Jenna Starborn

by Sharon Shinn

  “I can see that,” I said, laughing inwardly at my own understatement. “It’s unfortunate that he is here so rarely.”

  “Ah, well, it’s a pleasant enough life at any time,” she said. We had by this time made it to the foot of the stairwell, though she turned toward the kitchens to make a final inspection. “Good night, Jenna. Sleep well.”

  “Yes, you too,” I said, and climbed up the two flights of stairs to my room.

  Where I sit at the window, looking out at the ill-lit acres of lawn and expecting no such blessing as a good night’s sleep. Instead, I have gotten out my recorder and told it every word I could remember from my extraordinary conversation with Mr. Ravenbeck. My brain feels like it has been turned to tinder for the greediest of fires; thought after thought sparks through my mind, leaving its own trail of brilliance and complexity. Amazing how the chance to express your opinion aloud begets in you opinions you did not know you had and fuels you with a desire to explain the smallest detail of your ideology.

  I bent my head over the recorder in my hand and I whispered, “Oh, Reeder, I have met the most remarkable man tonight!”

  Chapter 5

  But the next two days did not, to my chagrin, live up to the promise of the first. That was not a reflection on Mr. Ravenbeck; it was not that, by the cold light of day, he seemed more pedestrian and less able-minded. On the contrary, he seemed invisible. We did not see him at all.

  This was a blow to Mrs. Farraday, who lamented the fact over every shared meal and during our quiet, feminine gatherings in the evening. “Poor Mr. Ravenbeck! He has been so busy he’s scarcely had time to gobble down a breakfast, and I declare he was over at the mine compound until past midnight last night. Such a shame, for it is nice to see him on those few occasions he is actually here, and I daresay he’ll be going away again any day. Well, I will just have the cook go ahead and prepare that special braised beef. I am sure he will have an opportunity to eat it, even if he doesn’t get to sit down at a table like a civilized man.”

  Ameletta too did much pining over Mr. Ravenbeck’s absence, though I had to confess I could not judge the depth of affection that lay between them. They had not seemed to interact at all during the time I had been in the same room with them. Miss Ayerson seemed driven to distraction by the little girl’s constant sighing, and spoke a little more sharply than her wont. If she missed Mr. Ravenbeck’s presence, she gave no sign.

  As for myself, I was conscious of a bitter disappointment, but I conducted myself with all my usual calm dispassion. I had no claim on Mr. Ravenbeck, like Ameletta; no history, like Mrs. Farraday; I had no reason to suppose I would ever lay eyes on him again. Thus, I refused to be sorry that his affairs kept him elsewhere during his brief visit.

  “Last time Mr. Ravenbeck was here, he took me for a long ride in his aeromobile,” Ameletta was saying wistfully. “We flew past town and on to the Taff holding, and then we went in and had luncheon. And Mr. Ravenbeck told me silly stories and I laughed and laughed, and he said he had more stories to tell, but he would save them for another time—but the time is now and he is not here!”

  “Oh, Ameletta, could you please stop!” Miss Ayerson exclaimed. “I am sure Mr. Ravenbeck will find a few hours to spend with you, but it is not attractive to be so desperate over any man’s attention, even that of your guardian.”

  That statement told me a lot about Miss Ayerson, though I could not exactly argue with the sentiments. I smiled at Ameletta and held out a hand. “Why don’t you spend the day with me, Ameletta?” I suggested. “I am going to walk every inch of the forcefield checking for strains, and I am going to bring a picnic lunch with me, and eat it by the oxenheart tree, and then I am going to sit outside in the afternoon sun and read from a book of stories. I think you would enjoy spending such an afternoon with me, wouldn’t you?”

  A look of mingled relief and guilt crossed Miss Ayerson’s face. “That would be very kind of you, Miss Starborn, but you do not need to feel compelled—”

  “Yes, a wonderful idea, Jenna!” Mrs. Farraday interposed. “Janet has been looking forward to a free day when she can go into town, but I have not been able to spare Mary or Rinda to watch Ameletta.” These were the two maids-of-all-work who assisted Mrs. Farraday with the upkeep of the household; they were half-cit teenage girls who only stayed at Thorrastone Manor a few days every week, and I had had scarcely any contact with them. Mrs. Farraday continued, “If you think you can handle her, this will suit everyone. I am very sure it will suit Ameletta.”

  Indeed, the little girl was bouncing up and down in her seat and mouthing “Please, yes, please, yes” over and over as we debated her fate. I smiled at her again. “I think I will not only handle her, but enjoy her,” I said. “It is settled, then. Ameletta, go change into your most comfortable shoes. I will tell the cook to pack enough lunch for two. Meet me in the foyer in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thank you, Miss Starborn,” Miss Ayerson murmured as Ameletta tore from the room.

  “A pleasure for me,” I said lightly. “You forget, I was a teacher myself for four years. If I can instill any theories of nuclear physics in her head during our outing, I will do so, but I do not have high hopes of making this an educational episode. I am afraid the most you will have to hope for is that she will be exhausted and compliant by bedtime.”

  A few minutes later, Ameletta and I met in the hallway and headed out for our adventure. She was dressed in a bright pink tunic and leggings ; I wore a similar ensemble, though in a more sober gray. She skipped along beside me with so much energy that I thought she might go airborne, like Mr. Ravenbeck’s aeromobile. A good thing for both of us to go on a long, brisk walk!

  We spent a pleasant day together, once the edge of her excitement was worn off. She chattered incessantly; I needed to do no more than smile, nod, and interject the occasional comment to keep her talking. She loved the holoshows that Miss Ayerson allowed her to watch one day a week, and she described plotlines and character traits to me with so much detail that I would have sworn she was talking about actual acquaintances if I had not known better. A lonely life for a child, I reflected, immured here on this outpost in the company of two spinster women and one who may as well have been. How had she come to be here, anyway? I had never had the opportunity to ask.

  At noontime, we spread a thin plastic sheet under the oxenheart tree and unpacked the basket I had carried with me all morning. The cook had catered more to Ameletta’s tastes than mine, I saw at once, for there were any number of cakes and cookies tucked inside and very few items of real sustenance. But a diet of pure sugar would not hurt me one day out of the year, I supposed, and so I set out the items with a great flourish. We munched and chatted and munched some more, until Ameletta stretched out on the sheet with a big sigh of contentment.

  “That was the best,” she said happily. “I’m so full I think my stomach will pop!”

  I was sure Miss Ayerson would not approve of such language, but I did not bother to reprimand her; I felt much the same way. “Would you like to take a little nap? Or would you like to return to the house? If you’re tired, we can go back now.”

  She shook her head, tangling her honey-colored curls with the motion. “No, I want you to read to me from your storybook. You said you would bring it.”

  “And so I did. But perhaps you would like to read to me? And then we could tell Miss Ayerson you have been practicing your vocabulary words.”

  She shook her head again. “I am feeling too lazy,” she said. “You read.”

  So I smiled and took out my book, a collection of children’s stories from across the Allegiance. It was one of the few things I had taken with me from my aunt Rentley’s house. “Once, long ago, there was a little girl who lived on the edge of the forest,” I began. Ameletta closed her eyes, and kept them shut until I had read the final paragraph. Then she opened her eyes and gave a little bounce—as much as a person who is supine on the lawn can be expected to bounce.

  “I liked t
hat very much!” she exclaimed. “Will you read me another?”

  I had the entire day to amuse her; reading stories was the least taxing of the activities we might undertake. “Yes, as many as you like,” I replied, and began the second one.

  We were on the fourth tale when I heard the hum of a motor in the distance and paused in my reading. Ameletta scrambled to an upright position and stared hard in the direction of the mine compound.

  “That must be Mr. Ravenbeck, returning to the manor,” she exclaimed.

  “Now, Ameletta,” I admonished. “Mr. Ravenbeck is a busy man. Even if it is your guardian, we cannot assume that because he is headed in this direction, he has any time to spend with us.”

  But I may as well have directed my comments to the tree itself for all the heed she paid me. She leaped to her feet and began jumping up and down, waving her hands wildly to catch the driver’s attention. “Mr. Ravenbeck! Mr. Ravenbeck! We are over here!” she called. I sat where I was, making no more attempt to check her. If it was indeed he, and he had a moment to spare, he might stop; if not, he would not. Let the matter be between him and his ward.

  Nonetheless, I was a little surprised when the aircar veered from its course and turned our way, coming to a halt a few feet from where our plastic sheeting was spread. The driver was indeed Mr. Ravenbeck, and he swung himself from the seat with all of an athlete’s natural ease. I noticed that he did not seem to favor his leg as he strode over to us, and that the three-day old cut on his forehead had healed almost completely.

  “Miss Starborn! Ameletta! What a happy chance! I was just thinking I had not seen either of you since I arrived. Ameletta, chiya, you need not greet me with quite so much enthusiasm,” he added, for the girl had thrown herself at him the way a puppy will leap toward his boy-owner’s face. I noticed the endearment—the first I had heard anyone use toward her—and saw also how it made her flush with pleasure. But I wondered why it would occur to him to use a word that came, if my linguistics were correct, from the Corbramb world where an exotic dialect spiced up the Millennial English used by the rest of the Allegiance.

  “It is just that I am so happy to see you,” she explained somewhat breathlessly. “Everyone tells me that I must not bother you, but it does not bother you to take me for a ride in your aeromobile, does it, or to fly me into town for a piece of cake at the pastry shop?”

  “No, not a bother at all,” he said, smiling. “In fact, I was wondering if you would like to do just that—ride into town for a bit of a snack.” He looked over at me. “Miss Starborn can come too.”

  I smiled. There was nothing I would have liked better, but Ameletta deserved his notice far more than I did. “I think your ward wishes for a bit of your undivided attention,” I said. “She has talked of very little except you for the past three days, and how much she enjoyed your previous outings. I would not like to intrude on that.”

  “No intrusion,” he said with a slight frown just as Ameletta was crying, “Oh, Miss Starborn! Please come with us!”

  But I was resolute. I shook my head, smiling still. “Some other time, perhaps,” I said, knowing there would probably be no other time. “I have spent the day with this little bundle of energy. I have plenty of things I can accomplish if you are to take over her care for a few hours.”

  He still did not look entirely pleased, but he did not let that keep him from patting Ameletta’s blonde head with an absent-minded though gentle gesture. “Very well,” he said. “I shall take full responsibility for my ward. But you,” he added, glancing down at that ecstatic creature, “need to run inside and change into something a little more fancy. We will be going to the Mayfair Shop, and I only take the most elegant ladies there.”

  She giggled and glanced down at her tunic. “I have the prettiest dress I have been saving for weeks and weeks,” she said. “It is made of ivory lace and sewn all over with pearl buttons. Shall I wear that? Is it fancy enough for the Mayfair Shop?”

  “It sounds ideal,” Mr. Ravenbeck said.

  “But, Ameletta,” I warned. “You have spent the whole afternoon eating sweets and candies. Make sure you order something healthy and nourishing in addition to dessert.”

  “I will,” she promised. “Mr. Ravenbeck, I will be right back. Don’t move an inch!” And so saying, she took off as fast as her short legs could carry her toward the door of the manor house.

  The two of us gazed after her in silence for about thirty seconds. “You could have offered her a ride,” I remarked. “It would have been much faster.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter. “I know. That is why I chose to let her run. I wanted a chance to have at least a brief conversation with my new technician. I have been a bad employer, I know. I have not seen you in three days or checked on your work or inquired if you had any questions to ask me. I would remedy that now.”

  I took a deep breath. “As to the performance of my duties, I feel reasonably confident,” I said. “The questions I do have pertain more to the inhabitants of Thorrastone Manor, and those perhaps are better left unasked.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Miss Starborn, you astonish me. Not one woman in ten thousand would have the nerve to bring up such a subject to her new employer mere days after having met him.”

  “I have brought up no subject,” I pointed out. “I merely commented that there were subjects I would like to bring up.”

  “Let me guess,” he said, glancing back toward the manor. “Ameletta.”

  “I admit to some curiosity about her origin—and her place here.”

  He nodded. “Shall we stroll, Miss Starborn? I have been sitting in meetings all day, and I think a little exercise would clear the cobwebs from my head. We need not go far—I believe we were strictly adjured not to move an inch.”

  I nodded and fell in step beside him. “Ameletta?” I prompted as we began a leisurely pacing in a grand circle around the tree.

  “Ameletta,” he said. “My ward. There was a time in my life, Miss Starborn, when I was not quite the sober and upstanding level-one citizen you see before you now.”

  I glanced at him sideways, and he smiled. “Ah, and you are wondering just how ‘sober and upstanding’ I can claim to be now, but you feel your acquaintanceship with me is too short to allow you to judge,” he said, almost gaily. I felt a flush come to my cheeks, for that was exactly the thought in my mind. “Nevertheless,” he resumed, “I am a far more diligent, responsible, and solemn man than I once was, and that I was ever a dilettante and ne‘er-do-well I blame entirely on my family. I was the youngest of several sons, born late to a mother who died shortly after my arrival. My father’s estates were vast enough that he could have happily supported twice the number of sons he in fact produced, and yet this was a man for whom the word ‘greed’ had the ring of virtue, and he did not like the thought of breaking up his property even after he was dead.”

  We walked on slowly another few yards. Mr. Ravenbeck had clasped his hands behind him, and he gazed down at the ground as he walked. The result was to give the appearance of a squarish, solid man tilted forward in a posture that might eventually make him tumble over. By contrast, I held myself with my usual erectness, my face angled toward the distant sun.

  “Thus I was told, when I was a young man, that I had two choices. I could accept a small inheritance which would enable me to retain my status as citizen until the money ran out, or I could perform a service for my family which would bring in enough wealth to render me a profitable asset. The service did not seem so disagreeable—and it was not, as I see by your shocked face, technically illegal—and so I saw no reason not to comply with my family’s wishes.”

  “You did the deed, sir?”

  “Oh, I most certainly did the deed. Thought the matter over perhaps two weeks, performed it in less than two hours—and regretted it for the next eighteen years. For there were conditions attached to this action that were not revealed to me until it was far too late—conditions which I would have thought wo
uld have turned even a greedy man into a philanthropist, so repulsive were they. And yet, as you say, the deed was done. There was no undoing it. I kept my temper, I bowed—metaphorically speaking—to my family, and I left the estates, for what I vowed would be the rest of my life.”

  “To embark upon a course of dissolution,” I said.

  He gave me another sideways glance, amused again. “Now, why would that be the first thought to leap to your mind?”

  “It is the natural course for many people who have been violently disappointed,” I said.

  “For many people,” he said. “Not you? You need not reply, for the answer is written clearly in every line and hollow of your face. You are not a woman who would ever give over to debauchery.”

  “I have not ever been living in circumstances in which debauchery seemed plausible,” I remarked. “But I must say the options that I know about have never appealed much to me. Including, as I suppose they do, drinking, gambling, experimenting with hallucinogenics, and consorting with—well, with all sorts of unsavory characters.”

  “Yes, especially the consorting,” he said, his face now brimming over with laughter. “But you mean to tell me that, even in your darkest days at Lora—and those unspeakable early days that were so dreadful you will not even discuss them—you were not attracted to some method of dulling your pain and forgetting your sorrows?”

  “If I wanted to make myself feel better, I think I would do a good deed and not a bad one,” I said. “I would extend a kind hand to someone in more distress than I. This would make me feel better than all the whiskey and all the hallucinogens you could produce.”

  “Hmpph. Well. You are almost unique in that attitude, but I must say it does you some credit. You will not be surprised to learn that was not the course I followed—doing good, I mean. I traveled to Corbramb, that place of such luxury that even you have heard of it, and I spent a hedonistic decade. I had funds, so I had friends, and I had no responsibilities, so I had unlimited time. You can imagine what my activities were. I wish that you could not—I would like to have been more creative in my vices, but I was lethargic as well as depraved. For a time, I was involved with a woman who operated what they call ‘a pleasure palace,’ a virtual reality emporium where you can experience all the gratifications of the flesh without actually exposing yourself to risk. In fact, there was some talk between us of opening our own palace, me to finance it and she to manage it. She had very grand ideas about entertainments—I’ m sure it would have been a popular destination.”