“The, um, the lidded bowl?”
“Yes. Of course. The gaiwan.”
Amelia looked over the dishes in front of her. There was a bowl with a lid, but it looked incredibly small for the task.
“Gaiwan?” she asked again.
The woman let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t you know how to make tea?”
She managed a half-hearted smile.
“Your accent,” the woman muttered. And then she said something that sounded like: “Who even raised you?”
Amelia had said this sentence to Chinese speakers so often that it was second nature to her now in any language. “I was taken in by Christian missionaries at the age of six.”
That gaze sharpened on her, turning to a disdainful pity. “So, you don’t know anything, do you?”
Amelia swallowed and glanced at Captain Hunter, hoping he couldn’t understand what was happening here.
“Not one thing.”
The woman came to stand behind her. “Take the gaiwan.” She took the top off the blue ceramic pot. Inside were some tea leaves. She took hold of the kettle, poured in a little water, and waited a moment. “Wake the tea leaves.” With one practiced motion, she put the lid over the top, then tilted the entire contraption so the hot water, colored a faint green-gold, streamed out into the little ceramic pitcher, leaving the leaves behind. “Pour that into the cups,” she said. “Then throw it away. It’s no good.”
Amelia poured the hot water into the cup, feeling the ceramic heat against her fingertips. Grayson moved to take his.
“She said to throw it away,” Amelia said, as he raised it to his lips.
He did.
“Now.” The woman poured more hot water into the gaiwan. “This you drink. After it”—Amelia didn’t catch the word she used, but she was guessing it meant steeps—“pour the tea into the pitcher.”
Amelia nodded. “Thank you for your explanation. I appreciate it.”
The woman just stared at her. “You’re not pouring. Did you understand what I said?”
“You said, after it…”
“Yes, after it—” That same word, probably? Maybe it didn’t mean steeps. Maybe it meant something else.
Amelia gave her a horrified smile. “But it hasn’t even been a minute.”
“A minute!” The woman widened her eyes. “No, no, this is good green tea. The first steeping finishes in ten seconds. How can you taste each steeping properly if you let the leaves sit in water for minutes on end like you’re boiling soup?”
“That’s how the English make it.”
“Ah!” The woman threw up her hands. “The English! Fight two wars for tea and can’t even make it properly! How will you marry if you can’t even prepare tea for your mother-in-law? What would your mother say if she saw you? She would be so ashamed.”
Amelia felt her face burn. The English. Of course that was how this woman saw her. How could she think otherwise? Amelia wore English clothing and spoke the English language. She had an English mother, an English childhood. She was English, in every way that counted to everyone who wasn’t English.
It hit her then, that sense of deep shame. It was just as well her mother hadn’t come back. Just as well that the woman had never seen what her daughter had turned into—someone who couldn’t even make tea.
“Thank you for your instruction,” she said quietly. “You’ve been extraordinarily patient, madame.”
“Madame.” The woman scoffed. “Don’t you know anything? Call me Proprietor Zhu. And throw that water out—it’s no good now. Steep it right. Twenty seconds the second time.” She left in a huff.
“Is everything all right?” Grayson asked after a moment.
She’d seen him use some Mandarin. Amelia didn’t know if he’d followed that exchange. Even in Mandarin, Proprietor… Who? Ah, there, the character was on the wall, how convenient. Proprietor Zhu had an accent. He might not have been familiar with it, and she had been speaking quickly.
Of course, she wanted to say. But the words stuck in her throat. It wasn’t right. None of it was right.
“What am I doing?” she finally asked, shutting her eyes. “Why am I doing this? I don’t even know how to make tea properly for my mother-in-law. How am I expected to make a code for a language I understand so badly?”
“I didn’t realize you had a mother-in-law.” A bit of a pause, and then he said, more dryly. “I didn’t realize you wanted one.”
“Metaphorically speaking,” Amelia said with a wave of her hand.
Her hand shook as she poured the hot water into the gaiwan; she could feel Proprietor Zhu’s eyes on her from across the room. When she decanted the liquid a short count later, pale and lovely, the woman gave her a sharp, approving grunt.
“Captain Hunter, I don’t know why I’m here. You need someone who will do this right, like with the gutta percha. That’s not me.”
“You’re here,” he said, “because you’re here. Because you will be the third person I hired for this task, and if you finish, it will be because you stayed, and they didn’t. If I didn’t have you here, it will fall to some Frenchman with less understanding of the language.”
Your mother would be so ashamed. It felt like hubris for Amelia to think she could do this. “I’m not going to be perfect. Someone else would be better.”
“You’re not wrong,” Captain Hunter replied with what sounded like practiced ease. “In an ideal world, a consortium of every interested party would sit down together and develop a natural approach. We had something like that in Japan, but the Japanese emperor wishes to embrace modernization in a way the Chinese do not. So here we are. In this world, an American invented the telegraph, developed a code for transmission, and left the rest of us scrambling to graft something usable on top of what he made.”
Amelia put her hands over her eyes, unwilling to look at him. “She said.” She let out a breath. “The owner. Mrs. Zhu. She said my mother would be ashamed if she could see me. How can I do this?”
Grayson looked over at her. “I take it she wasn’t talking about Mrs. Acheson.”
She shook her head.
“And I take it you care.”
Amelia found herself nodding. She shouldn’t have. She couldn’t remember her Chinese mother—just that false hope. I will come back for you. Hold on to your heart. She’d already lost it to the fog of memory.
“I don’t know your Chinese mother.” He gave her a little shrug. “Do you want me to offer false platitudes?”
She looked up, glaring. “Well now I don’t! You aren’t supposed to admit your platitudes are false before offering them! It completely ruins the effect.”
“Then have the truth: You can’t possibly know whether she would feel pride or shame if she saw you now. You can’t hope to meet the standards of someone who exists only in your mind and your memory.”
Her eyes stung. “I know. I’m not good enough.”
He poured her more tea. “That’s not what I meant. The question is not whether she would be proud of you. It’s whether you would be proud of yourself. If you’ll feel shame for working on this, then by all means stop.”