“She’s easily bribed,” Hyacinth explained, looking back at Frances, who had already assumed the requisite distance to the couple and was now looking quite bored. “All the best maids are.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gareth murmured.
“That I find difficult to believe,” Hyacinth said. He had probably bribed maids all across London. Hyacinth couldn’t imagine that he could have made it to his age, with his reputation, and not have had an affair with a woman who wanted it kept secret.
He smiled inscrutably. “A gentleman never tells.”
Hyacinth decided not to pursue the topic any further. Not, of course, because she wasn’t curious, but rather because she thought he’d meant what he’d said, and he wasn’t going to spill any secrets, delicious though they might be.
And really, why waste one’s energy if one was going to get nowhere?
“I thought we would never escape,” she said, once they’d reached the end of her street. “I have much to tell you.”
He turned to her with obvious interest. “Were you able to translate the note?”
Hyacinth glanced behind her. She knew she’d said Frances would remain far in back, but it was always good to check, especially as Gregory was no stranger to the concept of bribery, either.
“Yes,” she said, once she was satisfied that they would not be overheard. “Well, most of it, at least. Enough to know that we need to focus our search in the library.”
Gareth chuckled.
“Why is that funny?”
“Isabella was a great deal sharper than she let on. If she’d wanted to pick a room that her husband was not likely to enter, she could not have done better than the library. Except for the bedroom, I suppose, but”—he turned and gazed down at her with an annoyingly paternalistic glance—“that’s not a topic for your ears.”
“Stuffy man,” she muttered.
“Not an accusation that is often flung my way,” he said with a slightly amused smile, “but clearly you bring out the best in me.”
He was so patently sarcastic that Hyacinth could do nothing but scowl.
“The library, you say,” Gareth mused, after taking a moment to enjoy Hyacinth’s distress. “It makes perfect sense. My father’s father was no intellectual.”
“I hope that means he didn’t possess very many books,” Hyacinth said with a frown. “I suspect that she left another clue tucked into one.”
“No such luck,” Gareth said with a grimace. “My grandfather might not have been fond of books, but he did care a great deal about appearances, and no self-respecting baron would have a house without a library, or a library without books.”
Hyacinth let out a groan. “It will take all night to go through an entire library of books.”
He gave her a sympathetic smile, and something fluttered in her stomach. She opened her mouth to speak, but all she did was inhale, and she couldn’t shake the oddest feeling that she was surprised.
But by what, she had no idea.
“Perhaps, once you see what’s there, something will suddenly make sense,” Gareth said. He did a little one-shouldered shrug as he steered them around the corner and onto Park Lane. “That sort of thing happens to me all the time. Usually when I least expect it.”
Hyacinth nodded in agreement, still a little unsettled by the strange, light-headed sensation that had just washed over her. “That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping might happen,” she said, forcing herself to reaffix her focus onto the matter at hand. “But Isabella was rather cryptic, I’m afraid. Or…I don’t know…perhaps she wasn’t deliberately cryptic, and it’s just because I can’t translate all the words. But I do think that we may assume that we will find not the diamonds but instead another clue.”
“Why is that?”
She nodded thoughtfully as she spoke. “I’m almost certain that we must look in the library, specifically in a book. And I don’t see how she would have fit diamonds between the pages.”
“She could have hollowed the book out. Created a hiding spot.”
Her breath caught. “I never thought of that,” she said, her eyes widening with excitement. “We will need to redouble our efforts. I think—although I’m not certain—that the book will be one of a scientific topic.”
He nodded. “That will narrow things down. It’s been some time since I was in the library at Clair House, but I don’t recall there being much in the way of scientific treatises.”
Hyacinth screwed up her mouth a little as she tried to recall the precise words in the clue. “It was something having to do with water. But I don’t think it was biological.”