“So you’ve mentioned,” Hyacinth said. And then she couldn’t resist. She just had to ask. “But tell me,” she said, leaning in just a bit. “Truthfully. Weren’t you just a tiny bit excited? Once the fear of disco
very had worn off and you knew we would be undetected? Wasn’t it,” she asked, her words coming out on a sigh, “just a little bit wonderful?”
He looked down at her, and maybe it was the moonlight, or maybe just her wishful imagination, but she thought she saw something flash in his eyes. Something soft, something just a little bit indulgent.
“A little bit,” he said. “But just a little bit.”
Hyacinth smiled. “I knew you weren’t a stick.”
He looked down at her, with what had to be palpable irritation. No one had ever accused him of being stodgy before. “A stick?” he said disgustedly.
“In the mud.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“They why did you ask?”
“Because you, Miss Bridgerton…”
And so it went, the rest of the way home.
Chapter 10
The next morning. Hyacinth is still in an excellent mood. Unfortunately, her mother commented upon this so many times at breakfast that Hyacinth was finally forced to flee and barricade herself in her bedchamber.
Violet Bridgerton is an exceptionally canny woman, after all, and if anyone is going to guess that Hyacinth is falling in love, it would be her.
Probably before Hyacinth, even.
Hyacinth hummed to herself as she sat at the small desk in her bedchamber, tapping her fingers against the blotter. She had translated and retranslated the note they’d found the night before in the small green office, and she still wasn’t satisfied with her results, but even that could not dampen her spirits.
She’d been a little disappointed, of course, that they had not found the diamonds the night before, but the note in the curio cabinet seemed to indicate that the jewels might still be theirs for the taking. At the very least, no one else had reached any success with the trail of clues Isabella had left behind.
Hyacinth was never happier than when she had a task, a goal, some sort of quest. She loved the challenge of solving a puzzle, analyzing a clue. And Isabella Marinzoli St. Clair had turned what would surely have been a dull and ordinary season into the most exciting spring of Hyacinth’s life.
She looked down at the note, twisting her mouth to the side as she forced her mind back to the task at hand. Her translation was still only about seventy percent complete, in Hyacinth’s optimistic estimation, but she rather thought she’d managed enough of a translation to justify another attempt. The next clue—or the actual diamonds, if they were lucky—was almost certainly in the library.
“In a book, I imagine,” she murmured, gazing sightlessly out the window. She thought of the Bridgerton library, tucked away at her brother’s Grosvenor Square home. The room itself wasn’t terribly large, but the shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
And books filled the shelves. Every last inch of them.
“Maybe the St. Clairs aren’t much for reading,” she said to herself, turning her attention once again to Isabella’s note. Surely there had to be something in the cryptic words to indicate which book she had chosen as her hiding spot. Something scientific, she was fairly sure. Isabella had underlined part of her note, which led Hyacinth to think that perhaps she was referring to a book title, since it didn’t seem to make sense in context that she’d have been underlining for emphasis. And the part she’d underlined had mentioned water and “things that move,” which sounded a bit like physics, not that Hyacinth had ever studied it. But she’d four brothers who had attended university, and she’d overheard enough of their studies to have a vague knowledge of, if not the subject, at least what the subject meant.
Still, she wasn’t nearly as certain as she’d have liked about her translation, or what it meant. Maybe if she went to Gareth with what she’d translated thus far, he could read something into it that she didn’t see. After all, he was more familiar with the house and its contents than she was. He might know of an odd or interesting book, something unique or out of the ordinary.
Gareth.
She smiled to herself, a loopy, silly grin that she would have died before allowing anyone else to see.
Something had happened the night before. Something special.
Something important.
He liked her. He really liked her. They had laughed and chattered the entire way home. And when he had dropped her off at the servants’ entrance to Number Five, he had looked at her in that heavy-lidded, just a little bit intense way of his. He had smiled, too, one corner of his mouth lifting as if he had a secret.
She’d shivered. She’d actually forgotten how to speak. And she’d wondered if he might kiss her again, which of course he hadn’t done, but maybe…
Maybe soon.