He thought of what it might be like if he’d not had a telegraphic empire to establish—if someone else other than him could be put in charge—but that thought brought to mind Harry, and he could not go down that road.
So every time he spent a few idle moments thinking about her, he packed up his wistful longing and focused on what needed to be done. Get the cable loaded in San Francisco. Take a few weeks to go visit his family in Maine. Steel himself so he could ignore the unspoken truths that lay between them.
One day after inspecting cable in San Francisco, a packet of letters arrived.
It contained copies of manifests and budgets and reports of negotiations gone well. A note from the Yokohama office told him he would have to stop in Tokyo to discuss the scheduling of internal telegraph lines. Revenue from the Singapore line was up. Good, except that also meant a renegotiation of the agreement with the connecting telegraphic lines. There was too much to do, and he’d promised his mother he’d return in April.
He should have been looking forward to it.
He rubbed his temples. A letter from Amelia was a nice interlude, even if it was entirely about something mathematical—error correction and something, something modulus? Grayson skimmed the math enough to get the idea behind it, but lingered on her final words.
Take care, Amelia.
He traced the t and the c in “take care,” once and then again, something unknown welling up inside him as if it were the antidote to the burden on his shoulders. Then he packed it all away and picked up Benedict’s report.
The codebooks were going to plan; Benedict would be going to Hong Kong to deliver them and start the training, but he would return before the second meeting with the taotai…
Grayson stared at those words.
“The what?” he said aloud.
Benedict was not here to answer.
The second meeting with the taotai? What second meeting?
In a rush, he remembered how Amelia had looked in the final instants in which he’d seen her. She’d been bundled up in the cold outside the office, stamping from foot to foot. She’d looked up at him with a grin and said, “Your leaving at this exact moment is entirely according to my plan.” And then she’d innocently added something about operating independently.
“Son of a bitch.” Grayson exhaled slowly.
His first reaction should have been anger that she’d moved without his approval.
The problem was, he trusted her. Also, he’d specifically told her to move without his approval. That had been the entire point of all the letters he’d written to her.
His second reaction should have been fear. She might mishandle delicate negotiations.
But Amelia wasn’t stupid.
And so the thing that he actually felt when his thoughts cleared from the shock was relief. Relief that this was one thing someone else was managing for a change, relief that everything did not have to be done by him.
I should be there, he thought, and then, no, I shouldn’t. I promised my mother I would come back. But that opened up another unfortunate realization. He’d been dreading the visit.
He’d already been subtly regretting the time he would have to spend crossing the country, making his way to Maine, visiting with his parents pretending that nothing was wrong.
He practically had to go to the meeting with the taotai, didn’t he? And if he didn’t go home now, if he postponed the visit until after he was finished with the transpacific line, well. Then he’d have something to show for himself. Things would be less awkward in the first place. It would be a better visit.
Grayson got up. Paced around.
Don’t tell me you’re fine if you’re not fine.
Amelia had the right of it. If you couldn’t tell someone you weren’t fine, you couldn’t tell them when you needed care. But there was a time to descend into polite fictions, and his mama, British to her core, understood that in her bones.
He and his mama, they’d been lying to each other. Neither of them was fine, and they couldn’t talk about it because you couldn’t go back from some things.
I wish you had died instead of your brothers was not a thing a mother could say to a child.
On the one hand, if Grayson skipped out on this meeting now, there would be hell to pay. His aunts, far more direct, would be sure to let him know precisely how he’d stepped wrong. Zed would convey every ounce of their wrath.
And the next time he saw his mother, she’d be less able to hide that resentment from him.
But on the other hand, if he postponed their meeting? Maybe later he could actually speak of what lay between them. I know I’m not enough. I know I will never make up for it. But I’m trying, I’m trying, to do what they would have done.
If he left for Asia now, he’d save a full month of travel. More, because he could return via commercial ship faster than the Victory. He could handle the matters in Tokyo, the renegotiation of the Singapore contract. He could see Amelia and manage the taotai and push aside the uneasy truths that would break apart his family for long enough to maybe finally address them.
In the end, it wasn’t even hard.
Dear Mama, Grayson wrote. I must unfortunately cancel my upcoming visit…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Grayson only managed to land in Shanghai the morning before the meeting. He counted time in his head as he crawled his way through the paperwork associated with arriving in the foreign concession.
He’d spent a week in Tokyo untangling details of interior telegraphs, and yet he’d not announced his return to Amelia. He wanted to catch her by surprise.
But when he made his way to the office, the front room was empty. Instead, he could hear them upstairs.
“Order, order.” That was Amelia speaking in Mandarin. “We’re practicing, not making fun of me.”
He couldn’t hear the reply, but he found himself smiling just at the thought of seeing her. He crept up the stairs. The door to Amelia’s room was open a good three inches, and when he peered inside, he saw it had been filled with chairs. His eyes landed on Amelia where she stood up front with a group of Chinese women. More than a dozen, he thought at a glance.
The presentation they were practicing was entirely in Mandarin. Grayson’s Mandarin was decent, and the topic of conversation—telegraphy and travel—was one where his vocabulary was regularly exercised. It was easy enough to follow.
“For me,” one of the women gathered at the front was saying, “if I could send a telegram, I might find out if my son was alive. He went to Brazil as a laborer three years ago. We haven’t received any letters, so we wait without knowing.”
She bowed deeply and stepped back.
The next woman introduced herself as Zhu Yiwei. “My husband went to work on the American railway,” she said. She sounded tired. “It was finished several years ago. If I could send a telegram, I might find out what happened to him. If he’s alive or…” She trailed off. “I don’t even know if I should make offerings.”
There was a quiet despair to that.
Grayson stood back against the wall, not wanting to disrupt them, slowly sinking to the floor in the hall outside. He took in stories about grandparents, brothers, children. This is what a telegraph would mean to me, they said. This is why I need it.