“No.” He laughed hoarsely. “I am a coward.”
“No more than any other human being.”
The irony of her words stopped his laughter. “And what if you’re wrong? What if we start something we can’t finish?”
“We will work together to find the answers, Quentin Forster.”
Quentin closed his eyes. She’d won. Behind her gentle touch was the force of compulsion, his compulsion to remain and seek mending for the wounds even he didn’t understand.
His compulsion to stay near her—his healing goddess. His Valkyrie.
For your sake, Johanna, I pray that the answers aren’t more dangerous than the questions.
Chapter 6
Johanna loved the early morning, before any of the patients but May had left their rooms—when she had the garden and wood and orchard to herself, and plenty of time to think.
She walked out to the orchard while the dawn air was still lightly touched with mist and the old bantam rooster was completing his ritual welcome to the sun. The neatly pruned apple, peach, and walnut trees in their measured rows, like the vineyard on the other side of the house, contrasted sharply with the wild woods on the hillside beyond.
The vineyard and orchard were unmistakable emblems of man’s imposition of order upon nature. Even in the short time Johanna had been in the Valley, she’d seen more fields put to the vine, more houses built for the men and women who worked this rich land. Yet it retained its loveliness.
Such order could be a very good thing, like a physician’s aid when complications beset a woman’s ordinary process of birth. Or when the mind turned upon itself and must be cured with the help of science.
Johanna leaned against the trunk of a mature apple tree, striving to arrange her thoughts in similar tidy ranks. She’d spent a restless night after yesterday’s conversation with Quentin, her mind wholly taken up with the new patient, and not to any useful purpose. It wasn’t at all like her to lose sleep just because she encountered the unexpected in her work.
But Quentin had managed to surprise her. His rapid and unprompted transition into an hypnotic state was startling enough, but then to witness what must surely have been a reliving of some great anguish in his past…
She pushed away from the tree and began to walk down the center of the row, hands clasped behind her back. It wasn’t as if Quentin’s capability for such retrogression was unique in Johanna’s experience. He clearly hadn’t known what he’d revealed during the incident outside Harper’s room; amnesia for such episodes was typical. His ravings were those of a man trapped in a situation of great stress and suffering; he had been stricken with the kind of grief and horror she had seen in another of her patients. But Harper was seldom so lucid.
She remembered how Quentin had slipped with equal swiftness from an embattled state to one quite different, behaving in such a way that she hadn’t been able to tell if he were genuinely enervated or playing the rake. His “affectionate” conduct had certainly suggested the latter.
Her cheeks felt warm, in spite of the morning coolness. She was beginning to see that Quentin’s ready laughter and flirtatious speech were all part of the way he protected himself, his kind of defense against what was too terrible to bear, like Lewis’s washing and Irene’s delusions.
But what had he borne? Had Quentin Forster been a soldier? His words and expression during the episode implied it. Many former soldiers had turned to drink to blot out memories they couldn’t tolerate. She had visited asylums housing men driven insane by the War. Most could not be cured.
Not by conventional methods. Not while so many asylum superintendents and neurologists believed that all madness was hereditary or came from physical lesions in the brain. Papa had never subscribed to that conventional belief. “Insanity,” he had said, “is never simple.”
Johanna turned at the end of the row and moved to the next, plucking a leaf from a dangling branch. Insanity was never simple, nor was her as-yet-unproven theory. It was still new, tested only by the smallest increments for the safety of her patients. But she’d begun to see results.