by Kait Jagger
In the video, Lukas ran a hand through his dark curly hair as he spoke to her, his voice just audible above the chatter of the audience. ‘You take the high bit? Spare Daddy’s poor voice?’ to which on-screen Luna nodded. Lukas briefly conferred with the rest of the musicians on stage, then adjusted the pegs on his guitar, tuning it.
He started alone, singing the opening line a cappella.
He’s a thief
He’s a liar
On the take
For all his whole life
The song went on to describe a bad man, a user who had taken a woman’s heart and crushed it. A common enough theme, though the way it was written made it sound like it was sung from the perspective of a third party, possibly another man who loved this woman. Luna’s part, the descant, sung over the chorus in a sweet, clear soprano, was a torrent of abuse about this user, much of it profane.
Of course, at the time she had no idea that the song was autobiographical. It wasn’t a love song, a message to a beautiful, wronged woman. It was a mirror. And, judging from the agonised expression on Lukas Gregory’s face as he sang it, all that had occurred since he first wrote it – finding his Emily, loving her and becoming a better man because of her – all of that did nothing to mitigate his self-loathing.
Stefan watched all this transfixed, his initial delight fading into rapt engrossment as the song reached a crescendo. It ended with just Lukas on guitar and Luna singing the chorus, her high, clear voice ringing out like a bell.
He’s no good
No good
He’s no good…
There was a full ten-second silence after the last notes faded away. And then thunderous applause. The camera shook slightly, panning out to reveal everyone in the room on their feet, many screaming, some with tears streaming down their faces. And then back to Lukas, smiling now, talking to one of his bandmates. While on-screen Luna sat beside him, watching him, willing him to look at her. Ignoring the other musicians bending down to tell her what a clever, talented girl she was. Waiting for him to look at her.
The clip froze there.
She knew why Rafe Davies had shown her this. He wanted to prove to her that she had been a part of her father’s musical life. His best self. She wondered if Stefan would see it that way too.
He didn’t speak for some time, cradling the tablet in his hands. Then he said very quietly, ‘I know, Luna, that you don’t want my pity.’ And stopped, jabbing his finger at the screen. ‘But allow me for a moment to feel sorry for her.’ His voice cracked and she looked at him in alarm, only to see that he had tears in his eyes.
She felt… fine, later. Rather to her surprise, Luna found that there was, after all, some relief in talking about these things. Only to Stefan, she suspected. And it would be a lie to say that she was completely comfortable to reveal herself in this way even to him.
Particularly when, as he was lying behind her in bed late that night, his arm slung over her hip and his lips in her hair, he asked, ‘What did you say, to your headmistress? To talk her out of sending you back to your grandmother at Christmas?’
Unseen by him, Luna shut and opened her eyes. And considered dissembling. Answering vaguely, or with a half-truth.
‘I told her,’ she said at some length, ‘that if she forced me to go back, I would burn my grandmother’s house down. With her in it.’
Stefan laughed sleepily at this, hearing but not hearing her, and his breathing soon slowed and deepened. But Luna’s eyes remained open, staring straight in front of her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Oh, it felt good. Dressed in her black pencil skirt, Ferragamos and white silk blouse, Luna exited a taxi outside the portico feeling every inch the personal assistant.
She’d just returned from a job interview in London, which had gone extremely well. More than that, though, it had been incredibly empowering to be back to her professional self after months of jeans and itchy sweaters and, more lately, sundresses and sandals. The minute she’d slipped into her pumps that morning, Luna had felt… more herself. And when she put her hair up into its customary French twist, she felt invincible.
Practically skipping down the hall towards her old office, full of the joys, Luna heard Stefan on the phone, talking in Swedish – to Sören, she thought, judging from his tone and the gist of the words she understood. When she entered the office he confirmed it, saying, ‘Pappa, can I ring you back? Luna just came in.’
‘I have had the best day!’ Luna crowed as he rung off. ‘Interview? Aced it. Birthday present for your dad?’ She raised a Harvey Nichols bag. ‘Bought it. Lunch with Jem? Ate it. Oh, and I…’ she rooted through her handbag, retrieving a receipt, ‘…dropped your suit off at the dry cleaners too. Honestly, Stefan, I was on fire in that interview. They practically offered me the job there and then.’ Placing a hand on her hip, she prompted, ‘Go on, then. Who’s a clever girl, eh? Who’s a…’ She trailed off as Stefan walked over to her and placed his hands on her shoulders.
Ten minutes later, she burst into the Orangery, where Lady Wellstone sat on a wooden bench drinking tea, Regina fast asleep at her feet.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Luna exclaimed. ‘This, this isn’t what Stefan wants.’
The Marchioness raised an eyebrow and said, ‘You think not?’ And smiled enigmatically.
‘Arborage is your home,’ Luna insisted. ‘You can’t just leave.’
‘My dear,’ Lady Wellstone said calmly, patting the bench beside her. ‘Please come and sit with me.’
So Luna sat, knitting her fingers together as the Marchioness poured her a cup of Earl Grey from the pot on the table next to her. She waited until Luna took a sip before saying, ‘An old friend of mine has invited me to come visit him in New York. It’s been an age since I spent time there and now seems like an appropriate juncture. And then I’d like to do some travelling.’ She paused ruminatively. ‘I’ve never been to Japan, if you can believe that. I’ve a mind to see it.’
‘But,’ Luna said, ‘you’ll come back after that. After you’ve finished travelling.’
Lady Wellstone smiled again. ‘No, my dear. No, I don’t think so.’
‘But why?’ Luna cried, heart in her throat.
Just then the newly installed sprinkler system came on with a hiss, and the orange tree opposite them was engulfed in a fine mist. Lady Wellstone looked up at it and after some seconds nodded her satisfaction, then gazed out onto the gardens beyond. Like Ozymandias, Luna thought. Looking upon her works.
‘If I were to ask you,’ Lady Wellstone said eventually, ‘what you will do when you find yourself in my position, what would you say?’
Luna shook her head, not understanding.
‘If,’ the Marchioness lifted a hand, ‘and, God willing, may the day be long in coming, Stefan predeceases you, do you think you’ll be able to walk away from this place?’
Luna’s answer was swift and certain: ‘It’s Stefan I’m marrying, not Arborage.’
Lady Wellstone laughed then, a strange, arid laugh. ‘That’s exactly what I’d have said if you’d asked me forty years ago. That it was John I loved and this—’ she waved her hand, ‘—all this was just collateral, something that went along with loving him. I couldn’t even tell you when that changed, but it did. So have a care, my dear.’
Luna could muster no response, and Lady Wellstone didn’t appear to expect one. Instead, she lapsed into quietude again and for a moment it appeared she’d said all she intended to. A wave of sorrow rose up over Luna; sorrow and emptiness, that this was all that was left between the two of them.
‘I was an unnatural mother,’ Augusta said abruptly.
Luna looked at her in surprise and she clarified, ‘That was what I thought, when the midwife handed me James. Everything I’d been told, all the baby books I’d read, led me to believe that some force of nature would take me over and I’d feel a rush of love for him. But instead I found myself looking down at this little… alien, and feeling nothing. No protect
ive instinct, no flood of motherly love. Nothing.’
Augusta put her hand on her chest and half-laughed, half-gasped. ‘Do you know, I’ve never admitted that to anyone before. It’s a relief to say it out loud.’ She smiled ruefully at Luna. ‘Of course, at the time there were no helplines, no online forums for unnatural mothers like myself. So I set my mind on learning to love him. Fortunately, James was a very loveable boy. A good baby. And as he got older we had Arborage in common. Even as a very young child, he loved this place, loved the mechanics of it, the way I did. I remember him running through the gallery – he couldn’t have been more than four – rattling off each and every one of his ancestors’ names…’
Her eyes drifted for a moment, as if following the mental image of her little son. Then she remembered herself and continued, ‘You can imagine my horror when the girls came along and my lack of maternal feeling didn’t improve. If anything, it was worse. Helen was a difficult child to love, and once she saw her first pony she had no more use for me. And Isabelle was her father’s daughter through and through.
‘I began to believe that my unnaturalness must be down to gender, that I was one of those women who could only really love boys. And the secret shame of that led me to overcompensate. I spoiled the girls, didn’t discipline them as I should. I made a conscious decision to place all my eggs in James’s basket, so that when he died I was left with nothing. Nothing but two girls I hardly knew and a husband I blamed for my loss.
‘And Arborage,’ she said grimly. ‘I had that. It was the estate that kept me going in those horrible months after James died.’ She placed her teacup on the table beside her and rested her hands on her lap, staring up at the small rainbow created by a shaft of sunlight piercing through the sprinkler mist.
‘I remember the first time I saw you,’ she said softly, ‘on that playing field at St Catherine’s. Oh, I knew of you already, about your parents. But when I saw you, so small and so angry, it was like looking at a reflection of myself, distilled down to my bitterest dregs. I felt a connection to you. An affinity. Did you feel it too, I wonder?’
Luna met Augusta’s eyes and it was like looking into the sun; she had to look away.
‘I took an interest in you, after that,’ Augusta went on. ‘Used my influence where I could. Little things, like asking Elijah Noakes to help you with your ogre of a grandmother. Or persuading Isabelle to make an effort with you at school. For a while there, I actually hoped the two of you might become friends.’ She made a wry face and added, ‘Well, you can’t blame me for trying, my dear. How was I to know I’d invited a silent assassin into our midst? That day when you cut her dead in the gallery, it was something to behold. “But he still won’t love you, no matter what you do.”’
Luna lowered her head in mortification. ‘You must have thought I was a little monster.’
‘No,’ Augusta said firmly. ‘I thought you were in pain and you needed help. And I tried to help you.’
‘You did help me,’ Luna said, throat tightening. ‘I can never repay you for what you did.’
Augusta shook her head as if to say, nothing, it was nothing. ‘I kept tabs on you in the years that followed, kept track of your progress at university, and later as your career took wing. And then, when I was in the market for a PA, I thought of you.’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘I half-expected you wouldn’t be interested, that you’d have decided to forget this part of your life. But I reached out my hand to you all the same. And you came. And for a while there, we rubbed along rather nicely, didn’t we?’
Luna closed her eyes and nodded.
‘You were just… all about the work. My work,’ Augusta conceded. ‘Those two years with you, I felt I was finally coming into my own, really functioning to my full capacity. Really, I don’t know why it surprised me so when I discovered that Stefan had fallen in love with you. That he’d seen what I saw and wanted it for himself. We accomplished so much together, you and I. I had such plans for the future…’ Her voice deepened. ‘And the thought of Florian wresting all that from me, laying waste to the empire I’d built, it was insufferable.’
Curling her lip, she went on, ‘There had been rumours for years about him and his taste for vulnerable girls. And when I stumbled upon one of his victims last year, purely by chance, I saw my opportunity. I’d have blackmailed him one way or another, I freely admit that. But you must believe me when I say it was never my intention to involve you in this.’ She inclined her head, eyes searching Luna’s, seeking understanding. ‘I just… ran out of time. John became ill, I still didn’t have the ironclad proof I needed to bring Florian down, and I had to get it by any means necessary.
‘So I offered him the running of Arborage, told him I couldn’t manage it with John at death’s door. And in the bargain I offered him your services.’ Augusta looked down at her hands again, staring at the emerald on her ring finger. ‘I did this knowing full well that he’d fixed his sick mind on you, hoping that having you to torment would distract him. And it did. He was so busy indulging himself and grinding you under his heel, he never noticed me coming up behind him, ready to slip a knife into his back.
‘I thought—’ Augusta broke off, panting slightly, as if the headlong rush of her story had winded her. ‘I thought once I’d deposed him, I could explain myself to you and you would agree with me that the ends justified the means. But when you stood in my office that day staring at me with such horror and disgust—’ She stopped again, a strangled noise rising in her throat. ‘I knew I’d never be able to repair the damage I’d done.’
Silence. Save for the hiss of the sprinklers.
After a moment, Augusta raised the side of her finger to her eye, erasing the trace of moisture that had formed there. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that my leaving will take some of the sting out of Helen and Isabelle’s losses. Right now, they see themselves as victims. Your victims. It will be less painful for them if they see it more as a… changing of the guard here at Arborage. And Florian too – his desire for vengeance surely must lose its focus with me gone. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for abandoning you to him. I hope that someday you can forgive me.’
She turned toward Luna then, eyes shining.
‘So you see, my dear – my leaving, I’m not doing it for Stefan. But for you.’
Luna held herself together during the walk back to the house. She met a couple of tourists from South Africa who were lost and calmly gave them directions to the farm shop. She ran into Roland and Alex, heading from one meeting to another, and had a brief conversation with them, the entirety of which she would later find herself completely unable to recall. She walked down the hall to the Marchioness’s office as she had done hundreds of times before, her expression cool and serene and blank.
When she got to the office to find Stefan just finishing a meeting with David Martin, the estate’s most successful tenant farmer, she played the dutiful fiancée, graciously accepting his congratulations and asking after his wife and children and property in Norfolk, smiling and nodding when he kissed her cheek and said in parting, ‘I look forward to seeing a lot more of you soon.’
She stood in the middle of the Marchioness’s office, hands gripped tight together, as Stefan saw him out. Then, only then, when he returned and shut the door behind him, did her eyes well up.
He came and put his arms around her, and Luna wept into his chest.
*
‘I’ve known for some time that it would come to this,’ Stefan admitted later, as the two of them sat on the sofa in the office. ‘But I’m glad it was Augusta’s choice, in the end.’
Luna looked around the office, struggling to imagine it without Lady Wellstone to fill it. ‘I wish…’
‘You wish what?’ he prompted.
‘Nothing,’ Luna said. ‘I’ll miss her.’
The sound of chatter filtered up from the lawn outside as a tour group passed by, and it broke the mood. Stefan slapped his hands on his knees. ‘We never had a chance to talk about your in
terview this morning. Which one was it, the hotel group or the insurance company?’
‘The hotel group.’
‘And it went well?’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘The chief exec took me on a tour, introduced me to some of his managers, and he seemed keen to know when I could start.’
‘You’re interested in this job?’
‘Well, maybe,’ she said speculatively. ‘The pay is good, and there’s a good benefits package.’
Stefan made a face and grunted, ‘Hunh. I can’t quite picture you in the hospitality industry.’
‘I’d get a fifty percent staff discount at any of their properties,’ she noted pertly.
Another face.
‘And,’ she floundered on, ‘it comes with private medical insurance.’ Clearly, that didn’t impress him either. Really, she was starting to feel a little stung by his dismissiveness.
‘Do you not think,’ he said, ‘after all your hard work in Shetland, that you’re ready for something a little more challenging?’
Luna frowned. ‘Like sheep farming?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘No, no. I mean, look at all the skills you put to use there. Negotiating skills, contracting skills, team building, PR…’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ she demurred.
‘Well, I would. And so would my father.’
At this, the girl who never blushed felt heat rising to her cheeks. ‘Well, Sören is—’
‘—very impressed with your work, Luna. Stop talking yourself down. It’s one of your few flaws and it’s extremely annoying,’ he said testily. Luna opened her mouth to defend herself, but he wasn’t finished. ‘And really, wouldn’t it be a waste not to apply everything you’ve learned here at Arborage? Staff who understand the intricacies of running a historic estate are hard to come by, I know that first-hand.’
‘So,’ Luna said doubtfully, ‘you’re suggesting I apply for jobs with our competitors?’
‘I am not.’
She frowned again. ‘Well then, what?’ And stopped herself. Suddenly all was becoming clear. Placing her hand on his knee, she shook her head and said gently, ‘Stefan, I can’t be your PA.’ Only for him to look down at her hand on his knee, then up at her serious, sincere face. And roar with laughter.