The Mistress
“How did she get here?”
“Marie-Laure got into Eleanor’s email somehow. Laila and Eleanor email each other all the time. Laila thought Eleanor was bringing her to the States to surprise me. Nasty surprise.”
“That poor girl. Is she all right?”
“She will be. I made her call her mother and tell her she was visiting me. Laila refuses to go back until we find Nora, and I don’t have the heart to make her. Laila...she’s worked at a veterinary clinic after school every day for four years. My sister, Freyja, is very well-off.” He smiled faintly and swallowed hard. Grace wanted to touch him for comfort but pulled her hand back at the last moment. “So Laila doesn’t have to work. She was out walking one day and found a dog on the side of the road. He’d been hit by a car. That fourteen-year-old girl picked him up and carried him into town to the vet’s office. That’s how she got the after-school job. Because when the vet asked her why she’d carried this stray mutt so far Laila said that not even a dog deserved to die alone.”
“My God, what a beautiful heart she has.” No doubt Laila was distraught at this very moment, worried her own aunt might die alone.
“She does. She takes after my mother in more than her appearance. My mother survived a great deal of trauma and tragedy and went on to have a happy life.”
“Is she still alive?” Grace asked before she let her mind wander any farther down any path that ended at Søren’s mouth.
“No. She died a few years ago.”
“You loved her very much. I can tell.” His eyes softened when he spoke of her. She rather liked seeing that.
“I did. She...” He paused and closed the locket. “It’s a long, ugly story. I won’t bore you with it.”
Grace nearly laughed at that.
“You couldn’t bore me if you read me the phone book. Talk to me. I’d rather hear your words than the thoughts in my head.”
He nodded sympathetically. He must have felt the same. Better to talk of anything except what was happening right now.
“My mother came to America on a music scholarship and took a job with my father and his wife as an au pair for my half sister Elizabeth.”
“And he fell in love with her?”
“No. He raped her.”
Grace covered her mouth with her hand.
“My father was a bitter man. A penniless English baron of all things.”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite. His father squandered the family fortune. He came to America and leveraged his title to marry wealth. He tried to recapture the glory he thought should have been his. He made everyone call him Lord Stearns.”
“I live in England where we still have a peerage, and I can’t even imagine growing up in such an environment.”
“He was an evil man, my father. Highly manipulative, charming. He commanded respect wherever he went. No one would cross him. No one would dare. They had no idea what kind of person he was.”
“But you knew.”
“I knew.” He tightened his fingers around the locket. “I knew my mother feared him. I learned to fear him, too. Most mothers tucking their children in tell them bedtime stories. My mother recited her full name and address back in Copenhagen to me every night. That was my bedtime story. Her name, her address, her father’s name, names of relatives. Gisela Magnussen, datter af Søren Niels Magnussen, 23 Halfdansgade 2300 København S....”
Søren closed his eyes as he recited his mother’s bedtime story to him. Grace stopped breathing as his voice dropped to a whisper. She saw the girl, only eighteen, pale hair, gray eyes, sitting on the edge of a small boy’s bed. She watched the young, scared mother bring the covers to his chin as she whispered to him in a language no one else in the house spoke. Did she tell her young son why she made him learn names and addresses by rote? Or did she make a child’s game of it?
“Every night she told me the same story. Every night I had to repeat it all back to her. She knew it was only a matter of time before he shipped me off to school and tired of her.”
“She feared you two would be separated?”
“She thought he would kill her.”
Søren met Grace’s eyes a moment before looking away again.
“Instead, he simply let her go and moved on to a new victim.”
“My God, what your mother must have suffered....”
“It’s unbearable to think about. She loved us, my half sister Elizabeth and me. That’s why she stayed and didn’t leave, didn’t run away. Love kept her a prisoner in that house. Love for me.”
“Were you separated?”
“When I was five. He sent me to an English boarding school. My mother was summarily dismissed and returned to Denmark. She married and had my other half sister Freyja. I didn’t see her again or meet my half sister until I was eighteen.”
“What was it like when you saw her again?”
He paused and seemed to ponder the question.
“I can only answer your question by saying that I hope heaven is full of half the joy our hearts were that day. Even now that she’s gone, I still hear the echoes of that joy, still feel the aftershocks.”
Grace’s throat tightened.
“I can’t even imagine.” Grace thought of the child she once carried. A child never meant to be and yet still a small part of her grieved for what could have been. “What she must have felt losing you and then finding you again....”