avoid your company, or I will apply appropriate discipline. Stay away from her.”
God help Clarice Chastain. “We are at a house party, Mr. Chastain. Your wife understands that nobody’s interests are furthered by fueling gossip. Would that you had as much sense.”
The words were more foolishness tossed at a man who had no honor, but Della needed Chastain to go away, and an insult might chase him off.
“You think you are so clever, tossing me over for an earl’s son,” Chastain said, coming closer on a whiff of brandy fumes. “Do you want me telling Dorning the real reason I could make off with you? Does he know he’s married to the next thing to a bedlamite?”
Della gazed out at the terrace, where eight or ten people sat in small groups, and a knot of young men lounged along the balustrade.
“Your wife,” she said calmly, “has suggested I staged a failed elopement to get Mr. Dorning’s attention. Her version of events will scotch gossip, but in fact, you know full well that all I wanted was to be left in peace at my family seat. Come one step nearer to me, and I will scream, and a dozen people will see you menacing me through this window.”
Della went on, though the tingling had started in her hands and arms. “Your cravat is askew, and you’ve been seen frequenting the gazebo with both an unmarried young lady and Mrs. Tremont. You are getting off on a very bad foot, Chastain, and my husband would be unlikely to believe your dishonorable maunderings anyway.”
Except… Ash would have to believe them eventually, because Chastain’s accusations would be true.
“Why I ever tried to come to your aid,” he spat, “I do not know, and if you run off with a man, you should expect him to exact a little in-kind payment, Della Dorning, even from a scrawny little thing like you. Thanks to my attempt to aid you, Clarice’s settlements are all but lost to me, and I am not only leg-shackled to a nun, I now have her expenses as well as my own to manage on a miserly allowance. For that, I will have revenge.”
“You never sought to aid me,” Della retorted. “You took advantage of me, threatened me, and all but kidnapped me.”
He tugged his cravat to the right, though it still hung off-center. “Who will believe you? Who will believe that an aging spinster had to be coerced into running off with one of London’s most eligible bachelors? I’ll tell you who. Nobody. Your conjectures approach fantasy, my lady, another symptom of a diseased mind. Your husband is a confirmed melancholic, and your antecedents are rumored to be less than legitimate. Ruining you, him, his silly little club, and the Dorning family’s pathetic mercantile initiative will be the work of a moment for a person of my resourcefulness.”
Della was chilled, despite the library’s stuffy air. “Why do this? Why be so cruel? Your plans with me went awry, but that is not my fault.”
“Cruel?” William stomped away. “Cruel is putting a young man’s finances on a leash so tight that he can barely hold his head up, despite his family having more blunt than you can imagine. Cruel is marrying me off to a woman who likely hides rosary beads under her pillow. Cruel is expecting me to banish myself to goddamned Surrey for the rest of my life, pretending the stink of the yeomanry is my favorite perfume. This marriage has buried me, Della Dorning, and you were my last prayer of resurrection.”
He sent her a final scathing glance and took himself from the library.
Della sank into the nearest chair—not in view of the window—and endured the shaking hands and pounding heart that inevitably came with a nervous spell. From the welter of dread seething in her mind, three thoughts emerged.
First, William had been absolutely intent on raping her back in Alconbury. He hadn’t ended up in her bed as a function of drunken confusion. He’d been determined to violate her, and that all but confirmed that he’d delayed sending any note to his father.
A consummated elopement—even were the consummation rape rather than lovemaking— would have resulted in the Chastain family accepting a marriage between Della and William.
Second, Della would have been tempted to allow the match.
He’d come upon her in the middle of a full-blown attack of nerves at Lady Winterthur’s autumn ridotto. She’d been curled in a little ball behind a row of potted ferns, shaking, crying, barely