Jenna Starborn (40 page)

I turned away, because such an avowal made me want to weep, and I could show no such weakness during this interview. “I am sure you would care for me, in such a situation,” I said in rather choked tones. “For I see how you have tried to care for Beatrice.”

“Yes—you do see that, do you not, Jenna?” he asked eagerly. “Because Merrick believes I use her cruelly, but I do not. I cannot leave her unwatched, and I cannot allow her to roam freely, and I have done everything in my power to assure both her comfort and her safety. But Merrick thinks I abuse her.”

I composed myself and shifted face-forward again. “I think you treat her much more kindly than would most men in your situation,” I said. “But I do wonder one thing. Why remain married to her? I would not have expected you to abandon her—I would condemn you if you had—but could you not have continued to care for her while freeing yourself from your matrimonial bond?”

He shook his head. “I looked into that very circumstance and no, I could not. At the center on Dorser, I learned that her robotic compound was so high that, were she to come to the attention of the legal community through such action as a divorce, she would immediately be declared nonhuman and devoid of rights. And you know as well as I do that malfunctioning androids are destroyed and recycled. And though there have been days—many, many days!—that I wished her circuits would overload and destroy her, I could not bear to be the agent that led to her dissolution. I could not do it. I had promised, during that fateful bridal ceremony, to give her my name and cover her with my honor, and I could not, because of its great inconvenience to me, renege on that promise.

“So once she deteriorated to the point that she seemed to have no humanity left, I installed her at Thorrastone Park, in the remotest of my properties,” he continued. “I found a watcher for her, and a place she could be comfortable, and a setting where she could cause very little damage. I was not particularly well-known here, and my employees and the society people I met on Fieldstar would only know my history if I chose to tell it—which I did not.”

“But any man's history can be discovered on the StellarNet!” I cried. “Even my own, insignificant as it is, can be looked up by anybody with an interest.”

He nodded. “Yes, and I am sure the Ingersolls and the Taffs and the others did check me out in that electronic Debrett's,” he said sardonically. “But there I am listed as a widower, though my machinations to achieve that status are not something I want to go into now. I consider it ironic, however, that although I could not divorce Beatrice Merrick, I could kill her.”

“And yet she is not dead—and you have a wife—and thus you are not free to marry,” I said in a low voice.

He made a brushing motion with his hand. “Until today, only two living souls knew that fact—myself and Merrick—for his father is dead, and the rest of the world believes her to be as well. Now a handful of my employees know the truth, but their interests lie with me and they would not repeat the story—and who would believe them if they did? We have a safe secret, Jenna. We can proceed in confidence.”

“A truth that no one knows is still the truth,” I said quietly. “You cannot eliminate it merely because you do not publish it.”

He seemed, all of a sudden, irritable and sulky. “Well, this one I do not intend to publish,” he said. “I do not wish to proclaim to the world that Everett Ravenbeck has chosen to live in sin—or attempt bigamy!—with a young half-cit girl who is supposed to be under his protection. The world will see us cleanly wed, and that is all that anyone needs to know or understand.”

“But, Mr. Ravenbeck—”

“Everett, my love. You have called me that so sweetly for days!”

“But, Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said steadily, for so I would address him aloud though I continued to call him more familiarly in my heart, “I cannot pretend to marry you. I cannot live with you as your simulated bride. I must leave Thorrastone Park—I must travel as far from here as my resources will allow.”

He seemed not to have heard me—or, at any rate, not to have understood. “Yes, both of us must leave Fieldstar, and the sooner the better,” he said. “It has always been, for me, a place of grim responsibility and despair, and for you it has become a place of betrayal and horror. I do not wonder at your desire to flee! My cruiser is still in the spaceport. We need only wait until it is light, and we will return to the city. We will be gone tomorrow, and we need never return here.”

“Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said as gently as I could, “I cannot travel with you. I cannot live with you, or be with you, under any circumstances. I love you too much to stay beside you, tempted always by the mere fact of your presence to do what is wrong. Unlike your wife, I am only human, and I am not strong enough to resist loving you. And I will not love you unless I am your wife.”

“My wife!” He leaped to his feet and began pacing the room. “But you would be my wife, in every sense except the most formal! You would have all my affection—every dime that I owned would be lavished upon you—every society in the civilized universe would accept you with courtesy and honor—”

“Legally I would not be your wife, sir.”

He rounded on me, rather menacingly standing over me where I sat in my straight-backed chair. “What! All you care about is your legal status? All you want from me is full citizenship—a chance to vote in meaningless elections and have your name recorded in a fancy registrar? I mean nothing more to you than the title I can give you? My love is not enough for you unless it comes with accoutrements?”

Now I was as stirred as he was and I too came to my feet, forcing him to back away a step by the warning in my expression. “Titles—status—money—none of these mean anything to me, and you know it,” I said hotly. “What matters to me is my honor and my integrity and my very survival. If I let you take me with you now, who knows how long it would be before you tired of me, a half-cit girl who has no claim on you, whom you could abandon with impunity in any port on any planet across the settled galaxy? Who would care for me then? Or if you died? If I had no legal status as your wife, and I had lost all reputation by running away with you, how would I work? How would I live? Where do you suppose Janet Ayerson is at this moment, a young woman who eloped with a man who said he loved her? How can I give up the few things I have—and they are so few!—my unblemished reputation and my ability to care for myself, for a man who risks nothing for me? I do not care about your money. I do not care about your position in society. I would love you as well, or even better, if you did not have these things. But I cannot be your mistress, because I cannot throw away my life. I am too valuable for that. I am worth more than a rich man's whim.”

“Jenna—no—you are wrong—” he exclaimed, coming forward with arms outstretched as if to take me into his arms. “How could you think I would tire of you or abandon you—”

I evaded him and stepped away. “I do not think it! I do not wish to believe it! But I cannot risk it.”

“I will write a document, then! I will legally give over my property to you, avaricious and suspicious girl that you are—”

Again he reached for me, and again I sidestepped. “I do not want your property! I want to be able to rely upon myself, to know that
I
am still as good as my word, that
I
have not been compromised—”

“But you have not been compromised! You will not be! Jenna, I will love you till the suns burn down and the stars rotate out of their positions! With my heart, my mind, my body, and my soul, I love you. You can trust me to the limits of your life—as I trust you to the limits of mine—”

He had moved more quickly than I had; he had caught me around the waist and brought me, none too gently, into his embrace. I struggled, but in vain. He drew me closer, he crushed me against his chest. He bent over me with all the madness of a man who has been momentarily thwarted in his desire and is determined to achieve it or die.

“Say you love me, Jenna,” he said, and his voice was both pleading and threatening. “Say you will come with me tomorrow—or even tonight—we could fly into the spaceport this instant. Say, ‘Everett, I love you, and I will be yours—' ”

“I will not.”

He shook me, hard, and his face grew even more desperate. “Say, ‘Everett, I understand all and forgive all. I love you and will live with you forever as your wife.' ”

“I understand, and I do forgive, but I will not relent. I will not live with you, and you cannot force me, and if you do force me, you will not have me—not the me you want, not the part of me that loves you still—or would, if you did not kill it—”

My words seemed to snap some final civilized cord that kept his despair in check, for he uttered a short, agonized cry, and snatched me closer with a ferocity that made me gasp. He rained kisses upon my face, my eyes, my mouth, my hair; he sobbed my name over and over again, then began again with the desperate kisses. I could not breathe or struggle. I felt in peril of being ripped apart, devoured, consumed, and for a blind unreasoning moment I was tempted to give in. To exclaim, “Everett Ravenbeck, I adore you! I will be yours!” for so much I loved him, and so much was I moved by his love and grief. But the moment passed; sanity reasserted itself. With a great violent effort, I tore myself from his arms.

“I will not submit to you!” I cried. “I will not sacrifice myself to you! Do not make me hate you as much as I have loved you! Do not!”

My words were not even necessary, for my mere action of wrenching away from him had caused him to stagger back and shrink away with despair. He had covered his face with his hand. It was not impossible to believe that, behind his sheltering fingers, his eyes were awash with tears. “Jenna,” he moaned, his voice broken and hoarse. “Do not depart from me like this. Do not turn away from me so harshly, leaving me abandoned and alone—without friendship, without love, without hope. I cannot live without you, truly I cannot. You are life to me now. Without you, there is only darkness and death.”

I had prepared to flee from the room, now that I was free of his hold, but his words stopped me. I knew he spoke literal truth, for I felt the same way exactly. Once I left this place and his presence, my days would be dark and dreary—insupportably so, I feared.

“For what light it affords you, Everett Ravenbeck, I will love you till I die,” I said softly. “Wherever I am and wherever you are, there will be that bond between us, that I love you, and believe you good. But I cannot stay with you,” I added quickly, as his face lifted, hope written all over his countenance. “I cannot so put us both at risk.”

“Jenna,” he said, again in that pitiful voice.

I crossed to the door, and once there, put my hand with some determination on the knob. “Good-bye, Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said, and I could not keep my voice steady, though I tried. “Be strong. Be good. I will attempt to be those things as well.”

And I left the room.

Behind me I heard one last heartbroken wail, and then a dreadful silence. I did not stay to listen, to learn if he composed himself, or abandoned himself entirely to an uncontrollable frenzy. I went to my own room, and locked the door, and flung myself on my bed, and passed some of the bitterest hours of my life.

I
must have slept, for a few hours latter, I woke. I felt strange and haunted, as if I had endured unbroken decades of nightmares only to find, upon waking, that every morbid dream were true. The air about me felt so close, so unbreathable, that for a moment I feared the forcefield had been sabotaged again and that all inhabitants of the manor were about to suffocate in their beds. But slowly, as I pushed myself to my feet and glanced unseeingly around, I realized it was not the security system that had been breached, but my own inviolable wall of sanity. It was not the room that was surreal, but my senses that were unreliable. I must work on touch and memory, for neither my perceptions nor my calculations were likely to aid me now.

I must leave this place immediately.

I crossed to the closet and again looked through my pitiful assortment of ragged clothes. These would see me through a day or two, so I bundled them up and thrust them into a cotton carrying bag. I turned on the computer monitor to check my credit status—woefully low, for I had splurged so joyfully on my bridal trousseau—but it was enough, I hoped, to cover some part of a passage off-planet. If not—well, I did not know what I would do if it did not. If I stayed at Thorrastone Park one more day with Everett Ravenbeck, I would yield; I would not be able to resist either his love or his woe. I would forget my own needs in the overwhelming desire to alleviate his unhappiness.