Streaking (5 page)

“You mean the bet I placed?” he said. “Well, yes—it might be as well if you didn't mention that. Mummy would think better of me if she were allowed to assume that I came straight home rather than sitting down for one last dip on the roulette wheel. Stevie Larkin will probably be spreading the story all along the coast for the next six months, but Mummy leads a sheltered existence, so it won't get back to her any time soon if you and I keep quiet about it.”

“My lips are sealed,” she said.

He might have made a joke about lipstick, but he didn't. She was, after all, one of the ten most beautiful women in the world—and her best assets were perfectly natural.

CHAPTER SIX

Having been forewarned of his arrival, Bentley was waiting with his namesake at Church Fenton. The butler was chatting amiably to the drivers of the two hire-cars that were waiting to collect Lissa Lo's party and whisk her away to Harewood House; he watched the company disembark with an affected air of quiet amazement.

Customs and Immigration were less officious than usual, even though their people had been called out. Canny's bag was the one they elected to rummage through in search of illegal stimulants; he knew better than to joke about it, and simply stood patiently by until they had gone through the motions.

After the dry and artificial atmosphere of the plane the Yorkshire air seemed cool and fresh enough, but it wasn't moist and the sky was clear. The heat wave hadn't relented yet. Lissa and her entourage were already busy loading up their vehicles, and Lissa couldn't tear herself away to bid him a fond farewell. She did wave, though, and flashed him a smile as bright as any benign streak. Canny did his best to reciprocate.

“You were fortunate to obtain a lift, sir,” the butler observed, when Canny finally settled into the passenger seat beside him.

“Careful planning,” Canny said. “It's always best to have a supermodel and a private jet standing by, just in case one's cancerous father happens to take a sudden turn for the worse.”

“Of course it is, sir,” the butler agreed, effortlessly matching his sarcasm. “Is the lady an intimate friend?”

“That's not the kind of question loyal servants are supposed to ask,” Canny pointed out, “Even if they have known the young master since he was in nappies. I'll be the Earl of Credesdale soon enough—I might have to make some changes around here if I can't get the respect my position demands.”

“Yes sir,” Bentley said. “Would you like me to make out a list of suggestions, or should I leave all that to the village elders?”

“No—I'm relying on you to keep the village elders at bay. And no, she's not an intimate friend—but I
have
invited her to pop round tonight when she's finished her shoot. I don't know what time she'll arrive, and I'm not absolutely certain that she'll arrive at all, but I'm sure the staff can cope if and when she does.”

“The staff can cope, sir,” Bentley assured him. “It's your mother you have to worry about. And I hope you'll remember to tell your father that you don't know the lady intimately. He's not well enough to be allowed to jump to distressing conclusions.”

“I suppose he's instructed you and Mummy to draw up a list of eligible brides for me?”

“If only she and I had been able to do so, sir, it would doubtless have set his mind a little more at rest. Your mother and I have put our heads together but the county isn't what it was.”

Bentley had steered north towards Ulleskelf rather than west towards Barkston, but he had to swing left now towards Towton. The country was flat hereabouts, but now they were pointed in the right direction Canny could see the hills that shielded Cockayne in the distance, and the moors forming the horizon behind them.

“It's a bigger county than Daddy seems to think,” he assured the butler. “If it were necessary to go as far into the untracked wilderness of Bradford or York, it could be done without the aid of native trackers. Richmond might be difficult, though. I'm sorry he's been on at you. I suppose people of his antiquity are entitled to get bees in their bonnets, but they shouldn't used them to sting the people around them. It's my business, and I really don't know why he cares so much about something so ridiculously old-fashioned as
the succession
, but we'll just have to keep stalling.”

“It might make him feel better if you were prepared to pretend,” the butler suggested. “Or at least to make it clear to him, if Miss Lo does accept your invitation, that you were merely making polite reparation for her kind offer of assistance in returning home more speedily.”

“I'll do the second bit,” Canny promised, “but I'm not going to start spinning him a line abut some hypothetical Yorkshire lass I've got me eye on. Mind you, there's bound to be someone eligible in the village. There's a girl I was at primary school with—Ellen, the oldest of the Proffitt sisters, it was—who showed me her knickers once. She married Jack Ormondroyd, who runs the fish and chip shop and captains the cricket eleven. Her eldest daughter Marie must be sixteen going on seventeen now, just about ripe. Another four or five months and she'll be exactly half my age. She'd do, I dare say. Handsome family, the Proffitts. Maybe we ought to invite her up for tea.”

“The fact that a young lady's mother indulged in a little harmless exhibitionism when you were five years old is hardly a basis for lifelong commitment, sir,” Bentley observed, lowering his baritone voice a little further, “although I dare say that Mr. and Mrs. Ormondroyd would be very proud indeed to know that the gesture had enhanced their daughter's desirability.”

“Oh, stop pretending to be John Gielgud in that third-rate American movie,” Canny said. “It's bad enough when you come over all Jeeves-y, without taking it to silly extremes. Anyway, how is the old fart, apart from his neurotic anxieties about the succession?”

Bentley dropped his act immediately. “He's not good, sir,” he said. “The relapse took us all by surprise. He knew that the chemotherapy hadn't worked, apparently, but he gave firm instructions to Dr. Hale and the consultant at St. James's to say nothing, even to me. He decided that the power of positive thinking was his only hope. He was probably pushing himself a little too hard, pretending even to himself that if he only put on a good enough act he night actually get well again. When the illusion was punctured he went from one extreme to the other, although he has rallied a little in anticipation of your return. I'm sorry we had to call you back from your holiday.”

“It used to be a lifestyle,” Canny complained. “Now a trip to the Riviera only qualifies as a
holiday?
”

“Things have changed, sir,” Bentley said, meaning that Canny's lifestyle would have to change, whether Canny liked it or not. “Your mother really is going to need your support—the staff can only do so much.”

“I know,” Canny said. “I'm her son. It's my job, not yours. And even if it weren't my job,
I'm her son
. He fooled me, too. I thought he really was getting better, at least sufficiently for me to risk one last fling. We Kilcannons get into the habit of taking our legendary luck a little too much for granted.” He could talk relatively freely to Bentley about the Kilcannon luck, even though Bentley didn't know the whole truth, or even the half of it. Bentley was the kind of family retainer who never worried about how much of the truth he knew and didn't know, and would never say a word out of place, even—perhaps especially—if he knew more than he ought to.

The Bentley swept majestically through Towton, but the natives didn't bat an eyelid. If asked what they thought, they'd probably have opined that Bentleys weren't really Bentleys any more, now that they had to be manufactured by Rolls Royce. They'd probably have felt the same even if Rolls Royce hadn't been taken over in its turn by Germans. Canny couldn't help wondering whether the Bentley driving the Bentley was any more authentic than the car, in a world where servants were an anachronistic affectation rather than a necessity of civilized existence, but it would have been churlish to voice the thought.

“Did you have good luck in Monte Carlo, sir?” the butler enquired, innocently, as the car went over the Cock Beck Bridge and began to climb towards the ridge of the dale that hid the Crede.

“Swings and roundabouts,” Canny said tersely. “Look—I might be getting a phone call or two from a guy named Henri Meurdon about a matter of considerable delicacy. I'd rather Mummy and Daddy didn't get to hear about it. There was an incident—a robbery. It was nothing serious, and I don't want anyone worrying about it. The Union Corse will take care of it, if there's anything that can be done.”

“The Union Corse, sir?” Bentley echoed, the question mark at the end of the sentence was hardly perceptible.

“It's a kind of insurance company,” Canny told him, although he had no doubt that Bentley could easily come by a more accurate account, if he cared to take the trouble. The butler's computer had a broadband connection, just like the one in the library. “It's also possible,” Canny added, “that a story might get reported in the gossip columns involving Stevie Larkin, Lissa Lo and a little flutter on a roulette wheel. It might be better if Daddy didn't get to hear about that either. I'll warn Mummy not to say anything if she comes across it in one of her magazines.”

“That would be Mr Larkin the football player?” Bentley said. “The one who's reported to be coming back to England?”

“Yes, it would—although he didn't say anything to me about leaving Milan. And no, I don't know him well enough to get his autograph for any of your multitudinous nephews, or to put in a good word for Leeds United if he is thinking about a transfer. We just happened to be sitting next to one another in Monte, right across the table from Lissa Lo, and we all happened to bet on the same number. Pure coincidence—but you know what the papers are like when an opportunity comes up to get two celebrities' names in the same sentence, especially if one's male, the other's female and they're both sexy.”

“If only you were five years younger, sir,” Bentley observed, flippantly, “you would doubtless have sparked rumors of a fascinating
ménage à trois
. Were there no film stars present to add spice to the mix? Members of the royal family, perhaps?”

“I'm afraid not—unless you count royal families from the United Arab Emirates. I know you don't usually, but as they're moving Royal Ascot to York next year, I thought you might be prepared to be flexible.”

“Very amusing, sir.” Bentley had slipped back deep into mock-Wodehousian mode, if not all the way back to American sitcom parody, but Canny didn't mind. He had said what he needed to say, and he knew that the butler would have taken note of the salient points.

The car was already turning into the driveway of Credesdale House. The early morning sun was lighting the Great Skull from the side, making its shadowed eyes seem even more sinister than usual; Stevie Larkin would doubtless have thought its symbolism horribly excessive.

Canny got out in front of the house before Bentley took the car around to the old stables. He let himself in, and paused in the hallway to hug and kiss his mother. He was in no hurry to rush upstairs, but his mother was so enthusiastic not to delay him that he felt obliged to set aside all other possibilities.

“He's been asking for you for hours, Canny,” Lady Credesdale said. “Hasn't slept a wink. You mustn't mind if he curses you a little—he wouldn't take his morphine until he'd seen you, and now he's in dreadful pain. Ring as soon as he decides to take it—Bentley will give him the shot.”

“It's okay, Mummy,” Canny said. “I don't suppose he's got anything new to say—he just wants to make sure that I'm on board. It won't take long.” He knew that it was an optimistic judgment, but it was what his mother needed to hear. He went upstairs resolutely, nodding derisively to the lugubrious ancestors whose eyes seemed to be following his course.

You might have hooked and landed me
, he said, silently,
but you haven't gutted and filleted me yet—not by a long way. Just you wait and see who'll be coming up these stairs with me tonight
.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lord Credesdale seemed more angry than pleased to see him, but that was just the pain. The old man was propped up on three voluminous pillows, but he was having difficulty holding himself steady.

“What's all this about you flying over in a private jet?” he demanded, as Canny pulled up a chair so that he could sit as close to the bedhead as the beside table would permit.

“I got a lift, Dad,” Canny replied, brightly. “A real stroke of luck—I wouldn't have got here till late afternoon if I'd flown Air France and British Midland via Heathrow. The streak's still holding, you see.”

“Well it won't hold much longer, if the diaries are reliable,” the sick man snapped. “I might not last through the night. This is the acid test, Can. This is when all your fine talk and snippy attitude will have to confront the reality of a situation.”

“Just like you did, Daddy,” Canny said, trying to make his voice sound soothing, “forty years ago. Hard landing, rude awakening, sobering experience. I know. I'm ready. If the luck really does run low, I'll be able to tell all right—and I'll take whatever action seems warranted. Trust me.”

“Trust you! How...?” The old man's voice gave out under the strain. His ravaged face was tormented, as much by anger as distress. Canny rose to his feet and poured a glass of water from the decanter on the bedside table. His father tried to refuse it, but that was sheer stubbornness, and Canny eventually persuaded him to sip it.

“How can you trust me?” he said, softly. “I can see the difficulty, Daddy—and I know you're right. All my life, I've had the family gift to draw on. It's always been there, and I've taken it for granted while I've felt free to doubt it, scoff at it, resent it, kick against its discipline, throw tantrums about its sillier rules. But now the crunch will come. If the records are right, the luck will fade away to dormancy—unless and until I renew it, by following the rules. I know all that, Daddy—everything I need to know. I really will try to learn from your experience as well as my own. If things do go sour, I'll be as desperate to get things back on track as you were.”

His father had settled back on the pillows, and had closed his eyes momentarily—but not because he was relaxing. Lord Credesdale was fighting his pain, fighting his anxiety—rebelling, like any true Yorkshireman, against whatever presented itself for resistance. As soon as Canny finished and sat down again, he rallied.

“
If
,” he echoed, contemptuously. “Always
if
. After all this time, all you've seen and been, it's still
if
. Trust me, you say—but you won't trust
me
, will you? You won't take my word, or my advice.”

The old man tried to raise his hand in order to point an accusing finger, but he couldn't do it. Canny took the hand in his own, startled by its frailty. The skin seemed slack and dry, lying upon the bone like ill-secured wrapping-paper. He couldn't remember having held his father's hand since he was a child, and he had no clear memory of how it had felt, but he knew that it must have been solid and strong, with a grip as firm as a carpenter's vice. His father had been a tyrant then, a thunderous man of whom even Bentley walked slightly in fear, and more than slightly in awe. Now, he was a shell about to be shed by a monstrous molting crab. It was terrible—more horrible in confrontation than any mere diminution of the family lucky streak could possibly be.

“I believe you, Daddy,” Canny told him, squeezing the fragile hand as hard as he dared. “I always did. It's just that...sometimes I have trouble admitting it to myself. It doesn't mean that I won't take care of things. You did. You tested it to the limit—but in the end, you took care of things. I know you haven't always thought as much of me as you wanted to, but am I really such a disappointment to you that think I won't take care of things? I have Mummy to look after, and the estate, and everything else. I know how much it all adds up to. There's no
if
about that. I'll do my best, Daddy. I'll take care of things.”

That speech seemed to have the desired effect. It couldn't do much to calm the physical pain, but it did seem to set the old man's mind at rest, just a little. Canny knew that it was what his father had wanted to hear, had needed to hear. While Lord Credesdale composed himself, Canny glanced around the bedroom, taking note of the extent to which his father had reclaimed it since his last return from hospital. His mother's attempts to modernize the decor and modify the ostentation of the Georgian furniture with a few light touches of the twentieth century had been carefully undone, although the modifications had stopped mercifully short of replacing the Alma-Tadema over the fireplace with one of the ancestral portraits from the upper landing. Even Daddy, apparently, could do without the cold stare of some censorious forbear zeroing in on his helplessness.

“You shouldn't have run off like that,” Lord Credesdale muttered, eventually. “Gave the wrong impression. And no matter how skeptical you are about the family history—and I've been through it myself, so I know what I'm talking about—you'd be a fool to tempt fate too far. You should be engaged by now, if not actually married. Waiting nine months to reignite the streak would be bad enough. How long's it going to take you now? Two years? Three?”

Canny couldn't help sighing, but he stifled the sound. “This is the twenty-first century, Daddy,” he said. You can get mail order brides practically by return of post, even in Yorkshire. Half the female population of Bridlington would marry a lord, sight unseen, faster than a Kosovan party girl would hitch herself to a British passport-holder.”

“Very funny,” the old man growled.

“Actually, it's rather tragic,” Canny told him. “And if there's one thing in the records that's almost certainly based on blind prejudice, it's the insistence on marrying so close to home.” He knew as the words escaped from his mouth that they would probably undo all the good work he'd just put in, but the old habit wasn't about to die yet. Fortunately, his father's reaction tended more to the plaintively maudlin than the righteously wrathful.

“That's what I thought,” the dying man said, “and look what happened to me.”

Canny couldn't actually “look” even in memory, because he hadn't been born until his father had been safely hooked up with his mother, who was a Garforth girl, but he had heard the story of his father's first wife a thousand times.

“It wasn't because she was from outside the county that she couldn't have children, Daddy,” Canny said. “There are as many barren women in Yorkshire as anywhere else, and at least as many fertile ones in every corner of the globe. The prejudices of the first dozen earls are based in the fact that not one of them ever went abroad any further than York, for lack of public transport or any desire to test the supposition that the people living south of Sheffield were all secret cannibals. We live in a cosmopolitan world now. The county has no official existence any more. Our postal address is in
West
Yorkshire now.”

“It's not a matter of postal addresses or local authorities,” Lord Credesdale declared. “Calling the bottom end of the east riding Humberside doesn't make it part of Lincolnshire. Yorkshire's Yorkshire and always will be, even if Bradford looks more like West Pakistan.”

“You're being ridiculous, Daddy. Anyway, breaking the rules didn't do you any harm in the long run. I arrived in my own good time, and I for one am glad that it worked out that way. The matter's not as urgent now they've invented antibiotics, and I'm not even going to mention IVF and nuclear transfer technology—but if it'll set your mind at rest, I'll promise to start courting just as soon as I can, starting in Tadcaster and Wetherby. When Mummy puts it about that I'm well and truly on the market, the local gentry will be hurling their daughters at me with catapults. The only difficulty will be persuading them to form an orderly queue.”

The tone of this speech might have been provocative on another occasion, but Lord Credesdale had grown used to Canny's little ways over the years, and was not devoid of a certain dry wit himself. The old man condescended to make an effort to smile, although the expression he actually contrived was something of a travesty.

“And the gambling?” the old man said. “You haven't got a habit, have you? You can let it go, when your luck dries up?”

Canny didn't challenge his father's use of “when” rather than “if”, although he still remained unconvinced that the allegedly inevitable diminution of the family gift following the death of an earl was anything but a patriarchal myth intended to prey on the minds of guilt-ridden scions. “An addiction, you mean?” he said, scornfully. “No—I'm as clean as a whistle. I can leave off for a year, or ten years if it's necessary, and not feel a pang. I'll run the portfolio defensively and keep the mill ticking over, until everything's well and truly sorted. Or would you rather I put all the shares in a blind trust and gave the village elders
carte blanche
to oversee the mill's businesses the same way they oversee the village shops?”

“Good god, no! At least you've got brains, even if your luck deserts you. Stockbrokers are all crooks, and the village elders are all fools. You can rely on Maurice Rawtenstall, though. He's probably crooked, but he's discreetly crooked, and it's better to have a clever crook in charge of your cash cows than an honest idiot. If he creams a little off the top, that's fine—just make sure we get all the milk. Keep everything under control. Use a tight rein, until you've done what you have to do.
All
of it.”

“I'll follow the family motto,” Canny assured him, sourly but not entirely insincerely. “No matter how absurd it seems, it's best to do it
just in case
.”

There was a sneer in his voice, but that too was what his father needed to hear. If he'd said it piously, Daddy wouldn't have been able to believe it, but saying it as if it were something nasty that he had to swallow regardless, he could be convincing—or as close thereto as was humanly possible.

Canny could remember a time when his father wouldn't have cared a tuppenny toss whether Canny intended to follow the rules or not, just so long as he got the lion's share of the luck he'd renewed by siring a son as the rules required—but he didn't doubt the sincerity of the old man's conversion. Daddy really did care about the succession, about the continuation of the Kilcannon streak, not because he thought the Devil would have him if the bargain weren't properly extended, but because it was the done thing. As men like Lord Credesdale approached death, they cared more rather than less about the state of affairs they were leaving behind: its order; its propriety; its continuity. Canny wasn't at all sure that he wouldn't go the same way himself, especially if the course of events did knock him off his high horse, and persuade him of the wisdom of following the rules
just in case
.

If parental tyranny had achieved nothing else as he'd grown older under its spur, it had certainly inculcated the habit of doing his petty penances and performing his petty rituals because compliance was far less troublesome than non-compliance. He hadn't had the benefit of Stevie Larkin's personal tuition, but he'd read enough psychology to know how easy it would be to take aboard the age-old obsession with lineage and continuity along with all the rest of the petty rituals once the responsibility of managing the family luck was his alone. He wasn't under any delusion that Daddy's death would free him, or that burning all the portraits of his ancestors would render their commanding stares impotent.

Canny had never met the thirtieth Earl, but he had a strong suspicion that Daddy had turned into a replica of his own Daddy—and now that he was looking down at the hollow wreck of the man his father had once been, it was all too easy to imagine that he might be forced into the shoes of the departed tyrant, possessed as he had been by exactly the same obsessive ghost.

“I'll ring for Bentley, Daddy,” Canny said, softly. “It's time for your shot. You need to rest.”

“Bugger that,” said the old man, hoarsely. “I'll sleep when I'm dead. Right now, it's not pleasant dreams I need. Look, Can, it's hurting me to talk to you almost as much as it hurt me to stay awake fidgeting, fretting that you wouldn't get here, but if I take the morphine I'll be away with the fairies till supper-time. The least you can do is hear me out and save your smart remarks and sarcasm for someone who appreciates them.”

“Yes, Dad,” Canny said, meekly. He always shortened “Daddy” to “Dad” when he was making a show of being serious. He released his father's hand and sat up straighter in his chair.

“You think I'm going to give you the usual load of crap about your responsibilities, don't you? To your mother, the estate, the villagers. Well, I'm not. You're not the only one who's noticed that it's the twenty-first century. Your mother's as tough as an old boot and the villagers are perfectly capable of looking after themselves in spite of the fact that we've kept them wrapped up in cotton wool for the best part of two hundred years. The mill was never a part of the family heritage, and the patchwork pig's ear it's turned into is an irrelevance. It wouldn't matter a damn if the entire folly went up in flame tomorrow, as long as the insurance was paid up. What concerns me is you, Can, and what you make of yourself.”

The dying man had to pause for breath then, but Canny knew that he wasn't supposed to interrupt. He waited, patiently, for his father to find breath enough to continue.

“You've probably always thought of yourself as a means to an end,” Lord Credesdale went on, eventually. “That the only reason I ever had a son was to renew the Kilcannon streak. And you've probably always thought that I resented having to share my luck with you as much as you've lately come to resent having to share yours with me. Well, there's no denying it—you're absolutely right. You were a means to an end, and I
have
always resented the sharing. But that's never been the whole story.”