Deep down, he wanted it. He wanted her. He wanted to know her, to feel her, to—
He shook his head. It was ten years too late. She might have been a match for the person he had once been, but the man he was now? She was open. Vulnerable. Trusting.
He was very much not those things anymore. It was better that they spoke this way—separated by thousands of miles, she pouring out her questions to him, and he finding numbers that might illuminate her path forward in some tiny way. It was better for her to build a life without him.
He set down the missive he had decoded and went to his notes, looking for the right response. Not seven; not thirteen. There.
That was it. That was the number to send.
The response that Amelia received to her message from the prior week was 22. When she opened that envelope, it read as follows.
I’ve given you authorization to hire who you need. Trust your instinct. Who do you want around you? What is it that your project will include? Find those people.
She stared at the page for a long while. She checked her notes on what she had sent, and then checked the number he’d transmitted and the number on the envelope.
It wasn’t an answer to the question she had asked. It wasn’t even close.
But it was an answer. Who did she want around her? What would the project include? Who did she want to be? Wistfully, she thought of turning a corner one day. Of seeing her mother down a long road…
No. She needed a new dream, a new connection. And that meant…
Maybe…that?
The Shanghai teahouse looked much the same as the last time Amelia had come on her prior visit. Last time she had been here, her head had been filled with the details of her coming project and the certainty of her own failure.
Today, it was midmorning. The rosewood furniture gleamed in the morning light, but the room was largely empty save for a few men in the corner.
Proprietor Zhu caught sight of her and came over, her tray full.
“You’re back,” Proprietor Zhu said, setting the tray in front of Amelia. “Good. You know how to make tea properly now.”
It wasn’t a question, but Amelia answered it as one. “Yes.”
The woman nodded and left. Where. Where was here.
Amelia managed to use the gaiwan to get tea into a cup, her fingers only slipping a little as she held the lid in place and poured. She pulled a notebook out of her pocket and sketched. There were, she had discovered, four separate difficulties in encoding Chinese. First, her original idea wouldn’t work. She’d assigned separate code values to each Chinese radical, but an English operator wouldn’t know a Chinese code, making it impossible to use outside of China. So that was out. She’d have to use English characters as an encoding. It would mean sending telegrams outside China at the higher cipher rate, but that was inevitable.
Second, the—
The bench across from her seat scraped as Proprietor Zhu pulled it back, sitting across the table from her.
“Don’t let the tea go cold,” the woman scolded.
“Oh.” Amelia gave her a bright smile. “I’m sorry. I was…” Lost in thought? She wasn’t sure if the idiom would translate.
But Proprietor Zhu leaned over and pulled Amelia’s notebook to her. She smiled at a doodle of Merry, frowned at the mess of characters Amelia had made.
“You’re a scholar?” She sounded dubious as she looked Amelia over.
“No, I…” Amelia trailed off. She wasn’t sure how much she should tell others. “Do you know what a telegraph is?” She used the English word for it.
The woman shook her head.
“It’s—” Machine, machine, what was machine in Mandarin? She didn’t know. “Some thingy that allows you to send a message very quickly. If I had a wire long enough, I could send a message to London that would arrive before you could blink twice.”
“Every charlatan claims to have such a thing. Are you being scammed?”
“No.” Amelia pinched the bridge of her nose. “This one truly works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used one to send messages from India to Hong Kong.”
“Really! That far? So quickly?”
“They reach all over the globe now. The English use them all the time. You have to send the message by code, and I’m trying to work out a code for Chinese characters.” Amelia’s shoulders slumped. “It would be easier if I were more familiar with them.”
“Ahh.” Proprietor Zhu nodded. “So you aren’t a Chinese scholar. You need a Chinese scholar.”
“I. Um.” Amelia looked at her. Captain Hunter had given her authority to hire employees and told her to do it as she saw fit. “Probably? I’m just not certain how to find one.”
Proprietor Zhu stood and waved a hand. “Hey!” she called across the shop. “Scholar Wu! Yes, you. You were just complaining about not having enough to do now that you’ve reduced your teaching hours. And you like ridiculous things. Come take a look at this.”
Amelia looked over at the woman. “Thank you, Proprietor Zhu.”
The woman looked at her and shook her head. “Proprietor Zhu? You’ve come here twice now. Don’t you know anything? You should call me Auntie Zhu. And don’t thank me. This is a favor to me. He’s always complaining about boredom. Now you can deal with him.”
Shortly after that, Amelia got a note in the courier pile again.
32.
If you get this, we’ve used the system you and Lightfoot developed for a week without incident. Excellent work. You should be proud of yourself.
Proud of herself. It seemed such an odd concept, to be proud of herself. And yet. There it was. A flicker of happiness inside her. Amelia grinned, hugged the page to her chest, and then went back to work.
It had been six weeks since Amelia left Fuzhou. In that time she had sent four letters to her mother and received two in return. The one she held now would likely be an answer to the second letter she had sent.
That letter had come out of extensive soul-searching on her part. Captain Hunter’s words before he took her to the tea shop had stayed with her, rankling in her soul. Don’t tell me it’s fine if it isn’t fine.
She had thought herself generally truthful up until that point. But once he had said those words, she’d suddenly become aware of all the ways in which she lied. “I’m fine” was only the start. She had started a list of the lies she had told her mother, and they had been surprisingly extensive. “No, it doesn’t bother me if I can’t get a dog.” “Of course it’s no problem.” “I’m willing to marry again.” “I’d love to meet Mrs. Flappert.”
It had shocked her sensibilities to discover that she was not only untruthful, she was a consummate, inveterate liar.
So in her second letter, she had tried being honest, turning each sentence over in her head until she was certain she was offering the truth and not the platitude her mother wished to hear. She’d written a heartfelt, honest letter. She had said that the work was hard but rewarding. For every three steps forward she took, there was one step back—sometimes two. She found herself thinking about the project at all hours, having it consume her thoughts. Benedict Worth had to remind her to take meals. She was wildly happy.