Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  Three minutes later she was standing in the ladies room, waiting for her elderly dining companion to finish on the loo. She’d been only too happy to volunteer for toilet attendant duties rather than endure another Nordic toast. Leaning back against the tiled wall, Luna studied herself in the mirror, picking at a hangnail. At that moment, the door swung open and Astrid came reeling in.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t see you, making your escape,’ she chortled accusingly. Luna raised her finger to her lips, pointing to the toilet stall, and Astrid shouted, ‘Hej, Olga!’

  ‘Ah, hej, Astrid,’ came the octogenarian’s reply from the stall.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Astrid said. ‘She speaks no English. So, nice Christmas?’ She made a gargling, vomiting noise and Luna let out a loud guffaw, her laughter reflex finally getting the better of her.

  By rights, she should hate Astrid Hagström. Stefan’s former girlfriend was a walking advertisement for Swedish femininity, unaffected and beautiful in a completely natural way, down to her braided dark blonde hair and the scattering of freckles on her nose. But Astrid’s devilish sense of humour made her impossible to dislike.

  ‘Oh my God, what must you think of us Swedes, with our boring toasts and our awful food,’ she was moaning, running her hands under the washbasin tap.

  ‘This place is…’ Luna trailed off.

  ‘Overpriced? Up itself?’ Astrid suggested, drying her hands on a cloth. ‘I hate this restaurant. Especially the maître d’, that pompous ass. I don’t know why Karoline insists on coming here every year.’

  ‘Do you—?’ Luna hesitated, suddenly shy. ‘Do you think I’m dressed appropriately?’

  Astrid turned away from the sink and cocked her head at Luna quizzically.

  ‘For this type of event, I mean,’ Luna stumbled on. ‘Only I…’

  Astrid understood then. Placing one hand on Luna’s, she gestured toward her own ensemble of short silver smock dress teamed with ultra-sheer tights and ankle boots. ‘She hated me, too,’ she said simply.

  ‘No,’ Luna shook her head. ‘She thinks you’re wonderful. She talks about you all the time.’

  ‘Now she does,’ Astrid shrugged, as inside Olga’s stall, the toilet finally flushed.

  The three women exited the ladies shortly thereafter to find Stefan and Karoline in the corridor outside the private dining room, embroiled in an intense conversation with a server and the maître d’. This seemed to happen every time they ate there. Karoline would find fault with something – the food, the wine, the attentiveness of the service – become agitated, and expect Stefan to sort it out. Even now, Luna could see him playing peacemaker, quietly mediating towards a resolution.

  Astrid saw her watching the stand-off and muttered under her breath, ‘Leave them to it.’ To her slight shame, Luna did just that, allowing herself to be led back into the dining room, where the tables were being cleared for dessert whilst several guests took a quick fag break outside. Astrid came with Luna and Olga back to their table, bending down quickly to whisper in Olga’s daughter’s ear. Whatever she said caused the redhead to perk up and immediately prance off toward the main table, whereupon Astrid sat down in her chair, grinning conspiratorially at Luna. A waiter approached, attempting to remove the half-drunk bottle of red from the table and Astrid hissed at him, waving him on his way.

  The evening rapidly improved after that. Mika and Matthias drew their chairs over to join them and Matthias ordered a round of aquavit for the table. A fussy-looking dessert made of marzipan, cream and fruit appeared, rounding off Luna’s inedible evening, and she reverted to her usual role of quiet observer, watching as Astrid teased Matthias and Mika worked his Finnish charm on Olga. Even the redhead’s husband started to relax in her absence, loosening his tie and ordering a second round of aquavit.

  Eventually, Luna glanced toward the top table, where Karoline had returned and was holding court with three members of her inner circle, twittering in that animated way of hers. Luna could hear her even from this distance, and marvelled idly at how completely different Karoline’s accent sounded from Stefan’s and Sören’s. Whereas Stefan speaking his native language sounded like a babbling brook, his mother’s elongated vowels and over-pronunciation of certain consonants were like little thrusts of a dagger.

  Then, just as Luna was about to look away, Karoline leant toward one of her friends, whispering into her ear. Impossible to know what she’d said; some offhand comment about the woman’s appearance, Luna suspected, because her friend quickly looked down at her blouse and blanched, then flushed. Her message delivered, Karoline shifted in her chair, focusing her attention on the two other women as her friend sat pale and pinched beside her. Something murky stirred within Luna. Transfixed, she literally couldn’t take her eyes off the tableau in front of her.

  ‘Everything okay?’ came a familiar voice next to her ear, and Luna jumped in her seat, then smiled up at Stefan.

  ‘All good,’ she assured him. ‘Everything okay with your mum?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, and filched her aquavit, downing it in one like a man who sorely needed a drink. Smile broadening, Luna tilted her head backward and Stefan took the opportunity to bend down and plant a kiss on her lips. A quick peck was what he probably intended, but Luna furtively slid her tongue into his mouth and the kiss lengthened until a noise of mocking protest rose up from the table, the Nordic equivalent of get a room.

  ‘Later,’ Stefan promised Luna in a whisper, and sauntered back toward the main table. She watched him as he went, eyes travelling from his broad shoulders encased in her favourite, perfectly tailored slate-grey blazer down to his delectable arse clad in matching trousers. Luna’s lips had just begun to curve in appreciation when her gaze intersected fleetingly with Karoline’s, also watching her son’s approach intently, unsmilingly.

  Stefan came and sat next to his mother, reaching to top up her wine glass, ever the good son, and Karoline stood, rapping her dessert spoon against her glass. The hum in the room receded as she began to speak.

  ‘This has been a year of many blessings,’ Karoline said, smiling brightly, gesturing in Luna’s direction. ‘First, my son finds a wonderful fiancée, who has brought him so much happiness.’ There was a scattering of applause at this, clearly insufficient to Astrid, who thumped the table with her fist and shouted, ‘To Luna!’

  Mika raised his glass and repeated, ‘To Luna!’ chinking it with Olga’s as the toast echoed around the room and Luna sunk slightly in her chair.

  ‘I too,’ Karoline’s voice rang out, cutting through the rising levity in the restaurant, silencing it. ‘I too,’ she repeated as eyes returned to her, ‘have been blessed with love this year.’ She paused, looking down at Stefan fondly. ‘And I know that my pojkvän wants nothing more than to welcome you as a son.’ Luna gasped. Did Karoline have any idea of what she was saying? Stefan’s face turned to stone as his mother went on to enumerate Viktor Putinov’s many wondrous paternal qualities, her murder of crows all smiling and nodding as if it were entirely acceptable for her to suggest that his father could be replaced by this man.

  ‘Although he could not be here with us tonight,’ Karoline said, placing her hand on her chest, ‘nothing I could say would stop Viktor from paying for our meal, so really it is he who is your host tonight. He specifically asked me to say that he looks forward to hosting many more such gatherings, coming to know you all, making what is mine his…’

  Wishing that someone, anyone, would shut Karoline Lundgren up, Luna glanced haplessly around her own table, to find Mika staring at her. His face gave nothing away, but his eyes flicked from her to Stefan and back. Abruptly he raised his fist and brought it crashing down onto the table.

  ‘To love!’ he yelled.

  Matthias and Astrid jumped to their feet and raised their glasses. ‘To love!’ they chimed. Then suddenly everyone was standing and drinking, and the toast from hell was fi
nally over. Throwing a quick, grateful look at Mika, Luna focused her attention on Stefan, who was stiffly holding his mother’s chair for her as she sat back down. Karoline Lundgren looked up at her son and curled a finger to him, wordlessly commanding him to lower his head to hers. His head came down and Luna watched in horrified fascination as Karoline murmured into Stefan’s ear and his lips thinned, a vein pulsing in his temple.

  The strange, murky feeling from a few moments earlier returned, magnified by a thousand. It swelled in Luna’s breast, rising up into her throat, threatening to choke her. She found herself on her feet, walking across the room toward the main table. They looked up at her as she approached, mother and son, and she said the first thing that came into her head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m feeling a little off.’

  Three minutes and thirty-five seconds later, she was sitting on a bench in the square outside the restaurant, where Stefan had settled her before going back inside to retrieve their coats. One minute and fifteen seconds after that, he emerged wearing his full-length black wool Lundgren coat, and helped her into her parka. And then they were walking away, Luna gripping Stefan’s hand, Astrid and the Salonens walking behind them.

  ‘Better now, in the fresh air?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Luna nodded. ‘But… I’m hungry.’

  *

  Stefan and the Salonens prevailed upon Astrid to open her restaurant for them, sneaking like thieves in the night into its stone cellar, cajoling her to whip up a late-night snack. The restaurant, in which Stefan was an investor, had opened just over a year ago and it was everything the night’s previous venue was not: welcoming, unpretentious, and hugely popular with Stockholm’s younger clientele.

  Indeed, seeing the lights on through the small, ceiling-level windows that overlooked the outside pavement, several local regulars had already squatted down to look inside, gesturing to Astrid. Open? Are you open? Till she finally switched off the lights, and lit candles on the table.

  She brought a tray of beers for the men and a salad for Luna made up of various fresh herb leaves, topped with feta cheese and toasted walnuts, with a slice of fresh cardamom bread on the side.

  ‘This is just what I wanted,’ Luna salivated, immediately tucking in.

  ‘I’m texting Dagmar,’ Mika announced, and minutes later Luna’s former boss, who lived in the apartment building next door, descended the cellar steps. Luna immediately leapt up from her seat, throwing her arms around the lanky redhead, and they spent the next hour reminiscing about their shared time in the Shetlands and chatting about work at Lundgren’s, the upscale men’s clothing store owned by Stefan’s father where Dagmar was now head of the design team.

  When Dagmar heard where Luna had been that evening, she rolled her eyes in that characteristic way of hers, glancing down the table at Stefan, who was deep in conversation with the Salonens. ‘Almost I feel sorry for him, with Karoline for a mother,’ she said grimly.

  After, Luna and Stefan walked back through Södermalm, down empty streets lined by apartment buildings, cafés and arty boutiques. Despite the neighbourhood’s bohemian reputation, it was surprisingly quiet at night. Ever polite in the best, most Swedish way possible, even late-night bars turned down their music to avoid disturbing their neighbours.

  ‘Feeling better?’ Stefan eventually asked.

  ‘Much better,’ Luna said, and hesitated. ‘I hope we didn’t upset your mother, leaving early.’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about my mother,’ he rejoined swiftly and finally, like a door slamming shut. And again, Luna felt a strange, unnameable emotion rising inside her.

  ‘I—’ she broke off, chest suddenly straining, hands clenched within her mittens. Too much. For the first time in a very long time, she forced herself to picture her mother’s apothecary chest, imagined placing something dark and cold and ugly into it, shutting the drawer. She exhaled silently and changed tack. ‘I really like Astrid.’

  ‘Do you?’ She heard the smile in Stefan’s voice, felt the air around them begin to clear. ‘I’m glad. She likes you too.’ He reached for her hand and squeezed it, then tucked it under his arm, pulling her closer to him.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ Luna observed, adding cheekily, ‘I can see why you and Dagmar were willing to share her.’

  A mock huff from Stefan and a quick bump against her shoulder. ‘You are never going to let me live that down, are you?’

  ‘Come on now,’ Luna laughed. ‘You’re saying that if I told you about a threesome I had back in my salad days, you wouldn’t give me a little stick about it?’

  A moment’s silence. Then, ‘Have you?’

  ‘No!’ she lamented. ‘And frankly, I’m feeling a little deprived.’ They hopped over a pile of frozen slush and turned onto Sören and Christian’s quiet street overlooked by Sofia Church, glowing on the hillside above.

  ‘And if I told you that experiences like that, threesomes, sex clubs, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be?’ he asked.

  Luna opened her mouth to reply, then replayed his words in her head. ‘You’ve been to sex clubs?’ she squeaked.

  ‘One sex club, yes,’ he confirmed. ‘I had a friend who was a member of such a club and I was curious, so I went with him once a few years ago. Before I met you, of course.’

  A torrent of questions flooded into Luna’s mouth and she quickly swallowed them, sensing that the wrong reaction from her could shut this conversation down entirely, and she definitely didn’t want that to happen. But he seemed to be awaiting her response, so she ventured, ‘And you…’

  ‘…didn’t stay for long,’ he supplied. ‘It wasn’t for me. These places, these experiences, they sound exciting when you hear about them. Not so much when you brighten the room.’

  Luna shook her head, not understanding him.

  ‘If you imagine the room with the lights turned all the way up,’ he clarified. ‘I looked around that club, which seemed so forbidden and mysterious, but I think with the lights turned up all I’d have seen was men watching women like animals, waiting for their opportunity to pounce. And one too many women who were sorry they’d come, wishing they were anyplace else but there.’

  They passed under a streetlamp, almost to Sören’s house now. ‘A lot of things look worse with the lights turned up, I have found,’ he concluded. ‘Whereas you, who I have made love to at night, in the morning, in the bright light of afternoon… you are always beautiful. The things we do together, too, all beautiful, no matter how bright the light.’

  His tone was easy, matter of fact, but his words… Luna quickened her step and swivelled to face him, stopping him in his tracks there on the freezing path outside his father’s house. ‘You are very wise, Herr Lundgren,’ she said, raising her mittened hands to his cheeks and smiling up at him.

  ‘I am,’ he nodded, abruptly reaching down and planting his hands on her arse, hoisting her up against him, carrying her into the house. Once inside, he leant back against the door and Luna tightened her legs around him, slowly removing her mittens. She ran her fingers over the planes of his cheeks, then bent down to kiss them, first one, then the other. Then kissed his forehead.

  ‘I am very lucky,’ she whispered, and buried her head in his neck. She thought, then, that she could feel someone watching them in the darkened hallway. But when Stefan carried her in that direction a few moments later, there was no one there.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘See, through the gap in the trees? That light?’ Luna was standing next to Tilly and Megan on the stone stairwell leading up to the attic. ‘That’s what Robert would have seen, five hundred years ago.’

  ‘A security light?’ Mika enquired sceptically from behind them.

  ‘Or do you mean that jet on approach to Heathrow?’ said Stefan.

  Luna turned and pursed her lips at the two of them. ‘Pay no attention to these comedians,’ she said astringently. ‘They know absolu
tely nothing about romance.’

  The girls giggled, then screeched with laughter as Mika placed a hand on his chest and staggered backward, gasping, ‘Cut to the quick.’

  ‘No,’ Stefan confirmed. ‘Mika and I are not romantics. But I know someone who is. Back when I was courting Miss Gregory, she used to stand for hours on end at this very window, hoping to catch a glimpse of me on the horizon.’

  ‘Did you?’ Tilly asked, eyes shining up at Luna.

  Luna shook her head. ‘Never.’

  An early January Saturday night, and the Waverley girls’ inaugural overnight visit was going well. After a slightly awkward handover from their father Mark that afternoon, Luna and Stefan had walked with them over to the Dower House to look at where Margery’s casket had been discovered. To Luna’s relief, Stefan had been his usual good-natured self, teasing and joking with the girls. Mika, too, was on good form when he joined them later at the main house.

  It was a revelation for Luna, seeing the girls on their own rather than through the prism of their mother. Megan, it transpired, was quite the budding scholar, well versed in Arborage’s history. And little Tilly turned out to be a starry-eyed romantic through and through, utterly charmed by the story of the 6th Marquess wooing his wife.

  ‘If Robert loved Margery so much,’ she asked as the five of them descended the stairs back down to the family quarters, ‘why did he make her live in the Dower House?’

  ‘Ah,’ Luna replied. ‘That, we don’t know. All we know is that the two of them fell out and lived apart for a long time, until the night Margery lit that candle.’

  It didn’t escape Luna, when they sat down for dinner in the family dining room amid mahogany furniture, pastoral artwork and genteelly faded wallpaper, that the girls seemed more at home in the family suite than she did. They’d spent much of their young lives here, after all, whereas she still viewed this as the heart of Lady Wellstone’s domain. True, since Mika had moved in they used the kitchen more often – she and he had breakfast there most mornings after Stefan had headed off to work in London – but she still felt ill at ease in the heart of the Wellstones’ domain.