Amelia turned to her mother and saw the grave expression on her face. As if she were speaking of the worst fate that might befall a woman.
Amelia, however, had been married once. Not being tied to another Alden seemed like an unexpected bounty.
“Really?” Do you promise?
“Really.” Her mother nodded. “And I know that may not figure at this moment. But you’ve never found someone you really want before, have you? One day you might meet him and realize what you’ve given up.”
It was an echo of the thing she’d said earlier. You’ve never met a man who could obtain your full and enthusiastic participation.
Amelia had now.
She could almost hear her wants whispering to her: Wouldn’t making a telegraphic code be a lot more interesting than being a wife to a man she’d never met? If she helped build a telegraphic network, perhaps she could send advertisements throughout China, asking if anyone had lost a six-year-old child on November third seventeen years ago. But even saying that made her feel the helplessness of the endeavor. November third? They didn’t even use the same calendar.
She could feel old wants tangling around her. The devil of her wanting had come courting, and there was nothing for Amelia to do but to turn him down. Again and again. Repeatedly. Until he finally gave up and let her bury her deepest, darkest desires in the depths of her heart.
But oh. Until she did. Until she did tell him no…
Until then, she wanted to pretend.
Chapter Six
Grayson’s cousin had been making the tea run to Fuzhou since he was nine—first with his father and grandfather, and now that they’d retired, on his own as captain of the Lenity. When Grayson arrived back at Captain Zedekiah Hunter’s ship, he found his cousin on the docks haggling with a Chinese merchant. Zed spoke Cantonese and the Fuzhou dialect fluently. He was friends with all the Chinese tea merchants—at least while they weren’t talking prices.
The haggling was apparently going well since both parties were claiming the deal would send them into bankruptcy.
In the past years, Gray had become very good at pretending. If he didn’t pretend, people worried. If people—especially Zed—worried, they wrote home. And if they wrote home with something like I’m worried about Grayson; he doesn’t seem like himself, his mother would end up on a ship to China.
So instead of finding a place to hide and mull over what he’d just learned, Grayson waited for Zed to finish. And when Zed suggested a Chinese wine shop to wind down after a hard day’s work, he agreed with a practiced grin.
“So,” Zed said after they’d made their way down a narrow passage, past a table where fortune-tellers were doing a brisk business at the shop’s entrance, through a dark serving room, where they were waved into an empty table in the corner where they could order. “Did you get your man?”
Grayson made a face as the wine arrived in a clay jar. His cousin set out the cups and poured a generous amount into each.
“I see,” Zed said. “Something of a hang-up? Nothing you can’t work around, I’m sure.”
Grayson took a long pull of the wine. It was rich and fruity and enough of an excuse for silence to allow him to gather his thoughts. “The Silver Fox is a woman.”
The shop was crowded. Zed leaned in, cupping one hand to his ear. “Say again?”
“She’s a young woman,” Grayson admitted, a little louder.
There must have been something in Grayson’s face or tone that gave him away because Zed waggled an eyebrow at him. “Aha. A beautiful woman?”
Grayson did his best to give his cousin a quelling look. “It’s a business matter. Her looks aren’t relevant.”
Zed just cackled. “That’s a yes.”
She was pretty, he might have said objectively. Not a beauty, at least not until she got excited and that light shone in her eyes. Grayson rubbed his temples. “It’s going to take a bit of a delicate touch.”
“Already thinking about touching. Delicately. I see how things are.”
He had to change the direction of the conversation. “It’s not like that. She reminds me a little of Noah.”
Zed’s eyes lifted to his. The teasing humor slowly seeped out of him and he blew out a breath. Grayson hadn’t meant to say something quite so revealing. He hadn’t even realized he thought it until the words came out of his mouth.
He didn’t talk of his deceased brothers often. Doing so reminded him of too many things he needed to forget.
“Hell, Grayson.” Zed reached across the table and refilled his wine cup.
Now that Grayson had made the connection, his internal reaction to her made a lot of sense to him. “You know how Noah was.” It hurt to say the words, hurt more to keep his tone steady, to pretend his heart was not scraped raw. “He would get interested in something—anything—and that’s all he would talk about for months on end.”
“He was bright.”
“Beyond bright. With Noah, it was the railroad fascination. Then steamships and propulsion. Then eventually, gutta percha.”
Noah’s gutta percha obsession had changed Grayson’s life. It should have changed Noah’s.
Zed reached across the table. “I miss him too.”
Grayson hated being so transparent. He wanted to yank his hand away from the offered comfort. “She isn’t like Noah. Not really. Not at all. But over the course of two hours, she showed me the bamboo bustle replacement she’d been trying to make. I got six minutes of megalodon facts. And she eviscerated Viguier’s telegraphic code proposal without even batting an eye. She isn’t like him, but there’s the same kind of single-minded enthusiasm.”
Zed nodded in understanding.
His family had always encouraged Noah. When the incessant railway discussions had annoyed Grayson when he was younger, one of his uncles had taken him aside and explained. Love is a gift, he’d been told, and wanting to love things is a bigger gift. Let him be.
Grayson had breathed and let his brother be. Noah had blossomed. Latitude charts and calculations…
Zed shook his head. “So I see the need for delicacy. A lovely young white woman. Raised by sticklers in the East, I would imagine. Heavily protected and told not to do anything. How is she managing?”
“She’s not white.”
Zed’s eyes widened.
“She’s Chinese. She was, ah ‘taken in’—her words—by a missionary when she was six.”
Their eyes met over their wine cups. Grayson didn’t elaborate; he didn’t need to. Zed didn’t respond. He also didn’t need to.
“I need to be rational,” Grayson said. “I need to propose employment and negotiate terms. But I keep thinking of what it would be like for Noah to be raised by someone who told him his people were savages.” Grayson trailed off, shaking his head and draining his wine cup. “I can’t think about the matter like that. I can’t get involved.”
Across the table, Zed looked into his wine cup, sloshing it slowly from side to side before looking at him. “Involved?”
“In the next year and a half, I have to lay the last two segments of the transpacific cable—four thousand miles. I have to establish telegraphy on the Chinese mainland. I need a code that will convince the Taotai of Shanghai that this is not just some Western devilry. I have to be rational, or I’ll never get this done.”