"Questions and Consequences," Clara announced, her hands clasped with the eagerness of a hostess ready to begin. "The rules are simple. Each person draws a question from the deck and must answer honestly. You are each allowed one redirect." She gestured to the crystal tokens, each engraved with penalties including sing a song, recite a poem, confess a secret. “Evasion earns a consequence, and those are chosen at random.” Some penalties can be quite severe."
"Severe how?" The baroness leaned forward, concern etched on her face. "I have not sung since the Regent's birthday, and even then, it was a mercy to stop."
"Then speak the truth," Crispin chimed in from his chair beside the fireplace, "and save us all."
Laughter rippled through the group. Alice observed the room settling into the rhythms of the game, the young ladies in pink muslin whispering, the dark-haired gentleman feigning boredom, and a silver-haired dowager adjusting her lorgnette withexaggerated care. Crewe remained apart from the merriment, a locked door.
Mr. Davenant, a pleasant young man with ambitions outpacing his intellect, drew the first question. "What flower best represents your character?" he read aloud, grinning. "A sunflower. Always turning toward the brightest light in the room."
"Modest as ever," someone murmured, and the game commenced.
Questions flowed easily, like a fan’s lazy flutter. Favorite pastimes, preferred seasons, most admired historical figures. When Alice’s turn came, she found herself holding a question about childhood pleasures.
"Climbing trees," she replied promptly. "To the horror of every governess my parents employed."
"You climbed trees?" The baroness's shock was palpable.
"Higher than any of my brothers. Though I should note," Alice added, tapping her closed fan against her lip, "I was eventually forbidden after tearing three petticoats in a single month. My mother calculated the expense and decided I must learn embroidery instead."
"And did you?" Clara asked, her eyes bright with amusement.
"I learned to embroider trees." Alice spread her hands. "Compromise is an art."
The company laughed, and satisfaction coursed through her at the result of a line well delivered. Yet when she glanced across the circle, Crewe remained silent, his assessing gaze fixed on her, taking her measure, as if she were a text in a language he had not quite mastered.
She lifted her chin slightly, a challenge unmasked.
As the hour deepened and the wine flowed, the questions turned more personal. "What quality do you most admire in a friend?" shifted into "What quality do you regret lacking in yourself?" The dark-haired gentleman confessed to impatience while one of the sisters admitted to envying her twin's accomplishments, then the baroness acknowledged her tendency toward gossip, which she blamed entirely on living in the country where nothing else happened.
When Alice drew a card asking about her greatest fear, she paused, her fan pressed against her lower lip.
"Boredom," she finally said, the word escaping lighter than intended, a shield raised so quickly that she almost believed in its substance. "The slow deathof predictability. Knowing exactly what each day will hold before it arrives."
"How exhausting," Crewe replied quietly, "to require constant novelty."
The room seemed to contract around his words, other conversations trailing off as guests turned toward this unexpected contribution.
Alice met his gaze across the candlelit space. "How exhausting," she countered, matching his measured tone, "to require constant certainty."
Someone, perhaps the baroness, cleared her throat. Clara reached for the card deck with the smooth efficiency of a hostess preventing disaster.
"Next question, I think," she said brightly.
But Alice continued to watch Crewe, noting the tightness of his jaw and the slight shift of his weight in his chair. Restlessness masked as adjustment. His fingers drummed once against his knee before stilling.
He was not as composed as he wished to appear. The discovery pleased her more than it should have.
The game continued, questions falling and rising like the rhythm of breath, but something had shifted in the air—a charge, a tension, the awareness of a temptation that might prove more dangerous than anticipated. Alice answered the remaining querieswith her usual wit, deflecting sincerity with cleverness, but Crewe’s attention pressed against her skin.
When she glanced at him again, he no longer watched her. His gaze had dropped to his glass, fingers curled around the crystal.
The candles burned low, their steady flames flickering and casting shadows in the corners of the room. Several guests drifted toward the sideboard for more wine, while the baroness retreated to a settee near the window, claiming exhaustion. Yet the core of the circle remained intact, and the cards continued their circulation.
Alice drew her next question with the casual ease of a woman unafraid of paper and ink. She unfolded it, read the words, and felt a tightening in her chest.
What is your greatest temptation?
The question sat in her hand like a spark in her palm. She could answer honestly, confess to recklessness, to the seductive pull of doing what one should not simply because one could. But that would reveal too much, and Alice Pickford had not survived five Seasons by exposing herself.
