Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (30 page)

‘Yes, he was extremely talented,’ Luna said.

Her grandmother appeared not to hear her, for she repeated, ‘“Such a shame, and you his mother, with nothing left of him. Nothing to show for all those years of keeping him fed and clothed, schooled.”’

‘You have your memories,’ Luna said. ‘As have I.’

‘Yes!’ her grandmother cried eagerly, leaning forward in her chair. ‘But you have
more
than just memories, don’t you?’

Luna sighed and placed her teacup and saucer on the table. She could almost feel the waves of confusion rolling off Stefan at this extraordinary exchange. But she couldn’t think of him, not now.

‘He would not have wanted his mother, his poor mother left with so little, while his selfish daughter lives like a princess,’ her grandmother was saying.

Luna looked down at her cotton sundress and cardigan, then around the room. ‘You appear to be doing well enough.’

‘You are just like her,’ Marika Gregory seethed. ‘Just like that silly, empty girl who stole my Lukas away from me. That selfish, stupid girl…’

She faltered then, realising too late that she had overplayed her hand. For as Marika’s final words escaped her lips Luna stood in a rush, her knees slamming into the coffee table, causing the glass cups and teapot to chime against each other.

‘Enough,’ she said icily. ‘You will not speak of my mother.’

Looking up at her, Stefan quickly deposited his teacup on the table and made to rise. Immediately the balance of power in the room shifted. Her grandmother lifted her hand, waving it to them, urging them to sit.

‘This thing you’ve found,’ Luna said, her patience exhausted. ‘Show it to me.’

Her grandmother made to balk, but as her pale blue eyes connected with Luna’s own, she seemed to recognise that she’d lost this round. Standing, she went to the next room. Stefan turned to Luna on the settee, his expression incredulous, but she held up a finger to him.
Later.
Marika Gregory was down but she wasn’t out, not yet.

Her grandmother returned a moment later carrying a small rosewood apothecary chest. Luna’s heart leapt at the sight of it and she struggled to keep the expression on her face blank, disinterested. Reseating herself on her throne, the older woman settled the chest on her lap, turning it around for Luna to see. Four large drawers at the bottom, six smaller ones in the middle, and eight tiny ones at the top.

‘Yes, that’s my mother’s,’ Luna said, cursing the slight tremble in her voice, which her grandmother heard and which caused her to tighten her grip on the chest.

‘You are
sure
?’ Marika asked, her tone climbing precipitously at the end of the sentence, like she was talking to a confused child. Luna felt Stefan’s body grow tight next to hers as he began to understand the game that was being played here.

She placed a brief, reassuring hand on his arm and said, ‘I’m sure.’ And rose again, coming to stand in front of her grandmother’s chair. She held her hands out and for a brief moment, Marika looked almost ready to climb up off the mat. But then, reluctantly, she handed the chest to Luna. Who looked at Stefan, motioning her head toward the front door. They moved swiftly, in tandem, Marika following behind. Stefan opened the door and stood against it for Luna, who turned to look at her grandmother.

‘This is the last time you’ll see me,’ she said gravely. ‘Don’t bother contacting Mr Noakes again. I won’t come.’

And then she saw despair in her grandmother’s eyes. Despair and rage. That her luck had finally run out, and Luna had gotten the thing, the
only
thing, she’d ever wanted from her.

*

‘If she’d given me this the first time she made me go there, I’d have stopped the visits then,’ Luna said later, sitting on their bed at the apartment, the chest resting on her lap. ‘But she didn’t know that, thank God, or I’d never have gotten it back.’

‘How many times have you visited her?’ Stefan asked.

‘Six? Seven? Once every year or two,’ Luna replied absently. Stefan came toward her and placed his hands over hers, gently unlocking her fingers, which were white against the chest, and placing it on the dressing table. He returned and sat on the edge of the bed, taking her cold hands in his.

‘I promised you once that I would never press you on the matter of your parents,’ he said, eyes gentle upon her, ‘and I will honour that promise, no matter what. But, Luna, I want to
know
you.’

Luna looked down at their entwined hands, and his ring, back on the third finger of her left hand.

‘She asked for an open casket, at my father’s funeral…’ she began.

Devastation. That was the word that best captured twelve-year-old Stellaluna Gregory’s mindset on the day of her father’s funeral, hastily arranged in a small church just outside of Newbury.

Complete and utter devastation, a never-ending vista of scorched earth that snuffed out all other emotions. Sadness, anger, love… even any curiosity she might have felt at seeing her grandmother for the first time, sitting ramrod straight in the front pew a few feet away from her son’s casket.

The funeral director had done his best with Lukas Gregory, though Luna later learned that he’d strongly advised against the open casket. Her father had fallen in front of a train, after all, sustaining massive injuries that were difficult to conceal, even using all his mortician’s skill. But Marika Gregory had been insistent. She wanted to see her boy, one last time.

So the sight of her father looking nothing like himself, like a grim, plasticine parody of the man he’d been, only added to his daughter’s devastation.

Her grandmother, this woman she didn’t know, insisted on Luna sitting next to her, holding her hand throughout the brief service. Again, at the time, Luna was too far gone to care what she did, what happened to her. She only vaguely took in the presence of many of her father’s musical friends, and completely missed Rafe Davies, who confirmed years later that he had been in attendance, his downturned, sad eyes going even sadder at the memory of the little girl in the front pew.

Her grandmother disappeared immediately after the service, having exchanged not a single word with her. Though Marika Gregory did speak at some length with Luna’s headmistress, who at the time must have been grateful to discover that there was some family, someone to take charge of this wordless, devastated twelve-year-old.

Luna could only speculate on how that gratitude must have grown into desperate thankfulness, after her student returned to St Catherine’s and promptly despatched the counsellor assigned to help her ‘process her grief’ with a carefully placed, icy stiletto during their fourth session together. And refused to continue attending daily services in the school chapel, offering no explanation other than, ‘No, I don’t see the point.’

Her grandmother was working behind the scenes throughout this time, however, cleaning out her parents’ rented house, stripping it of everything of value. She phoned the school when she was finished, asking them to send Luna to collect her things.

The house was empty when Luna arrived in her headmistress’s car, the two of them walking inside to find all the furniture gone, her parents’ bedroom shorn of all her father’s and, more heart-rendingly, her mother’s things: the apothecary chest, Emily’s clothes and make-up, which Lukas Gregory had left untouched since her death and which Luna regularly, in the months after losing her, would sneak into the bedroom to touch and smell. All of it gone. Just a tiny pile of Luna’s clothes on the floor of her own bedroom.

Luna looked at her headmistress then, standing in that house, and waited for her to see what she saw, that Luna’s life had been stolen, every tangible piece of evidence that she’d once had a family, a mother who loved her and a father… but her headmistress looked away and Luna caught a brief glimpse of the fear in her eyes. Fear of a little girl’s unforgiving gaze.

She fought tooth and nail that autumn, when her headmistress called her into her office to say her grandmother wanted Luna to spend the mid-term break with her in Manchester. Much as she had done prior to her ill-fated sessions with the school counsellor, Luna told her headmistress that no good would come of it; she’d seen as much as she wanted to of Marika Gregory.

Luna did not prevail, not on this occasion. They packed her off on a train to Manchester with just enough money for a taxi from the station to her grandmother’s house, where she arrived late on a sunny October afternoon to find her grandmother working in the front garden, a straw hat perched on her head and garden shears in her hand, tending her autumn blooms.

It was completely unexpected, this woman with Luna’s eyes and her hair, at that time with only hints of grey in it, standing in the garden lavishing attention on her flowers. Like the witch in
The Snow Queen
, another story Luna’s mother had read to her often when she was small, who lured unsuspecting Gerda into her garden because she wanted a little girl of her own. Luna was taken off guard, and a small, brief flame of hope blazed within her, that perhaps she had misjudged her grandmother.

That flame was extinguished almost the moment they entered the house, the chemical odour of mothballs flooding Luna’s nostrils. Her grandmother had many valuable wool rugs and tapestries, she was told. The mothballs were to protect them. Many valuable things, too, which Luna wasn’t to touch. Instead, Marika led her up to her father’s old room – also, heartbreakingly, denuded of every last clue that he had ever lived there – and told her to stay there until she was called. So Luna sat down on the single bed, on the musty wool blanket that was to leave her covered in hives by the following morning.

Her grandmother called her down to dinner later, to a meal of some bitter-tasting soup and hard black bread, followed by a surprisingly delicious cherry trifle, Marika Gregory’s only apparent weakness being a sweet tooth.

Her previously uncommunicative grandmother talked throughout the meal, first of Luna’s father and what a talented boy he’d been, a clever boy, a good boy, all of it wasted now. And then of her mother; bitter, ugly words about the nineteen-year-old girl she’d met only once, but for whom she had nursed a roiling, monumental hatred in the intervening years.

And finally of Luna, this child for whom she was suddenly responsible, this burden upon an old woman. So much responsibility, so many legal problems, with Lukas Gregory having died intestate. So many matters for a simple woman like her to sort out. It was lucky, she remarked in passing, that there was some income from his estate for her to draw on, royalties from his music.

‘Not enough, of course,’ Marika said with a sour glance at Luna. ‘Nowhere near enough.’

It was her grandmother’s words about her mother that stayed with Luna that night, after she’d gone back up to her father’s bedroom. All the rest, about her father and herself, well, perhaps it was true. That he had squandered his potential, leaving behind a burden for his long-suffering mother. But Luna’s mother, she wasn’t what that evil witch said. Only a sick mind or a senile one could think such wicked things about Emily Gregory.

She made her plans that night, plans for escape. After Marika woke early the next morning and repaired to the bathroom for her morning ablutions, Luna rose from her father’s bed, fully dressed, and went quickly to her grandmother’s bedroom, rifling through drawers, peering under her bed.

She found her mother’s diamond earrings in a small tray on top of the dresser, and one of her silk scarves hanging in the wardrobe. Her father’s beloved Yamaha Xeno trumpet was under the bed, still in its case, and his gold wedding band was out in plain sight on the bedside table.

There was more, Luna knew it, but no time, no time to find it. She quickly shoved what she could into her bag, listening all the while to the sound of water running in the bathroom next door. When the sound stopped she grabbed her bag and her father’s trumpet case and ran down the stairs, struggling with the three locks on the front door before escaping onto Chorlton’s streets.

She hadn’t thought everything through, unfortunately. She had no money. No mobile phone. She managed, with difficulty, to make her way to Manchester Piccadilly train station, where the guard proved to be like every other adult Luna had dealt with in the past few months, refusing to see the desperate girl in front of him, pointing again and again at the fixed return date on her ticket, five days hence.

‘When I finally got back to school, my headmistress hauled me into her office and told me she’d had my grandmother on the phone saying I’d robbed her and run away after one night. But that she forgave me, and she was still willing to take me in again, come Christmas term break.’

Luna was sitting next to Stefan on the bed, relating all this in a detached, unemotional tone, though a trickle of acid crept into her voice at this last revelation.

Stefan, meanwhile, was finding it difficult to listen in silence.

‘Please tell me you didn’t go,’ he burst out. ‘Tell me that bitch of a headmistress didn’t make you go back.’

Luna blinked at him in mild surprise. ‘She wasn’t a bitch. Not really. She just didn’t know how to deal with me. And when I think of what I put her through, after that, the problem student I became…’ She smiled. ‘No, I didn’t go back at Christmas. I explained my position to her in a way she understood this time.’

They were quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘Five days.’

‘Yes,’ Luna said, her expression clearly indicating that this was a matter she would discuss no further with him. That some drawers would remain shut.

Stefan reached for her hand, twisting her engagement ring around her finger. ‘Luna, your grandmother mentioned an advertisement of your father’s.’ He hesitated, adding earnestly, ‘I’ve made a point of not googling him or anything, since I promised I would wait for you to tell me.’

Luna gave his hand a squeeze and leant into him briefly, entirely unsurprised that he would behave this way, honouring both the letter and spirit of his promise to her. She hopped off the bed and retrieved her tablet from her backpack, quietly revelling in the way his jaw dropped when she brought up Rafe Davies’ car ad.

‘Your
father
wrote this song? This is him singing?’ Stefan said in amazement.

She explained to him briefly about the legal steps she had undertaken to sever herself from her grandmother, and about her meeting with Rafe in Mr Noakes’s office earlier that year.

‘He was sweet,’ she recalled, relating Rafe’s desire to get her blessing to use her father’s song. ‘I tried to tell him that it wasn’t for me to give permission, that my father and I didn’t have that kind of relationship… and then he showed me this.’

She pulled up another video titled ‘Lukas Gregory – Rare Live Gig’. The notes beneath it indicated it had been shot on a cold February night at the Cat in Hackney, the club where her father sometimes performed. Luna herself had almost no recollection of this night, though she’d been there, sitting in a chair at the side of the stage. Equally, she couldn’t remember a young Rafe Davies standing on the opposite side, recording all of this on a handheld camera.

Luna forwarded the clip to around the nine-minute mark and pressed play. The footage showed her father between songs, joking with his bassist, then briefly looking offstage as he removed the capo from his acoustic guitar.

‘I need some help for this one,’ he said with a smile. His fellow musicians started to laugh and gesture, someone bringing up a chair. A girl with waist-length dark brown hair walked over to the chair, her eyes trained on Lukas.

Stefan sat up straight then and grabbed the tablet away from her, looking more closely. ‘This is you!’ he exclaimed excitedly as, in the footage, Lukas leant down to his daughter and briefly spoke with her. ‘Oh, Luna,’ Stefan said wonderingly, ‘you are so small.’

Twelve-year-old on-screen Luna, undersized for her age, didn’t need much instruction from Lukas. She knew her father’s music best of anyone on that stage, though he rarely performed the song he was about to play.

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.