Streaking (19 page)

“Not to mention the wind farm on Wuthering Heights,” Alice said. “You know, Canny, even for a lord of the manor and recently-reformed playboy, you're a seriously weird person.”

“That's it,” he said. “Pile on the insults. I'm the universe, remember. You have one hell of a grudge to pay back.”

“It was a compliment,” she told him. “A spontaneous one—the nicest kind.”

“I knew that,” he admitted. “But I was hoping that you wouldn't point it out, so that when I got around go telling you how impressed I am with the way you're handling all this, I could pretend to be exercising extraordinary generosity.”

“I'm not doing it to impress you,” she said, sharply. “I'm just doing the best I can.”

“I know,” he said. “I really do understand. Isn't that a police car heading for the village? Your family liaison officer, do you think?”

“Could be,” she agreed. “Shit—if Mum rings your house and the creepy butler tells her we're out walking on the ridge, our Ellen will...no, actually, she won't. She'll make allowances. And she thinks you're a saint, even if she's the only person in the village who does.”

“She's right,” Canny said.

“I know. Better hurry anyway, though. There might be news—I'll just have to take the risk of being in time for church. I hope you find the book interesting, Canny—you're probably the only reader it's ever going to have. If you're as much of an expert as you pretend, you could finish it for him. Monument to his genius, etc. If you're not too busy being a big cog in a little wheel.”

“I'll think about it,” Canny promised, insincerely.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Canny had to go to London the following day, but he drove into Leeds first to collect Bob Stanley's report on Lissa Lo and her ancestry.

“It was easier than I expected,” Stanley reported, as he passed over a remarkably bulky file. “Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all married relatively high-profile guys, and several journalists in search of background took the trouble to follow the paper trail back to the nineteenth century—including a number of highly efficient Japanese and Singaporean researchers. Let me know if you need more.”

“I will,” Canny said. “Thanks, Bob. Send me the bill and I'll settle up.”

“Not the kind of work your father used to ask for,” the detective observed.

“Not exactly,” Canny agreed, “but it demands the same kind of discretion. Must rush—got to drive to London and the M1 will be hell, at least until junction 32.”

This prophecy proved, alas, to be all-too-accurate—and the traffic built up again as he approached the M25, with the result that he was running late all day. He had no opportunity to study the file until the day's business was belatedly concluded, at which point he was finally able to retire to the flat. The last phase of his day's journey was the slowest of all, even though rush hour was long past. The flat was located in one of the residential terraces off Marylebone High Street, but the subterranean garage in which the Bentley's parking-spot was reserved was five minutes walk away—which always caused problems when he had paperwork to transport. It was ten-thirty before he got in, eleven before he started turning the pages of Stanley's report. There was no time left to plough through it all that night, and he was too tired to give it his full attention.

Canny tried to absorb as much of the story as he could by scanning each document in a matter of seconds. The method left him hazy on matters of details but allowed him to build up a composite sketch in which a clear pattern seemed to be discernible. He had already anticipated its broad outlines, but he was grateful for the solid support that hard data lent to his conjectures.

It wasn't just the procession of the centuries that altered the rewards of luck, he deduced. Cultural contexts varied just as much—and even more so when sex-differences were factored into the calculation. The direction in which the male Kilcannons had been steered by their lucky streak was entirely expectable in the context of the north of England; the direction in which Lissa Lo's female ancestors had been steered by theirs was just as expectable in their own context. The greatest luck conveniently available to Lissa's mother, maternal grandmother and half a dozen others before them had been luck in contracting marriages. The model was the natural product of a multigenerational Cinderella story, whose meteoric stars—in striking contrast to the wives of the Earls of Credesdale—were all makeshift Prince Charmings.

Lissa's back-story lacked the steadiness and coherency of Canny's, because her family's house percentage had never worked as smoothly. Canny couldn't be certain whether that was due more to the innate conservatism of his own forebears or to the fact that Lissa's ancestors had lived in such interesting times, but he figured that the combination probably leaned in favor of the latter. The luck carried forward by Lissa's female ancestors did seem to be transferable to their spouses, but only in the short term; the consorts drafted by Dame Fortune enjoyed remarkable prosperity immediately before and immediately after their marriages, but once their daughters were born their disability became obvious—more than one had died with extraordinary abruptness.

Canny could see the logic of that. Mummy had been an invaluable asset to Daddy in terms of the contribution she made to his own welfare, let alone the upbringing of his son; the continued utility of a patriarch in the Far East was, from the viewpoint of a female's luck, far less obvious. Lissa's own father had died while she was still in infancy—a pattern that could be extrapolated back to the sixth generation with only minor temporal variations. Only in remoter ages, before the advent of the nineteenth century, had the material protection afforded by warlords been a sufficiently significant factor to sustain the male adjuncts long enough to see their daughters married. Or so it seemed.

The fact that Lissa's foremothers tended to die a good deal younger than Canny's forefathers gave him slight pause for thought, but it wasn't difficult for him to come up with plausible explanations. Given the way the world worked, even in the supposedly-enlightened West, a man needed far less luck to establish him in long-sustainable comfort than a woman. If the females in Lissa's ancestry had used their lucky streaks more recklessly, it was probably because they had always had to. It couldn't have been as easy for her ancestors as it had been for his to maintain a balance between self-restraint and self-indulgence. No wonder her oral traditions were more sensitive to issues of yin and yang—and no wonder her defiant attitude to family tradition seemed reckless even to him.

The way that Lissa seemed to be using her ration of luck at present suggested to Canny that her mother might not have much left of her own portion—but if Lissa's lucky streak was allegedly fated to run dry in the same way that Canny's was, when her mother's luck ran out entirely, the experiment she had proposed to him began to seem even riskier. Lissa appeared to be hoping that a child whose heredity was lucky on both sides might renew her own luck more prodigiously than any child produced in accordance with tradition.

In essence, Canny guessed, Lissa was hoping for a miracle child: a superheroic Cinderella, with
more
than a double dose of shareable luck, by virtue of some kind of chemical or alchemical synergy. Such hope—and such recklessness—might be more in keeping with her traditions than his...but it seemed to Canny to be perfectly conceivable, if not rather probable, that the vital genes—or their metaphysical equivalent, if it turned out that his materialist assumptions were false—would not work in association at all. Even if they did, it might not follow that both the miracle child's parents would benefit equally. If chance should dictate that the child was a boy, and that Canny was the parent who benefited from his son's remarkable inheritance...what would Lissa do then?

He tried to haul himself back from the wilderness of conjecture to the contents of the documents Bob Stanley had gathered for him, but it wasn't easy. How, Canny wondered, did Lissa interpret the demographics of her own bloodline? Did she expect that he would follow the examples of her father and grandfather by dying almost as soon as his appointed task was complete? Did she really imagine herself as some kind of queen bee, relative to whom he was a mere disposable drone? Was she simply taking it for granted that her child would be a daughter rather than a son, or did she have some magic or technology in mind that would enhance her chances? If so, did she also have some magic or technology in mind that might assist in his removal from the scene? If not, what would the consequences be if she were to give birth to a boy who would be heir apparent to Can's wealth, if not to his titles?

Canny decided, on due reflection, that he dared not hope, let alone assume, that Lissa was planning to share the fruits of her experiment with him. She hadn't bothered to put up any sort of pretence that she was looking for a long-term relationship, so she presumably intended to take the child for herself, even if it turned out to be a boy. If she did intend to take sole custody of the child, there would be little that Canny could do, in spite of his title and all his connections, to prevent her doing so. But would that matter? Did legal custody of a luck-bearing child have anything to do with the distribution of its gift? There was nothing in the Kilcannon archives to help him with that; it was a possibility as yet untested.

How much would it matter, he wondered, if the child's luck—however exceptional it might prove to be—were to be used entirely to Lissa Lo's benefit? He could go on to have other children, with other women...but that might not suffice to renew the family streak.

The worst-case scenario, it seemed to him, was that he might lose his gift along his first-born child, having sacrificed his own opportunities on the altar of Lissa Lo's divine or diabolical beauty. But was that possibility any more than a phantom of superstition? If the streak really were a mere matter of a gene carried on his Y-chromosome, he ought not to be any worse off for having participated in Lissa Lo's experiment, even if she tried to cheat him...always provided that she didn't intend to do him any physical harm. He couldn't believe that she did...but he wasn't entirely sure that what he could or couldn't believe was the best guide to action in his particular case.

He could almost hear his father's ghostly voice saying: “Play safe. It isn't worth the risk. It's a bad bet.”

He was too tired to give the matter sensible consideration. He had to go to bed, to sleep.

Tuesday was entirely taken up by meetings, and so was Wednesday. There seemed to be dozens of acquaintances to renew and cement, dozens more to make for the first time and set firmly in their intended pattern. It was surprisingly exhausting work, but it had to be done. In order to make sure that the house percentage of his business interests didn't begin to wane or go astray, he would have to be as careful and as vigilant as Henri Meurdon. The process of establishing himself as the new central cog in the many-spoked wheel did, however, have a certain innate fascination to compensate him for the fierceness of his concentration. It was easy enough to think of it all as some vast game, more like mah-jongg than poker, and every bit as demanding of expertise and practice.

Had he been more confident of his luck, the decisions he was called upon to make would have been simple enough, but as the hours went by he realized that he could not escape the toils of psychological probability. He had not had the slightest atom of real evidence that his luck was running low, but the conviction that it might be was irresistible, and it changed the pattern of his thinking very markedly. Now that he dared not take it for granted that bright streaks would deliver him from any threatened disaster, the problem of redeploying his money to insulate his share portfolio against the stock market's continued decline—not to mention the possibility of a flood of demands to fulfill his obligations as a Lloyd's underwriter—seemed quite intractable. The income from the estate would hold up reasonably well whatever happened, but it seemed now to be a tiny proportion of his fortune. The value of his property portfolio, which had soared with the boom, also seemed reasonably foolproof—except for the possibility of a crash, which he no longer dared to rule out.

He listened dutifully to a great deal of advice, and soon began to wish fervently that there was some discernible consistency in it—but he consoled himself with the thought that the supposed expertise of his inconsistent advisers was evidence that there was nothing accurately calculable in the shape of the future.

Talking to various bank-managers in Leeds, Canny had easily been able to sustain the illusion that his casual suggestion to Lissa that he was wealthy enough to live indefinitely on his resources without any supernatural injection of luck had been the simple truth. Two days of talking to brokers, underwriters and London estate agents, by contrast, gave him a very different impression. Yes, he was rich—but he was also living in a world where sudden reversals of fortune were not merely possible but had recently become routine. The financial world was full of foam, and no one really knew which bubbles were likely to burst, or when. Nothing was safe any more. He was as fireproof as anyone could be in twenty-first century Britain, and could probably live in relative comfort until he died no matter what might come to pass—but relative comfort was not an obviously worthy aim for the scion of a very long line of hardened gamblers, and could not seem so in the hubbub of the metropolis.

In the heart of the City of London, the devil's engine-room, Canny quickly came to understand very well why other recently-elevated earls, who must have been just as determined as he had been to get rid of all the mumbo-jumbo—to eat and drink like normal gluttons and to avoid sticking blades in agonizing places—had soon come to feel an irresistible pressure to comply with the demands of tradition.

He also began to understand much better what enormous relief those other fledgling earls must have felt when their bizarre endeavors began to pay off—and why his father had spent as much time as possible in the infinitely less fevered environments of Credesdale House and the village of Cockayne.

The trouble with being a lucky Kilcannon, Canny quickly realized as he made his way around the labyrinthine toils of London, was that it raised the expectations of everyone with whom one came into contact, as well as one's own—and the expectations of his metropolitan contacts were already wilder than common sense allowed. Perfectly ordinary ill-luck would become, for a Kilcannon, evidence of slackness and inferiority—and while that might be cause for gentle commiseration in Leeds, the only emotion it could generate in the City was contempt. If it would be difficult to suffer the effects of ordinary luck in the secret recesses of his own thoughts, it would even more difficult to suffer them in the arenas of high finance.

In Leeds, the thought of the self-mutilatory aspect of the rituals that were supposed to complete his compact with Dame Fortune—once he had fulfilled the basic requirement of siring a son—had seemed rather ridiculous. In London, however, it was easy enough to see self-mutilation as a matter of routine: a trivial cost that everyone involved in the life of the City expected to pay, if not by way of knives and flames, then by way of drug addiction, stress and the crushing burdens of the need to conform, the need to succeed and the need to show no weakness. Superstition was everywhere, and all-consuming.

Was this, Canny wondered as he went through the motions of his schedule, the stuff of which all magic had always been made? Was the real basis of all occult belief little more than a kind of cosmic fruit-machine, which paid off enough people enough of the time to keep them all coming back for more, even though the inevitable sum of all their endeavors was a massive house percentage in favor of the devil? Was his own consciousness of that fact, and his conviction that he was on the devil's side, really an advantage, or just a kind of cosmic irony? Might it be better, in fact, to be moderately unlucky all the time without ever suspecting—let alone believing—that there was any way to beat the odds, than it was to be as certain as one could be that there
was
a way to beat the odds without knowing how, exactly, the trick was worked?