we face it together.” A tired platitude, and a soul-deep conviction of recent provenance. Ash had contemplated separate bedrooms for Della’s sake, but his own selfish preferences lay in a different direction.
“You face your melancholia alone,” Della said.
And just look how well that’s going. “Tell me about what upset you.”
“I worry,” Della said, twiddling the fringe of her shawl. “To put it that way is like saying that your melancholia makes you a trifle distracted. I am so good at worrying, I should be appointed to a government post that oversees all worrisome matters specifically to ensure that those matters are the subject of endless fretting.”
“But you never seem anxious.”
“Do you seem sad?”
“Sometimes.” Though likely not. To his family, he simply appeared lazy, unmotivated, and directionless—and to himself too, of course. “I’m often not sad so much as I simply lack the will to do the tasks before me.” Eat, dress, wash, those sorts of tasks. Basic adult functions.
“I cannot seem to stop worrying, once I get started,” Della said. “I have worried over everything from a French invasion to Nicholas’s premature death to my own demise from influenza to the King of Rome growing up to plunge the entire European continent back into war.”
The King of Rome was Napoleon’s legitimate son, a mere child very likely still concerned with ponies, kites, and Latin grammars.
“You have a vivid imagination.”
“For bad things, and sometimes, my imagination grows hysterical. My thoughts explode into foreboding, into unshakable certainty that all of creation is about to end and the fiend has been loosed upon my loved ones. I am overcome with panic that has no basis in reality. I babble and stammer, I can’t catch my breath, my balance goes awry. On occasion, I faint when overcome with these feelings. I’m sorry. I am a hysterical ninnyhammer of the first water, and now you are stuck with me.”
She was still shaking subtly, still unnaturally warm, as if she’d been crying.
“I married you,” Ash said, giving her a one-armed hug. “Being stuck with each other was rather the point.” Or he hoped it was. His reassurances had Della regarding him so solemnly that the dread she’d described began to creep over Ash’s heart. “What did Chastain say, Della? Tell me exactly what he said.”
She straightened beneath Ash’s arm and untucked her feet to sit primly beside him. “He said I should leave you, and I am tempted to agree with him.”
Had the stone Cupid toppled onto Ash’s head, he could not have felt a greater sense of fate dealing him a blow. He’d sat for hours yesterday afternoon, watching nothing in particular, while Della had read on the terrace below him. Today, she’d taken up guard duty once again, while Ash had drifted among the clouds, too bloody melancholic to leave his bloody chair.
“I’ve left you alone in the market day crowd,” he said, removing his arm from Della’s shoulders. That he should emotionally abandon his new wife made him sick with sorrow and rage, but no matter.He could make it right, or at least make it less wrong. “I’m sorry for that. Damned sorry. I am the one person upon whom you should be able to rely, and a week into our marriage, I’ve turned my back on you. If you want to leave me, I will understand, Della.”
She did not immediately answer, and Ash realized that a fate worse than melancholia might yet be his.
“Thank you.” The Marchioness of Tavistock offered the words grudgingly.
Sycamore accepted them with equal bad grace. “You may tell Lord Tavistock he is welcome. I could have tended to the markers on his behalf. You should not have had to do it.”
Her ladyship was not a cameo-pretty woman. Her jaw was angular, her russet brows too heavy, and her nose too strong. Cam loved simply looking at her, for no emotion or thought was allowed to mar her serene countenance, unless she allowed it. Her eyes alone gave her away, a startling jade green that could flash with ire or radiate mirth, and her mouth…
A mouth like that on a woman was reason for mortal man to give thanks to the Creator. On the rare occasions when her ladyship displayed anger, that mouth was a flat slash of disdain. When she smiled, especially when she smiled at him, Cam’s mind went happy-stupid, and his blood pooled behind his falls.
She had smiled at Sycamore exactly twice in all the months he’d known her, and she wasn’t smiling now.