The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1) (20 page)

His mind was immediately set alight by this, and he felt on-edge. Six new guests, four servants, a rambunctious nephew…there should have been some sort of noise, but even as he strained his ears he heard nothing.

Then, very softly, he heard voices. He couldn't place the first one he heard speaking, but the volume was slowly rising, as if they were becoming agitated, and then he recognized the second. A woman's voice. Was Lydia here?

He pushed himself up from the chair and walked across the room. The colonel was surprised to find that even just walking across the room was an exhausting affair. He knew they must not have been far; he pressed his ear against the first room he came to. It wasn't that one. He lingered there a moment to rest, and then moved on to the next.

He was certainly moving in the right direction; the voices were clearer, and he could almost hear what they were saying. He heard his own name more than once, from both parties, and it spurred him on to keep moving even as the blood pounded in his ears.

And then he saw the door; it was open, only a crack, but he looked inside. There was Lydia; she was positively radiant, he thought. She was flushed and looked excited by something. Then he saw Henry. As his heart pounded hard, he heard Lydia speak, though she turned away from the door as she said it.

"You don't think he'll make it, then?"

Henry stepped up behind her and pulled her into his arms, pressing his face into her neck.

"I'm afraid he may not," he said, softly.

Suddenly, he realized, everything was becoming clear. They must have been in it together from the beginning, or she had seduced Henry away. He could feel the anger rising in his chest, a hot boiling feeling, and he pushed the door open. Lydia turned and saw him as the world went dark.

Chapter 20

Lydia was sitting, looking down over John Paul when he woke. He scowled at her, but said nothing.

"John Paul," she said, breathless. "You're awake."

"What time is it?"

"A bit past eleven, I think."

"And you're still here?"

She looked at him and pressed her lips together.

"Why are you acting like this?"

"You know why," John Paul answered. Lydia closed her eyes and her fiance's anger exploded. "What on earth were you thinking?"

"I was worried about you."

"So you had my nephew poisoning me?"

Lydia looked at him hard for a moment.

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"You know full well what I'm talking about. Your brother—"

"My brother," Lydia cut off, "has done nothing at all to you, or to your precious, lecherous Henry!"

"Were you aware that I lent him eight hundred pounds?"

Lydia thought about that a moment before answering. "That might not have been wise. You shouldn't be too badly hurt by it, though, should you? I don't think Simon would press anyone for money that would put them in the poorhouse."

"—and knowing that he'll never pay it back, he's been poisoning me. Using you to poison me. To clear his debt."

Lydia stood up and drew herself back against the wall. He could see her face, and she looked angry. It had always been coming up to this, and there was no use in getting upset now. He continued.

"And when you were gone, one of you bribed him somehow into continuing your dirty work for you. With your body, I suppose!"

He was shouting; certainly, the guests would be able to hear, but John Paul didn't concern himself with that now. Let them hear; he would have to call the wedding off, disappear somehow. Now that he had learned that there was no one who could be trusted, he could begin recovering somehow.

It wasn't about the money; he had only wanted to begin a new life, but it seemed that was simply too much to ask. Lydia stood with her back against the wall. Her expression was inconstant, changing quickly from confused to angry to frustrated and back again in a mixed swirl. She was caught out, then, and what little family he had built himself was falling apart.

"That's not true," Lydia said, whispering.

"What?"

John Paul silently dared her to deny it again. He had her caught out, absolutely dead to rights. If she had the gall to insist that he was lying…he snarled. Could she not have the courtesy to tell him the truth on his deathbed?

"Shame on you," she said. Her face was in her hands, but he thought he could hear her weeping. "I am innocent, I have done nothing of the sort."

"What, then?" He struggled not to believe her outright. She sounded so pure, so honest, that it was hard not to accept whatever she said. He told himself that the best thing for it was just to listen to what she said.

Certainly, he thought, whatever lies she told would be caught out in the end. He had only to wait for her to utter them, and if he maintained a calm mind then he would see through them. If, by some coincidence, she was as innocent as she maintained…

John Paul didn't let himself think it. If he did, then he would be lost from the very first moment. He wanted nothing more than for her to be innocent.

"You have been sick for months!" Lydia was panicking; he could see it on her face. "Nearly a year, John Paul. You kept saying you'd get better, and then I went away and you just got worse!"

It was true; he had just gotten worse, no matter what he had done, and he hadn't missed it either. The doctor had never suggested anything else that sounded reasonable. It wasn't that John Paul hadn't asked, either. He had; it wasn't cancer, it wasn't the flu. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't.

Nothing in any of the medical literature he'd read, though he had to admit that he had read only very little of it. Now that he was sick enough to be concerned about it, he was too sick to go to a library and research.

"That's right," John Paul said, softly. "That's why it must have been more than just one person. Several people, then. In concert."

"Well," Lydia said, sliding down the wall to the floor, "I had no part of it."

"What were you doing with Henry, then? In a bedroom, no less!"

"John Paul Foster, you have just been getting worse and worse. Nothing I can do helps you. Nothing I ever do. I just wanted help. I just wanted someone to tell me what to do, and Henry's the only person you ever spend any time around!" She looked tired; exhausted, more likely. She should have been in bed by now, he knew. It was no small scandal for her to be out so late. "He said that you're just going to get sicker, that there's nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do."

"So, what? You went to him for comfort?"

She reached out her hand and slapped him across the face. The place where her hand had struck burned hot.

"Don't you dare, John Paul. Don't you dare accuse me of that. Did you think I had no other offers?" He could see that even as the tears fell down her face, she wore a look of absolute fury. "Well, I'll have you know, I had other suitors, Mister Foster! I have stayed faithful to you from the very first time you asked me to marry you, I have turned down several perfectly good prospects, and now—"

She sat back again and started to cry.

"Your father said no, you know." He laid his head back on the bed. "He thought I couldn't be trusted."

The colonel looked over at Lydia and watched her crying. She didn't look at him, keeping her face buried in her arms. He waited a moment before continuing.

"I wouldn't tell him how I came into my money, you see. I didn't inherit it. So how does a man make such a fortune for himself without industrial connections, without any special skills, without any business investments?" He let out a long breath. "He wasn't wrong to have felt that he couldn't trust someone who wouldn't be honest with him; I couldn't have done it, either."

Lydia didn't reply. He knew she heard him, but she didn't respond, so he continued further.

"When I was in Australia…It was in October, so it would've been just a little under two years ago, I suppose. There were reports coming in of Aboriginal rebels. It was clear that they had some sort of military supplies, so someone was selling them. Or worse, smuggling them out for free, as some sort of opposition to the crown."

He waited for a response. Lydia had wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but still didn't look directly at him, and she didn't say anything.

"Under normal circumstances, there is a police force for that sort of thing. At least, regular army could handle it. But given the implication of a subversive in the British military…there was a perfectly good chance, as well, that the blame would be fairly high up in the British military, for the missing supplies to have gone unnoticed."

"So then…"

John Paul looked at her for a moment. Those were the first words he'd heard her speak since he had started the story, but it seemed that was all he would get out of her for now.

"So I went along, so to speak, to smooth things over with the leadership, if things went poorly."

"And did they?"

"Not especially, I suppose."

"So what's the secret, then?"

"Well, I went with the Lieutenant along with a troop of men. They weren't many; there were only a few dozen, and we had them badly outnumbered. The rebels had been relying on surprise to take down larger units than themselves, but they had no surprise advantage when we took them.

"They had been stealing from convoys, and taking donations from sympathetic locals, and had amassed themselves some money. But we had no suspicion that they had anything like what they did."

"Gold? Henry mentioned something about gold."

"Did he, now," John Paul answered vaguely. "Well, yes. About a hundred-fifty, two hundred kilograms of the stuff. Enough to buy your own tropical island across the pond."

"But aren't you supposed to report that sort of thing?"

"Yes," John Paul replied flatly. "I had to pay more than a few men to keep silent about it. Of course, the Lieutenant had no problem with it. He kept almost a third of it himself, and I kept the perhaps half. After all, it all hinged on me, didn't it?"

"I don't understand."

"If it's a Lieutenant's word against a Colonel's, which do you think that command will believe? That's why I was there in the first place, after all."

"I see," Lydia said, looking doubtful. "But you didn't have to kill anyone over it, did you?"

John Paul sighed. "If you have to kill someone, your plan's already failed, my dear. And in general…well, it all sounds awfully cute now, but there was a time when my plans didn't generally fail."

He laid his head back on the pillow. "Do you have a way home?"

"No," she said. "But I know someone in the area who has a few extra beds."

He smiled, his eyes still closed. "Do you, now?"

"I do," she said, and kissed him. She was almost out of the room when she turned back. "Thank you for telling me all of that."

Then she pushed the door open and she was gone. John Paul pushed his legs off the side of the bed and grasped his cane. He stood up and hobbled across the room to the light and flipped the switch off. Then he hobbled back over to bed and let sleep take him.

John Paul awoke the next day to find the world buzzing around him. He neede groomsmen; that much was clear by itself, but he was a bit surprised to find so many on offer, as each of the men he'd served with struggled to help him fit into his suit. It had been made only recently, but even still it hung off him. No one thought it wise to bring the matter up to him.

He stood with his weight fully on his cane. If there was any sort of gossip about Lydia's early arrival—and, indeed, the arrival of the rest of the Wakefield clan separately and much later—then the guests had the tact not to mention it. And after all, it was a large house and they'd woken her paramour from a cold sleep quite alone in his bed, so they had no evidence of anticipating their marriage.

John Paul's mind buzzed, though, not with the excitement of the marriage to come. It didn't even seem real around him; he felt as if in a dream. This was his finishing line. He had made it, somehow, in spite of it all. He tried not to think too hard on the argument with Lydia. She would forgive him, in time.

He was kept in the kitchen, with Jacob fussing over his coat, punctuated by Thomas running into the room with messages from the bride, or the Reverend, or from the groomsmen.

He could hear music beginning to play in the garden; it was nearly time, then. Little wonder that Henry hadn't come to see him. It seemed as if the lad were avoiding him. John Paul thought that he was right to be avoiding his uncle. Nothing that had happened the night before had reflected kindly on the boy.

He was led out into the garden. It wasn't traditional, certainly, but neither did he want to embarrass himself by tripping over his own feet on the way to the altar. He saw Lydia, saw her dress. She looked positively radiant. As beautiful as she had always looked. She rubbed wetness out of her eyes and smiled.

He hadn't decided what he would do with Henry. Perhaps the entire affair was a big misunderstanding. It might not be poison. He could have simply been trying to comfort Lydia and mistakenly made it seem to the outside world that he had been more physical with her than altogether intended. The possibilities were there, certainly, and he would rather have not ignored them. But he couldn't let all of it go unanswered, either.

He only awoke from his reverie when he felt someone jab into his side, and the Reverend looked at him pointedly. "Do you, John Paul Foster, take Lydia Wakefield to be your lawfully wedded wife?"

"Yes—I do."

The preacher's lips pressed together for a split-second, and then he turned to Lydia.

"Lydia Wakefield, will you take John Paul to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, honour and protect him, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?"

"I do."

He turned, then, to the seats that had been set out for the occasion, seating the Wakefield clan. Henry had been given a seat; John Paul could see it, if he looked out of the corner of his eye, with a slip of paper on it that said "Henry Roche." No one sat in it.

They had practiced the ceremony before, and John Paul relied on that to get him through. His mind was whirling, but as long as he could keep some measure of attention on the wedding he was able to make it through. At last the reverend asked for the ring.

He produced it out of his pocket; his hands shook violently with nerves, with fatigue, with excitement, and the ring slipped out of his grasp and onto the floor.

He feared, for a moment, that he would need someone else to pick it up for him. He worried that if he tried to reach down for it himself, he would find himself quite unable to get back up again, but he decided to risk it. He leaned down and reached, and then picked it up from the floor more easily than he had expected and pressed himself back up.