Streaking. Brian Stableford
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 create 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