He looked down at their joined hands. Juliana wasn't wearing gloves. Prior to flouncing out to the carriage, she'd grabbed her umbrella but left a pair of white gloves sitting on the marble-topped table. Lady Frances hadn't noticed in her current, bemused state, and James hadn't thought to remind Juliana to take them, either.
Or maybe he hadn't wanted to.
Her hand felt small in his, her palm smooth and warm. He couldn't remember ever being so aware of anyone touching him before. It was a wonder she didn't seem to be feeling it, too.
"I see now," she said. "Your brother's death is why you became a physician. I've been wondering what would compel an earl to take up doctoring," she added, squeezing his fingers with kindly understanding.
He tried not to squeeze back, lest she realize she was touching him. "That's sound reasoning, but not the way it happened. Philip was my older brother—he was supposed to be the earl. I became a physician before his death, not after, because, as a second son, I needed a profession. I was at his bedside as his physician when he died."
"You don't blame yourself for his death, do you?" Concerned sympathy flooded her eyes. "Just because you're a doctor—"
"Good God, no." Even in his darkest days, he hadn't tortured himself with that. "Variola major—the more severe form of smallpox—defies treatment. There is really little a physician can do but keep the patient as comfortable as possible and hope for the best."
"So doctors do nothing?"
"Oh, there are things physicians try, but they generally involve bleeding, emetics, and purgatives—treatments I fear weaken a patient rather than strengthening him." He'd done everything he'd thought could conceivably help his brother; he was totally at peace on that score. "I don't blame myself at all. But I would blame myself if I allowed more people to contract smallpox without trying to do anything to stop it."
"I understand." Her eyes looked blue now, a blue softened by compassion. "I'm truly sorry you lost your brother to such a devastating disease."
"You must have lost a brother, too," he realized suddenly. "Else Griffin wouldn't be the marquess. He wasn't meant to be, was he? After Oxford, he joined the military, same as I did."
"Our brother Charles died of consumption," she said. "A year after our mother succumbed to it first."
They called consumption a "gentle death," but James knew better. Its victims might fade away rather slowly and gracefully, but watching a loved one die was never easy. And Juliana had suffered through that twice.
"Consumption seems to descend upon certain families," he told her. "Probably because it's not easily transmitted like smallpox, but after weeks and months in the same home—"
"I thought it wasn't contagious." She looked shocked. "We all cared for my mother and brother with no concern of risking our own health. The doctors told us consumption is caused by the patient's own constitution and runs in families only because relations are so often alike."
"That may be the prevailing wisdom, but I don't believe it. And I'm not alone. More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates himself warned doctors to be wary of contracting it from patients. And early in the last century, Benjamin Marten wrote a paper theorizing that consumption is caused by 'wonderfully minute living creatures' that can pass from one person to another, although rarely without extended periods of contact." His explanation didn't seem to be making her rest any easier, so he tried a different approach. "I don't expect you need to worry about catching it now if you haven't already. Nor should your sisters or Griffin. Whatever 'minute creatures' might have been in your home are long gone, I'm certain, and you needn't fret that you were all born with constitutions that will cause you to develop it, either."
"So Charles caught it from our mother, but none of the rest of us did." She drew and released a breath. "I've been wondering if we all might succumb eventually. Is it wicked of me to be relieved that we won't?"
"It's natural to be relieved," he said. "And I could be wrong. Most physicians wouldn't agree with me."
"I think you're right," she said. "I think you're a man who thinks for himself, who looks for his own answers instead of blindly accepting what others claim. We need your sort of men—and women. You're the people who discover things that make the world better for all of us."
If she was wicked to be relieved, he must be even more wicked to want to kiss her because she believed in him. He'd faced a lot of censure over the years from colleagues who scoffed at his refusal to bleed patients and his unorthodox insistence that cleanliness helped prevent infection. Not that he was the only physician to believe such things—it had been nearly sixty-five years since Sir John Pringle, a former Surgeon General of the Army, had coined the word antiseptic. But he certainly went against the norm.
"Thank you," he said, squeezing her hand.
A mistake. Looking startled, she pulled it away. "So." She cleared her throat. "Tomorrow evening at the ball…just how are you planning to ask Lady Amanda if you might court her?"
The quick change of subject made him feel as though his brain had just fallen off a cliff. How did women manage to do that? How had Juliana gone from holding his hand to assuming he was still planning to court Lady Amanda?
He wasn't. He'd decided he'd rather court Juliana—or rather, tempt her into letting him kiss her.
But he didn't quite know how to answer her question, because she hadn't asked him if he was planning to court Lady Amanda. She'd asked him how he was planning to ask for permission.
She must have taken his silence to mean he couldn't figure out how, because
