“Can’t we do something?” Frances pleaded.

“I am,” Elizabeth ground out, holding up her book.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, no!” Harriet cried out.

“I knew you were going to spill the ink!” Elizabeth yelled. Then she let out a shriek, “Don’t get it on me!”

“Stop moving so much!”

“I can help!” Frances said excitedly, leaping into the fray.

Sarah was just about to intervene when Lord Hugh reached forward, grabbed Frances by the collar, and hauled her across the carriage, where he deposited her unceremoniously onto Sarah’s lap.

It was rather magnificent, really.

Frances gaped.

“You should stay out of it,” he advised.

Sarah, meanwhile, was dealing with an elbow to her lungs. “I can’t breathe,” she gasped.

Frances adjusted her position. “Better?” she asked brightly.

Sarah’s reply was a huge gulp of air. Somehow she managed to twist her head to the side so that she was facing Lord Hugh. “I would compliment you on a superior extrication except that I seem to have lost all feeling in my legs.”

“Well, at least you’re breathing now,” he said.

And then—heaven help her—she started to laugh. There was something so ludicrous about being complimented for breathing. Or maybe it was just that one had to laugh when the best thing about one’s situation was that one was still breathing.

And so she did. She laughed. She laughed so hard and so long that Frances slid right off her lap to the floor. And then she kept on laughing until the tears were running down her face, and Elizabeth and Harriet stopped their bickering and stared, astounded.

“What’s wrong with Sarah?” Elizabeth asked.

“It was something about having trouble breathing,” Frances said from the floor.

Sarah let out a little shriek of laughter at that, then clutched her chest, gasping, “Can’t breathe. Laughing too hard.”

Like all good laughter, it was contagious, and before long the whole carriage was giggling, even Lord Hugh, whom Sarah could never have imagined laughing like that. Oh, he smirked, and occasionally he chuckled, but right then, as the Pleinsworth carriage rolled south toward Thrapstone, he was as undone as the rest of them.

It was a glorious moment.

“Oh my,” Sarah finally managed to say.

“I don’t even know what we’re laughing about,” Elizabeth said, still grinning from ear to ear.

Sarah finished wiping the tears from her eyes and tried to explain. “It was— He said— oh, never mind, it would never be as funny in the retelling.”

“I’ve got the ink cleaned up, at least,” Harriet said. She pulled a sheepish face. “Well, except for my hands.”

Sarah looked over and winced. Only one of Harriet’s fingers seemed to have been spared.

“You look as if you’ve got the plague,” Elizabeth said.