When she had been young and foolish, and swept up in the deepest admiration for the man she had wed, she'd believed herself intrepid. Fearless Gemma, the doctor's right hand, his student, his assistant, his bride. Dr. Edmund Oakes had been a brilliant physician and a good, ethical man. He'd been much admired for his analytical mind and gift for difficult diagnosis.

Not a fiery lover, though. Perhaps his intellect prevented a certain warmth, or at least excused the lack of it. He'd been ardent in the beginning, at least often enough for her to believe herself admired and wanted. He was her world and all was right with that world.

And then they had gone to war.

Battlefield surgeon and his battlefield bride. She'd been mad, that was all. Mad for her husband, obsessed with proving herself to him, proving that she was good enough for him, willing to suppress all dread, all fear, all recoil as she'd waded through blood and mud and gore, stepping past bodies blackened by fire, broken by cannon and torn apart by shot. Dying, moaning, screaming men and boys, some so young she could not believe anyone had thought it wise to wrap them in woolen uniforms and give them firearms.

Although she'd never served outside the medical tents, sometimes the front line had come so close that she could hear the boom of cannon fire, and the cries of the wounded and dying carried by the wind, along with the smell of smoke and burning flesh. She still dreamed of the strange, heavy odor of blood so strong it became a taste in her mouth.

So yes, she'd seen the broken, the shattered and the stunned.

"Commotional," Edmund had called it. The strange state of a mind so battered by death and destruction that it could no longer carry the same soul and personality that it once had held. Over-reacting to the world, that broken soul, as sensitive as the newly born, as mindless, sometimes, as the truly mad.

Foolish, unwise, fearless Gemma. She had spent herself on those fields of blood, much the way that Edmund had. The pace, exhaustion and failure — more often than success — had broken him in a different way. When the war had ended, he'd wanted nothing more than to return to the house left to him by an aunt. He'd spent a few summers in Yorkshire as a child. "It is clean there," he told her.

It was clean, she'd thought when she'd arrived, because it was damned empty. In time, she had come to love the wide sky and spacious dales. The village worshiped her husband. Dr. Edmund Oakes could have had a prosperous city practice but he stayed in Farby. He had grimly devoted himself to the people of Swaledale, but the war had stolen his passion for healing.

And his passion for her as well.