by Jagger, Kait
‘You think I don’t know what this is about, flicka?’ came Stefan’s calm, gentle, rational voice. ‘You think I don’t know why you’d rather shut yourself away on Christmas, and Valentine’s Day, and your birthday? But your wedding isn’t just another celebration they won’t be here for. It’s a day for you and me. For our family.’
With that, he stepped out of the Land Rover, shut the door, and walked into the portico.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Luna stayed where she was for some time, staring at the scan image, considering his words. Like an arrow to the heart, they were. Was she being selfish? Putting her past ahead of their future?
She went to neither the office nor their attic rooms when she finally entered the house, but instead to the ticket office. She knew it was becoming an obsession of hers, checking sales for the Robert and Margery exhibit, but she needed a little mental comfort food right now. She believed she could count this among her successes, when the Marchioness came to chair her first board meeting next month. Ticket sales so far justified her decision to charge a supplementary entry fee, and once Roland’s book came out…
After, she walked along the carpeted corridor through the main state rooms and music room, into the portrait gallery. There was a student group visiting, teenage girls and boys from the local comprehensive. A loud group, a bit boisterous, with only a month left till the summer break. Boys teasing, showing off. Clutches of girls standing together like juvenile witches’ covens, gossiping lazily, nodding and pointing to other, less fortunate girls. Oh, Luna knew this well…
‘Can her parents not afford new trainers?’
‘If she could see what she looks like in that skirt.’
‘It’s pathetic, really, the way she goes after him…’
It was like running the gauntlet, passing through a tunnel of sheer, unadulterated malice. The pure, unfiltered kind that only teenage females could produce. Luna kept moving, passing them by.
‘You better watch yourself when we get back to school, you little bitch.’
She slipped into the corridor beyond, to the concealed wood-panelled door leading to the hidden stone staircase. Behind her, she heard the sound of shrill laughter.
‘You think I can’t make life hard for you? You have No. Fucking. Idea.’
She shut the door behind her, took one step up the stairs. And remembered.
*
‘You better watch yourself when we get back to school, you little bitch,’ thirteen-year-old Isabelle Wellstone said threateningly.
Standing in the middle of the portrait gallery on a rainy spring afternoon, Isabelle loomed over Luna, exploiting all her two inches in height superiority. Behind her, four of her closest friends brought up the rear, cocking their heads spitefully at Luna, silently cheering Bella on. Out of the corner of Luna’s eye, she could see Jemima Evangeline hanging back, clearly wishing she was anywhere but there. Luna felt a fleeting moment of kinship with her. We’ve gotten ourselves into a right mess here, haven’t we? And promptly quashed it. This girl wasn’t her friend. None of them were.
Isabelle didn’t like being ignored. Tossing her ruthlessly straightened hair, she went on, ‘You think I can’t make life hard for you? You have No. Fucking. Idea.’
Really, Luna thought to herself, Isabelle was about as subtle as a brick. All this drama, all this hormonal rage for a boy with floppy hair, sickly skin and a collection of truly horrible woolly jumpers that made Luna itch just to look at them. But Isabelle fancied herself in love with him, this pathetic Swedish cousin of hers. Were they really actual cousins, Luna wondered, and if so, wasn’t there a law or something proscribing what Isabelle had in mind?
God, had Luna known how volcanically enraged Isabelle would become when she told Cousin Stefan to ‘fuck off back to Sweden’ during their hike the previous day, after he’d moaned for the umpteenth time about how wet and cold and backward England was… If she’d have known how quickly Isabelle would turn against her…
Luna smiled to herself. If she’d have known, she’d have done it all over again. Just to see the moment of horror on Bella’s face when her whole, cosy afternoon jaunt with Cousin Stefan fell apart. Again and again and again, for that one shining flash of excruciation. No point in denying it; that was what Luna lived for these days.
But now, stuck in the gallery, with Isabelle breathing her Tangfastic-laden breath all over her, Luna just wanted it over with. She wasn’t worried that Isabelle would hurt her. The Marchioness’s daughter wasn’t a fighter. She used words and the power of the bitch pack to achieve her aims. And Luna wasn’t overly concerned about the promised retribution back at St Catherine’s either, because she was a fighter, and if it came to it, she would take Isabelle down.
But she was tired of this, tired of having Isabelle invade her personal space, tired of listening to her bang on. So she let herself run cold, fixed her white-blue eyes on her lovelorn opponent, and said quietly, ‘But he still won’t love you, no matter what you do.’
Nothing but the truth. But it was all in the way of saying it. Luna watched in satisfaction as Bella’s face whitened, then flushed bright red. Isabelle opened her mouth before realising that she had no comeback, no cutting remark or bitchy insult to hurl at Luna. She had to settle, in the end, for spinning on her heel and storming out of the gallery with her followers in tow.
Jemima Evangeline, meanwhile, trailed slightly behind them, pausing briefly to look back. In answer, Luna curled her lip and made a flicking motion with her hand. Trot on, little pony. And then she was alone. She felt herself deflate, her shoulders sagging – always, it seemed, these little bursts of iciness came at a physical cost, a momentary diminution.
‘Shall I show you a secret?’ came a voice behind her, a wry lilt shot through with tiny slivers of steel. A voice, if Luna were honest, she had dreamed of one day being directed toward her. She turned to find Isabelle’s mother, Lady Wellstone, standing behind her, dressed entirely in black, still in mourning for her eldest, James, who had died in a boating accident the previous year. The Marchioness’s dark hair, like her voice, was punctuated with a wide swatch of silver emanating from her right temple. She was smiling, and it hurt, how much that smile affected Luna; like plunging a frostbitten hand into a bowl of lukewarm water.
It had been the Marchioness, Luna was sure, who had saved her from expulsion following her head-shaving rebellion. And she also suspected that Lady Wellstone was paying her school fees. Having discovered many of her parents’ valuables secreted away in her grandmother’s house, Luna doubted that her father’s mother would willingly part with any of the income from his music royalties. Not for her granddaughter, at least.
In Luna’s mind, Lady Wellstone was more than just her benefactor, however. When they’d first locked eyes with each other across a crowded playing field at St Catherine’s, Luna had felt a… connection. An electric shock of recognition. She wondered if Lady Wellstone felt the same.
If she did, Isabelle’s mother gave no sign of it, walking with Luna past the portraits on the wall of the gallery, telling her about all the illustrious Wellstones past. And Luna was content with that. Afterward, try as she might, she couldn’t remember many specifics from that tour. She was happy, quite frankly, just to bask in Lady Wellstone’s undivided attention. She remembered their subsequent conversation on the hidden staircase with absolute clarity, however.
The staircase had a smell about it, a tinge of dampness mixed with the potent perfume of age. Not the mouldering, antique-shop smell Luna had always loathed, but genuine antiquity, centuries’ old echoes of whispered secrets, foiled plots and hidden trysts. It was the one thing that made her envious of Isabelle, Luna thought to herself, listening to Lady Wellstone on the landing as she talked about her plans for renovating the house’s east wing and expanding the number of rooms open to the public. Isabelle always made it sound so boring, the mechanics of running a hist
oric home, but to Luna it was fascinating. She wished… she wished…
‘So, tell me, what are your favourite subjects at school?’ Lady Wellstone asked.
Blushing – yes, her, Stellaluna Gregory, blushing – to be the subject of the Marchioness’s scrutiny, Luna replied shyly, ‘History and English Literature.’
‘Ah, mine too, mine too,’ Lady Wellstone said with a gimlet-eyed smile. ‘What are you studying now in English?’
‘Paradise Lost.’
‘Milton! Oh, he was my absolute favourite, after Shakespeare. I always thought, and you must never repeat this at St Catherine’s,’ she said with a complicit look at Luna, ‘that Milton liked the devil rather more than he let on. I mean, honestly, he’s the most interesting character in the entire story. “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” You can see why Eve was tempted by that apple he offered her, can’t you?’
This was very much not what Luna’s teacher, a Jesuit priest, had to say about the character of Satan, but she nodded uncertainly.
‘And then there are Milton’s ideas about original sin,’ the Marchioness went on. ‘That mankind was created by God to be good, and they had to choose to sin. It always seemed a little unfair to me. A little cruel, as though God was setting them up to fail…
‘What do you think, Stellaluna?’ she asked then.
Luna started, trying to grasp the question she was being asked. Lady Wellstone wasn’t looking at her, but down through the metal grille toward the gallery below, the dim light from the gallery on the metalwork casting patterned shadows on her face. When Luna didn’t immediately answer, the Marchioness clarified, ‘Is man born naturally good, or naturally sinful?’
And then perhaps she realised that this was too big a question for a thirteen-year-old, for she supplied, ‘Me, I prefer to think that man is naturally bad. Or maybe naturally selfish is more the word. I think that men, and women of course, have to fight against their baser instincts all the time, that they have to aspire to be good. It’s the reason we have governments, and religion, and maybe even places like Arborage.’ She waved her hand around at the darkness of the stairwell. ‘Because of men aspiring to their better natures.’
Lady Wellstone turned, then, and came close, so close that Luna could feel her breath on her shorn, exposed scalp. ‘I know what it is,’ she whispered. ‘To find that the words from your mouth have the power to wound, the power to destroy. It’s an incredibly… compelling feeling. Addictive. But it’s lonely, too, being every bit as cruel as you would like to be. You lose people.’
And that was all. No sooner were those words out of her mouth than the Marchioness transformed back into the spritely, charming hostess she’d been before, as if their entire conversation had been a dream. They went back down the stairs and she directed Luna toward the staff canteen to get some hot chocolate, instructing her to ask for someone named Marta. And then she was gone, off to her office, to work.
But the conversation stayed with Luna. She played it over continuously in her mind for the rest of the day as she wandered around the house on her own. Was she capable of overcoming her ‘baser instincts’? It staggered her to even contemplate it; she honestly didn’t know any more if she had the capacity to be good.
Luna was so intent on avoiding Isabelle and her clique that at one point that afternoon, on hearing them coming down a corridor in the basement, laughing to each other, she quickly dived into an alcove. Only to find that it was already occupied by Cousin Stefan, looking painfully thin and sickly in a hideous patterned fisherman’s jumper. He also looked sheepish. Ah, he was hiding too, Luna realised.
They could have both stayed in the alcove, safely hidden. But Luna found that she wasn’t quite ready to start aspiring to her better nature. So instead she raised her arms, flexed her fingers into claws, and bared her teeth.
And snarled viciously at him.
That was enough for the Swedish boy, who blinked at her and swiftly exited the alcove. To meet his doom.
*
Luna showered again and changed into her work clothes before coming back downstairs; her blue, belted shirtwaist dress, a particular favourite of Stefan’s. Entering the office through the anteroom, she heard the sound of girlish chatter inside and smiled to find Megan and Tilly in their school uniforms sitting at the conference table, eating biscuits. Stefan, meanwhile, was sat behind her desk, talking on his mobile.
‘Hello, girls,’ Luna greeted, and helped herself to a biscuit. They chatted for a while, until Stefan finished his call and clapped his hands, whereupon the sisters ran giggling from the room. Luna stood up, brushing the crumbs from her dress, and took a deep breath.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m being stupid. Forgive me?’
In response, Stefan smiled his best smile and patted his knee.
‘You will like being married to me, Miss Gregory,’ he said when she came and sat on it, curling one set of fingers into his nape, and entwining the other set with his. ‘I promise.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Luna decided to wear her grey dress with the shawl collar the next day, her wedding day. The weather had turned cool overnight and her more summery dresses just didn’t seem appropriate. Stefan had made arrangements for the two of them to go to the register office in Southwark, not far from his apartment.
‘They told me there was a cancellation when I phoned yesterday, so I snapped it up,’ he said casually, when she asked.
Her hair had presented a difficulty, when she’d come to do her prenuptial toilette. The numbness in her right hand had improved, though Luna began to fear that it would never completely go away, a concern she had yet to broach with Stefan. Distressingly, the clumsiness in her fingers meant that styles that had once been simple for her to achieve with her waist-length hair were beyond her now. She settled for a sloppy bun.
Her shoes… well, it had to be the black Ferragamos, the heels she’d been wearing when she first met him, pedalling along the drive to the estate with bacon in the front basket of her bicycle like the Wicked Witch, pre-twister. Luna smiled in recollection, wondering how he’d ever seen past her prim façade to find his future wife.
He was waiting for her beside the Land Rover when she came down to the drive, holding a single pink Arborage rose still in bud. ‘I have been a naughty marquess,’ he admitted, ‘and stolen this straight from the formal gardens.’
She looked him up and down in his slate-grey suit, considered the possibility that maybe their outfits were a little matchy-matchy, and held out her hand for the car keys. ‘I’ll drive. You hold my rose.’
The traffic was terrible getting into London and Luna found herself becoming a little edgy. ‘What time do we have to be there?’ she asked, waving in a Peugeot that was trying to merge in front of her on the M4, frowning when the driver gave no acknowledgement. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said under her breath. ‘Honestly, that’s just rude.’
Stefan looked up from his phone, where he was tapping out a text, briefly reaching out to clasp her knee. ‘We have plenty of time, älskling. Relax.’
She got even more tense when, after crawling for several blocks along Peckham Road, she finally turned off onto the road the register office was located on to find the drive to the office cordoned off with yellow tape. ‘Has there been a…’ she slowed to allow a car coming the other way along the road through, ‘…murder here or something? I’m going to drive past, try and find a car park.’
‘No, it’s okay, flicka. Just pull up in front.’
‘But it’s all blocked off!’
Suddenly a grizzled man in a kilt stepped out into the road, lifting up a cone.
‘Hunh,’ Luna said. ‘He looks just like… that’s Magnus Petersen!’ She looked at Stefan and he lifted his hands as if to say well, imagine that! And then another man in a kilt appeared, lifted a second cone and waved her onto the drive. She drove past
him and he gave her a cherubic smile. ‘Malcolm Couper!’ she exclaimed. The penny dropped. ‘Stefan…’ she began.
She parked under the tall trees that shaded the front of the attractive eighteenth-century building. ‘Gentlemen!’ she laughed as she and Stefan exited the Land Rover. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, lass,’ Malcolm said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘We got a call from Stefan last night…’
‘Aye,’ Magnus said, adjusting his sporran. ‘Seein as du ar gettin’ wed, I t’ought I’d come fer de fyanna.’ Oh, she’d missed Magnus and his impenetrable Shetland dialect.
And then Sören and Christian emerged from the building dressed in morning suits, and Luna finally realised what all Stefan’s phone calls and non-stop texting for the past twenty-four hours had been about. Pursing her lips at him over the 4x4’s bonnet, she began, ‘You have been a naughty Mar—’
‘My roommate!’ came a raspy American accent behind her. Luna froze, meeting Stefan’s bright blue smiling eyes. He shook his head at her. Did you think I’d make you marry me without them? What kind of monster do you take me for? With that, she turned around on the cobbled forecourt and was immediately engulfed in her three friends’ embrace.
‘I got the call while I was, would you believe it, trying on wedding gowns with my sisters,’ Jem said a few minutes later in the building’s foyer, which featured graceful marble arches and greenery in antique urns. ‘Stefan said he’d finally convinced you to go through with the ceremony and he wanted to get it done before you changed your mind.’
‘Flew me first class all the way from Beijing,’ Nancy averred. ‘Tell you what, I’m ruined for economy now.’
‘Yeah, and God knows what Swedish House Mafia did to convince the three other couples who were supposed to be getting married here today to come another time,’ Kayla said with a nod toward Stefan, who was stood talking to Rafe Davies and Chris Ollason from Shetland. Jem, meanwhile, was checking her watch, jigging slightly on her feet. Kayla gave Luna a meaningful look and whispered, ‘He’s put his little general here in charge of getting you ready, so watch out.’
