Free The Lamorna Wink by Martha Grimes Page B

knowing who and what he was, Melrose still at times hated the man, saw him as an interloper in the Belgravia house. Would it have been easier to accept his mother’s affair if Grey had been a seducer, a rotter, and a layabout? And his mother a woman caught in his spell? Or was it simply that the real Nicholas Grey was none of these things but was instead the sort of man it would be difficult to live up to?
    He had seen Grey several times in the Belgravia house, which Melrose had since sold. He had sold the house for that reason—it was where Nicholas Grey had come. The sale had taken place a few years after the solicitor had handed over a letter that his mother had directed be given to Melrose long enough after her death to give him time to get over the worst of it. His mother had been dead for five years when the lawyer had given him the letter. And he hadn’t gotten over it.
    He returned to that letter time and again, reading it so often he had worn down the fold so the two parts barely hung together. Nicholas Grey was Irish (the letter said), and it was that which one could say killed him. He had died in Armagh in a skirmish with the IRA. He had himself at one time when he was younger been a member of it, until he finally couldn’t put up with what he felt were random and arbitrary assassinations. Grey himself had been a hot-head but not an anarchist. He was a man sublimely caught up in his cause and had the reputation of being a brilliant strategist, a matchless orator, and an inspiration to the men under him. Grey had disliked the aristocracy, not in theory but in fact; he had hated it for what it had become.
    What Lady Marjorie, his mother, had done was to trade a fairly amiable and undemanding man born to wealth and leisure for one who it would be very hard for Melrose, his son, to live up to, a father who had stamped Melrose with a nearly impossible romanticism for which he could find little or no outlet.
    He thought she had been wrong to tell him, and yet her motives, if clouded, had been good ones. His mind, he hoped, was large enough to allow for this. His own motives he felt were equally cloudy. He told himself that in relinquishing the title of eighth Earl of Caverness he was squaring things with his nominal father, the seventh earl. But he suspected what he was really doing was squaring things with Nicholas Grey, though he couldn’t say why.
    He wondered if it was his vanity, rather than his heart, that had been bruised.
    He would much rather weigh in as the real Melrose Plant than as the bogus Earl of Caverness.

13
    S he had said:
    I make no apology for my behavior (which might strike you as arrogant and selfish), except insofar as you’re being made unhappy; I did not want you to read this until some years after my death—when you would be over the worst of it. . . . There is so much of Nicholas in you, your looks, your moods, that it haunts me.
    She was not telling him “ to unburden myself and thereby place a heavier burden on you ” but to fill in what she saw as a tremendous distance between what he, Melrose, really was and what he had to think he was, “ gentleman, an aristocrat without a past —” Melrose still wondered what she meant here—
    and an uncertain future, the Earls of Caverness having been unremarkable in their lives and legacies. They were perhaps what people think of when they think of the aristocracy. You do not fit this mold and never will, I think.
    Even as a child you showed no interest in aristocratic trappings. You wanted to be a “plain old fellow” (your words) and go to the local comprehensive school. Your father, of course, wouldn’t hear of it; he was, he said, “scandalized” by the very notion.
    Once you went missing for a whole day and we found you in Sidbury on a picket line demanding more government subsidies for the farmers. You carried a sign you had made yourself. Every word in it was misspelled