“You were no scholar either,” Nick said, “but everybody loved George Haddonfield. Probably a greater accomplishment, to leave Oxford with a wide circle of friends instead of perfect Latin.”
“Nick, I was miserable. Everybody else was swiving the tavern maids, lodging at the merry widows’ boardinghouses, and exchanging notes with the tutors’ daughters. I was lusting after my classmates.” And after the tavern maids, merry widows, and tutors’ daughters.
“Must we air this ancient history?” Nick asked gently.
“I did not know who or what I was, I made no sense to myself, and I could discuss the problem with no one.” Least of all with his great, strapping, swaggering brothers.
Nick passed him the cat. “And, Haddonfield that you are, you couldn’t keep it in your breeches either. What has this to do with Della and Ash Dorning?”
George did not allow the ruddy beast to touch his breeches, but instead put the cat on the carpet. “When melancholia is severe, life is at risk.”
Nick rose and went to the window, the cat strutting in his wake. “You think Della will soon be a widow if she marries Dorning?”
“It’s possible. Very possible, if Dorning’s malady is chronic.” George had had occasion to read the medical literature regarding disorders of mood.
“How bad was it, George?” Nick asked as the cat stropped his boots.
“Must we air this ancient history?”
Nick speared him with a look. “You had nobody with whom you could discuss your situation, and you’re refusing to discuss it when I invite you to?”
George was happily, wonderfully married. The present Mrs. Haddonfield knew her husband’s past, knew the breadth of his preferences, accepted them, and had his undying devotion—and fidelity— as a result. But arriving to that happy situation had been a long and tormented road.
“I would have killed myself,” George said. “I had made arrangements to dispose of what little I possessed. I had the gun, and I had planned to end my days by the millpond at Belle Maison. I would be found by a tenant that way rather than a family member, and I wouldn’t spatter Mama’s carpets with my life’s blood. I planned to shoot myself in the heart so nobody would have to deal with patching up my skull for a viewing.”
Nick was looking at him as if he’d sprouted snakes for hair. “You would have… You planned to kill yourself?”
“Society felt that men such as I deserved to die by the executioner’s hand, Nicholas, surrounded by a jeering crowd while I wet myself twitching on the end of a rope. My own family wanted me to go away or be somebody different. I could not imagine a woman would want me for a husband, not with my past, and the men… When intimacy is a hanging felony, much desperation and risk attends the whole business.”
“You planned… You planned to take your own life?” Nick sounded near tears.
“Della found me drafting a farewell note.” Cleaning his gun, actually. The note had been drying on the blotter. “She begged me to reconsider. She said she’d always felt that at least one other Haddonfield didn’t fit the merry Viking mold. If I abandoned her, she would be left alone among loving strangers. She doubtless already knew of her illegitimacy by then.”
More than that, George would not say. Della had kept his confidences, and he would keep hers.
“I am sorry,” Nick said. “I am abjectly, damnably sorry, and I am just as sincerely glad Della talked sense into you.”
“She did not let me out of her sight for weeks.” And nobody, not Nick, not Nita—the family healer—neither relentlessly brisk Kirsten nor observant Beckman, had noticed Della’s vigilance.
Or knew what it had meant to George.
“Does she truly regard us as loving strangers?” Nick asked, a particularly insightful question.
“You were off to public school before she was taking breakfast with the family, Nick. Ethan was gone even sooner. Beckman left immediately after you. The older sisters regarded Della as a sort of mascot. If Della is attracted to a man who is regarded as different by his own family, I can understand her choice.”
Nick picked up the cat again. “You’re saying Della and Dorning are kindred spirits?”
“Something like that.”
“Loving strangers… Bloody, bollocking hell.” He cradled the cat against his chest, doubtless getting cat hair all over his morning coat. “They haven’t come out of the conservatory.”
“If Dorning has an ounce of gentlemanly consideration, they won’t for at least another hour.”
Nick muttered more profanities as he stood by the window, petting