“I’m sure you’ll tell me if I’m off when we’re in Shanghai together—”
Here was a good place to remind them both. “I won’t be in Shanghai long.”
“You had mentioned leaving, but surely not immediately.”
“Almost immediately. I’ll be there a few days.”
“Well.” She frowned. “In that case, I should explain what I am thinking now.”
The puppy lay nearby, chewing contentedly on a bit of rope that one of the crewmen had found for her. Clouds had obscured the sun for their journey up until this point, but this afternoon the winds had swept the skies clear. This was the first time he’d seen her in sunlight and wind.
He wished he hadn’t. They were traveling at close to twenty knots, and the wind caught little bits of her hair, sending it whipping behind her.
She turned to him. Her cheeks were red from the wind. She met his gaze and her cheeks turned even redder. She looked swiftly away.
She was attracted to him. He knew that. Why that should make him feel a storm on the horizon, he couldn’t say. He would have recognized the signs even if she hadn’t blurted it out earlier. He hadn’t lied; he was attractive. He’d even experienced it like this. Her shy demeanor, the way she hesitated before looking at him…
Even his stirring of interest in return wasn’t new. The desire to ask and know more. To flirt and grow close… He’d felt those before, and he’d ignored them often enough.
These sorts of feelings belonged to a younger man—someone who could allow sparks to build to flames.
Luckily, it also felt like the sort of new, fluttering emotion that he could starve to death in a matter of days. She would move on from him as quickly as she did from a new topic of conversation, and this storm would pass.
“You’re right,” he said. “We should talk code, and the sooner, the better. While we’re at it, you’ll need to hear what Lord Traders stands for. What I hope to accomplish.” He glanced at her. “You’ll fit right in.”
“Absolutely.”
“Let’s start with our competition. The Great Northern Telegraphic Company is currently attempting to produce a code for China. The man who is leading this endeavor is named Viguier, and while I don’t know his purported code, I do know the general thrust of the idea.”
Mrs. Smith nodded, leaning forward. “You had mentioned it before.”
“As I remember, you abused the method he came up with—assigning numbers to each character. How do you plan to do it differently?”
She sent him a tentative glance. “I don’t have a plan as such. I never finished a complete encoding.”
He’d seen the letters she’d sent her brother. She already had a more intelligent plan than he’d seen from anyone else.
“I was looking through my journals on the way to Hong Kong,” she said. “Back when I was contemplating the matter, I thought it would make little sense to treat Chinese the way Morse did English. In Morse code, letters that are more commonly used are given shorter encodings. The letter E, for instance, is a single dot. But written words in English are composed of letters arranged in a single dimension. Chinese characters are not quite analogous. They are composed of radicals arranged in two dimensions, and even that understates the complexity. Morse in English maps a one-dimensional arrangement—words—onto another one-dimensional arrangement—code. The difficulty with Chinese is how to deal with those multiple dimensions.”
This all came out in a rush of words, a wild overflowing of enthusiasm. He understood about half of what she said, but he was still caught by the look on her face, the light in her eyes, the way her hands moved to illustrate what she was saying.
“And you doubt I hired the right person.”
“I’m telling you I don’t know how to complete it.”
“You’re telling me that you’ve identified the difficulty.”
She made a face. “The benefit of assigning numbers to Chinese characters is that you don’t have to solve any of these difficult problems.”
“Of course. And the detriment?”
She blew out a breath. “It is incredibly stupid.”
He let out a startled laugh.
“I’m warning you. I started learning characters a mere six years ago. I’m not a master. I’m scarcely even what you might call a journeyman. There are Chinese masters who study this sort of thing for decades. I’m liable to make mistakes.”
Grayson waved a hand. “Then hire someone who has studied them for decades. You’ll also have to think about training operators. You will have help with that—we’ve made a code in Japanese—”
She let out a little gasp. “Oh! But if you can do Japanese, then you must know how to send Chinese characters!”
“Not so fast. Wabun code is only for Japanese syllabaries. The use of Chinese characters is as yet unsolved.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Drat.”
“And we expect the telegraphic code in Japan to be limited to Japan itself. The global population distribution is different. The Japanese have largely kept to themselves until the era changed a few years ago. But Chinese people can be found all over the world.”
“Hmm.” She frowned at that.
Business. He had to talk business—things like limitations, expectations. Things that had nothing to do with the emotion she showed so freely.
“That creates an added difficulty. Your code must be able to be sent by operators who have never spoken, and will never speak, a lick of Chinese. You’ll need to test this under real-life circumstances. I won’t understand the details; I’m a cable expert, not a code expert. But we need a code that convinces the Taotai of Shanghai that this is a Chinese code, designed for the spectrum of the Chinese language, not some slapdash Western thing thrown together in an afternoon.”
She made a confused face. “The taotai? Taotais are administrators, aren’t they?”
“In Shanghai, the taotai holds diplomatic power. I’ve heard the Chinese call him the Barbarian Keeper. If we want to establish a telegraph in China, we’ll have to convince him.”
“I see.”
“But convincing him is only the first step. If Viguier comes out with his code first, no matter how stupid, it may very well end up the standard by virtue of its mere existence. We have to get in first.”
“Why, if ours is superior?”
“Because we’re the Lord Traders,” Grayson told her. “Someone else will make a code, ask the taotai for permission, and when it isn’t forthcoming, they’ll shrug, say ‘we tried’ and just build the telegraph in with the certainty that China won’t fight a third war over a little copper wire.”
“And you won’t?”
“No.” He let out a breath. “We won’t, for the same reason we won’t just throw a handful of characters next to a numbered list without caring that we’re dooming a generation, at least, to a foolish code that is unworkable. If we’re going to connect China, we’re going to connect China—not just make a show of it for Western profit. I want your code for Chinese ready in rough form within the first three months. I want training methodology ready three months after that. We have a meeting with the taotai in February. And we have to be not just ready, but good.”