Verwandte Artikel zu The Gallery

The Gallery - Softcover

Fitzgerald, Laura Marx

 
9780142427705: The Gallery
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0142427705 ISBN 13: 9780142427705
Verlag: Rocky Pond Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A riveting historical art mystery for fans of Chasing Vermeer and The Westing Game, set in the Roaring Twenties!

It's 1929, and twelve-year-old Martha has no choice but to work as a maid in the New York City mansion of the wealthy Sewell family. But, despite the Gatsby-like parties and trimmings of success, she suspects something might be deeply wrong in the household—specifically with Rose Sewell, the formerly vivacious lady of the house who now refuses to leave her room. The other servants say Rose is crazy, but scrappy, strong-willed Martha thinks there’s more to the story—and that the paintings in the Sewell’s gallery contain a hidden message detailing the truth. But in a house filled with secrets, nothing is quite what it seems, and no one is who they say. Can Martha follow the clues, decipher the code, and solve the mystery of what’s really going on with Rose Sewell?

Inspired by true events described in a fascinating author’s note, The Gallery is a 1920s caper told with humor and spunk that readers today will love.

* “This lively and inventive mystery successfully incorporates history, art, and literary classics.” —Booklist, starred review

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Marx Fitzgerald studied art history at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. Her first book for young readers, Under the Egg, won the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association’s Middle Grade Book of the Year award. Laura lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 2

September 1928

I learned early that if you ask an adult for the truth, usually you get a story.

Sometimes two.

Take the story of my birth. My dad said that Ma labored brave and hard all night with me all topsy-turvy in her belly—never leading with my head, sure, nothing’s changed, he’d say—and that as I finally made my way into the world, the dawn broke and light streamed in through the window, sunbeams warming up both sets of cheeks. And the doctor said I was the most beautiful baby he’d ever delivered, and I should be named Aurora for the goddess of the dawn, and Daddo still wishes that’s what they’d named me.

My ma said that’s malarkey, that I was born in the unnaturally hot blaze of a May afternoon, with a single nurse and not a doctor to be found for the likes of a poor mick like her, and how would Daddo know anything about it when he was at the saloon the whole time? And my name was always going to be Martha, for my great-aunt Martha who paid my ma’s passage over from Ireland when she was a girl.

Which one is true? Maybe both, probably neither.

So this time, I’m telling the story.

I mean, the truth.


Late September in Brooklyn can be delightful, with wisps of fall in the air, or it can be as hot and muggy as August.

That was the kind of day it was when I sat in catechism class, trying not to let Sister Ignatius see me scratching my sweaty behind under my regulation wool tights. I had an idea that I might sneak out and walk to the elevated train. I’d be at Coney Island before French class even started, to la diablo with Mademoiselle Flanagan.

I figured I could fake lady complaints and ask for a pass to the nurse. Flanagan would think I was at the nurse’s office, and the other girls would tell our last period calisthenics teacher I was excused from exercises. As a plan, it couldn’t fail.

“Martha O’Doyle, I asked you a question.”

“May I go to the nurse, Sister?” I doubled over my desk. “It’s my time.”

“Well, how apropos, as we were just talking about the Curse of Eve. And wasn’t it the curse last week when I asked you to recite the Second Lesson on God and His Perfections? And the week before that when it was your turn to clap the erasers?”

I groaned louder and clutched my stomach.

“Or could this be your punishment for ignoring your studies last night?”

I’d meant to memorize the Fifth Lesson after I fed, bathed, and tucked my little brothers into their prayed-over bedsides. But I’d heard on the way home that Declan Leary bet Jimmy Ratchett that he could pull his dad’s Ford around the block with his teeth. (He couldn’t.) So after the show, the boys and I wheedled beer-splashed peanuts off of Dom Donovan’s speakeasy and hosed off under a fire hydrant. By the time Ma got home from her job in Manhattan, all she saw was a clean kitchen and wet heads on the pillow.

So, no, there’d been no time to weigh the sins of Eve.

“So I will ask you again, Miss O’Doyle: How was Eve tempted to sin? Speak from personal experience if you can’t remember the details.”

The other girls giggled, damn them.

“Erm . . . a snake. No, a serpent.”

“Yes, Eve was tempted into sin by the Devil, who came in the form of a snake and persuaded her to break God’s command. And that command was?”

“To eat . . . I mean, not to eat the apple.”

“The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And which were the chief causes that led Eve into sin?”

Now my stomach really did churn. Before bed I’d flicked through an issue of Dime Detective, not the Bible. So I casted around for words left over from Father Quinlan’s homilies. Fruit. Sin. Naked. Shame. Knowledge.

“Knowledge.”

“What about knowledge?”

“She—Eve—wanted to know. To know what God knew. What he forbade her from knowing.”

“Yes, this was the primary sin: She admired what was forbidden instead of shunning it. And the other—”

“Hold a tick,” I heard myself saying.

“What did you just say, Miss O’Doyle?”

“I mean, just a minute. Why was Eve punished for knowledge? Ain’t—sorry, Sister—isn’t that what we’re all sent here to do? Learn things?”

“Just like our spiritual parents, Adam and Eve,you are here to learn the things God deemed fit and right to learn.”

“And how are you supposed to know that something’s not fit and right until you, well, know it already? That’s a bit of a barn door behind the horse. It just seems to me Eve got a bum rap is all. Whoever wrote this thing—”

“This thing! Is that how you refer to the living Word of Our Lord?”

“The Bible, I mean. Whoever wrote it sort of put it all on Eve. Who can blame her for wanting to know some big secret like that? And why does God point it out so much and then forbid it? I know that if Ma tells my little brothers, ‘Don’t go eating the pie I just made,’ I’ll find their fingers in it as soon as her back is turned. Better to just hide it under the bed and let them wonder why the place smells of cherries.”

“Martha Doyle, I warn you to stop talking this instant.”

Here’s the thing. Once I set to wondering something, my mind skips straight ahead. Like my brothers running into traffic.

“And I don’t see how Adam is some great hero in this story. It’s not like he took too much convincing to do the same thing Eve had the guts to do first.14Why’d Eve get the curse? Why can’t boys spend a week out of every month sitting on a rag bundle like the rest of us?”

As I paused to contemplate Declan Leary and his gang complaining of cramps, I caught sight of Sister Ignatius’s face. It resembled a mushroom I once saw at a Chinatown market: squat, purple, and bloated.

And I knew that, just like Eve, my wonderings had gotten me expelled from what would—in retrospect—seem like Paradise.


“You think your schooling is some grand joke? Well, missy, you’re about to get a taste of the life of labor. You’ll see what I’ve been warning you about.”

My ma’s nasal Irish tones carried over the clacking of the elevated train. She lectured her way over the Manhattan Bridge, but I let my attention wander out the train window, to the boats in the harbor, lit up by the early morning sun, and Lady Liberty waving us over to the Manhattan side.

“Sit down properly, and stop your gawking out the window. Dear me.” Ma shifted her address to the more general public as she waved away a gust of dust. A gentleman next to us rushed to close her window. Ma had that effect on people. She gave him a nod and resettled her hat. “I’ve arranged a position under Mon-soor Lerblanc, the cook. Lucky you we binned a kitchen maid this week. Let’s see how a year washing pots and chopping onions compares to a bit of study.”

Sister Ignatius had told my mother enough was enough, probably with some Latin thrown in, and that I was a bad influence on my fellow pupils at the Blessed Name of Our Holy Mother parish school. Ma, no less formidable a force, was able to negotiate my expulsion down to a year’s withdrawal, with a conditional seat the following fall, assuming I’d learned my lesson.

What lesson, my mother was happy to spell out in vivid detail. My school uniform...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Rocky Pond Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0142427705
ISBN 13 
9780142427705
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
NOSOLI72
33155536069
SCLIENT@chapitre.com

rue bellevue
le plessis
Lamnay
france
72320
Frankreich