Lord and Master

by Kait Jagger

  In case we don’t get to speak tomorrow, I will meet you outside the theatre at 7.

  xx

  L

  Luna reread the note, looked at the ‘xx’ and wondered if it was too much, decided she couldn’t scribble it out without it looking weird, then added:

  P.S. I went to the GP this week and am now back on birth control pills. Informing you of this purely for moral support reasons…

  She left the notebook where she’d found it on the table and tiptoed out of the room, smiling to herself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At just after nine the following morning, Luna’s office phone rang, the display reading ‘Gift Shop’.

  ‘There’s a gentleman here, I think he’s a little lost. A James MacGregor?’

  ‘Ah, right,’ Luna said. ‘Tell Mr MacGregor I’ll come along to fetch him.’

  She was dressed for maximum efficiency today, in her white silk blouse, pearls and black pencil skirt, hair in a topknot bun. Teamed with her black four-inch Ferragamo pumps and sheer black stockings, it was an outfit Luna was confident in. She liked the way her heels clicked along the portrait gallery’s marble floor as she approached the Visitor Centre.

  Entering the shop, she approached a bespectacled, thirty-something man standing in front of a photo montage near the glass entrance and extended her hand.

  ‘Good morning, James, I’m Luna.’ The man started and did a gratifying double take. In her heels Luna was at least three inches taller than him; clearly, her power ensemble had had its desired effect. Pulling himself together, James MacGregor smiled and shook her hand. He had wavy brown hair and lovely, seal-like brown eyes and Luna warmed to him instinctively.

  ‘It’s good to finally meet you. Stefan’s told me a lot about you.’ Luna raised her eyebrows and bit her lip dramatically – oh no, that can’t be good – and James laughed, sounding a little relieved that she wasn’t quite as scary as she looked. He nodded towards the photos. ‘Coming to the wrong entrance has actually been a good thing. I’ve gotten to look around a bit and watch your new visitor’s welcome video.’

  ‘These are “making of” photos,’ Luna said, pointing toward one of the Marquess and Marchioness talking with the director of the video while a lighting crew set up behind them on the Queen Charlotte lawn. ‘It was actually a very difficult video to shoot.’ Not least because the Marquess showed up a mere half hour before filming began, fresh off a plane from Italy and looking like he’d come straight from an all-night party. The Marchioness had been livid, though the end result, including brief clips of them ‘topping and tailing’ an introductory video of Arborage’s history, revealed none of this turmoil.

  ‘Hey, that’s you, isn’t it?’ James pointed to a very small photo in the corner of the montage, which showed just the back of Luna’s head and a slight bit of her cheek as she stood in the portico, watching the Marchioness being filmed.

  ‘Yes, I think the photographer thought my hairstyle looked historic that day,’ Luna observed dryly. ‘The ghost of Arborage past, or something like that.’

  As she led James to the west wing, she quizzed him about his involvement with Stefan’s business and it soon became clear that they’d known each other for a long time, since Stefan had spent a semester at Cambridge during his university days.

  ‘When he decided to open a London office he rang me up, and it’s been pretty much non-stop work ever since,’ James said, hastily adding, ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Luna laughed. ‘I won’t rat you out. I can well imagine exactly what it’s been like. He never seems to slow down, does he? All I can say is I hope he pays you well.’

  ‘No worries on that score,’ James assured her, adding just a little bit shyly, ‘I’m his “slide guru”, by the way.’

  Lady Wellstone and Stefan were at her meeting table when Luna pushed open the door and ushered James in. Stefan was facing away from her, wearing a dark blue suit she hadn’t seen before, but when he turned to look at them Luna’s eyes were fixed on Lady Wellstone, doing the little, silent dance they sometimes did when she had guests. Luna looked at her watch again and lifted her shoulders slightly, and the Marchioness nodded.

  The greeting of the board members was left to Luna and it was a task she enjoyed; she fancied she was good at it, welcoming guests to Arborage, ushering them through the main portico into the heart of the great house.

  As Luna was showing St John Marsh into the conference room, Stefan and James came along from the office and she gave James, who looked a little nervous, a smile and a quick thumbs up. She didn’t look at Stefan at all, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear even to her.

  Meeting underway, Luna returned to her desk. She spent the next hour or so working on mindless tasks, approving expenses and the like. She googled James MacGregor and discovered that he was single, he’d studied classical civilisation at Cambridge and his hobbies were travelling, skiing, and ‘spending way too much time on my Xbox’. The perfect friend for Stefan, she reckoned.

  The meeting broke briefly at 12.30, when lunch was delivered. Luna ran along to the conference room to find the Marchioness sitting at the table on her mobile, Stefan standing near the projector talking with two of the board members, and James sat opposite Lady Wellstone shuffling through a pile of papers. She met James’s eyes and he asked, ‘If I emailed you a couple of documents, could you print them off for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, standing up and heading for the door, only to hear her master’s voice calling her back.

  ‘Luna! Luna, I need you.’

  So she came back to await the orders of the Marchioness, who was still on the phone. As she did so, she covertly studied Stefan, who looked refreshed after a good night’s sleep, his face cleanly shaven. She couldn’t quite hear what he and the two trustees were talking about, but it sounded genial enough.

  Lady Wellstone cleared her throat and Luna realised with slight embarrassment that she must have missed the cues that her phone call had ended. She bent her head down and asked, ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Well enough. Challenging, I’d say, but nothing we can’t handle. Can you dig out the last report the accountants did in September? And there was an email that came with it – print that too. Then bring them here to me.’

  Luna nodded and made to exit the conference room. As she passed James, he said, ‘I’ve just sent you those documents,’ at the very same time as Stefan asked, ‘Luna, did I leave my phone in Augusta’s office?’

  She froze for a second and out of the corner of her eye caught a quick wave of peevishness emanating from her Ladyship, who really, really didn’t like it when Luna divided her attention between her and anyone else. Stefan and James caught it too, and there was a comic millisecond when Luna thought they’d both tell her to forget about their requests.

  Instead, the moment passed. Luna looked at the Marchioness and silently assured her that her task would come first, briefly said, ‘I’ll check,’ to Stefan, and gave James a cheeky little wink on her way out.

  By the time she returned to the conference room, the meeting was already underway again. Stefan was standing with the remote and she could see from the screen that he was well into presenting his four options for Arborage. The mood in the room seemed slightly fractious.

  ‘…frankly, if I were Augusta, I would find the implication that Arborage is behind the times, some kind of dinosaur of the historic preservation world, deeply offensive,’ St John Marsh was saying. The Marchioness waved her hand and he continued, ‘No, no, it must be said that it is you and you alone who has saved this place from wrack and ruin. The work you have done here, the many treasures you have managed to safeguard for Arborage’s future when others would have been tempted to sell them off…’

  Luna quickly deposited James’s printing in front of him before proceeding to the Marchioness’s side of the table.

  Stefan, meanwhile, sat down at the table and leant in Marsh’s direction, his expressi
on serious. ‘St John, I can remember my first visit to Arborage almost twenty years ago like it was yesterday. I remember back then visitors had to phone ahead to arrange a tour, and tours were only available when, Augusta?’

  ‘The first and last Thursday of the month,’ Augusta replied, smiling.

  ‘And only included the garden and four rooms. Four rooms in the east wing. I know better than anyone how much Augusta has done to transform Arborage…’

  Luna knelt next to Lady Wellstone and passed her the report she’d asked for. The Marchioness quickly donned her reading glasses and paged through it.

  ‘…but I’m afraid I would have to argue that the treasures you so rightly say she has protected for the future are really the only things that are currently attracting visitors to Arborage.’ Marsh made to disagree and Stefan continued, his voice growing forceful, ‘Visitors who are presented with literally hundreds of options in the Greater London area and who will go elsewhere if we fail to modernise, cut costs and to innovate as our competitors have innovated.’

  The Marchioness removed her reading glasses and nodded to Luna, who stood and departed just as the bluster was starting to depart St John Marsh.

  ‘Well, I take your point, I suppose. At Bletchley Park, I think it’s fair to say that they’re leaps and bounds ahead of Arborage in terms of their offering…’

  Luna shut the conference door behind her, then clasped her hands together, feeling ever so slightly stressed on Stefan’s behalf.

  An hour and a half later, at just after 2pm, Lady Wellstone strolled back into the office, closely followed by Stefan and James. Luna stood and her boss held up a hand.

  ‘They’ve all left, my dear, so you can stand down.’

  ‘Oh,’ Luna said, slightly nonplussed. The Marchioness and James continued into her office, clearly in an ebullient mood.

  ‘I couldn’t believe he asked that question and I literally had the data sitting right in front of me,’ James crowed.

  ‘And here I thought you had all those numbers memorised,’ her Ladyship joked.

  Stefan came to stand in front of Luna, smiling down at her as he ran a hand through his hair. She reached onto her desk and retrieved his mobile, holding it out to him, and at long last, for the first time that day, she looked up into his eyes. She could feel him buzzing, physically humming almost – it had gone well in the end, clearly. And, well, it shouldn’t have been a sexual thing, but her body responded to him like a divining rod, drawn ever so slightly closer to his till she felt the heat of him. He looked down at her and she could tell from his expression that he felt it too, and that he welcomed her response like it was his due.

  ‘Stefan,’ came the Marchioness’s voice, sharply.

  Spell broken, Luna turned around and saw Lady Wellstone standing just within her doorway, looking at them. Stefan clasped Luna’s elbow, then went into the office and shut the door.

  Luna sat back down at her desk. Had the Marchioness noticed something? It had seemed like a veritable electrical storm between her and Stefan to Luna, but from an observer’s perspective surely it was just a secretary handing someone his mobile phone, right? She silently promised herself not to have sexual thoughts about him in the office ever, ever again. Then pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to erase the grin there.

  James emerged from the Marchioness’s office at 3.30, rushing to get back to the office.

  ‘Stefan’s asked me to start the meeting without him. What a day!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll ring you next week.’ And he was gone.

  Luna began to pack up her things, because she, too, needed to go. She’d asked Lady Wellstone if she could leave early to meet Jem and Nancy in town for Kayla’s preview screening. She didn’t like to leave when Stefan and Lady Wellstone were still in her office, but for once she wanted to give herself enough time that travelling by motorbike wasn’t necessary.

  She listened briefly outside the door. Her Ladyship was talking, though the door was too thick for Luna to make out what she was saying. She waited for a moment to hear Stefan’s voice, but then decided she’d been foolish enough for one afternoon, and went to make her way upstairs.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Just over three hours later, she was standing outside the West End theatre where the preview was taking place. Nancy and Jem were inside getting drinks, and a steady crowd of punters were streaming past her through the glass doors of the theatre foyer. She looked at her watch: 6.50. Then looked at her mobile: no messages, no missed calls from Stefan. She debated ringing him, but if, as she was beginning to fear, he’d been delayed at his meeting, there wasn’t really a point. She waited a few more minutes, saw a couple of moderately famous celebrities enter, then heard the bell ringing inside the theatre. The performance was about to start.

  The orchestra was just finishing tuning up as Luna sat down next to Jem. She briefly shrugged to her and said softly, ‘No sign of him. I think he must have gotten stuck at his meeting.’ And then the orchestra started playing the overture, and all at once Luna was reminded of how much she loathed Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.

  Unfortunately, the next hour did precious little to change her feelings. When all the cats entered the stage to sing the opening number it was certainly a spectacle, and Luna was completely wowed by the sleekly reimagined costumes Patrice had created for the show. But Kayla was right; something wasn’t coming together in this production. At one point, Nancy, who was sitting on the other side of Jem, angled her head over and caught Luna’s eye, shaking her head, and Luna’s heart sank. To make matters worse, her throat, which had been scratchy all afternoon, was now aching. She was coming down with a cold, trapped in Lloyd Webber hell.

  Kayla herself didn’t appear until the end of the first act. Hers was arguably the best role in the entire musical, Grizabella the Glamour Cat, the old cat past her prime who sang the musical’s famous, showstopping number, Memory. Luna knew that casting Kayla had been a risky move – at only twenty-seven, she was really too young to play the role. Judging from what they’d seen so far, it was entirely possible that this was yet another mistake by the director.

  When Kayla finally took the stage, Jem grabbed both Luna and Nancy’s hands, gripping them tightly. Patrice had made Kayla’s ‘onesie’ a threadbare, tattered affair, with bits of bare flesh peeking out exactly like a stray cat that had been in one too many fights. Her gorgeous hair had bits of matted dreadlocks woven into it, again, exactly like a cat with no one to groom her. And Kayla herself was a complete revelation, playing Grizabella as some kind of deranged consumptive. ‘Like Mimi in La Bohème,’ Luna whispered to Jem, ‘but crazy!’ She began to sing, and Jem increased the pressure on Luna’s hand till it hurt.

  ‘Midnight. Not a sound from the pavement…’ Kayla sang, her voice shaky, broken, but then building and soaring, filling the theatre. Luna squeezed Jem’s hand. Kayla was amazing.

  When they went down to the foyer at intermission, Luna half expected to find Stefan waiting for them, smiling that smile of his and full of apologies, but he wasn’t there and still there were no messages on her phone. And then she shivered, beginning to feel well and truly ill.

  She managed, just about, to sit through the second half without curling up in a ball on her seat and going to sleep. And she was glad she’d stuck it out till the end, when Kayla reprised Memory and gave it so much wellie that Jem started sobbing uncontrollably. The applause that came after the curtain went down, however, was tepid at best, though of course when Kayla took her bow all three of her friends immediately got to their feet and screamed their lungs out.

  They waited for her at the stage door, Luna wiping the mascara streaks from under Jem’s eyes with a tissue and Nancy furiously tweeting praise for Kayla’s performance, vowing, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to make sure she doesn’t get dragged down by the rest of this crappy production.’ When Kayla finally emerged, still in costume, Luna could see from her face that the underwhelming response from the audience had her dis
traught. All three of them immediately launched into a litany of praise for her, Jem insisting, ‘People are going to come to this just to see you.’

  Kayla looked at Luna and then looked around, and Luna said, ‘Stefan got stuck at work.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ Kayla exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to see that train wreck.’

  Luna shook her head and said gravely, ‘You were incredible, Kay. I was’ – she looked at Jem and Nancy – ‘we were all amazed by you, and we can’t believe we have such a talented friend.’

  At this, Kayla burst into tears and they all had a group hug.

  Luna cried off post-theatre drinks and got straight on the Tube and then the train to Newbury, her entire body now aching. Sitting alone in the train carriage, she saw that she had a voicemail message from Stefan. He’d left it sometime during the second act of the play.

  ‘Luna, I’m sorry,’ came his voice, sounding…constricted. ‘Something has come up,’ there was a noise on the line, like a PA system or something, ‘and I’m sorry I couldn’t make it tonight. I’ll ring you later.’

  Luna stared at her phone. He didn’t sound like himself. She honestly couldn’t imagine what had happened to transform the triumphant man she’d seen earlier that afternoon. She resolved to ring him later, but by the time she got back to Arborage, it was all she could do to drag herself up to the attic and into bed.

  It was flu, not a cold, she realised when she woke at eight the next morning, swallowed more painkillers and went immediately back to sleep. She slept fitfully until mid-afternoon, waking to find no missed calls from Stefan.