Be calm. Do not let Lady Caroline see you so flustered.
Behind him, he heard Lady Caroline’s voice. It was followed by the quiet exchange of coins. He walked to the far side of the nearest canvas wall, where the lanterns did not reach, and the crowd’s noise became an impersonal tide at a useful remove. He put one hand against the canvas and stood there, breathing, not examining what had just happened, because the alternative was to sit with what the woman had said.
Caroline’s footsteps preceded her voice.
“Are you unwell?”
He did not turn. “You should return to the performance.”
“There is no further performance.” She came around the canvas until she was in his sightline, and he could not, without making the choice obvious, continue to study the tent wall.
He looked at her. Her expression was not the careful, tactful version she wore in drawing rooms. It was the direct one, deployed when she had decided that tact was a luxury the moment could not sustain.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing is wrong.” He said the words even though it felt as if he were swallowing gravel.
“You left the tent so abruptly.” Although her tone was soft, she was not letting it go. Anthony had not expected anything less.
“I had heard enough, which meant the session was complete.” He was doing his best to appear nonchalant, but he was not sure he was doing a very good job.
“She had not finished.” She held his gaze with an intractable steadiness. “And you knew that. You walked out because she said something accurate, which is a peculiar response from a man who claimed, on the way here, that the fortune teller would serve us nothing but falsehoods.”
Anthony took a deep breath. “It is exactly because I do not believe in it that I left. Why do I have to listen to crock knowing full well that it is all a lie?”
Caroline was not convinced.
“Anthony.” Her voice was quieter now, much more difficult to dismiss. This was also the first time she had used his Christian name rather than his title.
He exhaled. One slow, controlled breath. “She did,” he acceded, “make an uncomfortable observation.”
Lady Caroline waited for him to continue.
He said nothing. He looked at the canvas wall with the flatness of a man who had arrived at the edge of something and found the view entirely unwelcome. Caroline must have recognized the quality of that silence because she allowed a full beat to pass before speaking again.
“Anthony.”
“The evening has been eventful enough.” His tone was final, the conversational equivalent of a closed door. “I should take you home now.”
“You are clearly shaken,” Caroline said. “Something that woman said caused you to leap from your seat.”
A silence. He did not move.
“What she said,” Caroline continued, with the composed persistence of a woman who had learned that patience was, with him, more effective than force. “Which part of it was true?”
“None of it.” Flat, immediate.
“Anthony.”
“I said?—”
“You walked out,” she said again, simply, and left it there.
The silence that followed had a different quality from the ones that had preceded it, less defended, more reluctant.
“The duchy,” he said at last, and the word came out stripped of its usual register, no irony, no performance of ease. “The management of it. The… constant nature of it.”
He stopped.