Free The Rich Shall Inherit by Elizabeth Adler

Mrs. Jeb Mallory. And she knew that in the future, when her husband “needed” her, she wouldn’t fight him off. Oh, no, she’d just lie there and let him do what he must; she would simply put her mind elsewhere … on the color of the new curtains or what to have for luncheon the next day.
    A woman had her own weapons of revenge, Margaret had thought icily as she walked back across the room and lay down again beside her husband. And as she had watched the first light of dawn streak through the gap in the gold velvet curtains, she had known she would use them.
    From then on Jeb spent most of his time away from home. Margaret didn’t know where he went, or with whom, and she never asked.
But when he was home, he never let a day go by without claiming his rights as a husband.
    As the years passed, Rosalia Konstant wondered how Margaret put up with things the way they were between her and Jeb. “He’s here one day and gone the next,” she said angrily to Nik, “back to his real life—gambling and running around with fancy women in San Francisco.”
    Nik shrugged. “He married Margaret for the wrong reasons,” he said, “and when he didn’t get the child he wanted, he lost interest, the way he always does.”
    To make up for Jeb’s long absences, he and Rosalia went out of their way to be kind to Margaret, but their home was always filled with noisy, cheerful Abrego relatives and it only seemed to make the contrast with Margaret’s big lonely house worse. They watched her withdraw more and more into herself, filling in her days by creating a beautiful garden.
    Tall locust trees now provided shade in the middle of her spacious lawns, and the drive to both the Mallory and the Konstant houses was lined with beautiful young poplars that were a marvel of delicate greenness in the summer and a brassy gold in the autumn. Each year, at the first snap of cold they shed every leaf in a single shudder, leaving the trees mere black naked skeletons amid their fallen golden glory.
    But what Margaret loved more than the bright-blossomed hibiscus, or the graceful oleanders and the enormous heavy-scented English roses, were the poppies. Every summer, the field behind the house changed from a bright spring green to a mass of silvery leaves, and then into a sea of trembling scarlet blooms. It was like a billowing red carpet with here and there a patch of deep blue cornflowers for accent. She would sit alone on her verandah on the long summer evenings, just drinking in their transient beauty—for they lasted only a few days before the wind snatched their petals and scattered them, like confetti, over the hill.
    Rosalia hardly dared tell Margaret when, in November 1879; she knew that she was pregnant again. Greg was already almost seven years old and she and Nik had prayed so long for a second baby, she was just bubbling with happiness. But when she finally did tell Margaret, she was stunned by her reply.
    “As a matter of fact,” Margaret said, casting her eyes down and blushing modestly, “Jeb and I are going to have a baby too—and about the same time as yours.”
    Things were different after that. Jeb sent crateloads of nursery furniture from smart San Francisco emporiums, along with anenormous rocking horse and toys of every description. He came home more frequently, and they noticed how considerate he was to Margaret, treating her tenderly, although he never kissed her or made any gesture of affection. And when Jeb was away, Margaret would chatter on about him and the baby; it was always “Jeb this” and “Jeb that” … as though they were quite a normal married couple.
    Rosalia’s daughter was born on the first of June, 1880. It was an easy birth and the baby had white-blond hair and eyes even bluer than her father’s. She was baptized Angel in remembrance of the Russian town of Archangel, where Nik had been born; and Irina after his mother and Ampara for Rosalia’s mother … Angel Irina Ampara Konstant.
    When