Lord and Master (6 page)

As fate would have it, Stefan had his own ideas about how their day in London would pan out. He had early morning meetings in Kensington, so he asked Luna to meet him at Isabelle's shop at ten.

Emerging from the Knightsbridge Tube station, she found the skies clear and the air crisp. With time to kill, she walked as far as Sloane Square. There were far worse things than sauntering along some of the most expensive streets in Britain, pausing occasionally to window shop in stores she couldn't afford.

At just gone 10am she met Stefan outside Lionsbridge, which was located in the ground floor of a beautifully renovated brick Victorian building near the Cadogan Hotel. The building itself, like many along Sloane Street, belonged to the Earl Cadogan, and Luna blanched to think what the rent for Isabelle's small shop ran to.

In truth, the accounts for Lionsbridge were a mystery to Luna. Whereas she had a good basic grasp of the balance sheets for the rest of the estate's businesses, the Marchioness was careful to keep Isabelle's vanity project under wraps. For vanity project it was, from the expensively etched Arborage lions on the glass frontage to the carefully contrived scent of Arborage roses and beeswax that greeted visitors inside.

As Luna and Stefan entered, a rail-thin woman standing behind a restored Edwardian glass and mahogany counter smiled. At Stefan. Abandoning her task of artfully folding silk scarves, she came around the counter and extended her hand to him.

‘You must be Stefan Lundgren. Isabelle told us to expect you.'

Alerted by the sounds outside, Isabelle herself sailed out of a back storeroom on a cloud of Guerlain.

‘Cousin Stefan,' she squealed, leaping toward him and throwing her arms around his neck. Luna was briefly gratified to see Stefan stagger back slightly before returning the embrace. ‘Mummy tells me you've been here for
weeks
and you haven't bothered to call me.' Isabelle's slightly feline features arranged themselves into a pout.

Isabelle bore a passing resemblance to her elder sister, in the way a thoroughbred horse looked like a Dartmoor pony. She was a very beautiful girl. To Luna, she took after her father more than Helen, with his large hazel eyes and appearance of a permanent tan. Isabelle's natural hair colour was light brown, like her sister's, but hers was tinted and sliced to a warm honey that she wore loose, in artfully artless waves that fell to her shoulders.

Her clothes, too, were all designer. Luna had often thought that Patrice and Kayla would have a field day in Isabelle's closet. The only thing that let her down was her taste for bling. She was wearing a large gold necklace with matching earrings and cuff that served to detract from her beauty and were at odds with her exquisitely cut Roland Mouret dress.

‘It's only been two weeks, cousin,' Stefan was saying. ‘I'm sure we'll be seeing more of each other from now on.'

‘But you can't stay for lunch?' Isabelle asked piteously, widening her eyes like Regina the spaniel.

‘I'm afraid not,' he smiled apologetically. ‘Luna and I have another appointment in Shoreditch after this.' Luna glanced at him sharply; it wasn't strictly true that they had to rush off to Jem and Rod's office, and far be it from her to stand in the way of the Marchioness's carefully laid plans for Stefan and Isabelle. But before Luna could correct him, Isabelle clapped her hands together and cried, ‘Wait! I'm coming out to the house for the weekend with a few friends to do a bit of shooting, a bit of drinking. You must join us! You're staying at the Dower House, aren't you? You must come up to the house tonight and have a few drinks with us.'

‘That sounds—' Stefan began.

‘I won't take no for an answer,' Isabelle interrupted. ‘I'll see you tonight at eight. Don't make me come down to the Dower House to fetch you.'

Meanwhile, Luna stood in silence, ignored by Isabelle as she knew she would be. That they had known each other for years, had once even nominally been friends, counted for nothing now. In Isabelle's eyes, Luna was her mother's secretary and nothing more. Oh, occasionally, when the two of them were alone in Luna's office while Isabelle was waiting for her mother, and if Isabelle was feeling chatty, she might mention their long-distant schooldays. ‘Remember Hester? Prim old Hester? I saw her in Mayfair last week. Pregnant with her third child, if you can believe it…' To be honest, Luna preferred being blanked. She knew where she stood when Isabelle ignored her.

She wondered if Isabelle remembered the time she, Luna and Stefan had briefly crossed paths twelve years earlier. Luna rather imagined that she did, but she had few qualms that Isabelle would reveal as much to Stefan. Isabelle had almost as much vested in keeping the past in the past as Luna did…

*

A strange thing happened after Luna's father died just before her thirteenth birthday. Whereas her mother's death the previous year had turned her into a bit of an outcast at the private girls school she attended in Chieveley – what teenage girl, after all, knows how to deal with the recently bereaved? – the subsequent demise of her father in even more tragic circumstances transformed her into something of a cult figure. An emotional grotesque, as it were, who attracted the attentions of morbid goths and earnest do-gooders in equal measure. Isabelle had fallen into the latter category, only she was the
alpha
do-gooder of St Catherine's Preparatory School for Girls, daughter to the local landed gentry and top dog in the well-controlled pack at the apex of the St Catherine's food chain.

Luna couldn't remember Isabelle taking much notice of her before her father died. And perhaps if things had been different she might have spurned Isabelle's persistent advances when she returned to St Catherine's after the funeral, now a full-board student on a bursary hastily arranged by the school's headmistress.

But Isabelle herself had recently suffered a family loss in the death of her brother James. Judged according to Luna's brutal internal calculus – her barometer of pain – the death of a sibling didn't really measure up to the death of both parents, but the connection with Isabelle held a secret attraction for her.

Isabelle's mother, Lady Wellstone, Marchioness of Lionsbridge, was a member of the St Catherine's board of governors. Luna had seen her at school sports day, standing at the sidelines watching Isabelle play rounders. She had been dressed in black, in
mourning,
Luna marvelled. Who wore mourning clothes anymore? Not even Luna, whose life was silently and utterly devoted to mourning. She saw something she recognised that day, a kindred spirit in suffering. Measured by Luna's exacting barometer of pain, the death of a beloved child was commensurate with her own loss.

She also knew, had been quietly told as much by her headmistress, that it had been Lady Wellstone who had paid for her to stay at the school. And saved her from expulsion when she subsequently hacked her hair off, her beautiful coccyx-skimming hair that her father had always said looked just like her mother's, and donated the proceeds to Cancer Relief. ‘The girl's heart is in the right place,' the Marchioness had said, or so Luna had been told.

So she had accepted Isabelle's advances, becoming a temporary junior member of her pack. And she had been as close to happy as she was then capable of being when Isabelle invited her to join a select few for a mid-term visit to Arborage.

Luna's memories of the months after her father's death were cloudy, but she remembered her first approach to Arborage House with complete clarity. The way the yellow sandstone of the building stood out against the dark April clouds. The meticulously trimmed topiary hedges that surrounded the portico. And the copious scaffolding, for despite being in mourning the Marchioness was proceeding with a planned renovation of the east wing of the house, Isabelle informed them in somewhat bored tones.

Luna couldn't believe how blasé Isabelle was about her home, how much she took it for granted. And, she realised soon after their arrival, she had been foolish to think that she could fit in with Isabelle and her real friends, sitting on Isabelle's frilly canopied bed giggling and confiding in each other about secret crushes and hidden enmities. The harder she tried, the worse she felt, and the more she hated each and every one of them for not seeing how trivial their concerns were.

Worst of all was Isabelle, who at the time was claiming undying love for her visiting cousin, Stefan, from Sweden. It was all ‘Stefan says this' and ‘Stefan thinks that' and, really, Luna couldn't see the point of it. He was two years older than Isabelle – a lifetime when you are a teenage girl – and anyway, he was nothing special: a painfully thin, sallow-looking youth with floppy hair and a collection of truly awful woolly jumpers. Not that they saw much of him, because he went out of his way to avoid them.

One afternoon, however, after Isabelle had pestered her mother one too many times, the Marchioness ordered them all to take a hike in the forest.

‘And bring your cousin with you,' she added. ‘He could do with the fresh air.'

Which Isabelle had been only too happy to do. So they had all trekked out under darkening skies that soon gave way to an afternoon of constant drizzle. Luna hadn't brought a coat or, crucially, a hat for her recently shorn head with its half-centimetre of hair, and she was soon wet and miserable, trailing along with the others in Isabelle and the Swedish boy's wake.

The boy seemed positively angry about being forced to spend time in England. From what Luna could gather from his monosyllabic responses to Isabelle's best efforts to engage him, his mother had pretty much forced him to come over for college studies in the wake of her divorce from his father. And everything he saw here appeared to disappoint him.

‘Your roads here, they are crazy. You English see a tree in the way and you build the road around it. In Sweden we cut it down, build the road straight…English houses are so cold because they are badly built. In Sweden we know how to build efficiently…You English, you always expect everyone else to speak in English…' and on, and on. Meanwhile, Isabelle gamely continued flirting with him (Luna half expected him to comment on the fact that English girls just didn't flirt with the same gusto as Swedish girls). And the rest of them walked along behind, watching this tragedy unfold like a sodden Greek chorus.

They stopped under a stand of yew trees at one point to shelter from the rain, and Isabelle leaned closer to her skinny cousin, laughing at a joke he hadn't really made, while Luna stood against the trunk of a yew tree wishing she had a hat.

Then the boy said something about how the rain didn't feel as wet in Sweden and something inside Luna snapped. She turned to the other girls and said, ‘Why doesn't he fuck off back to Sweden then?'

She hadn't bothered to keep her voice down, and from the red blotches that immediately appeared in the boy's cheeks and the furious expression on Isabelle's face when she turned to look at Luna, she could see that she'd hit the mark. At this point in her life, Luna was not one to shy away from confrontation, so she brazened it out, giving them both a caustic, contemptuous look. And for a moment, it could have gone either way. One of the girls, the extravagantly named Jemima Evangeline Mitford, actually started to laugh. Had the others followed suit, it would have turned into a mini-triumph, with the whiny Swedish boy put in his place and Isabelle receiving a salutary, patriotic wake-up call.

Alas, it was not to be. On seeing Isabelle's stricken expression, the other girls cast hard looks at Luna, and Jemima Evangeline stifled her laugh. The Swedish boy said nothing for the rest of the long walk back to the house, by which point Luna was back where she started, an outcast.

*

Luna had plenty of time to reminisce during Stefan's meeting with Isabelle. Isabelle was as slippery as an eel when it came to questions about her business, and Stefan, for whatever reason, seemed slightly cautious with her.

The shop had a tea room, or
salon de thé
, as Isabelle preferred to call it, in the back, where Isabelle had taken them for her ‘little chat' with Stefan. Sitting on slightly uncomfortable white painted wrought iron chairs, with a complete set of fine bone china laid out before them, Isabelle poured tea for them all, the perfect hostess. She even smiled and wrinkled her nose at Luna as she passed her her cup; it didn't escape Luna that this was all for Stefan's benefit.
Look, look, Stefan, how lovely I am to the help.

Luna gave herself a little mental shake. It was very easy to slip into the rut of criticising Isabelle; something about their shared history brought out the worst in her. She made a conscious decision to think about something else as Stefan pulled out a sheaf of spreadsheets Luna hadn't seen before and attempted to get Isabelle to focus on them.

‘But, cousin, really, I leave all this stuff to Mummy,' Isabelle protested. ‘I'm just a simple shopkeeper, doing my best to promote the Arborage brand.'

Watching as Stefan repeatedly but patiently brought her back to the task at hand, Luna reflected on how much he had changed since she first met him. He really was practically unrecognisable, a complete metamorphosis from the petulant teenager he had been then. Or perhaps, Luna acknowledged to herself, she had been unfair in her assessment of him at the time. All her experiences in the immediate wake of her parents' deaths passed through the distorted lens of her grief and other, darker emotions. Maybe if twenty-six-year-old Luna had met sixteen-year-old Stefan, she would have seen a boy on the cusp of manhood, uprooted from his home country, separated from his family…and felt sorry for him.

As it was, all she could do was wonder at how well he'd turned out, how in the space of twelve years he'd put on at least two stone, a substantial amount of muscle, clearly gotten over his hatred of all things English, and built a small business empire for himself. All by the age of twenty-eight. She actually
admired
Stefan Lundgren. She respected his opinion and his business acumen, she appreciated his patient approach to his work and to people in general, and she…well, Luna had always been attracted to competent men, men who were good at what they did and knew it, and Stefan was the single most competent man she'd ever met.