What did that leave? “Are you ill?”
“Yes, but my illness is not of the body. I suffer melancholia, though that makes it sound noble and romantic. I turn into… Do you have any friends with this affliction?”
Over the past two years, Della had concocted a long list of reasons why an apparently eligible and interested man might not offer for an eligible and very interested female—a gambling habit, an opium addiction, a family on the wrong side of the blanket, a wife tucked out in the shires, a preference for men, an inability to function sexually, poverty, consumption, an unmentionable disease…
She would never have guessed that urbane, handsome Ash Dorning was afflicted with melancholia.
“I am familiar with the condition in only a general sense,” she said. “This is why you spend winters in Dorset?”
“It is. I’ve tried spending winters in Town. At university, the winters weren’t so bad, and sometimes I am felled during the warmer months. May I sit?”
“Of course.”
He took the place a decorous one foot away. “The ailment can strike without warning, or it can come over me slowly, day by day stealing my motivation. I never know how long the bouts will last, never know how bad they will be. I liken my condition to being at war. The enemy is out there, always watching, and victory is never assured.”
What an appalling analogy, and yet, Della understood it. “I’m sorry.”
He brushed a glance at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry this malady afflicts you. Clearly, you endure misery because of it.”
He braced his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward. “Everybody around me endures misery because of it. When I am afflicted, I have no appetite and no energy. Shaving is too much of an effort, and bathing is an ordeal. I can lie in my bed for days, Della, a human pit of darkness. My family worries, and I am sick with disgust at myself, but I can’t seem to do anything save loll about and wish I were different.”
Della longed to take his hand, longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him fast.
And to be held by him. Instead, she picked up a trio of acorns from those scattered on the bench beside her and fired them one by one over the railing at a whorl in the bark of the nearest tree.
“Do you contemplate taking your own life?”
He sat up. “I do not. Whatever god has sent me this affliction has also sent me the sliver of rational perspective to remind me that the darkness passes. It always passes, no matter how abjectly terrified I am that it will not. Then I am well for long periods, and my gratitude for those months of normal life is as bottomless as my despair at the other times.”
“I don’t think of you as abjectly terrified.” Just the opposite, in fact. Ash was unfailingly in control of matters, ever competent.
“I hope your good opinion of me is never diminished, Della. I hope you never see me indifferent to my own hygiene, indifferent to day and night, unwilling to leave my dwelling, unable to carry on a coherent conversation. I can sink into rages over nothing and weep for less than nothing. I become a lesser creature entirely, one I hope you never meet.”
Della had read about melancholia, but she was more familiar with the literature on hysteria and hypochondria, those being typically female complaints.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, marveling at how far appearances could diverge from a person’s private reality. “I am just so sorry.” She fired three more acorns at the hapless tree five yards off, hitting the whorl of bark hard each time.
“I don’t want your pity any more than you want mine,” Ash said, regarding the oak she’d made into her target. “I want you to think of me as the charming and witty Ash Dorning, who can be a good friend, an amiable escort, and even a passable flirt, but he’s too good a friend to ever expect anything more than that from you.”
He offered her a crooked smile and a wink, and Della’s heart broke for him. “Do you think you are the only person to battle private demons, Ash Dorning?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “But I am determined that my demons remain mine. A wife goes into marriage expecting her husband to provide for her, to make a home with her that’s a haven from the miseries of the world. I cannot be such a man, and thus I will not marry.”
Della sat beside him in the pretty little folly, her mind taking off in three different directions at once.
Firstly, how would Ash Dorning know what a wife expected from marriage? Did all wives carry around the same set of expectations, like a military pattern for a musket? Did Ash see a husband’s role as a glorified banker, doling out pin money and placid domesticity in exchange for his wife’s marital favors?
How utterly distasteful. Secondly, what if acquiring a wife, a dedicated ally, made battling the demons less of a struggle?
Thirdly, did he expect his spouse would never have a demon or two of her own to subdue? Was marriage only for the perfect and healthy?
Della certainly hoped not. “You have this all sorted in your mind,” she said. “I suspect logic would be unavailing should anybody attempt to reason you away from your conclusions.”
He seemed amused, the lout. “My conclusions are logical.”
Della rose. “No, they are not, but they are your conclusions, and I am the last person to pry away a comforting lie when cold reason could not serve anywhere near as loyally.” She descended the steps without Ash’s escort, though he followed at a sauntering pace.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Della.” Beneath his amused tone lay a hint of defensiveness.
“You’re sure of that?” She took his arm, mostly to keep the appearances friendly, but the discussion had upset her, and when she was upset, she needed to be alone with her thoughts.
“You have doubtless had the blue devils,” he said, “a few despondent days. Melancholia is a grief that has no cause, no bottom, and no reliable end. It’s an ever-fading twilight that feels eternal and deserved, though you know it’s neither.”
And he had walked, stumbled, and crawled through this twilight alone, over and over, and was prepared to traverse it alone for the rest of his life.
“I must think on this,” Della said. “You have explained much, and I thank you for telling me. I will speak of it with no one, and I do mean no one, Ash. Not my lady’s maid, my siblings, or my cat. No one.”
A subtle tension left him. “Thank you. When we met… When I kissed you, I was having an extended period of good health. I hoped the melancholia was behind me, but it never is.”
“Someday, perhaps it will be, or it won’t be as severe. Let’s give Lady Caldicott what she’s been longing for and allow her to offer me the cut direct, shall we?”
Della took a firmer hold of Ash’s arm and marched for the buffet tent.
Chapter Five
Telling Della Haddonfield about the melancholia hadn’t gone as planned, but then, Ash hadn’t planned to tell her, ever. Then he’d seen Lady Caldicott, a serpent coiled and ready to strike, and it occurred to him that Della deserved to know the truth.
Della had enemies now, but she also had an ally, despite the fact that he could never be her husband.