The Soldier's Poisoned Heart

He felt the word March hit him in the stomach. He had no idea how he would spend the months. Perhaps he would recover, he thought bitterly. He was upset at the fact that the thought occurred to him at all, and it showed on his face for a moment.

"John Paul?" She had put her hands back into the muffler and was had taken a few tentative steps toward the door, but now she turned back.

"Yes," he asked. He regretted his dark thoughts immediately.

"I love you," she said softly. So softly that it took him a moment to register what she'd said, as he moved automatically to open the door for her. He stopped still, watching her walk away into the snow.

"I love you too," he answered. She didn't hear him. He watched her climb up into the cab and the horses pulled it away. He didn't feel the chill; it seemed as if the entire thing wasn't happening to him, but to someone he was hearing the story from later. The cold, the snow, none of it touched him.

He looked down at the letter again. A pit opened up in his stomach. He missed her already, and she'd only been gone a moment. How would he deal with three months? He couldn't imagine it, and the truth was that he didn't have an answer, and he didn't find one, either.

Part 4

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.