Page 46 of The Queen of Roses

“I found your wedding announcement,” said Theresa as she sat across from Miss Pearce in the garden the following Saturday.

“Did you?” asked Miss Pearce.

“You were beautiful.”

“I still am,” said Miss Pearce.

“I didn’t mean to—”

Miss Pearce began to laugh. “You need not stumble over yourself to apologize, Miss Johnson. I am aware that I do not look like a blushing bride of twenty-two any longer. I was beautiful, if a little long in the tooth.”

“You just said yourself that you were only twenty-two,” Theresa protested. “That’s only three years younger than me.”

“Well, in 1904, you would have been hopelessly on the shelf. I had the good fortune of only having a toe over the line,” said Miss Pearce with a sly smile.

“That hardly seems fair.” Although, she supposed, if her mother had her way, Theresa would already have been married, with at least one child.

“I do sometimes wonder what my life would have been if I had been born later, but that sort of speculation is hardly fruitful.”

“How did you find married life?” asked Theresa.

Miss Pearce raised a brow. “Is that a coy way of asking whether I hated my husband from the very beginning?”

“No! No.”

“The truth is, I threw myself into the role of dutiful wife because it was all I had been raised to do.”

“I read in the newspaper that you honeymooned in Europe?” Theresa asked.

“Guy swept me away to London, Paris, and Rome. It was idyllic, although occasionally his work would cast a shadow.”

“How could he have worked from Europe?” asked Theresa.

“He left the Andalusian in the hands of a capable manager, but there were regular telegrams every morning asking him to make decisions about this and that. A few times we had dinner with hoteliers in the cities we visited, or with investors Guy was trying to woo. I soon found that he expected me to help him by befriending those businessmen’s wives.

“When we returned to Pasadena, I learned that Guy had purchased a huge house on South Orange Grove Boulevard called the Gables. It was my responsibility to make it a beautiful home where we could entertain, and not just his investors. True to his word, Guy had his sights set on the top of Pasadena’s social order.”

“That sounds like a great deal of pressure for you,” said Theresa.

“It was, I suppose, although I did not see it that way at the time. After so much time spent trying to capture a man’s attention as an unmarried lady, it was intoxicating having a husband who would come home from J. Herbert Hall’s jewelry shop with a new diamond necklace or a ruby brooch for me. He liked me to be beautifully dressed and bejeweled at all times, and that suited me very well indeed. Within three years of marrying, I had more emeralds than I knew what to do with because he said they looked best with my dark hair.” Miss Pearce laughed and then shook her head as though in disbelief that that had once been her life.

“What I am trying to say, rather inarticulately, is that the first two years of our marriage were as happy as a union that is built on need rather than love could be,” said Miss Pearce. “But then, in 1906, that all changed.”

“How?” asked Theresa.

“It all started with a ball.”

chapter eighteen ADELE

May 1906

Adele turned her head, her eyes fixed on the intricate plasterwork of the cornice in her bedroom as Dr. Morris, hidden behind the sheet draped over her knees, poked at her. The man’s touch was undeniably uncomfortable, but that was nothing compared to the indignity of having him in her bedroom, examining her most intimate parts.

“It will be cold, Mrs. Whitley,” said Dr. Morris.

Sure enough, she felt the shock of metal against her legs and then the pressure of the speculum. She closed her eyes, wishing for the entire humiliating thing to be over soon, and cast her thoughts to the place she felt the calmest. Rosewood House.

Guy had been good to his word and purchased the home nestled in the Altadena foothills for her as part of her marriage settlement. He’d delivered the deed on the eve of their wedding, grinning with delight as he said, “A present for my wife-to-be.”