“I trust you’ve worked yourself up an appetite?”
Chapter 3
John Paul and his nephew returned home after perhaps an hour. The sun was sitting low on the horizon by the time they had returned the horses to the stables and walked through the door. Henry took the bed once more, and John Paul laid down on one of the old, foul-smelling beds.
They stank of dampness; John Paul wondered to himself what sort of rot must be, but dropped into an easy sleep. There was a woman in his dreams. She was the most beautiful woman he could have imagined, with hair like velvet, skin like milk, and a voice like honey. He thought there was something familiar about her, though he couldn't place it.
He awoke with a start, the moon high in the sky. He couldn’t remember exactly what his dream had been about, but he guessed it well enough. He remembered the woman he had met earlier. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he might look for a wife.
After all, he was far past the romance of youth. Love was a young man’s game, and he was on the other side of what seemed like an entire lifetime. Twenty years in the service, all of them on the opposite side of Her Majesty’s empire.
He was still not entirely comfortable here. Even in the outback, he had known who he could trust, known every one of them and what they were made of. His only companion now was a young man who knew nothing about himself or the world.
It was easy to like him; he had a youthful exuberance and desire to please. Yet at the same time, it was hard to trust him. A man who’d never had his mettle tested may as well have none at all.
All these thoughts plagued John Paul as he tried to drift back into sleep and the embrace of the beautiful goddess of his dreams. But sleep wouldn’t come, he realized. There was no helping it, he would simply need to do what he could to spend the time. He pulled his boots on, slipped his arms through the loops of the coat he’d been lying on, and set off into the night.
It was still cold in the night, even as the days were beginning to warm up. During the day, his jacket was hot, and he preferred not to wear it. He hadn’t expected England to feel hot after years in Australia, yet here he was acclimating quite well to the local opinion.
When they said it was hot, he agreed it was hot. But perhaps his tolerance for cold was not what the city folk had. He quickened his pace, walking down the empty street. He saw, finally, his nearest neighbor’s house, and realized he had be walking for nearly two miles.
There was forest all around, he thought, and in them could be all sorts of animals. He could be attacked by some dingoes—no, he corrected himself. They didn’t have dingoes in Britain. They had dogs, certainly. Wolves, maybe, in some parts. He wondered if they had wolves here before deciding that they hadn’t. It was too civilized, even in this more isolated area. Perhaps there were parts of Britain that did have them, but he had no idea where those places might be. The thought quickened his pace, nonetheless.
He didn’t meet any dogs along the way home, which was lucky for him. He might have been concerned if he had; he had no way to fend them off, after all. He would be absolutely at their mercy, and he had no desire to be at the mercy of wild dogs. John Paul was a strong man, and he could dispatch a man with only his empty hands.
He had done it before, though he didn’t want to repeat the experience. Not only to avoid committing a crime, but because it was hard work. Most men he dealt with—certainly most men he’d needed to attack—had been difficult enough to make it a close thing. If there was one thing that John Paul didn’t prefer in the rare times that he needed to become violent, it was uncertainty. That was how a man got himself killed.
As he pulled the off-kilter door up and back into its frame again, he realized that he felt tired. The constant straining to listen for the sounds of wild animals had exhausted him, and he once again slipped into sleep.
This time he didn’t dream. It felt as if he laid his head down a only a moment before he opened his eyes again. In that time, though, he saw that the sun had risen, and was visible over the horizon.
He heard the sound of movement in the rest of the house and rose to see what was making so much noise. He found a trio of men walking through his foyer carrying a new chair. When they put it down, he crouched to inspect it. It looked to be in quite good shape, entirely unlike the chair he’d returned. Perfect, he thought. That’s exactly what I wanted.
They came next with a bed, which Henry helped them to carry into the room John Paul had left only moments before. Then the two others, who John Paul vaguely recognized as the usual delivery boys, looked at him expectantly.
“Oh, yes, one moment,” he said, pulling a billfold out of his jacket pocket. He counted out a couple of pounds for the furniture, and a shilling a piece for the young men who had helped to unload the furniture. “Thank you, lads. Have a pleasant rest of your day.”
They left without saying anything further. John Paul stepped onto the porch and watched them load up into the wagon. He turned and saw the door sitting beside the frame, unpainted but otherwise quite nice looking.
There was a large pile of lumber with a bit of paper attached to it, which John Paul guessed must have been a note of credit. When the young men had left, he turned on his nephew, the smile that he’d put on for the hired hands gone.
“You should have woken me,” he said, his voice hard with annoyance, made worse by having just woken.
Henry’s face blanched. “I just thought—”
“I know what you thought,” John Paul put in, before Henry could finish his thought. “But even still, I don’t need you to take care of my affairs for me, Henry. I’m the master of the house, after all.”
Henry’s face twisted up into an upset expression, but he kept his mouth shut, and John Paul’s hard edge softened.
“I know, you were only trying to help. But in the future, you need to call me if I’m in, is that clear enough?”
“Yes, sir,” Henry answered, dejected.
John Paul clapped him on the back and smiled at him.
“Well, then,” he said. “I suppose we should get to work.”
At half past twelve in the afternoon, a wagon pulled up. He wasn’t used to anyone coming by at all, so he assumed it must have been someone carrying the servants, and he was not mistaken. A pair of young men, perhaps Henry’s age, stepped off the back and thanked the driver, who nodded and drove off. John Paul could see thick bales of hay piled in the back, as well.