There were four principles governing Gareth St. Clair’s relationship with his father that he relied upon to maintain his good humor and general sanity.
One: They did not converse unless absolutely necessary.
Two: All absolutely necessary conversations were to be kept as brief as possible.
Three: In the event that more than the simplest of salutations was to be spoken, it was always best to have a third party present.
And finally, four: For the purpose of achieving points one, two, and three, Gareth was to conduct himself in a manner so as to garner as many invitations as possible to spend school holidays with friends.
Okay, admittedly, this is not the strongest opening line in a Bridgerton family novel. But that assertion has less to do with the low quality here than the higher quality elsewhere. One thing that can be stated with full confidence about the novels in this series is that the author is gifted with a prime literary talent: constructing a grabber for an opening. What is lacking in this example that makes it lesser than equal to is the sheer amount of verbiage. The best opening lines with which it must compared are that just that: an opening line. One single shorty pithy sentence that somehow manages to be enough to pull the reader immediate into the narrative. In order to get questions answered which are ambiguously raised. The problem is simply stated: too many words. And yet, it still does the trick. It just does not do it as elegantly.
Gareth looked down at the diary, at the elegant hand-writing forming words he could not understand. His father’s mother had been the daughter of a noble Italian house. It had always amused Gareth that his father was half-Italian; the baron was so insufferably proud of his St. Clair ancestry and liked to boast that they had been in England since the Norma Invasion. In fact, Gareth couldn’t recall him ever making mention of his Italian roots.
The key to a Bridgerton romance is the thing which is going to bring the couple together. It is the author’s version of Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin” in that it is the plot device which serves to kickstart the action, but ultimately turns out to be of mere tangential important in comparison to its purpose: bringing together a man and a woman. The intuitive reader will immediately the spot the opening for the MacGuffin in this case to do its job. Gareth’s obviously family problems go much deeper than his rocky relationship with his father. And on top of everything, in order to fully plumb the depths of those difficulties, he’s got to locate someone who understand Italian.
“Italian? Not nearly as ubiquitous as French, which of course any decent person would—”
“I can read Italian,” Hyacinth interrupted.
Two identical pairs of blue eyes swung her direction.
“You’re joking,” Mr. St. Clair said, coming in a mere half second before his grandmother barked, “You can?”
“You don’t know everything about me,” Hyacinth said archly.
Well, fortunately, that solves that. Hyacinth Bridgerton can fulfill the job of translation the Italian. Although, from the reaction her revelation of this talent brings, a reader not fully instituted in the ways and means of the Bridgerton family might well be moved to wonder at the veracity of her statement. So another question gets raised: can Hyacinth actually read Italian and, if so, to what degree of literacy? Of course, in the end the reader will have already guess that it hardly matters. It is not the level of literacy in “the language of love” which Hyacinth possesses, but the level of literacy in the language of love that is essential to the story.
