She nodded.
“The basic idea is that he’ll take the thousand most common Chinese characters and assign them a value from one to one thousand. Let us say the character for ‘life’—a very common one, I’m told—is assigned the value of one. To send that, one would send the numeral ‘one’ in Morse. For a less common character—”
“Stop,” she interrupted him. “That can’t be right. Are you telling me that he’s encoding Chinese characters for telegraph by first creating a Western code for each character, without regard to construction or appearance or radicals, and then encoding them a second time in Morse code only using numbers?” Her brow wrinkled. “Unencoding would be, I suppose, a matter of looking up numbers in the chart. But if the characters are arranged in order from most commonly used, the encoding itself…” She was talking as much to herself as to him. “How would that even be done? I suppose you would have to make a dictionary of some sort based on stroke number, although I’ve always found that method to be ridiculous and time-consuming. There would have to be an index to the code, and if you’re going to do that, why not make the index the code—” She cut herself off.
Grayson found himself smiling. “I see. You couldn’t do it?”
Her eyes met his.
Grayson had spent the past years of his life planning out his telegraphic enterprise. That meant he had seen enough people get excited about the telegraph to know what true passion looked like. Her uncertainty had fled while she was talking. Her entire posture had opened up. Her eyes had lit from within. She had listed, in thirty seconds, precisely the issues with a Chinese telegraphic code that the hapless fellow he’d hired before her had mentioned when he quit—encoding, decoding, ease of transmission. She had come alive when she was talking.
Her eyes dropped from his.
“Mrs. Smith, you cannot possibly believe that you’re flighty and forgetful.”
“But I am.”
He waved a hand. “It may be true about some things, but I’d wager it’s never true for the things you care about. When I met you this morning, you were trying to invent a bamboo bustle replacement.”
“Trying is too kind. Failing is more like it. It won’t work. The material is too friable.”
“Your brother showed me some of your letters. I’ve seen your idea for a Chinese telegraphic code. I listened to you talk. I just saw you light up like a second sun. You can’t actually fool me into thinking you can’t do this. You can only fool yourself.”
She seemed taken aback by this. “Captain. Um. I have forgotten your name again.”
“Hunter.”
“Captain Hunter. You seem to have misapprehended my capabilities.”
“Please enlighten me.”
“I am not an expert in Chinese telegraphic code,” she said. “It is simply that in my prior marriage, my late husband was stationed in Hyderabad.”
She hardly looked old enough to have married and lost a husband.
“The telegraphic office was close by. I helped out a bit.”
“A bit.” He looked at her. “I thought we weren’t engaging in these polite fictions. How much was a bit?”
“You know, decoding messages, sending them on.” She looked away. “The man who was ostensibly in charge of the telegraph office, um, took leave a bit more than usual, so on occasion, when I had the time, I would fix the machinery, splice cable, that sort of thing. Nothing difficult.”
“You learned to splice cable.” He spoke evenly.
“Anyone could,” she said dismissively. “It’s not difficult so long as you’ve been taught properly.”
“And you developed a Chinese telegraphic code while you were there.”
“It is wildly incomplete. Do you know how many characters there are in the Chinese language? It’s just that Leland and I used to speak Mandarin with one another, and since he was in Hong Kong and I was in Hyderabad, I had nobody to practice with. It took up much of my time because…” Her eyes slid away. “I’m the wrong person for this. I’m not a native speaker of any dialect of Chinese. I’ve scarcely fumbled into the writing of it.”
That surprised him. “Are you not native?”
“Technically, I must have spoken some dialect before I was taken in.” She looked away, off over the green foothills to the east. Her hand clenched at her side. “But my mother wanted me to learn English and forbade me from speaking any other tongue. I had forgotten most of what I knew by the time I was seven.”
Her tone tried to communicate that was no real loss. Her eyes, fixed to the east, with just a hint of a wrinkle in her brow, said otherwise.
“Did she now,” Grayson said, keeping his tone as mild as possible.
“She did.” Mrs. Smith pasted a smile on her face and turned to him. “So you see how it is. I could not possibly accept employment under false pretenses.”
“Well. You’ve convinced me. You’re not an expert in Chinese telegraphic code.”
She seemed to withdraw into herself. “Good. Then let’s forget—”
“Mrs. Smith. There is no such thing as a Chinese telegraphic code expert. The expertise does not exist, which is why I need someone to invent it. I need someone who will think clearly, react creatively, and work independently.”
“That doesn’t sound like me?” She made the sentence into a question.
He stopped in his tracks and turned to her. “It absolutely sounds like you. Your explanation of why you were inadequate included the information that you basically ran the telegraph office in Hyderabad for amusement because the man who was supposed to be in charge of it was a drunkard.”
“I didn’t say he was a drunkard!”
“No,” he said, giving her a smile. “But we’ve already established I’m rather more to the point than you are. You’ve likely been told all your life that you should be humble and not think well of yourself, but I think you know the truth. You cannot possibly be unaware.”
“Unaware?” She tilted her head. “Of what?”
“You are absolutely wasted here. It took me two minutes to realize that you are one of the brightest people I have ever met in my life. I want to hire you and set you loose on my problems, and you’re here wasting all that power of imagination determining whether you can endure marriage to Mr. Flappert.”
“Well. I see we are to be frank.”
“By all means.”
She turned to look at him. She had changed gowns from when he’d first seen her. She was now wearing something blue and sprigged and buttoned. His gaze caught momentarily on the slight swell of those buttons over her breasts before he looked into her eyes.
“This feels unlikely. Unrealistic. Impossible. You keep telling me I’m clever, and I’ll admit it. I am. I’m clever enough to know I’m less than excited about the prospect of impending nuptials.”
“Good.”
“I’m clever enough to be suspicious. Someone I’ve only just met appears out of nowhere, offering me a chance to escape something I dread by being paid to do something I enjoy so much I have done it for amusement.” Her nose wrinkled. “‘When the devil comes courting…’”