the gambling?” the old man said. “You haven’t got a habit, have you? You can let it go, when your luck dries up?”
Canny didn’t challenge his father’s use of “when” rather than “if”, although he still remained unconvinced that the allegedly inevitable diminution of the family gift following the death of an earl was anything but a patriarchal myth intended to prey on the minds of guilt-ridden scions. “An addiction, you mean?” he said, scornfully. “No—I’m as clean as a whistle. I can leave off for a year, or ten years if it’s necessary, and not feel a pang. I’ll run the portfolio defensively and keep the mill ticking over, until everything’s well and truly sorted. Or would you rather I put all the shares in a blind trust and gave the village elders carte blanche to oversee the mill’s businesses the same way they oversee the village shops?”
“Good god, no! At least you’ve got brains, even if your luck deserts you. Stockbrokers are all crooks, and the village elders are all fools. You can rely on Maurice Rawtenstall, though. He’s probably crooked, but he’s discreetly crooked, and it’s better to have a clever crook in charge of your cash cows than an honest idiot. If he creams a little off the top, that’s fine—just make sure we get all the milk. Keep everything under control. Use a tight rein, until you’ve done what you have to do. All of it.”
“I’ll follow the family motto,” Canny assured him, sourly but not entirely insincerely. “No matter how absurd it seems, it’s best to do it just in case.”
There was a sneer in his voice, but that too was what his father needed to hear. If he’d said it piously, Daddy wouldn’t have been able to believe it, but saying it as if it were something nasty that he had to swallow regardless, he could be convincing—or as close thereto as was humanly possible.
Canny could remember a time when his father wouldn’t have cared a tuppenny toss whether Canny intended to follow the rules or not, just so long as he got the lion’s share of the luck he’d renewed by siring a son as the rules required—but he didn’t doubt the sincerity of the old man’s conversion. Daddy really did care about the succession, about the continuation of the Kilcannon streak, not because he thought the Devil would have him if the bargain weren’t properly extended, but because it was the done thing. As men like Lord Credesdale approached death, they cared more rather than less about the state of affairs they were leaving behind: its order; its propriety; its continuity. Canny wasn’t at all sure that he wouldn’t go the same way himself, especially if the course of events did knock him off his high horse, and persuade him of the wisdom of following the rules just in case.
If parental tyranny had achieved nothing else as he’d grown older under its spur, it had certainly inculcated the habit of doing his petty penances and performing his petty rituals because compliance was far less troublesome than non-compliance. He hadn’t had the benefit of Stevie Larkin’s personal tuition, but he’d read enough psychology to know how easy it would be to take aboard the age-old obsession with lineage and continuity along with all the rest of the petty rituals once the responsibility of managing the family luck was his alone. He wasn’t under any delusion that Daddy’s death would free him, or that burning all the portraits of his ancestors would render their commanding stares impotent.
Canny had never met the thirtieth Earl, but he had a strong suspicion that Daddy had turned into a replica of his own Daddy—and now that he was looking down at the hollow wreck of the man his father had once been, it was all too easy to imagine that he might be forced into the shoes of the departed tyrant, possessed as he had been by exactly the same obsessive ghost.
“I’ll ring for Bentley, Daddy,” Canny said, softly. “It’s time for your shot. You need to rest.”
“Bugger that,” said the old man, hoarsely. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Right now, it’s not pleasant dreams I need. Look, Can, it’s hurting me to talk to you almost as much as it hurt me to stay awake fidgeting, fretting that you wouldn’t get here, but if I take the morphine I’ll be away with the fairies till supper-time. The least you can do is hear me out and save your smart remarks and sarcasm for someone who appreciates them.”
“Yes, Dad,” Canny said, meekly. He always shortened “Daddy” to “Dad” when he was making a show of being serious. He released his father’s hand and sat up straighter in his chair.
“You think I’m going to give you the usual load of crap about your responsibilities, don’t you? To your mother, the estate, the villagers. Well, I’m not. You’re not the only one who’s noticed that it’s the twenty-first century. Your mother’s as tough as an old boot and the villagers are perfectly capable of looking after themselves in spite of the fact that we’ve kept them wrapped up in cotton wool for the best part of two hundred years. The mill was never a part of the family heritage, and the patchwork pig’s ear it’s turned into is an irrelevance. It wouldn’t matter a damn if the entire folly went up in flame tomorrow, as long as the insurance was paid up. What concerns me is you, Can, and what you make of yourself.”
The dying man had to pause for breath then, but Canny knew that he wasn’t supposed to interrupt. He waited, patiently, for his father to find breath enough to continue.
“You’ve probably always thought of yourself as a means to an end,” Lord Credesdale went on, eventually. “That the only reason I ever had a son was to renew the Kilcannon streak. And you’ve probably always thought that I resented having to share my luck with you as much as you’ve lately come to resent having to share yours with me. Well, there’s no denying it—you’re absolutely right. You were a means to an end, and I have always resented the sharing. But that’s never been the whole story.”
Again, Canny waited out the pause.
“You’re my son, Can. I don’t know how other men feel about their sons, or other sons about their fathers, but it seems to me that nobody actually needs a streak like ours to mix up their motives and complicate their feelings. As far as I can see, it’s normal. Other people have their rules just as we do, and benefit in their own ways from sticking to them even while they seethe with frustration. I want you to get it right, Can. I very nearly didn’t, and maybe you’d say that I never did, as a husband or a parent, but either way, I want you to do better. I want you to succeed. That’s why I’m telling you, as firmly as I can. not to test the system to destruction. You’ve had the luck all your life, and maybe it won’t seem too different at first to be without it, for a couple of months or a couple of years—but in time, the cumulative effect of being without that house percentage will take its toll. Believe me, I know.
“To begin with, I dare say, a little common-or-garden bad luck might seem like a novelty. You’ll be able to bear it easily enough—but over time, it’ll wear you down. Oh, you’ll always be able to look around at your friends and neighbors, and see most of them getting by perfectly well under the dominion of honest probability—but it’s the ones who aren’t that you need to study carefully. Look at the ones who lose more often than they win, not just at their predicaments but at their attitudes. You and I know that their misfortunes are just a matter of chance, and so do they—but that’s not the way they feel. They feel victimized, Can. They feel tormented. They feel that fate has it in for them. Only a few of them get around to thinking, consciously, that they must have deserved the bad things that happen to them, but it doesn’t matter whether they get that far or not, because it’s just as bad thinking that they didn’t deserve it as it is thinking that they did.”
Canny felt the expression on his own face setting hard as the words got through to him. Even his father it seemed, had drunk his fill of popular psychology. Even his father had worked out the elements of psychological probability. The old man’s eyes were as dark and taut as they had ever been—no slackness or hollowness there!—and they were boring into him with all the fervor of a mind that desperately needed morphine to ease its distress but wasn’t prepared to compromise, for the moment, between raw wakefulness and sugared dreaming.
“If it’s like that for them, Can,” the old man went on, relentlessly, “imagine what it’s going to be like for you. You’ll be the thirty-second Earl, Can, at the tail end of a winning streak that’s lasted