“No.” His reply came out in a rush. “That’s not it at all.”
“Hmm?”
“One of my younger brothers was something of a genius,” he told her. “The rule always was to let him think where he wanted. You never knew what you were going to get. If it’s fun, by all means, think it through. I’ll ask Lightfoot if he wants to talk to you about it. He probably will. He loves things like this.”
“Oh.” She seemed taken aback by this. “Really?”
A storm was coming, and Grayson couldn’t stop it. Even if he wanted to, he needed her. All Grayson could do was hope to race ahead and avoid the worst of what was coming.
“I only meant you had no obligation to continue. If you want to do it, by all means. Go ahead.”
For the next days, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Lightfoot were inseparable. Damien Lightfoot was a Black engineer Grayson had hired after the war. He was almost seven feet tall and as thin as a wire, and Grayson tried his best not to feel jealousy every time he saw the two of them talking together, Lightfoot bent over to match her diminutive height.
Sometimes he saw them in the mess, going over diagrams. Sometimes he saw them speaking excitedly. Grayson didn’t see Mrs. Smith alone again until days later, in the middle of the afternoon at the side of the deck.
“Come on, Merry,” she was saying to her puppy. “Go. You can go.”
Merry was sniffing the railings eagerly but seemed in no hurry to do her business.
He shouldn’t ask. He should just tip his hat to her and leave. But… “How goes the telegraph at sea?” Grayson heard himself say.
She started, lost her footing, then caught the rail, steadying herself before he’d taken two steps in her direction to assist.
Grayson put his hands in his pockets, as if he had not just launched himself toward her in a panic.
She let out a pained laugh. “It’s not going. The start was promising, but, I am stuck.”
This was a business matter. Talking her through the solution of problems was necessary. “Sometimes it helps to stop cudgeling your brains to give up an answer.” Grayson gestured at Merry. “You can tell her to go for hours on end, but sometimes it just won’t happen until the pressure is off.”
She sighed. “The pressure. Why did I do this to myself? I told you it seemed so easy, and here I am! Discovering that it is in fact not easy.”
“That’s normal.”
“You would know.” She turned to him. “You woke up one day and said, ‘I want to build a worldwide telegraphic network.’ I imagine the pressure must be intense.”
Not many people noticed that. Grayson let out a bark of laughter because laughing was better than grimacing and falling to the floor, clutching his head. But he didn’t want to talk about himself.
“I suppose it must be,” he said.
“What made you decide to do it?”
After years of answering this exact question, he had a whole little speech he could rattle off—something about power and information and profit, something that made sense and told a good story.
But he’d already told her that.
A storm was coming and fool that he was, he faced headfirst into it.
“We had the idea back when we were breaking the gutta percha monopoly,” he found himself saying.
“The gutta percha monopoly? What is that?”
It was at the heart of his plans, at the heart of himself. He should make his excuses and go.
But in that moment, he could see it clear as day. He’d wanted to hire someone who would make a telegraphic code that felt right—not just done, but right. If that was going to be her, she had to know what he meant by that. And that meant telling her about gutta percha.
“So.” He turned to her. “If you’re laying copper wire on the bottom of the ocean floor, it must be insulated or current will never flow.”
“Of course.” The way she looked at him, the way her eyes were so wide and interested…
He looked off to the sea. “At the bottom of the ocean, it’s cold and the pressure is intense. Rubber becomes brittle and ceases to insulate. So, one cannot insulate a submarine telegraph cable with rubber.”
She nodded, rapt.
“Luckily for the worldwide telegraphic network, there is a latex exuded by a plant called gutta percha, which continues to insulate at the bottom of the ocean. It’s produced by a tree also called gutta percha.”
“And there was a monopoly on it? Did you do some clever negotiating to break it?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t a negotiation problem. Gutta percha only grows in a small portion of the earth—Borneo and British Malaya, some parts of Java. And—here’s the difficulty—if you fell a sixty-foot-tall gutta percha, you’ll get ten ounces of latex.”
Her eyes were wide. “From the whole tree? Just ten ounces?”
“From the whole tree. And it took two hundred and fifty tons of gutta percha to build a cable to cross the Atlantic.”
“But that’s…”
“Three hundred thousand trees,” he told her. “Unimaginable acres of forest crushed for ounces of milky fluid so that current can stutter across the ocean. How do you break such a monopoly? You might find a forest or two outside British control every now and again, but you’d run through it in no time at all. A few pounds here or there is no monopoly-breaker.”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. How did you do such a thing?”
You, she said. It had not been him.
“Here’s the thing,” Grayson told her. “When you’re starting to harvest gutta percha in the very beginning, the solution always seems so easy. The fastest, cheapest way to get ten ounces of gutta percha is to cut down one tree and extract all the latex. Keep it up though, and the forest that was growing on the coast has become a sea of stumps. Then it’s not just the cost of cutting down trees. You’re building railways into scarcely inhabited sections of Borneo and putting down rebellions when the locals realize you’ll destroy their way of life and leave famine in your wake.”
Her eyes were wide.
“This,” Grayson said, “is really what I think the Lord Traders are about. We find the places where everyone chose the first easy solution. They stick to that doggedly, even as it becomes mired in complexity and increasing costs. That’s when we try to find the second, better solution.”
“Which is?”
He leaned in. “You can get ten ounces of latex from one tree, but you can get an ounce of latex from its leaves. It doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that you can get that every year, without fail, from the same trees.”
“Ohhhh.” She turned to him. “Oh that’s a truly lovely solution.”
“It’s slower, but instead of causing famine in the local area, you’re increasing prosperity. You never have to look for another forest. You never have to build a new railway. That’s how we broke a monopoly—by questioning fast and cheap and thinking about what lasts. Once we had a long-lasting source for gutta percha, we saw what people were doing with it… At some point, we realized that we could already produce the most expensive ingredient in laying submarine cable.” He let out a breath. “The rest of it seemed obvious from there.”