Page 89 of A Devilish Element
“Down a trio of teeth, but alive and about her business. I’ve prescribed a garlic-salt rinse, followed by a compress of thyme and cloves. And a tincture of opium for the pain. Necessary, I think. Despite what you think Miss Wakefield, I don’t routinely dose my patients with opiates. Have I performed to your approval?”
“I’m sure Mrs Honeyfield is exceedingly grateful to you for such care.”
He snorted. “Cursing and grumbling over my insensitivity and what I’ve prescribed, I imagine. She’s some knowledge, I’ll admit, but her thoughts are antiquated. Whistler, you may wish to leave, unless you mean to assist in undressing him.”
“No.” Jem curled his knuckles to his mouth. “Sorry, but no. I’ll go next door. I don’t want the vision of him laid out for you in my head,” and it would be. It’d stick as a reminder of what was to come, and the images his mind conjured were gruelling enough. He glanced at Eliza, but she’d already turned away ready to assist Bell.
“Have you an apron I can borrow, Doctor Bell?”
She was still in the gown she’d worn to dinner. It was wool rather than satin, muslin, or whatever confounded thing dresses were made of, and devoid of excessive broidery, but comely nonetheless, and not something she would want ruined.
The last thing he saw as Jem hastened away was a streamer of pale cloth flying in Eliza’s direction.
-28-
Eliza
Bell had Eliza gather lanterns and candles to bathe the area in light while he disrobed and inspected the body, but the room remained thoroughly gloomy. He noted her stares once she’d returned to the table and flicked a bemused glance in her direction. “This is not the first time you’ve seen a man disrobed I think.”
She shook herself. It was not. Nor was Linfield the only male corpse she’d seen. “Why is his… Why is he so bruised about his nethers?” She cast a swift nervy glance at the door separating them from the surgery, while scraping her teeth against her lower lip. Not at all certain what to make of the contusions.
“Nothing to do with Jem, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Bell remarked, demonstrating more insight into matters than she’d thought him privy to. Then again, he was more intelligent than most of the physicians she’d met, most of whom were too busy masquerading as gentlemen to notice anything that wasn’t biting them on the nose. “My fault. I set my pets on him.” He nodded to the bell jar full of leeches on the countertop at the foot end of the table.
“Why?”
Bell’s eyes lit with mirth as he sought out Linfield’s sternum and brandished his scalpel. “For the same reason your man Whistler produced that blasted gas. I’m guessing he didn’t get into the details of why he was making it with you.”
The laughing gas? All those bladders of it remained next door, ready for a party that would never come. “He was making it for Lord Linfield.” Curious how it choked her to say that, while looking at his naked corpse.
“More like out of desperation. He needed to get himself out of a bind and he thought the gas might do it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you not?”
“Pray just speak to me as the idiot you consider me.”
Bell grinned. “His lordship here needed to sire an heir but couldn’t manage to maintain a stand robust enough to prick his wife with. He was getting desperate, the wedding was over two months gone, and the earl’s impatient. He was ready to try anything: leeches, experimental gasses, inviting another man into bed alongside his wife, and likely a dozen other things. Daft really, given it wasn’t a matter of impotence, merely preference.”
“I see.” She was not entirely sure that she did, but it was something to cogitate later. Jem had said the situation was more complicated than she wanted to believe. He’d hinted at coercion, but she’d seen them together. It hadn’t looked that way. Or maybe, her heart was still too dented to genuinely accept that possibility.
She chewed that over as she watched Bell work. He raised a line of blood as he pushed the scalpel through the dead man’s flesh.
At least Bell’s words confirmed it wasn’t anything Jane had done that had kept her husband from her bed. “Yet, Jane is with child,” she said after a moment.
Bell flashed her a toothsome smile. “Did I imply that I thought otherwise? Swab, please, Miss Wakefield.”
She obliged.
“We both know that the one thing is not dependant on the other.”
“Will you say it is not his?” That would destroy Jane’s reputation as surely as any threat posed by Mr Cluett. At least he might be bought, but Bell… She did not think he could be so easily swayed by money. Or maybe he could. She truly didn’t know him at all.
“Why would I do that, Miss Wakefield, hm? They are wed. Of course it is his. Half the peerage is sired by someone other than the man acknowledged to be their father, and we should likely all be grateful for it or none of them would possess a chin or brains, and there’s few enough of either to go between them all as it is.”
“But you just said—”
“No one beyond Cedarton is aware of his issue, Miss Wakefield, and no one here besides you, me, and Mr Whistler. I shan’t be slurring a dead man’s name. How would that benefit me? Will you? And while I’m sure you have your quarrels with Mr Whistler right now, do not doubt his integrity. He will not share the intimacies Linfield confided in him, after all, he didn’t share them with you, even when it would have benefitted him to do so.”
