Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  The boat was fast; it skimmed over the placid waters of the Mediterranean with consummate grace, bumping over the waves in a near-regular rhythm that set up a surreal contrapuntal relationship with the throb of its motor. The darkness of the cabin enhanced the insistence of Canny’s remaining senses, which gave the journey a dreamlike quality even though he never did manage to drift off into sleep. Eventually, he got up from the bunk so he could stare out of the porthole. He was on the starboard side of the boat, so he could see the lights on the shore, and could even make out the dark contour of the horizon against the sky, whose blue was already beginning to brighten slightly as the dawn approached.

  “Goodbye, Riviera,” he murmured. “I had a good time, while it lasted, but responsibility calls. From now on, when there’s trouble at t’mill, it’s down to me to sort it out. Maurice Rawtenstall probably doesn’t think I’m up to it, but his predecessor probably thought the same about Dad. It’s traditional, after all. Maybe I’m not—but with luck, I will be, and luck’s something I’ve never been without.”

  He shut up then, feeling slightly foolish even though the drone of the boat’s engine would have drowned out his words before they reached the ear of a listener stood directly beside him.

  Nice was lit up brilliantly, as a modern twenty-four-seven city ought to be; the Promenade des Anglais seemed endless. The heat in the cabin was stifling, but he remembered only too clearly what had happened last time he’d tried to let in a breeze and he knew that it wouldn’t last much longer. He let the porthole remain shut, and used the towel that had been carefully placed at the foot of his bed to mop the sweat from his face.

  He felt a sudden pang of nostalgia, not merely for Cockayne but for Cockayne in Autumn, when the shadow of the Pennines wasn’t quite enough to keep the chill out of the low-lying dale and the sky was as grey as slate and the smoke-blackened stone of the terraces was like a sponge soaking up the moisture from the foggy air.

  Soon, it would all be his: his own little Utopia, insulated from the hurricane of change that was sweeping the world by the mass and pressure of all the Credesdale traditions.

  For a moment, he could almost believe that he belonged there, cultivating his own narrow garden with infinite patience and stoicism. But then he thought of Lissa Lo, and everything that she symbolized, not merely by her beauty but by her glamour and fame, and told himself that there would be time enough for gardening in Utopia when he had wrung the last few drops of delight from the blazing glory of Cosmopolis.

  And then the sun came up, rippling silver across the placid waves of the Mediterranean.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Although Lissa Lo couldn’t have had more than two hours sleep, even if she’d tumbled into slumberland before Canny had stumbled across his friendly neighborhood mugger, she was as bright as a button by the time the two of them clambered up the steps into the back of the jet and fastened their safety-belts.

  They were running more than half an hour behind Lissa’s original schedule, but once they were in the air the captain turned in his seat and leaned out of the cockpit to give them a thumbs-up sign—a promise that he could get them to Church Fenton on time, given the kindness of the weather and the co-operation of French and English air traffic control.

  Canny assumed that Lissa Lo had that effect on everybody—everybody who was male, at any rate. Her face was immaculately made-up, presenting a truly fabulous appearance, and even her casual clothing was cut to the millimeter...but Canny wasn’t sure that it was wise to expose himself to so much titillation.

  Even though he knew that the information was irrelevant, Canny took time out to study the model’s discreet companions. They weren’t as ostentatiously big as the minders most successful models trotted around as status symbols, but they compensated for their lack of vulgar mass with an easy arrogance suggestive of immense skill in esoteric martial arts. Canny couldn’t pinpoint their origins, although he was normally able to tell Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos apart—but then, he couldn’t pinpoint Lissa Lo’s origin either; she had a curiously cosmopolitan quality even though she didn’t seem to have a single drop of Western blood in her veins.

  The bodyguards took up positions at the back of the cabin, far enough away to sustain the illusion that whatever Lissa might say to Canny, and he to her, would remain entirely private.

  The model didn’t bother to apologize for the fact that there was only freshly-squeezed orange juice to drink, so Canny didn’t have to explain—truthfully, although it always sound like a lie—that he didn’t like drinking alcohol in airplanes because it had such a dehydrating effect. It was one of the few occasions when the conscientious abstemiousness demanded by the rules didn’t seem in the least onerous, thus allowing him to assume a tokenistic attitude of compromise with their requirements. Given that he wasn’t drinking, he felt that he was entitled to a certain latitude in matters of lust.

  Lissa, seeming perfectly at ease, told him all about the photo-shoot she’d be doing at Harewood in some considerable detail. He would have prompted her if she’d needed it, but she didn’t. Although high fashion wasn’t really his sort of thing, Canny listened attentively, feeling privileged to be the recipient of so many words fallen from such exquisite lips. By the time she asked him whether he minded talking about his father, he was sufficiently relaxed not to feel too awkward about doing so.

  “Not at all,” Canny said. “To tell the truth, we’ve never been close in the usual sense of the word, even by dour Yorkshire standards. We respect one another, of course, but the old man always saw most aspects of parental responsibility as a matter of stern duty, and he brought me up to see my filial obligations the same way. If we ever did love one another, we’ve learned not to show it. He wasn’t always the mean disciplinarian I grew up with, mind. It always sends a shudder down my spine when anyone calls me a chip off the old block, but rumor has it that Daddy was a little on the wild side himself, before I was born to sober him up. The word in the county is that he didn’t calm down until his own father died, and then underwent a complete personality change. That prospect frightens me a little, but I figure that I’m my own man. I don’t have to go down the same route.”

  “So your father was a gambler too?”

  “He certainly was,” Canny said, wondering whether she had something more wide-ranging in mind than the closed bookmakers accounts and the bans imposed by White’s and the Victoria Club. “So long as I’ve known him, though, it’s just been Lloyd’s, the Stock Exchange and life in general.”

  “Was he badly hit by the crash?” Her voice was light, for all the world as if she were making polite conversation without actually caring at all what she was saying.

  “Everyone’s been badly hit by the crash,” Canny said, warily. “Luckily, Daddy never got into dotcoms—not his sort of thing at all.”

  “Will you have a lot of business responsibility to take over?”

  Canny could have read all kinds of hidden meanings into that awkwardly-phrased enquiry, but he didn’t want to, and he told himself that it would be ludicrously oversensitive to do so. “Oh yes,” he admitted. He decided that it would be a good idea to choose his own ground rather than let the string of questions extend into hazardous terrain. “I’ll have to give up on Monte, and Paris, and the season, at least for a couple of years. We’re not expected to make a meal of mourning where I come from, but taking care of business is another thing entirely. Time was when the Mill was just a mill, churning out textiles like all the rest, but it would have gone bust fifty years ago if it hadn’t moved on and diversified. There are only a handful of farms on the estate, but they’ve had to move with the times too—putting a few sheep out to graze the moor isn’t nearly enough to qualify as a living these days, and even that’s a more complicated business than it used to be. Then there’s the village. Collecting the rents is child’s play, but managing the pace and direction of its development...the elders are supposed to do all that, of course, but that only means that they cre
ate a deluge of demands that I have to act upon. I should have been getting involved in all of it for years—since I left university, I guess—but it was so much easier to play the prodigal son, and to let it slide and slide. Well, it’s fatted calf time now, and when the feasting’s over the grind begins. Grief is optional where I come from, but seriousness isn’t, once there’s no one else to shoulder the burden. It’s simply not done to go on playing the black sheep of the family once one becomes the thirty-second Earl.”

  “The thirty-second?” Lissa echoed, flirtatiously. “Is that a lot?”

  “Not really. A fair few of England’s hereditary titles go back to the Norman conquest, although many are more recent. Henry IV created quite a few when he displaced Richard II. Ours is one of the odd ones intermediate between the two. We’d probably have been stripped of our entitlements when the Lancastrians hammered Richard III in the Wars of the Roses, and might have lost the estate to the anti-Catholic purges of the Puritan era, but somehow we came through—the benefits of obscurity, I suppose. The Crede’s more beck than river, one of the least of the Wharfe’s tributaries—and Cockayne itself wasn’t built until the early nineteenth century, to house the twenty-fifth earl’s newly-imported mill-workers. The name’s second-hand—there’s a hamlet of the same name in the North York Moors—and stealing it was false advertising of the most outrageous stripe. Credesdale was even less like the mythical land of Cockayne than the other Cockayne’s idyllic setting even before the Mill was built; now it’s a parody. The industrialist earl probably didn’t know what the name signified, though.”

  “He wasn’t being ironic?”

  “Unlikely. Until I came along, the Kilcannons didn’t do irony. We’re not effete and corrupt like the aristocracy down south. We’re Yorkshire folk—genuine Yorkshire folk, not Johnny-come-latelies like the Viking settlers of the Dark Ages. The twenty-fifth earl might have jumped belatedly on the Industrial Revolution bandwagon by building the mill, but we were never the kind of people who made up proverbs about muck and brass. We’ve got roots all the way down to the county’s core. Daddy’s fond of saying that we’d probably be seriously rich if our remoter forefathers hadn’t taken such a caning during the Roman Invasion and the Viking Settlements, but even our relatively well-kept family records don’t go back to Anglo-Saxon days, so we only have legends to draw on with respect to its early days. Personally, I don’t care whether we’re ultimately descended from Celts, Picts or Neanderthals—it’s a cosmopolitan world nowadays, I tell him—but genealogy has always been an obsession of ours.”

  “It’s very fashionable nowadays,” the model observed.

  “Sure—but we’re not about to give it up for that reason, no matter how hard we and the village elders might try to resist the pressure of modernity.”

  “Family tradition is a valuable asset,” Lissa Lo assured him.

  He gave her another sharp look, but the comment seemed harmless enough. “So it is,” he agreed. “But it can be overdone. I keep telling Daddy that the world has changed forever, and mostly for the better, but he just shakes his head, in a way that none but a true Yorkshireman can. I’m sorry to see him go, of course, but he’s had a good innings. He’s only seventy-five, which doesn’t seem that much now so many people live to be a hundred, but he was in exceptionally good health until the crab got to work in his guts—didn’t look a day over fifty until the middle of last year.”

  “You must have been a very late first child,” Lissa Lo observed.

  “My arrival was more than a trifle belated,” Canny admitted, “although I look a little younger than I am. Daddy’s first marriage was a complete disaster—his description, not mine; I never met the lady. There were no more kids after me, even though the second was better. I suspect that he was glad to stop, once the continuity of the family name was assured. Other titled families take out insurance by having younger sons, then have to send them into the army or the church to get them out of the way, but not the lucky Kilcannons. One’s almost always been enough for us, and we’ve never been excessively afflicted by daughters.”

  Canny realized that his determination to fill up conversational space without exposing himself to too many questions was making him babble like an idiot, and wondered yet again whether the old man’s impending death had disturbed him more than he cared to admit, but he put it down to the fact that he wasn’t used to sitting this close to women as beautiful as Lissa Lo. He’d always tried to avoid fantasizing about such encounters, but he’d never been entirely successful. He’d always been prepared to tell himself that the rules had been soured by traditional misogyny, and that his father’s recent conservatism in that regard must have been caused, or at least excessively influenced by the failure of his first marriage.

  He wondered, briefly, whether his father had seen a dark streak before the tumors started to reclaim his flesh, and whether, if so, he’d guiltily attributed it to his own failure to keep the rules in his youth—but he set the thought aside and hauled himself back into the moment. It was impossible to think of a lift in Lissa Lo’s hired jet as anything but a generous stroke of fortune, and one worth following up as far as he might be allowed.

  He studied Lissa’s face as she paused, having no new question ready. He had always thought her exceedingly beautiful, whenever he had caught a glimpse of her at Henley or the palace, but now that he was so close to her—without a roulette wheel to distract him—he realized that there was something about her beauty that was just as magical, in its own way, as his own gift. Canny was used to the close proximity of lovely women, and had thought that long practice had accustomed him to the necessity of withstanding most of their beguilements, innocent and ingenious alike, but he could see very clearly that Lissa Lo was in a class of her own.

  “I suppose you’ll have to start thinking about the next heir now?” the model observed, when their search for conversational inspiration had dragged on a few moments too long. If it had been any other woman in the world—even another of her own seriously spoilt kind—Canny would have taken that for a blatant tease or a baited hook, but from Lissa Lo it easily passed for polite and disinterested conversation.

  “The old man is certainly going to say so, in no uncertain terms,” Canny admitted. “He might well get very intense about it, no matter how much morphine he’s on.” He hesitated, but eventually decided that he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t try, and bit the bullet. “Would you like to take a look at the estate while you’re in the neighborhood? The house isn’t in Harewood’s league, but it’s got some interesting features.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. “I might not be around long, though. My agent’s fixed up something in Venezuela.”

  “Tonight, if you like, when you finish the shoot,” Canny said, indicating with the slightest possible shrug of his shoulders that he wouldn’t be offended by a polite refusal.

  “I’d like that,” she said, with all apparent sincerity. “I don’t know what time we’ll finish, though—photographers are an exceedingly unreliable breed.”

  “That’s okay,” he assured her. “Come if and when you can. No need to call ahead—cook’s always able to stretch dinner if unexpected guests turn up, or lay on a little late supper. Shall I draw you a map?”

  “It’s not necessary,” she told him, flatly. She didn’t even bother to ask for an address; she was obviously the kind of person who took it for granted that she’d always be able to find her way to wherever it was that she wanted to go. Canny couldn’t help wondering exactly where she did want to go, and why. A man in his position had to be even more careful about reading too little into coincidence than he did about reading too much.

  “Don’t expect too much of a welcome,” he warned her. “Daddy will be delighted to see you, if he’s conscious, but Mummy’s bound to be a bit distracted.”

  “No problem,” she said serenely. “Is there anything I shouldn’t mention?”

  Even that could have passed, just about, for a polite and disint
erest enquiry—but this time, Canny got the distinct impression that there was something not quite right about this entire situation, and that he was being pumped for information that he’d be better off keeping to himself.

  “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.