“I hear you on the difficulty of the work.” Zed met his eyes. “The part I have difficulty with is that you think your plan is rational.”
Grayson stared at his wine cup.
“It’s not,” Zed said. “There is nothing rational about this.”
Gray forced a laugh. “You’ve seen the potential profits. What could be more rational than profit?”
“Going home to the people who love you,” Zed replied, “more than once every handful of years. You’re lonely, Gray.”
“I’m busy.” He picked up his empty wine cup, turning it around. “And how could I be lonely? I can scarcely get a minute to myself. Captain Bell of the Celerity is an excellent man. We met in service in the war. And Ellis aboard the Victory—”
“I’m not insulting the credentials of the men you picked,” Zed said with a wave of his hand. “Ellis and Bell are solid. But they’re wildly grateful to you because Black men, even with their naval experience, would otherwise have been relegated to shoveling coal on a transatlantic steamer. They aren’t going to tell you to go home for Christmas. And they certainly won’t be carrying tales to your mama.”
Grayson rubbed his temples. “Unlike you?”
“You see, I like my mama, and what’s more important, because I have a sense of self-preservation, I like my mama not being mad at me.” Zed shrugged. “That’s why I’m always going to turn you in. I’m doing you a favor. This is a warning. My mama and yours are plotting. And I’m telling you now, you need to think about your mother.”
Grayson let out a long breath. He and Zed both had been born in a tiny village in Maine in the United States that had been founded by the great-great-uncles who had started Lord Traders as an enterprise. His family home was unlike any place he’d ever been. His great-great-uncle Henry had been from good English stock, and he’d used his influence to shield the small Black community from what they’d heard of in so many other places—violence and people driven out.
Grayson’s father had gone to England to lecture on trade alternatives to slavery. When his parents had eloped, and his mother had been thrown out of her wealthy British family, they’d gone back to his father’s hometown.
The community was tightly knit, and his mother had wound herself into it. She’d named two of her sons after the aging great-great-uncles who had started everything. There had been a time when Grayson had unequivocally thought of his mother’s house in Maine as home. Even when he was on the other side of the world, it was home.
He didn’t know how to think of it now.
It was not that he never thought of his mother. It was that the thought of her—the memory of how she’d looked when he’d told her about Noah—would stay with him till his dying day.
“Look,” he finally said, when it became apparent he wasn’t going to get Zed away from this subject. “I know things are off with me.”
Off. Like milk gone bad. Like a ship permanently tilted at sea so nothing stayed in place. He was off; that was the only explanation he could offer.
Zed just gave him a skeptical look. “Stop overthinking everything. I was told to tell you directly that you’d better come home or your mama will come find you. And you don’t want that.”
He didn’t. He thought about what it would be like if she caught him off guard. If they ever had to have the conversation that would break them apart.
“I know I’m off,” he repeated. “But I know what’s gone wrong. And I have a plan to fix everything.”
He could feel the disbelief rolling off his cousin.
Megalodons, Mrs. Smith had said. Beneath the surface, he also had megalodons, wants so large they would eat him alive. His weren’t so friendly.
“I have a plan,” he repeated. “And when I’m finished, everything will be…”
Put to rights? No. That could never happen. Made whole? Also impossible.
“Everything will be as well as it can be,” he said.
Zed just shook his head. “Truly, Gray. You haven’t told me one word about your plan, and it already sounds foolish. Just go home.”
Amelia had not woken up with the desperate need to avoid Mrs. Flappert, but shortly after she’d dressed and gone down the stairs, she’d heard the woman talking to her mother.
“Honestly,” Mrs. Flappert had been saying with a little laugh, “I didn’t think I would have to be considering the feelings of a little Chinese girl in all this! I’m sorry to have upset her delicate sensibilities, but gracious me, Mabel—”
The rest of the conversation had been swallowed by the clink of tea things and the rushing whirl that fury and upset and humiliation made in Amelia’s ears. She’d crept out the back way.
She had errands. Definitely errands. She needed to go to the market to purchase…a vegetable, maybe? And if she left the house without money or so much as a sack to carry the hypothetical greenery she intended to purchase? Well. Sometimes she was absentminded.
Sometimes it was far better to be absent from reality than present for its harshest truths.
In the early morning, the air was crisp as she walked.
I didn’t think I would have to be considering—
She pushed that voice aside. It didn’t matter. She would never see Mrs. Flappert again. Especially not if she managed to make herself into Miss Out on an Errand for the remainder of Mrs. Flappert’s visit.
She hadn’t realized where she was heading until she arrived at the docks on the river Min. In the books that Amelia had read, European cities moved to the beat of the sun: lively during the day, a short burst of activity in the evenings, and finally falling into something like tranquility at night.
During tea season, the river Min bustled with the moon. At high tide, the only time the steamships could navigate the river to the ocean, Fuzhou positively boiled with activity. At low tide, the traders were out, bargaining as they could with the vessels that were stuck. At this time of morning, the ships were stuck in place, sitting low on the docks with the duckweed visible on the top of the water.
One of those ships belonged to…
His card was in her pocket, but she didn’t need to consult it. His face came to mind before his name. The curve of his eyebrow. The smile as he’d leaned in and spoke to her of megalodons. She could imagine his skin, a lustrous brown, with the morning light shining on it. Her heart picked up a beat—surely, she thought, the exertion from the walk—but there was no point lying to herself when there was nobody to fool. She wanted to see Captain…Hunter.
There. That was his name. Captain Hunter because he had hunted her out—her!
She didn’t know where Captain Hunter was staying, but it was easy enough to find out once she remembered how to refer to him.
“I’m looking for Captain Hunter,” she tried. “Captain Hunter of…” What was the name of his ship? She had forgotten. “Captain Hunter of…” What was the name of his trading company? She pulled out his card to remind herself.
The first white sailor she stopped looked at her face and saw nothing further.
“You lookee for big captain?” he asked her very loudly in exaggerated pidgin.