Envelope 43 had said this: I know the task may seem impossible, but everything is doable if you break it into small enough pieces. You can do it. She felt her eyes sting again.
“Grayson.” She looked down at her hands, blurry through her tears. “It’s been eighteen years. I don’t know her name. She came back, but she thinks I don’t want her. She’s probably angry or something. I don’t know if she still wants to know me.”
“Forty-three,” he repeated. “You said it had to be done. You know how to do things.”
“Very well.” She glanced at Leland. He still looked like wax. “It’s been eighteen years. I don’t know her name. What I do know is…” Amelia shut her eyes. “Eighteen years ago, she found Ah Ma outside of Shanghai. They spoke. Mother hasn’t said what she knows, but she must remember something. She knows more than she told me.”
He nodded at her. “You see. You do know where to start.”
“I don’t want to talk to her yet.” She knew that much. Her head hurt. She felt bruised.
“I know, sweetheart,” Grayson said.
That simple acknowledgment was crueler than pressing the point would have been. Amelia sighed. “I have to, don’t I? I have to go back. I’ll have to get Benedict to watch Merry.”
“Sweetheart?” Leland said to their side. “Captain Hunter, should I inquire after your relationship with my sister?”
Amelia felt her breath freeze in her lungs. She didn’t want to hear Grayson deny any connection. She knew he would, but right now—right in this moment—she didn’t want to hear how unimportant she was to another person she cared about.
Their eyes met. She inhaled. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t, damn it. She wasn’t going to make him have to comfort her or push her away. She wasn’t fragile. She wasn’t in need of care.
“I’ll be damned if I know what our relationship is,” Grayson said. “But I know this much. If she needs to go back to Fuzhou, I’m taking her. If she’ll allow it.”
Amelia let out a shocked breath. “Don’t you have things to do? And surely Leland might accompany me.”
She had been sure of it up until the words came out of her mouth. But instead of agreeing, her brother turned even paler.
“Amelia.” He let out a shaky breath. “I can’t. I can’t—I simply can’t look at her and…” He trailed off. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Please don’t ask it of me.”
That refusal stung. But her brother seemed genuinely distressed by her request. He’d actually vomited when he found out the truth. Amelia let out a breath.
“Captain, I can’t ask you to…”
“You didn’t ask. I offered.”
She should say no. She should remind him of his duties. But she didn’t think for one second that his memory had lapsed.
“Then yes.” She exhaled. “Yes, I would like that very much.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fuzhou had not changed, Amelia thought, as she made her way up the hill where she had once lived. Not in any real detail.
It was she who had changed. After months of working on telegraphic code with Scholar Wu, after spending time with Auntie Zhu and Miss Luo, Amelia had found her footing. The world looked different when you weren’t afraid of falling.
Amelia had never felt as if she fit in. Now she was all the more aware that this hill where the Westerners resided, with the flags of other nations flying, was painfully out of place.
The Celerity was docked in the harbor below. This time of year, the harbor was only half empty. Most of the tea would still be growing on the bush. Despite the gold pollen that dusted the waters, filling the river with tiny specks of yellow, Fuzhou’s harbor seemed relatively bare.
The voyage here had been short enough. Amelia and Grayson spoken over meals, and she’d done her best to think through her bruising pain—to break down her problem into little pieces. Grayson had offered to come along with her to the meeting as well, but she could not imagine her mother offering the truth in front of a virtual stranger.
So she was here, climbing the hill alone.
The last time she had been here, she’d still been holding on to her mother’s strictures. Don’t use slang, Amelia; people will think you have no culture. Don’t slouch, Amelia; how will they think you were raised? And there were those other rules, deeper rules, rules that she could scarcely remember being taught. Rules about how to pronounce words, drummed into her over and over.
Be English, Amelia, or people will think you Chinese.
She had thought those rules were a part of her, but after more than a year of absence, they’d begun to peel away. She’d left with her mother’s warning ringing in her ears, the inevitability of failure and ruination ahead of her.
She was coming back as the vice president of telegraphic encoding for the first company to strike a telegraphic deal with China, and it had happened because of her.
With that certainty to steel her spine, she knocked on the door. She nodded at the maid, who’d jumped at the sight of her. She’d asked her to fetch her mother and tell her she had a visitor. A surprise, she said.
The drawing room was as it had always been. Imported glass windows looked out over the Min. It was the picture of British opulence—British-style furniture, Persian-style rugs, Japanese vases—the best of everything from everywhere in the world. Amelia waited in this parlor decorated with the breadth of British trading.
She heard the door open behind her, the shock of breath.
“Amelia!” Her mother shrieked her name in joy. “You’ve come back to me!”
It had been more than a week since Leland’s revelation. Long enough that Amelia’s emotions, confused and angry and sad, felt as if they’d crystallized into something sharp and unbending.
Amelia turned to greet her.
Her mother looked as she always did. Beautiful. English.
“Have you come back for good?” Her eyes glistened with tears. She hastened forward, wrapping Amelia in an embrace that was so like old times that Amelia could not help but return it. “Are you mine again?”
The last question coiled like a knot in Amelia’s stomach. She let her arms drop and pulled away.
“I came back because I had some questions to put to you.”
Her mother must not have sensed the undercurrent of agony in Amelia’s voice. Amelia could scarcely feel it herself; it felt as if she were being carried out to sea on a strong riptide. As if she would never see this place again.
“Of course!” Her mother gave her a brilliant smile. “Let me get some tea.”
She called out, and a few moments later—the maid must have prepared in anticipation—the tea arrived.
Porcelain teapot. Little cups. One little teaspoon of tea for the entire gigantic pot. Milk and sugar to mask the taste.
Fought two wars for tea and don’t even know how to drink it properly, some part of her whispered as she observed this ritual.
Amelia wasn’t here to fight over tea.
She let herself be shepherded into a chair, let her mother ply her with sandwiches and a biscuit and milky tea that tasted sickly and sweet. Had she really drunk it like this? She took a bite of the biscuit. It tasted like sand.