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suggestion to make, ladies.”
    I looked with some interest to hear what he might have to say. “Hire a coachman who knows how to drive. That Johnnie Trot will land you in another accident. I never saw such a cow-handed fellow.”
    I stood with my mouth opening and closing silently. I was beyond speech for thirty seconds. “Well upon my word!” I said when speech returned. “If this doesn’t beat all the rest! You run us into the ditch, sprain our team, destroy our carriage, nearly kill the pair of us and suggest we find a new coachman! I suggest you find a new road, build yourself a private one, if you insist on driving like a mad fiend.”
    “I happen to be an excellent sawyer, ma’am. I have been driving upwards of fifteen years and have never had an accident before. Your man veered towards me as I cut out to pass, as greenhorns will often do.”
    “Then you should have been ready for it, if it often happens!”
    “I was, but my team, unfortunately, is new and city-bred, so such country driving as they encountered today found them unprepared.”
    I took a deep breath to give him a piece of my mind. The words were never uttered. It was Maisie who spoke. “Lizzie, they’re gone!” she wailed, sounding much as one imagines an Irish banshee would sound.
    “What are you talking about?” I asked, turning to look at her. She held the green leather jewel case in her fingers. She was turning it upside down, shaking it, as though a large diamond necklace had become lost in a perfectly flat sheet of silk.
    “They must have fallen into my reticule,” I said, stepping forward to pull the bag from her shaking fingers.
    I do not keep a neat reticule. It was stuffed to overflowing with money bag, handkerchief, comb, powder box, hartshorn, pins, needles, thread, pencil and paper—the usual necessities of a lady traveler. I rooted through the mess, becoming wild with panic as I felt my way deeper and deeper into the depths.
    “What is missing?” Blount asked, smiling hatefully at my rummaging.
    “My diamonds.”
    He pulled the reticule from my hands, walked to the table and dumped the whole contents into a heap, to rifle through them. Then, like Maisie with the green box, he shook the empty purse, to see if the diamonds fell out of nowhere. “Sure you put them in here?” he asked.
    “Yes. Are you sure they have not found their way into your pockets?” I asked, in a voice every bit as rude as his own.
    There was a stunned silence. Even I was shocked I had had the gall to utter my first suspicion. “I beg your pardon!” Sir Edmund asked in a high, incredulous tone.
    “Do you, Sir Edmund? It is the first time today it has occurred to you to beg our pardon for all the bother you have caused us!” Once it was out, you know, I could not very well back down, so meant to brazen it through.
    “I will not be accused of this!” he said, his eyes wide open, shooting sparks, while his full lips pulled into a thin line, white around the edges. “Do you know who you are talking to?”
    “I don’t care a groat who you are. You are accused, sir.”
    “No, really, Lizzie,” Maisie cautioned, twitching at the skirt of my gown, as she used to do twenty years ago when I misbehaved.
    “What do we know about him?” I asked her, making no effort to hide my words. “We don’t know a thing about this man but that he calls himself Sir Edmund something or other, and is a very bad driver. I can call myself Queen Charlotte, but it does not make me her. How do we know he means to pay for our carriage either, or hire us another at the stable? He can walk out of here with my diamonds in his pockets and we may never see him again.”
    Sir Edmund’s mouth fell open in shock. He stared, literally beyond words. “Well, sir, may we see your pockets emptied?” I asked boldly.
    “No, madame, you may not!”
    “You see, he’s got them!” I crowed triumphantly.
    Sir Edmund glared for about sixty seconds in dead silence, breathing