His eyes widened. “Are you schooling me in decorum?”
“Someone ought to,” she muttered, noticing that Lady Fenwick was organizing guests for charades and other games with forfeits.
“Just as someone ought to instruct that young lady over there not to chew her lip,” Purity pointed out. “She looks bovine yet probably fancies herself winsome. And that man with the mole on his forehead. Do you see him? He’s doing all the talking while the lady beside him has the appearance of a trapped rabbit. Since she can’t gnaw herself out of the situation, she must wait for him to take a breath and make an excuse to escape. What a tedious boor!”
“As I was over dinner,” Lord Foxford surmised.
Purity had to be honest. “On the contrary, you were doing precisely the correct thing with a dining partner who was feeling surly and untalkative.”
She was surprised when he laughed softly.
“You are brutally honest, even about yourself,” he remarked. And he put his gloves away as she’d suggested.
“I suppose I am.” Purity didn’t like prevarication any more than she appreciated slovenliness, poor manners, or disorderly conduct. Life was much more pleasant when people adhered to expectations and behaved as politely as possible.
She sighed, not knowing how to explain herself, nor particularly caring to.
“Everyone!” called out Lord Fenwick while his wife gave a single swift clap of her hands to get their guests’ attention. “Find a discreet corner to discuss your challenge.”
While Purity had been wool-gathering, she had missed when Lord Foxford took the small square of paper from Lady Fenwick, confirming them as a team of two.
“It’s a blindfolded game,” he said, handing her their instructions.
“For two,” she added upon reading it. “And something of a spectacle!”Why couldn’t people settle for cards or a pleasant piano recital when in the mixed company of strangers?
At least it wasn’t the romantic balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, as her sister had once performed before a roomful of people, including their parents. Purity had been embarrassed for her.
“You don’t know one another well enough for games ofMake Your Will,” Lady Fenwick said, “orSqueak, Piggy, Squeak.”
“Thank God!” Purity whispered to Lord Foxford.
In her opinion, the former told too much to too many. As for the latter, squatting over someone’s lap without touching them while squeaking was too awkward and primed for mishap.
Couple by couple, they went to the room’s center where the furniture had been cleared away and did whatever their hostess had written on the slip of paper.
The first couple blew feathers in the air. When the lady’s dropped first, her forfeit was to say a proverb backward. She was even allowed to choose it.
“I hope if I lose, I get such a forfeit,” Purity confessed. There were so many embarrassing possibilities.
Next another couple playedThe Messenger, each getting half the room to whom they must tell the same message, starting with the first person in their line. When it reached the last person, he or she said the message out loud. The lady’s messagecame through the line more accurately. Lady Fenwick cried a forfeit from the young man this time.
“You are to be a malleable Grecian statue,” she told him.
Bravely, he stood in the center of the room and let the other men move his arms and legs and even twist his body, all the while trying not to laugh and never once complaining.
“More like a gargoyle than a Greek statue,” Lord Foxford said when it was over, and Purity couldn’t help giving him her first smile of the evening.
Soon, it was their turn to playThe Cordial Greeting. Rising to his feet, he offered his hand, which she accepted.
“As they say in France,” Lord Foxford remarked, “Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute.”
While Purity was translating in her head —it is only the first step that costs— Lord Foxford drew her into the middle of the room.
“You go to that end, Foxford,” said Lord Fenwick, gesturing one way.
“And you go the other,” Lady Fenwick said to Purity.
Once they were at opposing ends of the spacious drawing room, Lord Fenwick blindfolded Lord Foxford. Purity watched it happen, his splendid, honeyed eyes gazing directly at her until they were covered, and then Lady Fenwick tied a kerchief around Purity’s face, knotting it at the back.
