He looked over at her. His eyes were dark and deep.
Amelia swallowed.
He continued. “But I don’t think you do feel shame. I think you want to do this deep down in your bones. I think that’s what scares you—that you can do it right, and you’re afraid you won’t. Am I wrong?”
That was what made it so hard. She did want this. She wanted to be the person who did it because if she did…
If she did, she would finally have someplace where she belonged, even if she’d had to carve it out herself at the intersection of China and the West. She felt tears prick against her eyelids.
“Whatever you create will have traces of you in it. If Viguier’s version becomes standard, then Chinese transmitted via telegraph will always have his echo. It will always be a code secondary to Morse. Convoluted, tricky, difficult to send, and harder to encode.”
She exhaled. “If I fail, it will prove once and for all that I don’t belong.”
She’d said something similar to her mother once—talking about that fear that went deeper than loneliness, deeper than rootlessness. She usually received reassurances in return—that she would always have a place with her mother, even if she floundered. Those words had never reassured.
Captain Hunter offered her no such easy platitudes. He just shrugged. “Then don’t fail.”
“Oh very well.” She ran a finger along the edge of her teacup. “I suppose I just won’t fail then. How useful.”
She wasn’t trying to hide her sarcasm.
But his eyes widened. “Aha!”
“Aha?”
“Aha, as in, eureka, I have discovered something. I made a bit of a mistake there. No—don’t look so despondent—I have not discovered that I think you’ll fail.” He shook his head. “It’s just…” He looked away. “You remind me a bit of one of my younger brothers. Noah.”
He wasn’t watching her. He’d mentioned his brothers before. The way he wasn’t looking at her, the way he was trying for a lighthearted tone…
“Noah was the one who came up with the leaf harvesting and extraction method for gutta percha,” Captain Hunter explained to his teacup. “He was the one who made humidity and latitude charts and…never mind.” His hands clenched around his cup. “You have his intelligence. His enthusiasm. I forgot you didn’t have his experience. Noah would have known he could succeed.”
Amelia felt a pit of uncertainty in her stomach. “And I don’t.”
“You don’t know it yet,” he said. “You’ll have to learn by doing.”
She made a face. “You don’t learn success. You either succeed or you don’t.”
He finally looked up at her. “No,” he said slowly. “Take it from me. You learn. And if someone has taught you not to succeed, you learn that too. You’ll learn.”
“How?”
He looked at her across the table. “You’ll learn because you’ll want something more than you fear it.”
She had thought him handsome before. But in that moment, that quiet assurance, the way he looked at her… Her doubts didn’t fall away. Her confidence didn’t soar. But it felt like the smallest parting of clouds, a single ray of sunshine bursting through and catching the two of them at this teahouse.
He nodded. “I have an idea. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll be on the wide ocean for weeks, and you’re clearly not ready to be left. There’s not much to be done about that, unfortunately, but here we are. Luckily, you’ve already set up a potential method of communication between us.”
“It might not work. It won’t allow for much.”
“I think it will be enough. Let’s assume you’re right.” He gave her a small smile. “Like I said. I have an idea. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
Chapter Fourteen
Captain Hunter appeared the next morning just as Amelia was making her way up to her office. He had a leather satchel over one shoulder. He nodded to her in greeting and bent to pet Merry, who responded with tail-beating enthusiasm.
He said little as she went to her desk and found the notes she’d made feverishly last night after their talk. She glanced up. The morning light glinted off his skin, drawing her attention. What would it be like to trace the brown divot in his upper lip with her finger…?
He was watching her in return. She felt her whole body light up when he looked at her. Attraction, she reminded herself. Many women were attracted to him. It wasn’t particularly meaningful.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can—early February, I hope.”
That was so many months away.
“It will be before the meeting with the taotai at any event. But while you’re getting started, I’ll be laying the Japan-to-Myriad line. We should be able to send messages: my telegraph to Japan, then via courier ship to Shanghai. The same will work in reverse.”
She inhaled. “Are you saying I should write to you?”
Merry pushed around Amelia’s feet, butting under her skirts, nudging her ankle with a cold nose and beating her tail against her calf. Amelia knelt beside her and rubbed her dog’s head, trying to hide the loneliness that welled up inside her at the thought of him leaving. He had said he would do it; it wasn’t a surprise.
He looked embarrassed. “I’m saying you must write to me.”
Don’t tell me you’re fine if you’re not fine. The idea of sending honest progress reports sent a shiver down her spine.
“And you’ll respond? What sort of question can I fit in a telegram? What sort of answer could you provide?”
“Benedict has access to our commercial ciphers. He can help you get a message down to a minimum. As for me, I imagine we won’t have much ability to send the lengthy return messages that might prove useful. So I’ll send you a number.”
“What am I supposed to do with a number?”
For a moment, Captain Hunter appeared as if he were contemplating a distasteful task. His lip curled; his nostrils flared. Finally he opened the satchel at his side and removed a stack of envelopes—thick enough that even when compressing them together, they did not fit in one of his rather large hands.
He handed them over in two hanks. On top of the first one, inscribed in dark black ink, was a number: 1.
“When I send a number, open up the corresponding envelope. It will tell you my thoughts on the matter. Understand?”
She stared at the envelopes. “Captain Hunter. Did you write all these out last night?”
He cleared his throat and muttered something.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, I might have.” He looked away from her. “It’s just another form of commercial cipher, highly compressed. Nothing else.”
The thought of him sitting up at night writing out instructions, however general they might have been, made a warm, fluttery thing come to life inside her. Then she remembered that he’d asked her for honesty, which meant he would provide it as well.
Some of these envelopes must contain reprimands.
Amelia fanned the thick stack. “I suppose envelopes two through thirty just say ‘no, you fool.’ But thank you.”