Page 68 of The Queen of Roses

“The trees produce enough fruit that Cook uses the lemons and oranges in the kitchen at the Gables when they are in season.”

She led Margot down the path laid in a gap between two olive trees and into the modest rose garden. A few late flowers were budding, punctuating the beds with pops of white, peach, and pink.

“Was the previous owner a collector?” Margot asked, reaching out to touch the deep green leaf of one of the roses.

She glanced at her cousin. “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“This rose garden isn’t so much a garden as a collection of plants. It appears that the person who created it was intent on collecting three of each variety and planting them together, but there is little in the way of anything else,” Margot said.

“Do you think there should be?” Adele asked, suddenly feeling a little silly for not having realized before.

Margot shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

“You are the expert.”

Margot laughed. “I’m hardly an expert. I merely collect flowers. It’s Mama who directed the gardeners at home.”

“I believe that your mother’s garden was one of the places I have been happiest in my life,” Adele said, recalling sunny afternoons playing and picking flowers when she and Margot had been girls.

“Mama would be delighted to hear that. Other than her grandson, there is little in this world she is prouder of than her garden.”

“As she should be. I wish I could make something half as beautiful,” said Adele.

Margot spun around, delight in her eyes. “Why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Why not make your own garden?”

Adele began to laugh until she saw that her cousin was serious. “Margot, I would not know the first thing about what to do with a garden.”

“You weren’t born knowing what makes a pleasing and comfortable room, but look what you did at the Gables and here at Rosewood House.”

“A house is an entirely different matter.”

“Why?” Margot challenged, her gentle yet stubborn streak that Adele remembered so well from their childhood showing.

“For one, a house is not filled with living things.”

“I imagine there are books and all manner of things that would help you. And if you hired a good head gardener, like Mama has, you could learn from him and delegate whatever you do not know,” said Margot.

Adele thought back to her first tête-à-tête with Mrs. Barnes when they had walked through the lady’s garden. Hadn’t Mrs. Barnes told her that she had attacked the project with vigor and little experience beyond what she had managed to learn while planting at her husband’s side?

“You said that some of your happiest times were in my mother’s garden,” said Margot. “Just think of what memories you could create here.”

Adele looked out over the expanse of roses before her and at the manzanita and scrub oaks that grew at the far edge of the property. What might have once been borders had been half reclaimed by crabgrass, and what flowers still bloomed in the November sun looked spotty and unintentional. It was such a far cry from Aunt Hyacinth’s garden back in England, it felt almost ridiculous comparing the two.

Yet as her gaze took in the expanse of her property, she could suddenly see possibility that lay hidden there. The formality of the gardens at the Gables would not suit the half-wild, isolated house in the Altadena foothills. Instead, she would need to be more ambitious. Perhaps she could create an English garden like her aunt’s that she’d enjoyed so much as a child.

After all, who was there to stop her?

The cigarette that Charlie Herold, the accountant with a penchant for hiking, so carelessly threw away as he walked away from Idlehour Campground still burned.

The embers at the tip of Charlie’s cigarette would have died out were it not for the early morning summer breeze that danced around his struck campsite. It meandered around boulders and stones, gliding over the crushed granite that made up the well-trodden hiking trail.

It being an extraordinarily dry year, the breeze lifted crispy brown leaves, waltzing them along the ground so that they scattered. Long, dry grass bent and swayed. Finally, a single oak leaf came to settle next to the end of Charlie’s cigarette.

The forest held its breath as the breeze pulled at the glowing ember, coaxing it to life as it nudged the dry oak leaf a little closer. And then…