The two men were still talking.
Amelia put a smile on her face and pretended to be interested in the conversation, which had switched to a discussion of the weather that year in the surrounding mountains and what that meant for this year’s crop of tea.
Mrs. Acheson was a good woman, but Captain… What was his name? Employment. Morse code. Prey. Pigeon. Shoot? Rifle? Those didn’t quite seem right, but then, that was the problem with trying to remember names. They never quite seemed right, even if they were.
Captain Name Not Rifle was not exactly correct, but he had not been entirely wrong in his estimations either.
Her mother wanted the best for Amelia, but what she came up with… Perhaps she lacked imagination.
Amelia had been married at seventeen to a man more than twice her age. She probably hadn’t hated it? The marital bed had been boring rather than painful. He had taken her on his mission to India. The English wives around had had acquaintances enough that they didn’t need to interact with Amelia beyond the pleasantries. She had hired Indian women to assist in the household, as had been typical, but she’d not wanted to impose more on their employment. Amelia would have been dreadfully lonely, but there had been a tame fox in Hyderabad that she’d enjoyed spending time with.
Between letters from Leland and her time in the telegraph office, she’d made do. Amelia had never fit in anywhere; not doing so in her marriage had felt depressingly ordinary.
Amelia had tried to be friendly, and she had some acquaintances. She would even say she had friends in Fuzhou. There was, after all, Daisy, the very nice yellow dog who had whelped the litter Amelia had cooed over just this morning. She was definitely friends with Daisy.
Mrs. Fleming, Daisy’s owner, spoke to anyone and everyone who would stop to listen, so she counted as well. But neither Daisy nor Mrs. Fleming was particularly picky. Most other British women looked at Amelia as if she were an oddity.
The Chinese women treated her warily. She’d been introduced to the Chinese population early, brought out regularly as proof that the missionaries who took in children treated them with love and kindness. But the end result of having to be proof, not a person, was that there was nobody she could talk to, no one among their number whom she dared confide in. She’d tried to learn the local Fuzhou dialect once she’d been allowed to do so. She managed only a passable competence.
Captain Something and Mr. Whatever Man were still conversing. Amelia had no idea what they were talking about. She pasted an interested smile on her face and tried to mind their words.
She lasted half a sentence. Import duties? Bleah. There was only so much attention she could pay to that.
What she needed was a pocket watch, except instead of sounding the hour, it would poke her in the thigh every minute to remind her to notice whatever was happening around her. An excellent idea, but then she would have to invent a pocket watch that stopped her other pocket watch from poking her in the thigh because being continually prodded would drive her into madness.
Her mother would sigh if she could hear her thoughts.
Her mother wanted Amelia to marry again.
“But of course,” Mr. Something-man was saying with a laugh. “We couldn’t allow that.”
Getting married again was the right thing to do. It was the moral thing to do. It was a failure in Amelia that she didn’t want it.
But employment. What was the difference between being employed by a man and being married to one? She’d worked all the time during her last marriage. She would clearly be expected to do the same in the next one. She enjoyed keeping busy.
But what if she worked for a man and didn’t have to lie there awkwardly, once a week, as he heaved himself over her? What if she worked for a man and he gave her money and she could decide what to have for dinner for herself instead of consulting his preferences?
That might be nice.
There was a woman in Fuzhou who made tea flowers. Unlike the square compressed bricks that were sent back to England to be broken apart and brewed, tea flowers were made by winding tea leaves and jasmine flowers cleverly together and tying them with silk threads. They were compressed into balls, then dried into what looked like boring, indiscriminate lumps.
When you dropped one into hot water, they unfurled, leaf by leaf, forming gorgeous flowers constructed of tea leaves.
Amelia felt as if she were a boring, indiscriminate lump held above hot water. She didn’t know what would happen if she were dropped. Maybe she would unfold into a masterpiece.
It spoke to something inside her, that concept. The idea that underneath her awkward clumsiness there might be something beautiful. She liked that idea.
Unfortunately, most boring, indiscriminate lumps turned into still boring, looser, less discriminate lumps when made into tea. When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want. She’d grown up with those words, a check on her flightiness, on her willingness to throw herself into whatever odd tidbit had piqued her interest that week.
And yet she had never been able to give up the hope that there was something inside her waiting to unfold. Amelia knew why.
In the depths of her heart, buried underneath years of neglect, she still held on to a lie. She knew it was a lie. It had been proven to be one again and again.
Hold on to your heart.
It seemed a strange echo of Leland’s words: what is valuable.
“Well.” Mr. Whatever stood, and Captain Something rose alongside him. The conversation was coming to an end; Amelia scrambled to her feet.
“A pleasure speaking with you,” Captain Something said, holding out his hand. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Waterman.”
“You as well. Surprising, really. But I see why Leland sent you my way. He always did collect interesting folk.”
Captain Whatsit smiled gently at that—not quite reprovingly. “It’s growing late.” It was barely past noon. “I had best get Mrs. Smith home before the sun grows too hot.”
“Of course, of course. My best to your mother, Mrs. Smith.”
“My best to your wife.” She did not add Mr. Waterman to the end of the speech because while Captain Question Mark had used the name, she was only fairly certain that was his name, not extremely certain. It would be extraordinarily awkward if she were wrong.
They left the building together. They walked back the way they had come, past the stand of mulberry trees with their slippery leaves, past the ginkgoes with their tiny green fruits.
He glanced at her once they’d started up the hill, away from those who might overhear.
“I understand now why your brother gave me a code name.”
She tilted her head toward him.
“He knows about your coming nuptials, I take it?”
She nodded. “I write to him every week.”
“Why ‘Silver Fox,’ by the way?”
Her hand crept to her locket. “It’s a silly story.”
“Indulge me.”
“Leland was twelve when my mother took me in,” Amelia said. “He was tasked with helping me learn English.”
He just nodded at that.
“Those first few years, sometimes people would make fun of me for my way of speaking.” She looked away. “And I forgot my Chinese name.” She couldn’t meet his eyes as she said this. “So he started calling me Silver Fox so that I would remember that I was quick. And clever. It’s not really the sort of name one would give a girl in Chinese though.”