Caroline did not flinch.
Anthony turned his head toward her by approximately three degrees. “You knew,” he said, still barely above silence.
“I read about it in Venice.” She kept her eyes on the lecturer, who was describing the reaction with the satisfied precision of a man watching an argument prove itself in real time. “My aunt confiscated most of the useful books, but she missed that one. I’d hidden it inside Fordyce’s Sermons.”
Another pause, longer this time. “Fordyce’s Sermons.”
“She never opened them. I had three years of uninterrupted reading.” She paused. “They were very useful covers.”
She thought she heard, at the very edge of audibility, the sound of a man suppressing a chuckle.
She did not look at him. She was determined not to look at him. The lecturer had moved on to a new preparation, and she fixed her attention on it with a focus that was entirely genuine and only slightly defensive.
The lecturer set down his instrument and surveyed the room.
“When a metal is exposed to air and heat,” he said, “itgainsmass.” He let this land. “If the phlogiston theory were correct, the reverse ought to be true. So.” His gaze moved across the benches with the patience of a man entirely comfortable with silence. “What is the metal combining with, and what do we call the process?”
His question settled over them as he looked out at the benches with the patience of a man who had asked this before and knew the exact weight of the silence preceding a correct answer.
Around her, men shifted. One consulted his notes, and another cleared his throat and proceeded to say nothing.
She knew the answer. She had known it three seconds after the question left his mouth.
She should not speak. That was the plainest instruction she had been given. But the silence stretched, and still no answer came.
“Oxidation,” she said.
It came out in her own voice. She registered this immediately, along with the fact that the word was already irrevocably in the air of the Royal Institution amphitheater, and approximately thirty male heads had rotated toward the back bench.
She cleared her throat. She shifted lower in the seat, dropped her chin, and repeated it at a pitch that rumbled up from somewhere beneath her ordinary register: “Pardon me. Oxidation.”
A brief silence. The lecturer regarded the back bench with the expression of a man who had heard something unexpected and was assessing it purely on its merits.
Then he nodded once, in the clipped, economical manner of someone for whom commendation is a tool rather than a habit, and returned to his table.
The heads turned forward. The room resumed its attention.
Beside her, the Duke had gone so still he was essentially furniture. She kept her gaze with ferocious determination on the demonstration below, and the heat in her cheeks was her own business entirely.
Several seconds passed.
“Oxidation,” he muttered beneath his breath, reaching only her ears and no further.
There was something in his voice she could not name—something that sat at the base of her throat and made it difficult to swallow.
“I told you not to speak unless spoken to,” he added.
She turned her head, just slightly, and met his gaze. His green eyes were entirely steady, and the expression in them was not what she had braced for.
“The question was asked of the room,” she said.
“You are not the room.”
“I was the only one in it who knew.”
He held her gaze for one beat, two, and then he looked back at the table below. The line of his profile was composed, and there was nothing in it she could read, and that was, she decided, rather worse than if there had been.
She watched the lecturer finish his demonstration, and she committed every detail to memory with the fierce precision of someone storing something against a future that will not include it.