Part 19 (1/2)
”You want to think,” she said, frowning.
”Yes. About my mother and what you said about her. About my grandfather. The experts. The asylum.” He pressed a thumb to his temple. ”I do not believe I've burst a blood vessel, but I distinctly see my life pa.s.sing before me.” Smiling crookedly, he added, ”And it is beginning to make sense.”
She felt a surge of alarm, which she ruthlessly suppressed. ”Very well,” she said calmly. ”No soporifics. We shall try a stimulant instead.”
Gwendolyn gave him coffee. Very strong coffee and a good deal of it.
Two hours and countless cups later, Dorian was fully recovered and his wife was staring at him as though he'd just risen from the dead. She stood by the fire, her hands folded in front of her, her expression a comical mixture of worry and bewilderment while she watched him yank on his clothes.
”I begin to suspect you believed I had burst a blood vessel,” he said as he fastened his trouser b.u.t.tons. ”Or was about to.”
The comical expression vanished, succeeded by the familiar steady green regard. ”I do not know what to think,” she said. ”Frankly, I am confounded. Two hours, from start to finish. This makes no medical sense at all.”
”I told you I distinctly felt the pressure ease after the fourth cup,” he said. ”As though my head were being released from a vise. Perhaps the coffee washed the pressure through my system and”-he grinned-”into the chamberpot.”
”It does have diuretic qualities,” she said.
”Obviously.”
”But you should not respond in this way.” Her brow furrowed. ”Perhaps I misinterpreted your account of the autopsy report, though I do not see how. Your mother's was hardly an unusual case.”
”I should like to know what's troubling you,” he said. ”Have I been babbling incoherently without realizing it? Am I manifesting signs of mania? Is the extraordinary sense of well-being a danger signal? Because if I am at death's door, Gwendolyn, I should appreciate being informed.”
She let out a shaky breath. ”I don't know. I had thought the dilating blood vessels and increased blood supply-possibly augmented by leakage-triggered the aura and pain. But for the pain to stop, the vessels must contract again and diminish blood flow-and your cells and tissue are supposed to be too weak and damaged to do it so quickly and thoroughly.”
He recalled what she'd told him yesterday about brain function. ”I see,” he said. ”You fear that something has cut off blood supply too abruptly, perhaps in a dangerous and abnormal fas.h.i.+on-and this is a temporary and illusory surcease.”
”I cannot say.” Her voice was the slightest bit unsteady.
Perhaps he'd fall down dead in the next minute, Dorian thought. That did not seem possible. He had never felt more alive. Nonetheless, he wasn't going to take any chances.
He went to her and gathered her in his arms and kissed her, long and thoroughly, until she melted against him. He went on kissing her, then caressing her, and soon, carrying her to the bed.
That wasn't what he'd intended. He'd only wanted to make sure she understood how he felt about her.
But there was no stopping, once they'd begun.
In a little while, the garments he'd so recently donned lay strewn about the floor, along with hers, and he was lost, drowning inside her, in the hot sea of desire.
And later, when they lay together, limbs tangled, he found his heart was still beating and his brain was still working, and so he told her what she'd done for him.
Yesterday, he'd told her of his debauched past, expecting shock and disgust. Instead, she'd impatiently dismissed his whoring and drinking as normal male behavior.
He'd told her about his mother, the pitiable and monstrous creature she'd become, and Gwendolyn had not turned a hair. ”It's like consumption,” she'd said, after reducing the horrors to a logical series of physiological events. ”There is no saying that her infidelities and secrets made it worse or triggered the breakdown. Her marriage was unsatisfactory. For all we know, the romantic intrigues may have reduced the emotional strain and delayed the inevitable, instead of hastening it.”
If Dorian had stayed with his mother, he might have added to her agitation, Gwendolyn had theorized, because Aminta had a stronger emotional bond with him than with his father.
Moreover, the conditions at the madhouse must be put into perspective, Gwendolyn had told him. The moral faculties were often destroyed in such cases. Patients might appear calm and rational without having any more awareness or control over their thoughts and behavior than if they had been marionettes, with the damaged brain cells pulling the strings. And aware or not, patients often forgot what they were angry or sad about, just as they forgot basic hygiene, and even who they were or who they'd imagined they were minutes before.
Then he'd realized that his mother might not have endured continuous humiliation and pain, because she'd been living for the most part in a world of her own, where little could reach her.
”You have truly eased my mind,” Dorian told his wife now. ”Even my grandfather does not seem so monstrous. Pitiable, actually, in his ignorance, his fear of what he didn't understand, and his dependence on 'experts.' But you are not like him or his precious experts. You have a knack for making the incomprehensible make sense. You've reduced it to manageable proportions. Even this last attack seemed like little more than a d.a.m.ned nuisance.”
She lifted herself onto one elbow and studied his face. ”Perhaps, because you became less agitated, your brain did not have to work so hard,” she said. ”You said you needed to think, and it appears your reflections were positive. It's possible that stimulating such thought, rather than stupefying it, was the more beneficial approach.”
”Lovemaking instills in me any number of positive feelings,” he said. ”Perhaps we must regard that as a beneficial treatment as well.”
She arched one eyebrow. ”I recall nothing in the medical literature recommending coitus as a course of treatment.”
He slid his fingers into her wayward hair and drew her down to him. ”Maybe you haven't read enough books.”
6.
Three weeks later, Dorian stood in the doorway of his wife's sitting room, watching her frown over a pamphlet.
Her books had arrived a fortnight ago, and he and Hoskins had helped her convert the sitting room into a study. The medical tomes stood in neat rows in a bookcase.
Her desk was not so neat. Pamphlets, notebooks, and sheets of foolscap lay in haphazard heaps.
Dorian leaned against the door frame and folded his arms and studied his preoccupied wife.
He knew what she was looking for. Not a cure, because there wasn't any, but clues to his ”positive response to treatment.” Though she would never admit it, Dorian knew she had hopes of prolonging his sanity, if not his life.
He had every reason to cooperate. He would be glad of an extra month, even an extra day. Yet her dogged search made his heart ache for her. She was not ”practical and selfish,” as she'd claimed. She cared, deeply, about her patients. She had even cared about Mr. Bowes, whose dementia made Dorian's mother's fits seem like mere sulks.
But at present it was not simply a matter of caring. Dorian feared Gwendolyn's dedication was crossing the line, from a quest for intellectual enlightenment to obsession. Last night she'd muttered in her sleep about ”idiopathic inconstancy” and ”lesions” and ”prodromal symptoms.”
He was strongly tempted to send the books back and order her to cease and desist before she developed a brain fever. Yet he couldn't deprive her of what he knew was the learning opportunity of a lifetime, or show a lack of respect for her maturity, intellect, and competence.
Fortunately, he'd been able to devise something like a solution because his mind was still functioning adequately, despite two more attacks. The last, a week ago, had continued for twenty-four hours, until he'd made her dose him with ipecac, to make him vomit. After that, he'd slept like the dead for another half a day.
Yet he'd recovered with the same sense of well-being and clarity of mind he'd experienced the two previous times. He was sure it was because she'd exorcised the demons of fear, shame, and ignorance, thus reducing emotional pressure on his damaged brain. He knew the reprieve was temporary, and he wasn't going to waste it. He had no future, but she did, and he'd spent the last week looking into hers.
”Is this a bad time to interrupt?” he asked.
Her head went up and her preoccupied gloom vanished, and the sun came out in the endless smile that could still make his heart turn over in his breast.
”There is never a bad time for you,” she said.
”You are the most welcome interruption in the world.”
Dorian came away from the door frame, crossed to her desk, and perched on the edge. His gaze settled upon the pamphlet she'd put down when he approached: ”An Account of Acute Idiopathic Mania as Manifested...”
”It is one of Mr. Eversham's studies,” she said.
”But your behavior does not fit his model.”