“Interesting image. Shall we sit?” Ash nodded in the direction of the folly, a pagoda-like structure that sat eight steps higher than the surrounding terrain.
Della allowed herself to be led up the stairs and settled on a bench with her back to the tent—and to Lady Caldicott. Ash remained on his feet, gaze on the river placidly rolling along some distance away.
“I do not want to treat you as your family treats you,” he said. “They mean well, while in effect disrespecting you. You are small but mighty, as the Bard put it, and I esteem you highly.”
Small but mighty. Nobody else had called Della that, and yet, she did not feel complimented. “And now you will tell me why we could never suit.” If anything could loom as a worse penance than a cut direct before half of society, a lecture from Ash on marital impossibilities could.
Della abruptly wanted to wrap her shawl around her head, hunch in on herself, and have the folly to herself.
“I owe you the truth,” Ash said gently. “Keeping it from you only flatters my vanity and creates misunderstandings. I am not a suitable husband for any woman, Della. I never will be.”
This wasn’t a dramatic declaration, but rather, a tired, oft-visited conclusion. “Do you prefer men?” Even those fellows sometimes married, and the union could often be considered successful. George was a case in point, though Della wasn’t sure exactly whose intimate company he truly preferred.
“I enjoy the company of many men,” Ash said, “but not in the sense you mean.”
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.