Streaking (7 page)

“Is there time?” Lissa countered, strongly implying that there couldn't be.

“We wouldn't be able to walk down there and back before dinner,” Canny admitted. “Another time, then. It may look a bit grim, but there are home-owners in Leeds who would kill for the opportunity to be mere tenants in Cockayne. The county council occasionally tries to reduce the elders' privileges, but the family has a lot more influence there than one democratically-elected representative, so we're clinging like limpets to our eccentricities. Some outsiders call Credesdale the last bastion of degenerate feudalism, others the last flourish of Victorian philanthropy, but the villagers like to think of themselves as ultra-patriots of the one true fatherland—Yorkshire, that is—and last-ditch defenders of an endangered way of life. We're all insane, of course—but we're Yorkshire mad, not common-or-garden mad. Daddy should have woken up again by the time we've had dinner, by the way. He'll be thoroughly morphinated, but more-or-less
compos mentis
. Would you like to meet him? Don't feel obliged—he's not at his best, by any means.”

“I'd like that,” she said. The shoes she was wearing weren't designed for walking up and down grassy slopes whose paths were rough-hewn and strewn with rabbit-droppings, but she moved with an unearthly grace, almost as though she were flowing. The turbidly creeping waters of the Crede came off a very poor second best. It was enough to make Canny catch his breath, and fix his eyes upon her back until he grew dizzy.

Canny felt unprecedentedly awkward. He knew that it would be a dire conversational error to bring up the awkwardness that had developed before they stepped out into the evening air, but the compulsion to babble had come upon him again and he was temporarily bereft of appropriate subject-matter. “Better to be formally introduced to a dying man than try to do girl talk with Mummy,” he said, in a stupidly mock-jocular fashion. He regretted it as soon as the words had spilled out of his mouth.

“That's not it,” Lissa assured him. “I really would be interested to meet your father—if
he
doesn't mind.”

“I'm sure he'll be delighted,” Canny murmured, wondering exactly how far her interest and curiosity might extend, if he gave it scope to operate freely. “If my guess is right, a visit from one of the most beautiful women in the world is exactly the kind of thing that might give his morphine dreams the perfect lift—and I'm a very good guesser.” They had reached the gate again now, and he overtook her swiftly so that he could unlatch it and hold it open while she passed through.

“So am I,” Lissa said, as Bentley emerged from the house to summon them to the table with all the imperious obsequiousness one could expect of an authentic English butler with a passionate interest in bad Hollywood representations of authentic English butlers.

CHAPTER NINE

Canny was uncomfortably aware that the food was no better than moderate, but he took refuge in the thought that Lissa probably wasn't going to eat much anyway. The mediocrity was only to be expected, given the short notice and the fact that the village shops managed their stocks much more economically than any town-based supermarket. On the other hand, the '73 Pomerol was one of the best the cellar had to offer, and Canny took due note of the appreciative way that Lissa sipped it. After consuming two glasses she refused the sweet Bordeaux—and, of course, the dessert it was supposed to accompany. She also declined to partake of the brandy. Although she'd made her way through a perfectly adequate portion of the main course, Canny was glad to observe that she didn't visit the bathroom in order to throw it up again.

Fortunately, Canny's mother was perfectly well-behaved during dinner, and never once mentioned her gnawing fear that Canny might be gay—which she usually confided to all his female acquaintances, in the faint hope that one of them might have contradictory evidence and a willingness to share it. She called him “Canavan” once or twice, apparently spoiled for choice between her own preferred diminutive and his, but he didn't mind that.

“You know that Daddy wants to give you the library keys tonight, don't you, Can?” Lady Credesdale said to Canny, when he and Lissa Lo stood up together to go up to his father's room. “He thinks it might be his last chance to do a formal handover, although Doctor Hale keeps telling him that he might live for another month.”

“He might, no matter how big a liar the old quack is,” Canny said. “He's always been tough—too tough for his own good, perhaps. I'll take the keys with all due solemnity, but I'll let him take a look at Lissa first. He'll enjoy that, and we might as well share what we can, while we can.”

Lissa Lo smiled at that too, but her motives were still profoundly unclear to Canny. Her body moved in interesting ways as she preceded Canny up the staircase, pausing more than once to study the portraits hung on the left-hand wall. He'd told the truth when he'd said that they were the best of the bunch, although that had more to do with the talents of the painters than the features of the sitters. The spectacular awfulness of the ones that had been retired to shadowed corridors on the third floor couldn't possibly have been
entirely
due to the ugliness of the subjects.

“Did they ever smile, or did they simply feel an obligation to glower at their painters by way of intimidation?” Lissa asked.

“They certainly didn't think of sitting for a portrait as any kind of fashion shoot,” Canny replied. “It was a matter of duty, to be faced in the same purposeful way as checking the accounts and sleeping with their wives. I'm different, of course—too much television, Mummy says.”

The model made no comment, but Canny could imagine what she was thinking as she scanned the faces of his ancestors. The Kilcannon luck had never extended far in the direction of good looks. Canny was, indeed, the cream of the crop in that regard. Not for the first time, Canny cursed the reflexive flicker of mad optimism which said that there might be something in this encounter for his long-suppressed hormones, as the hostile stares of his forefathers told himself to pull himself together. Wile he was in the presence so many ugly Kilcannons, he didn't dare believe that someone as beautiful as Lissa Lo might be seriously interested in his body. It seemed far more likely that she was here on some kind of quasi-anthropological field-trip, like a Brave New Worlder visiting the Savage Reservation.

Lord Credesdale looked terrible, and he wasn't entirely coherent at first, but Canny had been right about the sight of Lissa Lo giving him a lift. He rallied, in spite of the depressive effect of the morphine—and once his tongue was loose, he began to string sentences together with reasonable fluency. After half an hour of aesthetic appreciation and idle chitchat, though, the thirty-first Earl asked the model, very politely, whether he could have a few moments alone with his son and heir.

“I won't keep him long,” the old man promised. “Family matter—might not have another chance.

“I can't believe that,” Lissa said. “A mind as strong and capable as yours isn't about to lose its grip just yet. But of course you must have a moment with Canny. I'll wait downstairs for a while. I promised to be in my hotel in York by eleven, because I need to catch up with my sleep before taking the long haul out to Venezuela, but I won't go without saying goodbye unless I have to.”

It was the first time that she had spoken Canny's nickname; Canny was profoundly glad that she hadn't called him “Can” or “Canavan” in spite of hearing both from his mother's lips.

“Thanks, Lissa,” Canny said. In the circumstances, her promise to wait seemed to him an extraordinarily generous offer.

Lissa closed the door behind her, very neatly.

“You know what these are, don't you?” said the dying man, drawing the keys out from beneath his pillow, where Bentley must have placed them.

Canny knew that it wasn't a good time to say “Of course I do”, let alone “Get on with it”. It wasn't as if he'd never been in the library before, although he'd never been in any hurry to take up the burden of scholarship on which his father had always urged him to make an early start. He could have picked up the keys from their resting-place any time he liked, rules or no rules. The formal passing was purely symbolic—just another little ceremony, insufficiently burdensome ever to have been put to the proof—but Canny made no objection. He said his lines dutifully, trying not to sound weary—although his lack of sleep the previous night would certainly have given him an excuse.

“That's almost certainly part of the ninety-nine per cent of it that's bullshit,” Lord Credesdale told him, forthrightly, when they finally returned to normality. “I wish I'd been able to figure out which is the odd one per cent, but I couldn't. You might do better. I hope I didn't use more than my fair share, if it turns out to be a wasting asset, but you know how it is—they don't all win, and when the tide's going out it's sometimes hard enough to stay even. You haven't been fucking that tinted Sindy doll, I hope?”

Canny shook his head and pursed his lips. “She's not a doll, Dad,” he said, curtly. “She's heard of the Land of Cockayne, she uses words like ‘crenellations' in everyday conversation, and she's prepared to compromise her diet for a '73 Pomerol. She thinks the Restoration's beautiful, in its own way, and rumor has it that she doesn't go in for fucking at all—not even photographers or footballers. She's got where she is on looks alone, without pimps or producers' casting-couches. And of all the great Yorkshire traditions, the casual racism is the one least worth preserving—I'd really rather you didn't die with a sin as stupid as that one staining your soul. Now you've seen her at close range you know how believable her reputation is.”

“So what does she want with you?” was the brutal counter to that.

“She's certainly not after my money, Daddy—or the family secrets. She's no more a Mata Hari than a Sindy doll. I doubt that she wants anything at all—but that's not mutual. On the other hand, I'm not desperate. Even if I never get to kiss her, I like her a lot. Okay?”

“I'm sure she's a lucky girl in every respect,” said the dying earl, with the faintest of sardonic smiles. “I'm sorry. Can't help worrying. I suppose you're free to make your own arrangements, while you've nothing to lose, but there are warnings in the journals against sirens.”

“She's not a siren, Dad. She's not a Mata Hari, or a Jezebel, or a Delilah, or any other kind of
femme fatale
—and the only reason the earls of old were so bitter about female beauty was that they couldn't get any half-way good looking woman to give them a second glance in spite of their money and status. Lissa's a woman like any other—except that she can have any man she wants, and has no reason at all to pick me. She's just curious, bored with her usual entourage and her usual routine. Let it alone, will you? Can I go back to her now?”

Yet again, his father could only contrive a nod now that the reserves of bile had spilled out of him. He'd been able to talk to Lissa Lo with an approximation of charm and fluency, but he still hadn't mastered the art of talking to Canny with the aid of any other motive force than resentful disapproval.

“Tomorrow,” Canny murmured, determined not to let it go just yet. Then he went to say goodbye to Lissa Lo, and to tell her that she was welcome to drop in any time she liked.

She had obviously been crossing words with his mother again; to judge by their respective expressions, Lissa had scored all the palpable hits.

“Thanks,” she said, when he had offered the invitation. “It's a fascinating house, and I was interested to meet your family. Sometimes, I miss having a home—but my mother's been a nomad for years now and I hardly remember what it was like to have a real home. She's in England at present, but we might relocate to the USA next year. It's so difficult to choose where to settle, given the rate at which the climate's changing.”

“I really am very grateful for the lift from Monte Carlo,” he said, as he walked her to the stables, where her car was waiting. “The hours it saved me might turn out to be precious. No matter what Old Hale says, Daddy will be lucky to last the week, and there are things we need to settle.”

“I understand,” she assured him. “I don't suppose we'll be bumping into one another on the Riviera again, but while mother's in England I'll be popping back as often as I can. I'll ring you, if there seems to be a chance we could get together.”

The last few words reverberated in his mind, and in his body too.
If there seems to be a chance we could get together
. It was explicit, then: there
did
seem to be a chance. Except that, given her reputation, he couldn't be sure what “get together” was supposed to imply.

He opened the door of the hire-car for her, but he dared not make any further move. He waited for her to turn her face towards him, and to lean forward to kiss him lightly on the cheek.

There was no passion in it at all, but it thrilled him more than any other kiss he had ever received.

“I'd really like that,” he said. “Any time. Any time at all. Have a good time in York—and Venezuela. Drive carefully—the roads around here can be awkward after dark, at least until you get on to the A64.”

“I always do,” she assured him—although there was something in her tone that made him uncertain as to whether the assurance was believable.

CHAPTER TEN

Having had no sleep at all the night before, Canny felt quite exhausted, but his mind was still racing. His father's impending death and the new sense of urgency it had engendered would probably have been enough to keep him awake, but Lissa Lo's visit and the promise seemingly implicit in her farewell amplified the problem. The engine of his life seemed to have moved up a gear, and he knew that he would need to wind down before he could contrive to sleep. He felt that he had to take a solemn look at his new heritage, to complete the unspoken part of the ritual, but he lingered in the drawing-room until his mother had gone upstairs—fortunately, without offering any further comment on Lissa Lo.

Bentley had never before approached him to ask permission to retire, but he did so now. Apparently, the ceremonial handing over of the keys had been duly noted, even though the butler could only have the vaguest idea of its true significance.

“Of course you can go to bed,” Canny said. “I think I'll go to the library for a while, but I won't be needing you again.”

“Thank you. sir,” the butler said, without any hint of caricature.

There were three keys on the iron ring that Canny's father had handed over so ceremoniously; one of them fitted a conventional Yale lock, one a modern mortise lock, and the third a much more ancient device.

That third key was by far the simplest at the business end and by far the most ornate at the other. The part that turned in the fingers was very intricately-worked, inlaid with all kind of arcane symbols. Anyone, seeing it for the very first time, would immediately have identified it as the key to a wizard's den.

The library's basic design had been carried forward with the antique lock; like any respectable wizard's den it had an outer chamber with a supposedly secret door hidden behind a section of book shelving—only “supposedly”, because anyone with half an eye could easily work out where it was—and within the room behind the “secret” door there was a further chamber, better hidden now than ever before by the fact that its door no longer looked like a real door, but more like an item of bizarre decoration. Obedient to the well-known occult rule of three, the library's inner sanctum had an inner sanctum of its own, where its most intimate treasures were kept.

There were few shelves inside that second inner sanctum, and they were not filled with dusty incunabula; what they bore instead was a strange assortment of mortars and pestles, stone jars and glassware, moulds and candles, long brass pins and ornamental daggers. There was also a cupboard made of seasoned wood, so old that it was as hard as iron, and a desk that was just as sturdy, with a rack for pens and two sockets where porcelain inkwells had once been set. The cupboard was where the Kilcannon diaries were kept, along with more precious items of ritual apparatus: the vestments parodying those worn by priests; the speculum and the astrolabe; the idol, with gemstones for eyes.

In times gone by, Canny knew, the library—or its equivalent, in the house before the house before last, and any earlier edifices—would have been reckoned a wizard's den in a perfectly literal sense. In the days before printing, only two kinds of people were reputed to possess books: monks and sorcerers. That was because there were reputed to be two types of books: holy ones and unholy ones. The holy ones were indisputably real, the unholy ones merely their virtual shadow; insofar as there ever had been any actual volumes that passed themselves off as grimoires or textbooks of Satanic magic, they had probably been forged to prove their own existence for the benefit of those who would condemn them.

There was little of that sort in the Kilcannon library—nothing at all that seemed remotely plausible to Canny—although the earl who had commissioned the fake Restoration had dutifully accumulated a substantial stock of Rosicrucian follies and fake Hermetic tracts. There was no more evidence of any authentically diabolical text, in fact, than there was of the legendary contract than the first earl had reputedly signed, after exhaustive negotiations with the devil—whose own negotiating skills, later Kilcannons had proudly claimed, if only in secret, had increased markedly as a result of the experience.

Although several of them featured elaborate explanations as to what might have become of the “lost” diaries that had probably never existed at all, the actual diaries went back no further than the eighteenth century. They had all been written in volumes already bound, designed for the keeping of financial and public records, their pages made out of humble paper rather than parchment or vellum, vertically lined in various patterns as well as horizontally ruled to guide a pen.

Only one of the surviving texts, as far as Canny could tell, had been written before the invention of the steel nib. The Kilcannons seemed to have lacked the kind of resolution that drove monkish scribes to write when parchment was ridiculously expensive and the quill-based technology of literary reproduction required hard labor as well as considerable technical skill. No wonder they had fallen in so enthusiastically with the ideological thrust of the Industrial Revolution!

Before 1745, it seemed, the Kilcannon legacy and all its multifarious rules had been a purely oral tradition. Canny could only wonder how much educational labor had been saved when the nineteenth Earl had devised the ceremony of the handing-on of the keys, after writing down everything he “knew” about the history and mechanics of the Kilcannon luck, with as many exemplary anecdotes as firm instructions and as many philosophical conjectures as stern warnings. It had been the Age of Enlightenment, after all—philosophical conjectures were very much
de rigeur
, even for the beneficiaries of age-old diabolical pacts.

Canny didn't bother to lock any of the three doors as he passed through them on his way to the desk. His mother presumably knew where he was as well as Bentley did, but she would no more dream of disturbing him there than any of the servants. If the house were to catch fire and Bentley had to ensure his safety, the butler would probably stand in the doorway of the outermost library and call out very discreetly: “I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but would you mind running for your life, closing the doors behind you as you go?” Or words to that effect.

He didn't want to work, of course—indeed, he hadn't ever wanted to do any of the kinds of “work” that most of his forebears had thought essential to the maintenance of their defiance of the laws of chance—but he did feel a need to get the feel of the heart and soul of his legacy. The library might be a shrine to all kinds of folly but, in symbolic terms of which Stevie Larkin or any similarly-half-educated amateur would surely approve, it was the place in which the luck of the Kilcannons resided.

Tonight, Canny felt that he ought to be in that residence—not so much because the passing of the keys demanded it, but because he needed to feel the presence of that luck and breathe in its atmosphere.

It was his, now, to cherish for a few more days and then perhaps to revive, after an interval of a year or two—or ten, if he could wait that long or unkind fate insisted that he must—for the sake of continuity and preservation, and for the sake of avoiding a greater sin than any specified in the catechism or the Decalogue: the sin of
waste
.

After all, if the first earl really had sold his soul so that his descendants might confound the leveling effects of chance unto the fiftieth or the hundredth generation—no one had ever pretended to know exactly what duration he had demanded, or exactly how far the devil had beaten him down—it was up to those descendants to ensure that he had got full value for the price he had paid. A Yorkshireman, as Yorkshiremen had always been fond of saying—or at least hearing—was like a Scotsman with the generosity squeezed out.

Canny leafed patiently through the nineteenth earl's diary, congratulating himself on his ability to decipher the appalling handwriting, as black and coarse as Cockayne stone.

The rituals he was supposed to perform in connection with his father's funeral didn't seem too taxing. The fasting wouldn't be fun, but the rest of it wouldn't hurt him in any other way than making him feel silly. The ancient “wisdom” didn't call for any serious self-mutilation until the marriage ceremony—the private one, not the one that would take place in church—and the birth of his first-born son.

“I wish I could believe that you'd simply made the whole thing up, you old fraud,” Canny whispered to the old man's non-existent ghost. “What a hoax that would have been! A story to knock any Gothic novel into a cocked hat and make Defoe's history of the pirates look like sober journalism. But you believed every word, didn't you? Every word that your father had handed down from his father before him, and so
ad
-not-quite-
infinitum
. Even as you questioned it, and brought your Enlightenment sensibility bravely to bear on all its heaped-up absurdities, you didn't dare to do anything but believe it, maintain it, and hand it on. You wrote it down and locked it up in your wizard's den-within-a-den, along with your crazy apparatus, but that's as far as your daring went.

Having had the benefit of a modern education, Canny understood only too well how the age-old logic of superstition worked, and how it persisted in a supposedly enlightened era. He had seen it at work in many a sporting dressing-room and all the places he had ever been where gamblers hung out—which were very numerous indeed.

We did
that
when we won, the argument ran, so let's make sure we do the same again, but we did
that
when we lost, so let's declare it taboo until the end of time,
just in case
.

He knew from long experience as well as patient observation how easy such rituals were to start, and how hard they could be to put aside. He knew how they tended to accumulate, even within the space of a sportsman's brief career or an untalented gambler's hectic ride to ruin.

Given centuries to run riot, as in the case of the Kilcannon inheritance, their bulk and complexity could hardly help becoming horribly oppressive.

Sportsmen and gamblers rarely had any fate more terrible in mind than losing a game or losing their money—and even sportsmen with as much at stake as Stevie Larkin, and gamblers playing with the entire wealth of Arab emirates, had to figure that life would go on in the wake of those sorts of disaster. Children's rhymes came closer to the texture of the Kilcannon legacy when they endeavored to lend credulity to the ghoulish idea that you could break your mother's back by stepping on a crack. Given the perceptibility of vivid “streaks” whenever fate lent a particularly conspicuous hand to a Kilcannon, it wasn't at all surprising that the family luck came elaborately hedged about with sinister rumors of “black lightning”—not to mention the gnawing paranoia of the suspicion that the “cosmic balance” might one day be righted at a single appalling stroke, whose divine judgment would immediately deliver all the presumptuous Kilcannons into Hell.

“But it's all just
fear
,” Canny said to the Kilcannon ghosts. “It's all guilt, anxiety and psychological probability.”

Canny owned several books on psychological probability, by everyone who'd ever considered the phenomenon in detail, from John Cohen in the 1960s to Martin Ellison in the present. He understood that the human brain was preprogrammed by natural selection to look for patterns and induce generalities—that being the mental foundation of rational expectation—to the extent that it could not admit to itself that sometimes, there really were no significant patterns to be found. Even people who knew perfectly well that every spin of a roulette wheel was independent, so that red coming up four times in a row had no influence at all on the probability of its coming up again, were still more inclined to bet on black. Mere knowledge was insufficient to overturn the built-in hunger for order, for pattern, for balance, for even-handedness.

He understood, too, that the human brain was also preprogrammed to reward successes to a greater degree than it penalized failures, especially if the successes were few but large and the failures frequent but small, so that even people who knew perfectly well how heavily the odds were stacked against them could not resist the temptation to feed money into slot machines, or buy tickets in the National Lottery, in the hope of hitting jackpots.

He knew all that as well as anyone—but he knew better too. He knew that the Kilcannons had a gift that enabled them to beat the odds: a “house percentage” granted to them by some cosmic whim; a plenary indulgence protecting them from the mercurial wrath of mathematical probability. If common men were vulnerable to superstition, how much more vulnerable was a Kilcannon? If common men made the sign of the cross before feeding money to one-armed bandits, or fondled their lucky rabbit's-feet as the roulette-wheels began to spin, even though the house percentage always worked against them, how much more inclined was a Kilcannon to indulge in ritual, given that he was
guaranteed
to come out ahead if he did?

Canny sighed, and closed the book.

What he wanted, more than anything else in the world, at that moment in time—more even than a chance to savor Lissa Lo's naked body—was a chance to avoid being sucked into the vortex of anxiety and obsession that had consumed his father. So far as he could tell, that same vortex had consumed his grandfather too, and twenty-nine other Earls of Credesdale before him, exacting a price for their uncanny luck that was as heavy as it was ironic. If he couldn't avoid that fate, he reminded himself, then what he had—or had had, and might yet recover—couldn't be regarded as a gift at all. It would indeed become the family curse: a diabolical pact contracting him to a perverse kind of torment.

It was a challenge he had to meet. If he couldn't do it, with all the intellectual resources of the newly-born twenty-first century at his disposal, who could? His own son? The son, that is, that he would be forced by superstition to sire, in order to renew the lucky streak that would be damped down by his father's death and not return to full strength until it could once again be shared by a father and son—who would hardly be able to help loving and resenting one another at one and the same time.