Read Online Streaking by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œVery funny,” the old man growled.
    â€œActually, 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.
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œYou’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 occasion, but Lord Credesdale had grown