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