The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1) (10 page)

The root was coming from an elm tree, that much was clear. Beneath the patio had been gravel, which had been pushed apart by the rising roots; if he wanted to deal with it, the gravel would need to be moved and whatever below as well, to clear the way for the root to be pulled up.

He decided a hole would need to be dug, as well. It was all no good if the roots were just going to grow back in, so he would clear the space beside the patio as well.

John Paul walked to the shed and opened the doors. As he had hoped, he found a spade inside and took it out. The gravel didn’t want to allow the flat blade of the shovel through the stones, but he forced it in nonetheless and flung a shovel-full to the side. Then he took another, forcing the blade into the gravel. Then another.

He stopped again several hours later, when Henry came out to call him to dinner. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked at his hands. Hot, stinging blisters had formed on his hands. He realized, too late, that he should have had gloves for the work, but he ignored it.

“No, thank you. I’ll finish working out here.”

John Paul could see the doubt on his nephew’s face, but Henry didn’t voice his complaint. Instead, he turned on his heel and walked back inside. Jacob had come out into the back and had been quietly trimming hedges throughout the afternoon, and he walked past then.

“You really should take a break, mister Foster. That’s plenty of work for one day.”

He didn’t stop, though, and neither did John Paul. He pushed the shovel back into the dirt that he’d found beneath the gravel. He would only need another few hours, and then he’d be able to cut the damned root out and pull it. Then it would just be another hour or two after that to fill the hole back in.

He stopped more frequently, now. Once he had seen the state of his hands, the pain in his hands had become more real, somehow. Even still, he pushed the thoughts aside and after gulping down a succession of breaths he pushed the shovel back in.

This went on for a while, until he was more than waist-deep in the hole he had dug for himself, nearly long enough to lie down in, and he still had not found the absolute length of the root that had disrupted his back lawn.

As he stood, gasping for air, and leaning on his shovel, he heard a voice behind him, pleading with him to come in and eat something, but he ignored it. Very well, he thought. I’ll just have to dig a little more. He pushed the shovel into the earth once more.

Behind him, the gardener stepped into the hole and grabbed him around the waist. Though he was a burly man, and stood above six feed, John Paul found himself being lifted easily by Jacob and very nearly thrown bodily out of the hole.

John Paul looked at him, wild-eyed, and for a moment nearly scrambled back into the hole until Henry grabbed his wrist with both hands and held him back.

Jacob spoke up, pressing himself up and out of the hole as he did. “The roots will be there tomorrow, mister Foster. Eat now, for this much work you’ll need your strength in the morning, or you’ll hardly be able to get yourself out of bed tomorrow morning. We’ve got Thomas fixing you something up, and I’ll see to your hands while we wait.”

The Colonel felt the strength ebb out of his body. Whatever had possessed him to work with the fury that had pressed him through the day, it was gone now. He pushed the door open weakly and slumped into the first chair he came to. His stomach hurt from hunger. A moment later, Thomas came out to announce that he’d finished some food for the master of the house and set a plate down in John Paul’s lap.

He picked up the fork and his hands screamed in agony. He hissed with the pain and set it back down. There was a roll of bandages in the pack, part of a first-aid kit he’d put together, and he pulled them out and wrapped up his blistered hands instead of eating. Henry pressed him back into the seat and picked the fork up for him.

“Here, I’ll hold the silver for you. Just eat, now.”

John Paul was too tired to argue; he opened his mouth when Henry put the fork, some fish speared on the end, up to his lips. The taste was fairly good, but he hardly detected it. He wanted to sleep, or at the very least to go lie down. But the men gathered ‘round the room wouldn’t let him, refusing stolidly to listen to any protestations, until he’d finished it. Then they helped him to his room and closed the door for him as he undressed.

When he laid down, he could feel the soreness in every muscle; no matter how he turned, he was laying on another muscle he had over-worked. Eventually, he settled into a fitful sleep. He didn’t dream, or if he did, he didn’t remember it.

Chapter 10

The next morning, and the morning after, and all the mornings after that, he woke late. It seemed better than waking early, so much so that if he woke before he was quite ready he would return to sleep and hold his eyes shut as best he could until sleep took him again.

He did have work to do, but it seemed as if he couldn’t bring himself to do any of it.

First of all was the state of his hands, which seemed to take days to heal. He forced himself to hold his own utensils after that first night, but he couldn’t do it without pain for three days. He couldn’t take up a mattock and cut that root out. He’d been a fool to try to do it all in a day; he saw that, now.

He contented himself for the first day with reading in the parlor. That didn’t keep him occupied, though. Every time he turned the page, it seemed, he would be distracted by thoughts of Lydia. How was she handling things? Was she alright?

It was twelve days until he’d be able to go to the store, and who knows how long until he saw her again, even through her work at her family’s store, assuming they even continued to operate with the proprietor dead.

He didn’t only worry over her, of course. Sometimes he would be distracted by the description of a woman, and imagine that she looked like Lydia—the way she would wear her hair, or her clothes, or the curve of her nose, or of her cheek.

The time seemed to pass agonizingly slowly, and every time he thought of her it stood still until he was finished, as if the clock ceased to tick.

In the days that followed, he realized that even if he could not work, and he clearly could not, he could do something physical, at the least. He took to patrolling his lawn, and once he had completed a few laps he would go up or down the street a little ways, or perhaps going to share a cigarette with Mark as he took a break from cleaning the stalls.

And so, in that way, the time did pass.

Jacob hired a man to come in from town every day—he wouldn’t be staying on permanently, Jacob reckoned, so there was little enough reason to find him space to sleep in the house—and the pair of them made short work of what remained of the root clearing job.

They laid down the stones again and grouted them in the space of an afternoon, and it was as if the things had never been taken up, aside from the differently-colored grout. The discoloration would come with time, John Paul was assured.

The last of the gazebo went to kindling, and was thrown onto the growing pile of wood beside the house. Quickly, he found, the work was getting done. After a week, the lumber yard sent some boys over with three wagons’ load of hardwood floor panels, and they set to work unloading them. It took the better part of the day just getting materials situated, and then they started ripping the floors out.

John Paul stood on the third floor and watched them pulling the flooring out. He had grabbed the dolls he’d been keeping and was holding the lot of them in one over-full arm as he watched. They pulled the entire floor up, revealing a much worse-looking wooden floor beneath it.

They made disapproving noises as they inspected this under-floor before pulling it up as well. They didn’t explain, but he gathered that they had their work cut out for them. He turned around and walked back down the stairs. The dolls needed a place to go, he thought. So they’d go in his room.

He thought he might have a good home for them. It would only be another few days until he would go to the store, the first of June. Once he saw Lydia again, he’d give her the dolls. No more waiting for the right time.

That was the best way, he thought. He had no need for them. When he’d seen them, he’d immediately thought they would be for her. He’d been waiting for a chance to give them, some sort of occasion, but there wasn’t any occasion.

The death of James Wakefield, only a decade older than John Paul himself, had cemented a fear in John Paul’s heart. There was only so much time left in his life; he hoped for more than a scant few years until his heart gave out or sickness took him, but his escape from the violence of military life hadn’t made him immune..

He wouldn’t waste what time he had left, not any more. He laid down in the bed he’d been using. Eventually, everything in the room would need to come out. The floors here were no better than those above, and they’d have to play musical chairs for a bit until the flooring job was done. Until then, he tried not to think of the room as “his” room. It was just a room he was using right now.

Eventually he hoped to move the bed up to one of the master bedrooms on the third floor. It would be a fair bit of work, hoisting up the bed to that height, but with four strapping young men, and John Paul himself, a bear of a man, to do the moving, it would be easier work than it could have been. He laid his head back and drifted off to sleep.

He dreamed of Lydia, as he had the past several nights. In his dreams, they sat together; sometimes, they spoke, other times, he would just watch her with needlework. Tonight they walked through the snow, talking about everything he could imagine.

Henry and Simon walked with them, fast friends themselves. The four of them chatting happily, as snow fell lazily down on them. He woke up to a knock on the door.

The voice on the other side said “You’ve got mail, sir.”

John Paul rubbed the tiredness from his eyes as an envelope was slipped under the door. On the front, it had his address, written in a fine hand that he didn’t immediately recognize. After a moment’s inspection, he realized it was Lydia’s writing. He’d only ever seen her write in pencil or chalk at the store; to see her writing with a pen was an entirely new and exhilarating experience, all loops and shading.

He cut the envelope open and pulled the contents out. There was a card and a letter. He took the card first and read it. It was written with the same fine, feminine hand that had written his name and address on the front. It read that she was happy to hear of my condolences, and thanked me. She finished it “Ever Yours, Lydia Wakefield.”

The other piece of paper sat beside it, folded over to fit, and John Paul opened it.

This was written in a rather different hand. It was not nearly so fine, though it had a practicality to it that John Paul found himself liking even still.

“Mister Foster,” it opened.

“We have all had a good deal of tragedy in our lives recently, after the death of our father. Lydia grieves for him, and as a daughter should, she will be mourning for the space of a year.

“The day of our father’s death, she expressed to me, as well as to our late father, her desire to marry you, and this is not a matter I have forgotten, nor, I suspect, has her grief dulled such a desire.

“Of course, it would not be proper to have any sort of marriage during her period of mourning, but I would like to see that you have some sort of closure. I suspect that the preparations for such a union would help to lift the spirits of all the members of the Wakefield home, and as the new head of the Wakefield family, I am in a position to grant such a request, and I am inclined to do so.

“If you could come to the Wakefield home at your earliest opportunity, we will be having a small dinner among the family and close friends to try to put this awful event behind us the night before we intend to re-open the store, May 30
th
. If you would like to come at 4:30, then we can discuss matters of matrimony before the other guests begin to arrive.

“Signed,

“Simon Wakefield.”

John Paul folded the paper over. That would be tomorrow, then. He felt the straight line of his shoulders sag just a little bit. What he had not predicted, after the first few days of misery, was how much he had held himself up through sheer obstinacy over the past two weeks.

Now that he had an answer, the fight was gone, as if the chair had been pulled out from under him. He was surprised to find his eyes wet. He had his answer, then. After so much time fretting over it, the relief overwhelmed him. He walked back over to the bed and laid down.

He looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then covered his eyes with his arm and tried not to think for a while. He hadn’t forgotten Simon’s request for a loan. He wondered if that played a role in the agreement to marriage. It was much harder, after all, to refuse a future brother-in-law than it was to refuse the brother of a woman who you had once known, but been refused the hand of once and for-all.

He pushed the thought away before it could eat him up. He’d been given no reason, none whatsoever, to doubt Simon’s sincerity. To think such thoughts about him, particularly after being offered such a boon very nearly unbidden—it was downright un-Christian. He wiped the wetness from his eyes and sat back up.

He had only just arisen, but the revelations of the day exhausted him even still. He pulled on his clothes, then pushed out the door. He may not have any major work to do himself, but he was the master of his home, in the same way that Simon Wakefield was now the master of his own. He needed to check on the men who were working, to ensure that he was still perfectly happy with the work they were doing. To do otherwise would be shirking his duties.

The fact that he would be able to distract himself for one more day didn’t hurt, either.

Finally, the next day came; John Paul found it quite impossible to sleep, and watched the sun come up with exhaustion clawing at him, but even still he found himself unable to close his eyes for more than a moment.

He took breakfast and set about touring the house to ensure that everything was in working order before ducking back into his room to dress for the evening’s festivities. He looked into the mirror and tried to stand with his back straight.

Simon Wakefield was not a short man, but he was dwarfed beside John Paul, and the Colonel wondered momentarily if it wouldn’t be a better idea to slouch just so, to make him feel a bit more comfortable. He tried it on in the mirror and decided he looked an utter fool when he tried it.

He took the mare into town, hours before he was intended to see the Wakefield boy. No, he corrected himself, Mister Wakefield, now. John Paul wandered anxiously around town. He found that there was no place where he felt so comfortable that he might spend hours, not in the mood he was in currently.

He stopped for a moment in a bar and ignored his desire to walk straight back out. He sat down on a stool and waited, his fingers tap-tapping on the bar. He inspected his fingernails and went back to drumming his fingers while a young woman took his order and came back a moment later with a glass half-full of amber liquid and ice.

His nervousness threatened to overwhelm him. Who had ever heard of such a silly thing, he wondered. That a man of his background would be so nervous about, what—talking to a twenty-two year old boy! It was absolutely unthinkable, but he found himself very nearly sweating.

He sat down on a stool and waited, his fingers tap-tapping on the bar. He inspected his fingernails and went back to drumming his fingers while a young woman took his order and came back a moment later with a glass half-full of amber liquid and ice.

He absently took out a couple shillings and slid them across the table before picking up the glass and taking a comfortably large gulp of the stuff. It burned his throat, but the fire in his belly felt nice. He took another sip.

The Colonel looked at the glass, noticing a prominent bubble in the thick bottom. It drew, it seemed, an inordinate amount of his attention, and he looked at it idly as he waited for his time to be up. He took another drink and checked his watch. Ten more minutes here, and then forty minutes to the Wakefield home.

He had plenty of time. Still too much time, if he was being honest. He took another sip and savored the woody flavor and the thick burn that went down after.

John Paul looked again at his watch. Only another eight minutes here… he cut the line of thought off by taking another large swallow, upending the glass to get the very last of it out, and then set it back down, the ice rattling satisfyingly. He got up and straightened his jacket, then walked out the door.

The walk to the Wakefield home was leisurely, by design. He had far too much time left, but he had nothing much to do, and as he walked the area became increasingly residential. By the time he was a kilometer away, he knew that if he wanted to stop into a shop he would have to turn back, but he didn’t.

When John Paul Foster finally knocked on the door of the Wakefield home, it was four twenty-seven, and he’d been strolling the perimeter of the home just out of sight for the past five minutes or so.

There was only a moment’s wait before someone answered the door who he couldn’t put a name to.

“Mister Foster,” the young man inquired.

“Yes,” John Paul answered.

“Follow me, sir, Simon is in the parlor.”

John Paul followed him past a few closed doors to the parlor, where he’d first sat with Lydia and chatted when he had come to call on her. Inside, there was a thin, nearly gaunt man who turned to greet John Paul. He had an exhausted look, but if he ignored the way that his skin seemed stretched and waxy with exhaustion and grief, John Paul could just recognize Simon Wakefield.

“Ah! Mister Foster!” he cried out, with an enthusiasm that belied his sickly appearance. He stepped forward with a hand outstretched for a handshake, which John Paul accepted.