As family, the Pleinsworths had been the first to be allotted rooms at Fensmore, and they had arrived nearly a week ahead of time to help with the preparations. Or perhaps more accurately, their mother was helping with the preparations. Sarah had been tasked with the job of keeping her sisters out of trouble.

Which wasn’t easy.

Normally, the girls would have been watched over by their governess, allowing Sarah to attend to her duties as Honoria’s maid of honor, but as it happened, their (now former) governess was getting married the next fortnight.

To Honoria’s brother.

Which meant that once the Chatteris-Smythe-Smith nuptials were completed, Sarah (along with half of London, it seemed) would take to the roads and travel from Fensmore down to Whipple Hill, in Berkshire, to attend the wedding of Daniel Smythe-Smith and Miss Anne Wynter. As Daniel was also an earl, it was going to be a huge affair.

Much as Honoria’s wedding was going to be a huge affair.

Two huge affairs. Two grand opportunities for Sarah to dance and frolic and be made painfully aware that she was not one of the brides.

She just wanted to get married. Was that so pathetic?

No, she thought, straightening her spine (but not so much that she had to actually sit up), it wasn’t. Finding a husband and being a wife was all she’d been trained to do, aside from playing the pianoforte in the infamous Smythe-Smith Quartet.

Which, come to think of it, was part of the reason she was so desperate to be married.

Every year, like clockwork, the four eldest unmarried Smythe-Smith cousins were forced to gather their nonexistent musical talents and play together in a quartet.

And perform.

In front of actual people. Who were not deaf.

It was hell. Sarah couldn’t think of a better word to describe it. She was fairly certain the appropriate word had not yet been invented.

The noise that came forth from the Smythe-Smith instruments could also be described only by words yet to be invented. But for some reason, all of the Smythe-Smith mothers (including Sarah’s, who had been born a Smythe-Smith, even if she was now a Pleinsworth) sat in the front row with beatific smiles on their faces, secure in their mad knowledge that their daughters were musical prodigies. And the rest of the audience . . .

That was the mystery.

Why was there a “rest of the audience”? Sarah never could figure that out. Surely one had to attend only once to realize that nothing good could ever come of a Smythe-Smith musicale. But Sarah had examined the guest lists; there were people who came every single year. What were they thinking? They had to know that they were subjecting themselves to what could only be termed auditory torture.

Apparently there had been a word invented for that.

The only way for a Smythe-Smith cousin to be released from the Smythe-Smith Quartet was marriage. Well, that and feigning a desperate illness, but Sarah had already done that once, and she didn’t think it would work a second time.