“I will permit you to change the subject, because this gambit will profit you nothing. He rode up top, I rode inside. Thus, I had little warning that he was imbibing the day away until we were in close quarters. I could beat you, you know. Take a crop to you, if that would help. Less dangerous than angering another man.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t mind a chance to admire your manly fundament, if we’re being disgracefully honest.”
“Why thank you, my lady, but I must decline your generous and entirely inappropriate offer.”
She sent him a sidelong grin. “George says one starts gently and that there’s an art to wielding a crop on a bare and willing—”
Ash took her hand and applied her sandwich to her mouth. “I will be having a very stern talk with Mr. George Haddonfield. Will you attend the Whitfield musicale on Wednesday?”
Della munched her food. “I suppose I must. You?”
“I will be honored to escort you.”
“You don’t have to. If George is still in Town, he can take me. Nicholas will, if necessary.”
“I shall escort you, and I will enjoy it.” To Ash’s surprise, he was enjoying himself in that very moment. Della was less conventional than he’d thought her and much harder to shock. “I had not told you of my malady because I did not want you to think less of me. That was selfish. I should have told you the truth sooner lest you think the fault somehow lay with you.”
“Friends are honest with each other, Ash Dorning. Good friends are.”
She wasn’t scolding him, though he deserved a sound scolding. “I will be a better friend in the future, Della, I promise.”
She bumped his shoulder. “You’ll write back to me?”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
He did get a little carried away, though he first looked around to make sure nobody was watching. In the manner of a friend, he kissed Della’s cheek, and in the manner of a friend, she ignored his overture entirely.
They finished their meal, wandered the grounds for another half hour, and took a cordial leave of their host and hostess.
As Ash handed Della into the coach, he mentally battled the delightful image of a laughing, friendly Lady Della applying smart blows with a riding crop to his bare bum.
Della climbed into the coach, willing to call the Dickson’s Venetian breakfast a limited success, but for the revelation that Ash Dorning suffered melancholia.
He would be that noble and that clodpated as to endure despair while trying not to burden others. Part of Della wanted to regale him with tales of her own weak moments, but another part of her cautioned restraint. Melancholia could be fatal, despite Ash’s assurances that he’d been spared the temptation to take his own life—so far. Nothing she had endured, no weak moment or bad day, had imperiled her very life.
“Are your affairs in order?” she asked as the coach clattered down the lane.
“I beg your pardon?”
Ash seemed distracted, as if he perhaps regretted taking Della into his confidence.
“Are your affairs in order?” Della said. “You know, ‘To my brother Sycamore, I leave my horse. To my brother Oak, I leave my cat.’ That sort of thing.”
“I haven’t any pets.”
Never a good sign. “You have family. Are your affairs in order, Ash Dorning?”
He took off his hat and set it on the opposite bench, so Della did likewise with her bonnet. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and outside the coach, a brisk breeze was tossing yet more leaves from their branches.
“I haven’t had any affairs to put in order,” Ash said, “not until lately. Taking over management of The Coventry Club has put some coin in my pocket, true, but what little wealth I’d leave behind, my family would sort out.”
The Coventry was making money hand over fist, to hear George tell it. “Why did you kiss me?” Della asked.
Ash was gazing out the window at the wooded hedgerows and harvested fields beyond. “I told you. I thought I was doing better. You are lovely. I gave in to misplaced optimism and behaved badly. I am sorry. I should have explained the whole situation to you long ago.”
You are lovely. Della stored away that somewhat annoyed admission to examine later. “I meant just now. You kissed my cheek where half of London might have caught you at it.”
He spared her a disgruntled glance. “You are still lovely. I suppose that can’t be helped, but you are also… What is the point of your inquiry?”
To reassure herself that melancholia would not deliver him a fatal blow. Ash Dorning would see to his final arrangements before he let that happen, and he would not go around kissing women in public.
“When you are well,” she went on, “can you function as a husband functions?”
His expression went from disgruntled to puzzled. “I perform my duties at the Coventry. I earn coin. I show up at my brothers’ weddings. I box. I hack out in the park on fine mornings. I fence at Angelo’s and maintain my correspondence. Is that what you mean?”
The coach hit a rut, and Della was bounced against Ash’s side. “You are being deliberately obtuse. I mean can you…?” She waved a hand. “As men do with their wives, mistresses, the occasional frisky footman, and passing dairymaids of a generous and lusty nature.”
His gaze returned to the landscape beyond the window. “I do believe the temperature is dropping.”
“Winter approaches,” Della said. “The temperature will drop. You are avoiding the question.”
“The question is exceedingly personal and not very polite.”
Della had long ago learned patience with the missishness of grown men. She waited as the horses trotted along and a bank of pewter clouds rolled up from the south.
“To answer your question,” Ash said, “when I am in good spirits, I enjoy every blessing of physical health to which the typical Dorning male is heir. Fortunately, Dorning males are thick on the ground, and nobody will look to me to secure the succession.”
Of Dorning brothers, there was an abundance—seven—but none had as yet fathered a male child. Society kept track of those details, as the Dornings undoubtedly did too.
“Why do you ask?” Ash’s question could not have been more diffident.
“I am trying to make sense of your decision to forgo marriage.” Della pulled her cloak more closely around her, for the day was growing chilly. “You apparently enjoy good physical health, a normal complement of animal spirits, an interesting occupation, and every other indication of success for much of the year. For a few months or weeks at a time, you are out of sorts. That requires that you give up any aspirations toward a wife and family. Do I have this right?”
“When the beast is upon me, I am not merely out of sorts, Della.”
“You are melancholic, then, and the melancholia invariably lifts. You did say that.”
He sighed the weary, bedeviled sigh of men the world over when confronted with inconvenient logic. “And if the melancholia doesn’t lift, Della? When it’s bad, I am of no use to Sycamore at the club. I am of no use to my family. I am of no use to anybody.”
Della recognized that she was upset on Ash’s behalf, but the upset had an angry edge. She was not angry at him, but she was angry nonetheless.