Page 6 of A Devilish Element
“There’s no use looking at me. I’m not the medical man, and if I were, I’m not sure I’d ever prescribe anything quite so revolting.”
“Bodies are revolting,” Bell intoned, his expression sepulchral. Jem hadn’t yet decided whether it was an affectation intended to add gravitas or if the doctor spent so much time around corpses that he had one foot in the grave himself. “Diseased and injured bodies, particularly so.”
Linfield wriggled backward as if he could escape into the ghastly pattern on the upholstery. “Would this be the time to point out that I’m neither?”
“Yet you are, by your own admission, afflicted by a debilitating malady.”
“Acutely debilitating,” Jem droned. It was hard not to feel a smattering of sympathy for the sod, though Jem was finding it equally difficult not to laugh at his lordship’s predicament. It was, after all, a pickle of his own making. He could have refused to marry the girl his family had picked out. Lord knows why he hadn’t. Linfield wasn’t usually one to docilely bow to pressure. If he had one strength, it was that he was rarely galled or swayed, and while his opinions weren’t always based on sound rhetoric, they were always his own.
Bell’s shadow fell across the chaise. “You’ll need to lower your falls.”
Linfield reached for the fastening but showed a deal of hesitation over slipping the buttons. “You’re sure this will work?” He gave doctor and the saucer both sickly glances, and rightly so, given the delicate part of his anatomy they were headed for.
Bell captured one of the wrigglers between a pair of forceps. “There are no guarantees in this life of anything other than eventual death. However, this treatment is based on firm scientific principles. Erections depend on blood flow, and one thing leeches are very good at is drawing blood.”
“That’s because they bite, with teeth.” Jem flashed his own pearly whites. “Up to sixty of them so I’ve heard.” It wasn’t that he’d made a study of leeches, but he knew a fellow who had.
“You’re not helping,” Linfield whined.
“If you prefer, we can forgo the treatment, and go back to playing cards or whatever other vice you might care to entertain us with.” Bell said.
Relief released the tension from his lordships jaw. His eyes lost their nervous squint. Hope blazed like a sentinel beacon.
“That is, if you don’t mind remaining a bungler.”
And was snuffed out.
Jem snorted. The situation was positively ridiculous, albeit unfortunate, given the entire point of marriage was procreation, and Linfield’s prick had evidently lost all its vigour the moment he said I do.
Bell, too, was fighting off a smirk and catastrophically failing. Linfield swung a fist at one then the other of them.
“Oh, yes, it’s hilarious. Let’s laugh at the man who was doing no more than minding his own business, and had a lass thrust on him without so much as an opinion asked and is now stuck in fumbler’s hall because of it.”
“Had his arm twisted right up his back, he did,” Jem said to Bell over the top of Linfield’s head.
“I know, I had to treat the sprain.”
“You’re devils, both of you. I should dismiss you both.” He smacked them both, Jem on the wrist and Bell the thigh. It did nothing to kill their humour. They both knew he wouldn’t send them away. He couldn’t afford to. They were his only hope, albeit for ostensibly different reasons.
“You didn’t have to wed the woman,” Jem said.
“You say that, but you’ve no papa breathing down your neck, threatening to disinherit you if you don’t comply.”
Jem, whose parents had both departed this life when he was a boy of eight, took this statement with the sort of stoicism necessitated by an acquaintance with Linfield. The young viscount was an entitled, indolent rogue, and he said that with as much affection in his heart as he could muster, but truly, he was the sort Jem had ruthlessly avoided throughout his own studies, and regularly had nightmares about being allowed to run the country. The man had barely a bean of sense, no head for numbers, only a smattering of Latin, no Greek and maintained a mien of complete lassitude, stirring only when there was mischief to manage or a wager to make. How they had come to be acquaintances was a lengthy tale, but reduced to its simplest form, Jem had been employed by Linfield’s papa, the Earl of Bellingbrook, as a tutor for his wayward eldest son. Five years of Oxford education was deemed quite sufficient. It was time he shouldered the burden of responsibility, passed the confounded exam, produced an heir, and got on with learning the ropes of managing the ancestral estate. Not necessarily in that order, but now, while the earl still had wits enough about him to set his son right. Jem couldn’t fault Bellingbrook’s logic. If left unsupervised, Linfield would reduce the earldom to penury inside a decade, which would be an accomplishment indeed given that the family owned half of Lincolnshire and stretches of Rutland and Yorkshire too.
If not for the tutoring, they would never have met. Jem wouldn’t have got sucked into Linfield’s set, or come to be wintering in the wilds, or endured a host of other questionable activities which took him away from his studies. Still, he couldn’t deny there were benefits to the association too. Trailing after Linfield reminded him of his younger years, constantly surrounded by his cousins and being embroiled in endless adventures and escapades. It’d reminded him that life didn’t always have to be serious, and that joy could be found in unlooked-for places.
His gaze fell on Linfield’s face again. He was hardly the handsomest man he’d seen, being somewhat weak of chin, but he had eyes that were forest green and flashed like the summer peeking through leafy bowers, and hair that stood out from his head like puffs of smoke. Jem curled his hand over Linfield’s shoulder, whereupon the other man clasped his fingers tight.
“Ready?” Bell lowered the first of the leeches.
They were some of the most disgusting creatures Jem had ever come across, right up there with slugs, centipedes, and weevils. Likely, there were more repulsive creatures on this Earth, but fortuitously, he’d avoided encountering them.
“Jem,” Linfield moaned. He squeezed Jem’s fingers tight while he loosened his front fall with the other hand. “Say something. Distract me.”
“Like what? This is making my eyes water, and I’ve the good sense not to let one near bare skin.” He continued to squint and clench his thighs as Bell positioned the beast. Truly, one had to wonder if it was worth it. There had to be other means, a kinder means of curing impotency, or performance anxiety, or whatever affliction it was Linfield claimed to be suffering. Maybe if he drank a little less, or a little more, or thought of his wife as something other than a shackle, then he could fix his tallywhacker and make this whole procedure entirely unnecessary.
“Oh!” Linfield turned his head to look at the leech sitting on his cock. “I thought it would hurt, but there wasn’t even a pinch.”
