Black Rose

to absorb it, I guess. How cruel he was to her. She wasn’t an admirable woman, not from what I’ve read in her own diaries. Selfish, self-absorbed, petty. But she deserved better than this. You haven’t given me a son, so I’ll get one elsewhere. Accept it, or leave. She accepted.”
    “You don’t know that yet.”
    “We know.” She shook her head. “We’ll read the rest, but we know.”
    “I can go through this, and the others, later. Myself.”
    “No, let’s do it now. It’s my legacy, after all. See what you can find, will you? I’m going down to make coffee.”
    When she came back, she noted he’d gotten his reading glasses. He looked like a rumpled scholar, she thought, pulling an all-nighter. Shirtless, jeans unbuttoned, hair mussed.
    That same tenderness floated over her, like a balm over the ache in her heart.
    “I’m glad you were here when I found this.” She set the tray down, then leaned over, kissed the top of his head. “I’m glad you’re here.”
    “There’s more.” He reached up for her hands. “Do you want me to summarize?”
    “No, read her words. I want to hear her words.”
    “There’s snippets here and there, her thoughts on this worked into daily entries. Her humiliation and the rage under it. She made him pay in the only way she knew, by spending his money lavishly, by shutting him out of her bed, taking trips.”
    “A stronger woman would have thumbed her nose,” she said, pouring coffee, “taken her children and left him. But she didn’t.”
    “No, she didn’t. Times were different for women then.”

    “The times may have been different, but right’s still right.”
    She set down his coffee, and this time sat beside him. “Read it, Mitch. I want to know.”
    “He brought the bastard home, with some trollop of a wet nurse he brought in from one of his country holdings. Not the mother, he says, who remains in the house in town where he keeps her. He has his son at last, a squalling thing wrapped in a blanket. I did not look at it, and will not. I know only that he has paid the doctor to keep him quiet, and that I am required to continue to remain in the house, receiving no callers for another few days.
    “He has brought this thing home in the dead of night, so the servants will believe I delivered it. Or will pretend to believe it. He has named it. Reginald Edward Harper, Jr.”
    “My grandfather,” Roz murmured. “Poor little boy. He grew to be a fine man. A kind of miracle, I suppose, given his beginnings. Is there anything on his mother?”
    “Not in this book, though I’ll go through it more carefully.”
    “There will be more, in one of the other journals. She died here, Amelia did. At some point Beatrice must have seen or spoken with her, or dealt with her in some way.”
    “I’ll start looking now.”
    “No.” Tired, she rubbed at her eyes. “No, there’s a wedding today. Today is for joy and fresh starts, not for grief and old secrets. We know enough for today.”
    “Rosalind, this in no way changes who you are.”
    “No, it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. But it makes me think, that for people like this... for people like Reginald and Beatrice, marriage was a practicality. Social standing, breeding, family backgrounds. Maybe there was some affection, or some attraction, but at its core, it was business. The business of maintaining families at a certain level. And children were just tools to accomplish that. How sad for them, and how tragic for the children. But today...”
    She drew a deep breath. “Today we’re seeing it shouldn’t be that way. We’re going to watch two people who love each other make promises, make a marriage, cement a family. I’m glad you’re here, Mitch, and I’m glad we found this today. Because this wedding is just what I need now.”

    IT WAS THE perfect day for it, tailor-made with candy-blue skies and balmy air scented with flowers. The gardens Logan and Stella had made bloomed in a lovely array of color and shape.
    There were chairs set up on the lawn, covered with pale peach drapes and forming an aisle where Stella would walk on her father’s arm, toward Logan and her sons.
    Roz turned from the window to watch Jolene fuss with the flowers in Stella’s hair.
    “You make a picture,” she said. “Both of you.”
    “I’m going to start crying again.” Jolene waved a hand in front of her face. “I can’t count how many times I’ve repaired my makeup. I’m going to run out just for a