctor might get a little cranky if we use his Bunsen burner to make a hot meal.”
I chewed and chewed, trying to break the bar into smaller pieces. “Thank you,” I said through a mouth full of crumbled pemmican.
“If you’re really nice to me, I’ll let you have some sawdust bread and dehydrated potatoes, too.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly, not exactly sure what I wanted to convey. Regret? Pity? General distaste for their deplorable food?
“For what? Your family enslaving mine?”
Enslaving. The word felt like a strike or a slap—an indictment. “Don’t you think enslaving is a little strong? This isn’t the Antebellum South.”
Ewan leaned forward. “History repeats itself, princess. And you know what? My life feels an awful lot like slavery to me.”
“Don’t be unfair,” Jamie said, walking into the room with a tray of anemic-looking broth and prepackaged crackers. “Society now is completely different than it was during the Civil War. Race is not a factor any longer; the Wilders and Osbournes are African American, the Lawrences are Hispanic, the Thorpes came from India, and they are all gentry and have been since the Last War. Your ancestors fought against the Uprisen in that war and that’s why you now serve the gentry. This is about class, not race.”
“Are you justifying our bondage with the fact that we happen to be different colors? Just because this isn’t exactly like what happened back then doesn’t mean that it isn’t wrong. We toil, we sicken, and we die while you all play dress-up in your fancy houses, and we have no choice. If that’s not close enough to slavery for you, then you need to return to your history books.”
I didn’t respond. Ewan had a way of being direct and challenging without being aggressive. A few moments of quiet pervaded the room as Ewan’s blood filled the bag, and as I pondered thin soup and finished the pemmican instead.
An idea occurred to me as my steadiness returned, and I decided to seize the thought and act on it, like Ewan had encouraged me to do earlier.
“Ewan,” I said, “do you know much about Cara Westoff’s attack?”
A storm clouded his face. “I could hardly not know about it, given that I just had several police officers screaming her name in my face.”
“I think she’s lying,” I rushed. “I’m not sure why she refuses to say who really attacked her, but I don’t think it was a Rootless, and I want to prove it. I just don’t know where to start.”
“So you’re asking me?” His voice was as clouded as his face.
“I’m sorry. I thought maybe you might have heard something.”
“All I can say is that it was certainly not a Rootless who hurt her.” He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve kept a close eye on Cara Westoff and the issue of her assault, and I can guarantee that no one from my camp was involved.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I didn’t know if I should trust a man I barely knew—and a Rootless man at that—but Ewan was so open and approachable. And he’d shared his food with me, when he had impossibly little to share.
I decided to believe him.
Mother was screaming.
We were in the car, coming from a dinner at the Osbourne estate, and I was too preoccupied to notice when she got out of the car. I started in my seat when sh
e began shrieking in terror.
Father put a hand on her shoulder to steady her when she swayed, but as soon as he saw the front of the house, he gestured for the driver to come support her. After easing her into the arms of the servant, he walked forward, a dark silhouette against the front of the house. I got out of the car last, and therefore saw it last, the dripping red paint scarring the light gray stone of our house.
WE ARE RISING.
The words were scrawled across the front, stretching over two windows and the antique, hand-carved double doors of the entrance. In my mind, I could think of only one “we,” one group of people who hoped for upward movement and flight from pain. One group that would so daringly play on the term Uprisen, the name that all the gentry guarded with pride. One group that had been attacked yesterday, that had watched their women and children beaten for no reason other than a reckless lie.
“How could they?” Mother whimpered, now kneeling on the ground. I knelt beside her to comfort her, but to my surprise, she was the one who drew me in her arms. “Our lovely house.”
It was lovely, in fact. Jacob Landry had selected the stone himself from a quarry in England. It looked dove gray in the daylight—almost like marble—but at night, the stone took on a distinguished silver color.
Like our eyes, our Landry eyes.
And at that moment, I felt a stab of anger at the Rootless. Yes, they’d been attacked, and yes, my father was partially responsible, but . . . our house? My house? Historic and strong and graceful, and now scarred with this angry graffiti. The paint was as red as the lights on the nuclear charges, and for a moment, I had a terrible vision of the house bathed in red lights, poisoned with radiation, uninhabitable and empty.
And then I realized why my father truly feared them. In forcing them into nuclear slavery, the gentry had also handed the Rootless a weapon.
“I will have to call the other landowners, and the Uprisen, too,” Father said, moving toward the door. “We must find whoever did this, and after we do, we need to remind these criminals who takes care of them. Their livelihood is dependent on our charity, and if they lose that, they will starve. They must respect us, and if they will not, then we will force respect on them.”
God help them, I thought, at the same time as I wondered How could they? To my beautiful house?
Father stalked off, and I watched as the driver helped Mother into the house. I wandered inside, feeling in a daze.
• • •
The next night, the spicy and expensive smell of opium smoke curled from under the study doors, where Father held court with the other landowners in the city, no doubt discussing the vandalism to our house. It had been on every wall screen, the subject of every tablet call and tea-party conversation that day; dinner had been a fierce affair, full of frightened speculation and loud polemic. After my father and his friends cloistered themselves in the study, the rest of our dinner party had quickly devolved, with everyone eager for a break in the tension, and conversation bubbled on the humid patio as the remainder of the guests flirted and drank their way through our family’s supply of plum wine and whiskey.
David and Cara were dancing to the slow, sultry music the band was playing, his hand caressing the small of her back. That night she’d come looking for him on the balcony . . . it hadn’t been a one-time thing.
It had been a beginning.
It’s not that I cared whom he dated, I just thought there was more to him than that—depth and curiosity and agitation at being trapped in our lovely and lifeless world. I thought he would want more than a girl like Cara, who was as selfish as she was beautiful.
I wondered how she could dance after seeing the front of our house scalded with invective, after hearing the panicked fretting of her neighbors, and all because she refused to tell the truth. I decided to go talk to her, but at that moment, David lowered his mouth to her ear and whispered something that made her toss her head back and laugh. It was a practiced move, designed to send her blond hair tumbling over her shoulders and expose her long throat. But even though I’d seen her do the same thing with countless other boys, it bothered me tonight. I remembered the feel of David’s hand in mine as we ran across the lawn, the way he’d said we’re alike, you and I.
Our eyes met across the room, and I shivered, because suddenly not caring about David Dana seemed unimportant . . . impossible. I wanted to go talk to him. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to dance with him in the cloud of smoke and music.
I excused myself from the noise and retired to the library. As soon as I shut the door, the echoing sounds of revelry vanished, replaced with the hush of thick carpet and untouched paper. A fire licked quietly at massive logs. Almost on autopilot, I grabbed a book from a stack on the table and sat, opening the book to read but thinking a million scattered thoughts instead.
The door opened, and the sounds and lights of the party spilled into my solitude. David appeared in the doorway and came inside, closing the door with a click. His jacket was off and his bow tie undone, the white shirt setting off his bronze skin.
He dropped into the chair across from me. “Leaving the party so soon?”
“I wanted to read.”
“Ah. Of course you did.” David reached over and plucked the book out of my hands. “A History of the Last War,” he read aloud. “Sounds riveting.”
“I like history,” I said.
He tossed the book carelessly on a nearby table, then leaned forward. “What else do you like?” he asked.
“What?”
He sat back and ran his fingers through his hair. “What other things interest you? What do you do when you’re not reading? What’s your favorite food? Your favorite season?”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked. “Why don’t you go ask Cara what her favorite things are?” I’d meant it playfully, but it came out sounding jealous. Which it wasn’t. Because I wasn’t jealous.
Was I?
“I want to ask you,” he said, his voice low. “I want to know what Madeline Landry thinks. How she feels.”
The intensity of his interest unsettled me. This was far beyond my usual conversations with the opposite sex: ballroom observations and comments about the weather. This was something else altogether—something bewildering and irresistible. Something like that afternoon in the maze. My heart began to beat loudly, as if I was dancing a fast reel.
“How I feel about what?” I asked cautiously.
David looked around the library, as if casting about for a subject. “What about what happened to your house? It’s all anyone has talked about today.”
I stiffened, the red words flashing in my mind, the horrible premonition of Landry Park submerged in radiation and decay. “I can’t believe you would ask about that, of all things.” My voice sounded strange. Brittle.
He stood, rapping his knuckles against his leg. “I am sorry. I’ve offended you.”
I realized I didn’t want him to leave, not yet. “Wait—”
He stopped. “Yes?”
“I didn’t mean to be rude. But you can understand why it’s a sensitive subject for me.”
“I understand.” His kept his eyes on me. “I can see that you love this house.”
I nodded, trying to steady my voice. “I think it’s the most beautiful house in the world. It took Jacob Landry several years to build it after the gentry won the Last War and cleared the city to make room for the estates. He wanted it to be perfect.”
He stepped forward, looking down at me. “Is there a but?”
There was, and I hadn’t even realized it until he asked. “But,” I admitted, “sometimes I feel trapped. By the inheritance, by my family. I may not be able to go to the university; the will stipulates that all Landry heirs are to be married by the age of twenty-one.”
“Maybe you could marry after you take a degree? It would only be the difference of a year or two.”
I examined my hands. “I’ve already asked. Father said no.”
He considered. “D
o you want to get married at all?”
I blushed and immediately felt ridiculous for blushing. “Someday, perhaps,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t notice my discomfiture. “After I go to the university and if I meet the right person.” I cleared my throat. “What about you?”
“If I meet the right person,” he echoed.
We stared at each other for a moment. I wanted to ask if Cara was the right person, if he could see himself as the co-owner of Westoff Castle someday, but the idea of him saying yes was too upsetting. I don’t care, I reminded myself. He was only another bachelor, interested in parties and women, while I was bound for the university and something different and exciting.
The fire popped loudly and he started. “I have taken up enough of your time,” he said slowly. He crossed the rest of the distance between us in two long strides and gave my hand a swift and warm kiss, before turning and heading toward the door. I froze, barely daring to breathe, wanting to call him back.
But he was gone, walking back to the ballroom where Cara waited among the music and laughter.
• • •
Liberty Park perched on a high hill overlooking the skyline and river bottoms. Set in the exact center of town, it was a war memorial from the twentieth century that the gentry mostly ignored because it was close to the rougher edge of town. It was mostly frequented by the shopkeepers, factory owners, and others who made up the small but steady population of middle class in Kansas City, along with a handful of working-class factory types and visiting farmers with their families.
I liked the park because it was free of hairpins and waltzes and awkward conversation. I liked the wide leafy trees that rustled in the wind and the velvet grass that stretched out like a blanket down to the road below. Close to the top of the hill stood my favorite tree. It had a wide, smooth trunk, perfect for sitting against, and a view of the skyline that was unrivaled anywhere else in the city, save for the view from Landry Park’s observatory.
I snuck out the servants’ door early on Saturday morning, knowing full well my mother wanted to take me shopping for new dresses to impress David. I didn’t know what I thought about this, but I could still feel his energy from last night, that sudden surge of interest in me that fled as quickly as it came. Why did he always seek me out when I was alone? Was he embarrassed to talk to me in public?
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