It painted a very different picture from his first attempt. He’d talked about code and characters, about pricing and partnerships.
She’d hit on what was missing: a picture of how the telegraph could help China not to be more like the West but more like China.
“There,” Amelia said with satisfaction. “That’s everyone. I have notes, if you would not mind—”
“All of us?” said one of the women. “Of course it isn’t. What about you?”
“Me? But…” Grayson couldn’t see Amelia, but he could hear her hesitation. “I’m an outsider. A Westerner.” Her voice sounded so brisk. “This presentation is about you, about what the telegraph would mean for China. Auntie Zhu, I am legally a citizen of Britain.”
“Stupid,” said the woman who had spoken before.
“Very stupid,” said someone else, a woman with a higher voice.
“Of course you’re an outsider if you always stay outside,” said the first woman—Auntie Zhu? Grayson realized with a start that this was the woman from the tea shop. “I had to practically hit you over the head before you realized we were friends.”
“Didn’t you say that a minister asked about you at the last meeting?” This was another voice.
“Yes, but—”
“Nobody wants your excuses. Go, say something. Say something.”
Grayson could imagine the face she was making.
“Well?”
“I’m thinking,” she retorted. “Give me a moment to think of what a telegraphic system would mean to me.”
There was a tremble to her voice. Grayson let out a breath. A long time ago, Amelia had told him exactly what it would mean. She’d told him about her mother, about hopes that had died. He could imagine that look in her eyes now, the harrowing look of memory that had left her behind, but not quite.
And then she spoke.
“The last time I was here,” Amelia said, “your minister asked if the English missionaries removed the eyes and hearts of the children they took in order to make unholy medicine.”
Grayson could remember that.
“I recall.”
“When I was growing up in Fuzhou with the English woman I called Mother, she would sometimes take me out to show other Chinese people that I was living. That I had not been made into medicine. But I don’t think they ever asked the right questions. My eyes and my heart remained in my body, but they always yearned for something they could not remember seeing.”
Grayson was frozen where he was seated outside her office. The wood floor was hard; the office wall he leaned against cold. He could not have moved to interrupt her, not in a million years.
“The mother who gave me up during the Taiping Rebellion… I have wondered what happened to her almost every day. Who was she? Where did she come from? Did she live or die? Who was my father? What was my family name? Do I have sisters?”
Amelia’s voice was smooth and low. How had Grayson come to know her well enough to understand she was wrestling with tears?
“I accept that I will not ever know. I accept that I have other family now. But when I was writing this code, I thought every day about what it would mean if I could complete it. What it would mean for families who were separated, for children who did not know their mothers, if there were a swift means of reuniting people after a calamity.”
Grayson had known how personal the telegraphic system was for her, and yet hearing those words spoken aloud, hearing her say it to someone other than himself, touched something deep inside him.
“I have a brother I grew up with. A woman who has served as my mother. But there are grandparents I will never know. A name that once belonged to me is lost. My eyes and my heart are mine, but they’ve been changed, and I cannot recall the things that no longer belong to me. And if I can save one other person from that loss…”
He understood her more deeply than he ever had before in that moment. Wanting to build back with copper wire what time and war had destroyed. Knowing, deep down, the futility of what she was doing for herself, but throwing her all into the project for others.
That was when Grayson realized he was in love. The feeling was sharp to the point of pain.
He couldn’t build back what he’d lost with his family. He couldn’t even imagine it. But he listened to Amelia baring her soul for the sake of his—of their—telegraphic network. He thought of her brother who had told Grayson almost a year ago that his sister was criminally undervalued.
He thought about what he’d just done—walking away from his mother because he couldn’t face her yet, and he thought about Amelia losing more of the connections she cared about. How long had it been since she’d seen her brother in Hong Kong?
Close to a year, he imagined. She’d been here in Shanghai, plotting how to get the taotai to accept his partnership so she could help lift the load he shouldered.
Who cares for you? she’d asked. He hadn’t needed to come here to talk with the taotai. But, he realized, he had needed to know what she was doing.
Who cared for him? It didn’t matter. Who cared for her? It couldn’t be her mother, not with what she’d said. It couldn’t be him. He couldn’t let it be him.
But listening to the woman he loved talk about the pain she would always bear, Grayson knew there was an answer. It wasn’t him. It was the one person in the world who had valued her as she was before Grayson found her.
Amelia finished her speech.
“Good,” Auntie Zhu was saying. “You see? You were stupid to think you shouldn’t say anything.”
Amelia hadn’t seen him. She didn’t know he was here. Grayson inhaled and stood. He’d come to Shanghai, but he would have headed to Hong Kong after the meeting to negotiate the contract with Singapore. If he was going there anyway, there was someone he would have to see.
Before they finished, before they left and discovered him here, he slipped down the stairs and out.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was a Saturday—the first Saturday in which Amelia had not gone in to work in a very long while.
“In my defense,” she had told Auntie Zhu when the woman had berated her and asked her how she would ever marry, “if I didn’t go into the office, I’d still spend all my time thinking about my work. And I don’t want to marry.”
“Sister, do you hear that?” Auntie Zhu had turned to one of the Chinese telegraph operators they were training. Miss Ho wasn’t her sister—she was actually some kind of cousin by marriage—but they’d both rounded on her.
“You can’t think of anything besides work?”
“That’s not the defense you think it is. It’s a sign that you never get away.”
“Do you even remember what men are like?”
“She might like women,” said Miss Ho. “Nothing wrong with that. We know lots of women who—”
Amelia had tried to protest. “Stop!”
“Pah.”
“I can’t believe this ridiculousness,” Auntie Zhu had said. “The taotai just approved the start of negotiations on the telegraph line. And how are you celebrating? With more work?”
To be honest, she was still nervous about that. Grayson wasn’t due back in Asia for another month at least. It had taken a week after her meeting with the taotai before she’d received the official indication that negotiations should move forward, and her letter to Grayson had just gone out to Hong Kong.