in case.
Mercifully, Lissa didn’t come back into the drawing-room until his mother had had time to turn her frown upside-down, but Canny still had to weather the storm of Lady Credesdale’s unspoken disappointment as the three of them continued the conversation along conventional lines.
Lissa congratulated Lady Credesdale on the internal decor, politely overlooking its manifest hideousness, and his mother graciously took credit for it, although it had mostly been in place before she arrived—save for such oddments as the occasional table and the magazine rack—and was maintained entirely by the servants.
Lady Credesdale, in her turn, made banal and blatantly insincere comments on the exhausting nature of a model’s life, and Lissa assured her that the excitement alone was more than adequate compensation for the trouble, and that privacy was an overrated privilege.
Canny watched the two of them bring their mutual dislike to full maturity with interest, marveling at the amazing rapidity with which their hostility matured. Occasionally, he stirred the pot with a casual remark about Lissa’s bodyguards or Mummy’s book group—but in the end he saved the situation by offering to take Lissa for a turn around the grounds. He was unsurprised, but delighted nevertheless, when the model accepted with enthusiasm.
“You mustn’t mind Mummy,” Canny said, as Lissa contemplated the absurd neatness of the lawn and the mildly surreal quality of the topiary, turning her lovely face reflexively to catch the faint breath of the evening breeze. “She has exactly the kind of life she always wanted, and she feels guilty about not being able to enjoy it. She isn’t nearly as idle as she thinks she is, but she’s never been able to think of her commitments in the village as work. I’m going to devise a suitably-labeled executive position for her once I’m in charge of the empire, to see what she can do with some real authority. I think she might surprise herself.”
“I’ll probably become envious of younger women myself as I get older,” Lissa said, lazily. “And I’ll probably dislike myself for my shallowness. Faces and breasts fall much faster than minds decline; it’s something we all have to live with, but nobody likes it—not in my line of work. Is your gardener really a Barbara Hepworth fan, or doesn’t he have the patience to carve the crenellations of the hedge into peacocks and rabbits?”
“This is Yorkshire,” Canny told her. “Jebb doesn’t do twee. He doesn’t really do abstract expressionism either, but we’re all too frightened of his probable reaction to mention the phrase in connection with his endeavors. How do you like the gargoyles? They’re not authentic Gothic features, alas—just fashionable Victorian frippery—but they do have spectacularly ugly faces. The hellhound and the worm are supposed to be the best, but I rather like the one that looks exactly like the twenty-eighth earl.” He pointed out the relevant monstrosities as he spoke; they were still close to the north-western corner of the house, so they could see the side as well as the façade, although the walls still loomed over them in a satisfyingly intimidating fashion.
Lissa didn’t make any comment about Canny’s use of the term “worm” where she would surely have used “dragon”, but she’d already demonstrated that her mastery of English extended as far as the appropriate use of the word “crenellations”, so he wasn’t in the least surprised.
“Isn’t that one supposed to be the devil?” she queried, instead—speaking of the one that Canny had identified as an ancestor.
“Yes it is,” he agreed, “but the twenty-eighth earl was definitely the model—you didn’t have to go past his portrait to get to the guest bathroom, but I’ll point it out later, Believe it or not, the ones on the stairs are the better-looking Kilcannons. I’m the exception, of course—I got my luck from Daddy and my looks from Mummy. I shudder to think how I might have turned out if it had been the other way around.”
Thus far, Canny had navigated their stroll in such a way that the Great Skull was obscured—although she must have seen it as she drove towards the house—but once they had passed through the wooden gate in Jebb’s ornamental hedge the oddly-shaped rock formation on Cockayne Ridge was clearly in view, looming ominously over the grey slate roof and neatly framed by Credesdale House’s twin chimney stacks. It immediately became the obvious topic of conversation.
“Who would have expected to find a death’s-head dominating the Land of Cockayne,” Lissa said. “Your ancestors must have been exceedingly unsuperstitious men, to build a mansion house in the shadow of something like that—or men whose superstition worked in peculiar ways. I suppose family curses must be routine in this part of the world.”
“No family in Yorkshire is complete without one,” Canny assured her. “Isn’t it much the same in your part of the world?”
“Superstition works in peculiar ways there, too,” she agreed, “and no family is complete without its...unfortunately, Mandarin and English don’t run parallel in that respect. There isn’t a word in English that encapsulates our notion of such things. Curse gives the wrong impression.”
“You’re Chinese, then?” he asked, delicately.
“Not according to my passport,” she said. “In my part of the world, though, nations come and go in much the same way that conquerors used to come and go. Mandarin always endures and thrives regardless. It’s the language of wisdom and bureaucracy, the precious relic of the oldest empire of all.”
“The language of wisdom and bureaucracy?” he echoed. “You wouldn’t find many people in the West who’d yoke those two concepts together.”
They were strolling up the hill now, and Lissa paused to look back at the house. From this angle, it had always seemed to Canny to be direly reminiscent of a set from a particularly corny Hammer horror film, but the model made no comment as he dutifully pointed out its worst features.
“Tacky Victorian mock-Gothic has its virtues, of course,” Canny observed, angling his languid hand so cleverly that it took in the ornamental portico and the flying buttresses at the same time. “It passes for quaint nowadays, and the house must have been even uglier before, to judge by the surviving walls. Great-great-grandfather’s diaries always refer to the replacement of the patched-up Tudor pile that preceded it as ‘the Restoration’, although he must have known perfectly well that the Goths who conquered Rome never got as far as Britain. At least no one ever thought of replacing that beautifully coarse Yorkshire stone with red brick. The family’s even older than the title, if legend can be believed—the records claim that the land was ours long before the first Earl was ushered into the Upper House—but any house that was here in the fifth century can’t have been much grander than a wooden shell. Given that the Romans must have been perceived as the enemy, its occupants presumably took pride in the absence of a bathroom.”
“It is beautiful, in its own way.” Lissa’s own ancestors, he supposed, must have lived in a great many exotic palaces if the assurances of Hello! could be trusted. Considering that she’d spent all day posing in what Daddy would have called “posh frocks”, in front of the grand facade at Harewood, the model’s generous approval of his own humble abode seemed to Canny to be a substantial compliment. He didn’t have the feeling that he was being teased. Whatever Lissa Lo’s agenda was, it wasn’t anything obvious—but if she had been attracted by the fact that he was an unusually lucky man, she wasn’t going to be able to cut herself a permanent slice, if the rules could be believed. If the rules could be believed, his own luck was about to take a turn for the worse, and no matter how seductive she decided to be she wasn’t the right person to help him renew it.
If the rules could be believed.
Now that he was with Lissa Lo instead of his father, the force of that if had returned to its full and proper magnitude. In any case, what greater luck could there be in the world of the twentieth century, for a virile young man like himself, than to get together with Lissa Lo for as long as she was prepared to indulge him...if, that is, she were prepared to indulge him at all.
Even if she were, he reminded himself, the questions would remain, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. How much of the supposed precedent set out in the diaries was mere legend, lies