The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1) (18 page)

BOOK: The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1)
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Chapter 18

The months passed slowly, painfully. For the first couple of weeks, John Paul found himself forgetting. He would wonder what sort of things he would be doing with Lydia, trying to remember when their next day together would be, only to remember that there wasn't going to be one, not for a while at least. Those were the worst times, but eventually that passed, and he forced himself to keep going. Just wake up and get through the day, as long as time passed.

Further, to his great, albeit morbid, pleasure, he found himself not getting any better at all. He was deterioriating, in fact, faster than he had before. He wobbled badly on the cane, struggling even to get out of bed. The furthest he could go, he found, was to go up and down the halls, pacing, and that was how he spent the majority of his time.

When he was still, after all, he thought ever of her, of Lydia, and of how she looked and smelled and felt. Was she enjoying her trip, he wondered, was she alright?

He got letters, of course. Dozens of them, nearly every day. He struggled to write fast enough to get a reply out the door before a new letter came in with his name on it, smelling faintly like her. After a month, he began to wonder if they didn't hurt him more than they helped. He couldn't put his head down and soldier through their time apart with gritted teeth, no. He had to be thinking of it constantly.

The first letter she gave him sat on his desk. He wasn't sure when to open it, even as the snows outside his window melted and the sun started to come back out as March approached. He sat on his bed, massaging the pain from his thighs, and stared at it. He should open it, surely. She had given it to him to read, not simply to look at, and yet it seemed as if that was a perfectly adequate use of the letter to him.

Lydia, John Paul found, was a grand mystery. The letter she'd given him on Christmas, the day she was preparing to leave for London, served only to solidify that mystery, to make her mnore opaque. To make him love her more, he thought.

But eventually, with great difficulty, he made it through the time in spite of himself. The letters started to be shorter, as she began travelling around, tying up missed connections and preparing to return. Finally he received a letter that contained no words at all—just a date and time.

Eleven in the morning, March tenth.

She'd signed her name at the bottom. The paper smelled like her, more than any of the others had. He smelled it and closed his eyes. That was tomorrow, then. He wasn't sure how he would manage it; he had a devil of a time with the stairs, but he wanted desparately nothing more than to come and meet her the very earliest possible moment.

"I've missed you," he said aloud. He tried to stand up, but he fell back onto the bed. He reached for the cane and leaned hard on it to walk. If there could be one thing that he was happy for—her good name, it seemed, was cleared.

He started down the hall again. He did not make good time, but after a few minutes he finished, breathing only a little bit ragged, and leaned against the wall. He turned to look out the window. He could see down the road quite a ways from the third floor, he realized; he could just make out the nearest neighbors, a kilometer or so down the road. Their house was large, at least as large as his. He wondered that he'd never really had a conversation with them. Well, he thought. It was a little bit late now.

He rose early the next morning and tried to make it down the steps. His joints felt arthritic, and he was ever concerned that he might fall at any moment, but he took the steps slowly, and after a few minutes he found that he'd made it down the steps for the first time in what might have been three weeks.

He saw that at some point in his absence, the carpenters had pulled up the flooring on the front room. They would need to come to him, he thought, if they thought anything special should be done. It was not an ideal situation for either of them, but that was the situation in which they found themselves.

He hobbled over to the wall and pulled a coat off, shrugging it on as he used what little remained of his strength to stand un-aided. The door swung open easily. He'd been stuck inside for so long that it seemed as if it were going to be a major obstacle, but in the end it wasn't. He pushed himself out through the door. Mark was sitting in the stable, a heavy woolen coat on, and was brushing the horses.

"Sir! You're up. Is everything alright?"

"Yes, yes," he said. He was surprised to hear his own voice. He hadn't had much in the way of conversation the past few weeks, since he'd begun to struggle to leave his room. Henry would bring food in the mornings and evenings, often leaving it on his writing desk without a word.

It hadn't bothered John Paul at first, though now he wondered if his loneliness might have been helped by a few words of conversation from someone, anyone. "I need to be at the train station, you see. My Lydia is coming back, and I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Mark smiled. John Paul wondered if he'd seen the lad smile before; it was a memorable thing, and he thought that if he had seen it, then he would surely remember. Then the hostler picked up a chair and set it outside and told the colonel to sit, and then set about preparing the carriage.

John Paul pulled himself up on his own; he wouldn't be helped into the cart like an old man, though he feared that it was a very real possibility that he might need such help. He pushed the fears away. He had better things to concern himself with than a little bit of pridefulness. He would need to see a doctor again.

But if they told him that he would need to postpone the wedding…he couldn't bear it. He needed to be able to provide for Lydia, and he couldn't do that after his passing if they weren't married. It was a simple arithmetic problem. Simon had solved it, ages ago it seemed now, by borrowing the money. But for John Paul it wasn't so simple. He wouldn't be able to 'pay back' any loans.

He sat in the back, his cane across his lap, and watched the countryside outside the window. It seemed like just yesterday he was riding down these roads, but at the same time it seemed as if it had all been in another life, a hundred years ago. Before things had gone so wrong.

They made good time, he thought. They beat the eleven o'clock train by twenty minutes, which was plenty of time even for the hobbled to John Paul to find an empty bench from which to watch the trains come in.

 

Lydia was as beautiful, he realized, as he had ever seen her. More. She was perfect, absolutely perfect, and there was nothing he wanted more than to see her a thousand more times. He tried not to wonder if that was an option for him, with the way that his condition was deteriorating.

There was absolutely no excuse for such worrywarting, not when he was seeing his betrothed for the first time in ten weeks. He forced a smile on his lips and forced himself up from the seat.

Mark waved beside him.

"Miss Wakefield," he shouted, loud enough that more than just Lydia looked. She smiled and waved and started toward them, a porter behind carrying her luggage. When she saw John Paul, she stopped short and blinked. He saw the look on her face, a look of mixed surprise and horror, that she covered up a moment later. She swallowed hard and kept on.

"John Paul, dear God! Are you alright?"

"You're here, darling. Nothing could be better." He stretched a weak smile across his face as best he could.

"You look awful. Have you seen a doctor?"

John Paul coughed. "Henry has one coming in, he's been coming up every couple of days with some medicine."

"And?"

"I don't want to talk about that right now, dearest. Tell me about your trip."

"No," Lydia said, stepping back. "You're scaring me, John Paul Foster, now tell me what is going on right now or—"

John Paul sat back onto the bench and leaned on his cane.

"I don't know, Lydia. I don't know what's wrong. I…have my suspicions, but…"

But they were wrong, it seems, he thought. He hadn't known who on earth it could have been, either. The quack doctor, perhaps? Simon could have gotten to him. It wouldn't be especially difficult for him to have elicited the information from Henry about which doctor his uncle was seeing, and to the best of his knowledge the colonel thought that the pair were still spending time together. He frowned.

"Simon won't stand for this, John Paul. You should come and stay with us, there's no way that he's like to refuse. He'll want you to be near a hospital, if he knew how bad your condition was."

"Are you saying he doesn't know, then?"

The words came out before he thought it through, before he considered the ramifications of what he was saying, and he regretted them instantly. But he pushed the regret away. There was nothing he could do about it now.

"What does that mean?"

Lydia sat down beside him. John Paul was tired. He hadn't exerted himself so much for weeks, and he was quite ready to slip back into bed now, but he was in town and that wasn't a choice. He looked at her face. She looked concerned, but her expression was guarded, as well. He shrugged his shoulders up for a moment and looked away.

"I can't imagine that Henry hasn't told him; they're together often enough, aren't they?"

"Is that a bad thing?"

John Paul slumped back against the back of the bench.

"No," he said. He was tired of fighting. It seemed as if she had only been back a moment before he'd upset her, and that was the worst part of all.

"Please," Lydia said, tugging lightly on his sleeve. "Just come and stay with us for a few days, until the wedding."

He didn't answer right away. It might even be smarter. Enemies closer, and all that; and he would be closer to her, in case things turned for the worse he would be able to spend his last few weeks with her.

"No," John Paul answered after a long moment. "I need to stay in the house and make sure things are prepared for the wedding. There's still work left to be done on the house; it should be done soon, but I need to be there to oversee it. They can't go forward without my go-ahead."

Lydia looked at him, and he at her, and for a moment he thought she would ask him again. He would accept if she just said the words again; he didn't have it in him to refuse her a third time. But she didn't say anything, and he didn't volunteer to change his mind.

"I can take you home, if you like, ma'am," Mark volunteered.

"Oh," Lydia said softly. "That would be better than a coach, certainly. What do you say?"

She directed the last question at John Paul, who pressed himself up with some difficulty from the bed. His legs hurt.

"Absolutely."

He hobbled a little way behind them, except for Lydia, who slowed purposefully to match his pace. He didn't tell her how thankful he was for it.

 

The night passed uneventfully.

Rather, John Paul returned home and Mark helped him back up the steps. He didn't go all the way to the third floor; it seemed a bridge too far, and there were plenty of empty bedrooms, seemingly all of them having been filled piecemeal over the past few months. He slipped into one of the beds and fell asleep near immediately.

He woke feeling surprisingly rested. He had been so exhausted from the trip the day before that he fell asleep readily, effortlessly. He didn't dream; he was too exhausted for it.

His bones still hurt; he rose earlier than he would have otherwise preferred, but the throbbing of his knees was such that he couldn't have gone back to sleep. So he rose. There was a sound of working downstairs, much to his surprise.

He reached out for the cane he'd left on the bed-side table and used it to push himself up, and then took his time in walking to the stairs. He leaned hard on the bannister; he was glad for the renovations, because the structure bore his full weight, though it was much less than when he had moved in.

He saw the carpenters working on the floors. They were installing a dense parquet pattern; for a moment, John Paul was puzzled. He certainly hadn't cleared any such work, and they had come to him for nearly every step of the operation before this. Further, such a complex pattern almost certainly had to be more expensive than simply laying down lumber; that was an expense that he had by no means cleared, and there they were incurring it.

And then he saw Henry. He was leaning against the wall, standing in the hallway opposite the stairs. He hadn't seen his uncle yet, but he feared it was only a matter of time, Eventually the boy had to notice him.

He slid down to the ground and started to drag himself across the floor. Using the cane was noisy; he couldn't afford to risk being heard by using it, but neither could he afford to stay there. There were too many questions.

He had always been clear with Henry; he was the head of the house, and as such he needed to be consulted before money was spent. Particularly additional expenses, particularly household expenses. That he hadn't been was a surprise.

He thought for a moment before he decided that it was probably innocent, however. He was becoming paranoid as his illness spread, that was all. He had blamed even Lydia for it, for a brief period. He sat back against the wall.

More likely he wasn't doing anything dubious whatsoever; he was probably just finishing the work for his uncle as a present, knowing how much his condition had deteriorated in the past few months.

BOOK: The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1)
3.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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