“Hyacinth.”
She ignored him, pressing along the seam where the baseboard met the floor.
Gareth watched her for several seconds before remarking, “I’m quite certain you’ve done that before.”
She spared him only the briefest of glances before rising to inspect the window frame.
“Hyacinth,” he said.
She turned so suddenly that she almost lost her balance. “The note said ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and the Kingdom of Heaven is rich indeed.’ ”
“In Slovene,” he said wryly.
“Three Slovenians,” she reminded him. “Three Slovenians read the clue, and they all reached the same translation.”
And it certainly hadn’t been easy to find three Slovenians.
“Hyacinth,” Gareth said, as if he hadn’t already uttered her name twice…and countless times before that, always in the same slightly resigned tone.
“It has to be here,” she said. “It has to.”
Gareth shrugged. “Very well,” he said, “but Isabella has translated a passage from the Italian, and she wishes for you to check her work.”
Hyacinth paused, sighed, then lifted her fingers from the windowsill. At the age of eight, her daughter had announced that she wished to learn the language of her namesake, and Hyacinth and Gareth had hired a tutor to offer instruction three mornings each week. Within a year, Isabella’s fluency had outstripped her mother’s, and Hyacinth was forced to employ the tutor for herself the other two mornings just to keep up.
“Why is it you’ve never studied Italian?” she asked, as Gareth led her through the bedroom and into the hallway.
“I’ve no head for languages,” he said blithely, “and no need for it, with my two ladies at my side.”
Hyacinth rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you any more naughty words,” she warned.
He chuckled. “Then I’m not going to slip Signorina Orsini any more pound notes with instructions to teach you the naughty words.”
Hyacinth turned to him in horror. “You didn’t!”
“I did.”
Her lips pursed. “And you don’t even look the least bit remorseful about it.”
“Remorseful?” He chuckled, deep in his throat, and then leaned down to press his lips against her ear. There were a few words of Italian he bothered to commit to memory; he whispered every one of them to her.
“Gareth!” she squeaked.
“Gareth, yes? Or Gareth, no?”
She sighed. She couldn’t help it. “Gareth, more.”
Isabella St. Clair tapped her pencil against the side of her head as she regarded the words she’d recently written. It was a challenge, translating from one language to another. The literal meaning never read quite right, so one had to choose one’s idioms with the utmost of care. But this—she glanced over at the open page in Galileo’s Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno, in sù l’acqua, ò che in quella si muovono—this was perfect.
Perfect perfect perfect.
Her three favorite words.
She glanced toward the door, waiting for her mother to appear. Isabella loved translating scientific texts because her mother always seemed to stumble on the technical words, and it was, of course, always good fun to watch her mum pretend that she actually knew more Italian than her daughter.
Not that Isabella was mean-spirited. She pursed her lips, considering that. She wasn’t mean-spirited; the only person she adored more than her mother was her great-grandmother Danbury, who, although confined to a wheeled chair, still managed to wield her cane with almost as much accuracy as her tongue.
Isabella smiled. When she grew up, she wanted to be first exactly like her mother, and then, when she was through with that, just like Great-Grandmama.