To Prime the Pump - A. Bertram Chandler [59]
"That," said Marlene, her voice expressionless, "is a comforting thought."
"I'm glad that you see it that way." The Duchess sucked on her pipe, blew out a cloud of smoke that was acrid rather than fragrant. "You know, my dear, the cards were really uncanny. The Hanged Man kept turning up." For Grimes' benefit she explained, "That is one of the cards of ill-omen in the Tarot pack." She went on, "Of course, we were expecting a death, a violent death, but not in so literal a manner."
"Must we go into all this, Honoria?" asked Marlene.
"If you would rather not, my dear, we will not. But. . ."
"But what?"
"Poor Henri was addicted to the use of archaic slang but, oddly enough, only when he was talking to me. Just before he went out to play Vulcan to your Venus and Mars he said that he was going to fix your wagon." She deliberately took her time refilling and relighting her short pipe. "But your wagon fixed him."
"Let us leave these ghouls," said Marlene disgustedly. Grimes fell rather than jumped out of the miniwagon, then helped the girl to the ground. Together they walked into the castle.
* * *
"Yes, John," said Marlene. "It is better that return to your ship. You have played your part, more than your part."
Grimes looked at the girl's grave face. There was nothing in it for him any more. He looked past her to the shining weapons incongruously displayed on the wall of her boudoir. He thought, I know more about guns than women.
He said, "I'm sorry it happened."
"Don't be a liar, John. You wanted me from the very first moment that you saw me, and you finally got me."
"Are you sorry it happened?"
For the first time since their return to the castle, she showed signs of emotion.
"That is a hard question to answer, John. But, no, I am not sorry that it happened. I am not even sorry that it happened the way that it did. What I am sorry about is the humiliation. And, of course, Henri's death." Her features suddenly contorted into a vicious mask. "But he deserved it!"
"And somebody, as everybody here has been telling me, had to die."
"And better, I suppose, one of us than one of you. It keeps it all in the family, doesn't it? Very neat, very tidy." There were the beginnings of hysteria in her voice.
"Marlene!"
"No. Don't touch me!"
"All right. But I thought . . ."
"Don't think. It's dangerous."
"Marlene, what about the child, if there is one?"
"What about it?"
"Well . . . it could be . . . embarrassing. Will you marry me?"
She laughed then but it was not hysterical laughter. It was not altogether contemptuous. "Oh, John, John . . . The perfect petty bourgeois to the very last. Offering to make an honest woman of me, me, and on a world which can boast the finest medical brains in the Galaxy. Not that our physicians have had much practice in terminating pregnancies. Marry you, John, a penniless Survey Service Lieutenant? Oh; I appreciate it, appreciate the offer, but it just wouldn't work out. You aren't our sort of people and we aren't yours. I'd sooner have married Henri, and he asked me often enough, with all his faults."
"We could marry," he pressed doggedly, "and then divorce."
"No. This is El Dorado, not some lower middle-class slum of a planet. And furthermore, John, I shall be a heroine. I shall go down in history. The first woman to conceive on this world."
"You don't know that you have."
"But I do. I . . . I felt it."
He got slowly to his feet. "I'll see if Karl has packed my bags."
She said, "You don't have to go."
He asked, "Do you want me to?"
Her expression softened almost imperceptibly. "What if I told you that Lobenga, Eulalia and the Duchess have already left the castle? They have done what they had to do."
"And have they? Left, I mean."
"Yes."
He felt the weakening of his resolution. Those other guests had witnessed what had happened between Marlene and himself but, as servants of the Monitor, there was much that they must have witnessed. Now that he would no longer be obliged to meet them socially . . .
"You will