Lady Callandra Daviot. And they are not romantically impressionable young ladies."
Rathbone breathed out a sigh of relief. He had negotiated it superbly. He had even avoided saying offensively that Berenice and Callandra were not young.
Lovat-Smith accepted rebuff gracefully and tried again.
"Do I understand correctly, Sir Herbert, that you are very used to admiration?"
Sir Herbert hesitated. "I would prefer to say 'respect,' " he said, deflecting the obvious vanity.
"I daresay." Lovat-Smith smiled at him, showing sharp, even teeth. "But admiration is what I meant. Do not your students admire you intensely?"
"You were better to ask them, sir."
"Oh come now!" Lovat-Smith's smile widened. "No false modesty, please. This is not a withdrawing room where pretty manners are required." His voice hardened suddenly. "You are a man accustomed to inordinate admiration, to people hanging upon your every word. The court will find it difficult to believe you are not well used to telling the difference between overenthusiasm, sycophancy, and an emotional regard which is personal, and therefore uniquely dangerous."
"Student doctors are all young men," Sir Herbert answered with a frown of confusion. "The question of romance does not arise."
Two or three of the jurors smiled.
"And nurses?" Lovat-Smith pursued, eyes wide, voice soft.
"Forgive me for being somewhat blunt," Sir Herbert said patiently. "But I thought we had already covered that. Until very recently they have not been of a social class where a personal relationship could be considered."
Lovat-Smith did not look in the least disconcerted. He smiled very slightly, again showing his teeth. "And your patients, Sir Herbert? Were they also all men, all elderly, or all of a social class too low to be considered?"
A slow flush spread up Sir Herbert's cheeks.
"Of course not," he said very quietly. "But the gratitude and dependence of a patient are quite different. One knows to accept it as related to one's skills, to the patient's natural fear and pain, and not as a personal emotion. Its intensity is transient, even if the gratitude remains. Most men of medicine experience such feelings and know them for what they are. To mistake them for love would be quite foolish."
Fine, Rathbone thought. Now stop, for Heaven's sake! Don't spoil it by going on.
Sir Herbert opened his mouth and then, as if silently hearing Rathbone's thoughts, closed it again.
Lovat-Smith stood in the center of the floor, staring up at the witness box, his head a little to one side. "So in spite of your experience with your wife, your daughters, your grateful and dependent patients, you were still taken totally by surprise when Prudence Barrymore expressed her love and devotion toward you? It must have been an alarming and embarrassing experience for you-a happily married man as you are!"
But Sir Herbert was not so easily tripped.
"She did not express it, sir," he replied levelly. "She never said or did anything which would lead me to suppose her regard for me was more than professional. When her letters were read to me it was the first I knew of it."
"Indeed?" Lovat-Smith said with heavy disbelief, giving a little shake of his head. "Do you seriously expect the jury to believe that?" He indicated them with one hand. "They are all intelligent, experienced men. I think they would find it hard to imagine themselves so... naive." He turned from the witness stand and walked back to his table.
"I hope they will," Sir Herbert said quietly, leaning forward over the railing with hands clasping it. "It is the truth. Perhaps I was remiss, perhaps I did not look at her as a young and romantic woman, simply as a professional upon whom I relied. And that may be a sin-for which I shall feel an eternal regret. But it is not a cause to commit murder!"
There was a brief murmur of applause from the court. Someone called out, "Hear, hear!" and Judge Hardie glanced at them. One of the jurors smiled and nodded.
"Do you wish to reexamine your witness, Mr. Rathbone?" Hardie asked.
"No thank you, my lord," Rathbone declined graciously.
Hardie excused Sir Herbert, who walked with dignity, head high, back to his place in the dock.
Rathbone called a succession of Sir Herbert's professional colleagues. He did not ask them as much as he had originally intended; Sir Herbert's impression upon the court in general had been too powerful for him to want to smother it with evidence which now seemed largely extraneous. He asked them briefly for their estimation of Sir Herbert as a colleague and each replied unhesitatingly of his great skill