I did not believe it when I started to feel headachy and dizzy. Me, who had spent all my life on the driver’s seat of a wagon, or eating or dozing behind! But it was true. The chaise was slung on thick leather straps and it bounced like a landlady’s bubbies, and it swayed from side to side too. A great lolloping pig of a chaise, lined with sickly blue. I would have blessed the highway-man who stopped us. I would have been out of the chaise in a moment and begged him a ride on his horse.

‘You’re pale,’ Lady Clara commented, looking up from her book.

‘I’m sickly,’ I said. ‘The chaise makes me feel ill.’

She nodded. ‘Don’t say “sickly”, say “unwell”,’ she said, and reached for her reticule. She pulled out a little bottle of smelling salts and handed it over to me. I had never seen such a thing before.

‘Is it drink?’ I asked, holding it to the light and trying to see.

‘No!’ said Lady Clara with her rippling laugh. ‘It’s smelling salts. You hold it under your nose and smell it.’

I took the stopper off and held the little bottle under my nose. I gave a hearty sniff and then gasped with the shock of it. My head reeled, my nostrils stung.

Lady Clara rocked on her seat. ‘Oh, Sarah!’ she said. ‘You are a little savage! You wave it under your nose and breathe normally. I thought it might help.’

I stoppered the bottle again and handed it back to her. I fumbled in my pocket for my handkerchief and rubbed my sore nose and mopped my eyes.

‘I should feel better if I could ride,’ I said.

‘Out of the question,’ Lady Clara said, and that was the end of the conversation.

I shut my eyes against the swaying dizziness of the movement, and after a little while I must have slept, for the next thing I knew the wheels of the coach were squeaking and banging on cobblestones. I woke with a jump of shock and all round me was the bustle of the city and the shouts of the porters. The smell was appalling and the noise was as bad as Salisbury on market day, and it went on for mile after mile. I could not believe there were so many people in the world, so many carriages, so many paupers, beggars, hucksters, tradesmen.

‘London!’ Lady Clara said with a sigh of relief which showed how hard her stay in the country had been for her.