The Soldier's Poisoned Heart (True Love and Deception) (Victorian Historical Romance Book 1) (4 page)

Still, even though he had made his mind up, he found it difficult to fight against the temptation. It wasn’t just one choice, after all, but a series of choices not to go inside. He had little to comfort him but convictions, while a voice in the back of his mind whispered to him that it wouldn’t be any sort of intrusion. John Paul pushed the voice away.

Finally he did take a step in the direction of the flat, he wondered if perhaps he had lost his nerve after all. It was hard to even think, let alone move. It seemed as if he only managed to make the short journey because of the company he would be keeping when he arrived.

He knocked, and Nan answered; he hadn’t known her name, though Lydia had called her ‘Nan.' She smiled, though he guessed it was just for show. So he smiled back at her.

She took him in to a sitting room. He was intensely aware of his posture in a way that he hadn’t been since his training. After so many years of service he did not need to strain to keep his back straight in the chair. Still, he found himself checking at intervals to ensure that he wasn’t making any sort of mistake.

Nan left him for a moment, and when she returned, she had a beautiful young woman in tow. Lydia wore a fine red gown with a flattering fit. John Paul had not made the place for the home of a particularly wealthy family, but he saw that they did not spare expenses on her finery.

He smiled at her, and she at him, and he meant it. She sat down opposite him, with the older woman sitting alongside, pulling a bit of knitting out of a bag beside her. Before she got to knitting, she looked up at him.

“Tea will be here momentarily, Mister Foster.”

“Thank you ma’am,” he said softly.

John Paul’s throat felt parched, and he realized that he did not know what sort of things polite society talked about. It had been twenty years in the army, and he had not much to talk about with a woman who had never left this town.

The only things that immediately came to mind smacked of bragging about himself and his past. He had no desire to brag, and less desire to force the conversation. He decided that discretion was the better part of valor and kept his mouth shut, looking at Lydia’s hands.

They were thin, almost bony, and had an inhuman elegance to them. Her nails were neatly trimmed, and she lacked callouses. He didn’t need to look at his own to know where his callouses were. It seemed as if an eternity passed in that silence, likely only four or five seconds, before he heard Nan clear her throat. At last, Lydia spoke.

“How long have you been in Derby, Mister Foster?”

“Ah,” he said, caught off guard. It took him a moment to think of the answer. “I suppose about two weeks now, Miss Wakefield.”

She nodded, thinking private thoughts, and then spoke again. “And how are you finding it?”

“The people are nice enough, from what I have seen. The shops seem to be quite large. Quite a few restaurants.”

She was silent again, before adding “There are quite large shops, particularly in the square.”

John Paul finally spoke up. “Are there any in particular you enjoy?”

Lydia put a hand up over her mouth, but he could see from her eyes that she was laughing, either at his naivete or some other private thought. “None that would interest you overmuch, Mister Foster. I don’t imagine you would look—”

John Paul watched Nan give her charge a sharp look and Lydia did not finish her thought. He could see the mirth in Lydia’s eyes, though, and he could imagine a few possible endings for her joke. In either case, her smile was infectious. The conversation was awkward and impersonal, and his discomfort and inexperience was obvious. Even still, he found himself enjoying his time with her.

They did not discuss a wide variety of subjects. He asked her about plays she had attended recently, and she told him. She asked him about where he had lived in Australia, and he told her about New South Wales. Yet when he rose to leave after perhaps an hour, he looked forward to nothing so much as seeing her again.

Chapter 4

John Paul announced the next morning that they would spend the day working on the balcony. The lumber was all ready outside, and they would need to use it before rain came and started to warp the whole pile.

Henry and his uncle walked off in opposite directions. Henry tasked to go and retrieve a hammer and some nails, while John Paul strode out to the pile of lumber.

It was maybe twelve long planks at a glance, and he grabbed what looked like half of the stack and hefted it up onto his shoulder. It wasn’t heavy, but he decided that he had better not try to make a single trip of it. He carried the boards up the stairs and dropped them in the room before he went back for the second half.

In the end he thought better of making a stack on the ground and leaned them against the wall. They were only just tall enough to stand up inside the room, and he was careful not to scrape the ceiling. Then Henry arrived with the supplies and John Paul sent him back off to find a saw. He thought he might have seen one in the shed.

By the time Henry had come back, John Paul had already begun pulling the nails from the rotten boards. They came up easily, and he had gotten maybe a quarter of the surface removed by the time Henry had run downstairs and returned with a saw.

John Paul had watched him walking out to the shed through the hole in the floor of the balcony he’d made. It had made a humorous sight, with his nephew scurrying while trying not to appear rushed, all stiff legs and arms and back. Then John Paul stopped watching and got back to work. He pulled another board up and stood as his nephew returned with the saw.

There were several chairs in the room, and he laid one of the planks across its arms. It made an imperfect saw horse, but it would certainly suffice for the time being. Neither of them had hoped to become carpenters, and so a facsimile should work nearly as well as the real thing in a pinch. He laid the rotting wooden plank over it to use as a cutting guide while Henry took over the nail pulling.

John Paul took a measure of the wood and made a mark with his pencil, and then began to cut. He tested the fit by slipping the plank out across the frame where he’d already removed some of the wood, and it fit well enough. Pleased, he dropped the rotten bits of wood through the frame and they watched it fall, breaking into pieces as it hit the ground below.

The job went quickly, it seemed, but at the same time it took quite a bit longer than it had seemed, as well. John Paul wiped the sweat from his brow and pulled a watch out of his pocket. It had been two hours, and they had just finished pulling the last of the boards and sawing the new ones. All told, there sat beside him two dozen planks of roughly a meter in length.

They were unpainted, but a bucket sat in front of him with a pair of brushes beside it. He popped the top with a small pry-bar and they each dipped a brush into the bucket and started to slap the paint onto the boards thickly. The work was mindless and the pair of them had little difficulty in getting them all done quickly, perhaps a half an hour.

John Paul had taken to laying them out across the frame to dry in the afternoon sun. It would be hours until they could finish the job. The paint would need to dry, and they had no reason to believe that would take less than the rest of the day. He decided they would do that the next day. He could spend the last few hours before dinner trying to finish the trimming as best he could.

Henry picked up a plank and started carrying it across the room. John Paul looked up and saw the whole thing in slow motion. It was as if he knew what would happen even as Henry stepped up to the edge and leaned out to place the plank down. He was stepping onto a joist as John Paul rose as fast as his legs would allow.

Then his foot slipped off the side of the joist and he started to fall with nothing between him and the granite below but six meters of open air. John Paul’s arm shot out and grabbed at his nephew, his hand closing around the back of the younger man’s suspenders as he fell. Then time restarted.

Henry’s weight hit John Paul’s arm hard, and he nearly dropped him again. Henry cried out in fear, and then again in pain as his leg twisted between the joists and pulled at his hip. The board flew up and over the railing as Henry’s arms flew up in panic. John Paul reached with his other arm and wrapped it around the boy’s chest and pulling until they both fell back onto the rug.

Both of them panted with the panic and adrenaline that ran through them both. John Paul could see his nephew’s expression, gaping wide through the double doors that he’d fallen through.

John Paul said nothing to him, not right away. The terror was something he had faced before, and he had no words to comfort boy or soothe the fear. He still woke some nights, sweating with fear of what would have happened if he had stepped out from behind cover just one second sooner. What if he’d been just a bit slower ending the hard-fought duels that had seemed to provoke him at every opportunity.

As they sat on the ground panting and waiting for their heartbeats to slow, John Paul rose first, still gulping down breaths. He looked out the door and then looked down over the edge, at the plank that lay on the ground and the splat of white paint around it. He grimaced for a moment and decided they could rest for the evening. That had been more than enough excitement for one day.

He told this to his nephew, who didn’t respond at first. He just laid his head back down and stared at the ceiling, alone with his thoughts just as John Paul was alone with his. John Paul walked over to him and knelt down.

“Do you need help getting up?”

Henry didn’t respond at first. His uncle could see the panic that was thick on his face. John Paul knew, he was still standing there on the joist, feeling the weight go out from under him. He could barely hear what his uncle was saying, never mind really comprehend it.

So he offered a hand out, and Henry’s eyes cleared just so, reaching up to take it. John Paul pulled him up and Henry climbed to his feet. Then he followed his uncle out of the room, down the stairs, and the pair of them settled into chairs.

John Paul watched his nephew's face, watched the shock play out on it. There was a fine balance to coping with panic; if you let it sit too long, then it would wreak all sorts of havoc. Yet, try to push it away too soon and you could only fail.

He pulled out his novel and read a few more pages, and then a chapter, and then another. After an hour or so had passed, Henry stood, his hands shaking badly, and started to walk toward the bedroom he'd claimed for his own. John Paul decided that it was the right time to step in.

“Wait a moment. Would you fancy a bit of fencing? We have time, you know.”

Henry nodded, his eyes not quite seeing. “Yes, that would be nice.”

John Paul guessed that his nephew’s mood would turn around once he got started. His was an aggressive style, and lent itself quite well to an emotional approach. All he needed to do was to get started in that way, and the mood was sure to follow. He wondered if it was healthy for the mind, but he dismissed his concerns. It was only a bit of sport, and any man might give himself over to his baser instincts in sport.

Henry had put the mask and blade into his own room, and John Paul had not begrudged it of him. He thought of it as a sort of gift, and if that was a good enough gift then he did not mind it one whit. He fetched his own equipment from his trunk, where he’d replaced it, and waited for his nephew to return.

When they were together again, John Paul led him outside. They stood in the grass a few meters apart, with the sun near to setting, and waved their blades in salute. Then Henry was attacking again, as he had days before. He committed himself just a bit less, this time, and John Paul saw that the attack would never have succeeded. He was too slow to counterattack.

John Paul decided that if he was going to be of any use at all, he needed to correct his nephew, rather than simply treating him as an opponent. He pushed the blade aside, but didn’t riposte immediately. Indeed, he sat back and let his nephew attack, which was not hard. He would have attacked anyways.

The Colonel thought about Lydia for a moment. How unlike Henry’s dueling their conversation had been. His side of it had born a remarkable similarity, in a certain sense. He was always sitting back and waiting for an opportunity to present itself. In conversation, unlike in swordplay, he knew none of the right moves. The opportunities seemed never to present themselves until she offered them.

Then a blade came barreling down on him and he had no more time to think about conversations or beautiful young women. He smacked it away, centimeters from his chest, and put the point of his blade up finally, pushing forward.

He saw several problems; some of them were easier to fix than others, and John Paul struggled for a few moments with where to start. When he saw Henry’s blade slap his own away, he saw the largest, and perhaps the easiest to fix.

Henry moved his hand only a little, but the point of his blade went flying wide. When he tried to swing it back around to thrust back into his uncle’s chest, John Paul easily recovered to make a parry of his own.

The Colonel's riposte was not so hampered. He pulled off his mask after the touch and gestured for Henry to do the same. The entire bout had lasted maybe a minute, and there was a change to make, now. Something he could fix.

“Henry,” he said, “Let me show you something.”