“I’m glad you came.” Her mother gave her a tentative smile. “I know you didn’t want to—”
Amelia shook her head violently. “Madame Acheson.” Her voice shook. She waited until she felt steady and tried to speak loud enough to be heard. “She told me that a…” Refugee, what was refugee in Mandarin? Cantonese? She could remember it in French of all things. What was the use of that? Amelia gave up. “A person running from the Taiping Rebellion gave me up. Asked her to give me a home and to raise me as her own daughter.”
Her mother took hold of her hands, her eyes wide. “No. That’s not right.” She shut her eyes. “You had a fever. She had medicine and food. I thought she would make you healthy again.”
“I remembered you saying that you would come back. I believed it for years, but my…” She didn’t know what relationship to use to describe Mrs. Acheson. Mother felt odd and out of place, especially talking to the woman who had given birth to her. “Madame Acheson told me it was a false memory. Just a hope. She never told me that you came looking.”
“I was always looking.” Her mother met her eyes. “I told you I would come back.”
Amelia nodded. “I was always waiting.” A long pause. “I remember you telling me to hold on to my heart. Did you say that?”
“Yes.”
Amelia felt tears prick her eyes. “I tried.” She whispered the words. “I think I lost it for a while. But I found it again.”
Their arms came around each other, and Amelia felt something inside her burst—the emotions she’d been holding close, that strange, detached feeling that had taken over her limbs ever since she’d spoken with Leland. It seemed wrong that she should be crying. She could not have put a name to her feelings, but there was joy threaded with deep, nameless sorrow. She rather thought her mother was crying too. She could feel her petting her hair, soothing her with a language older than the halting speech they had in common.
“Limeng,” Amelia managed, after long minutes. “Is that what you named me?”
“Lovely dream.” Her mother said the words in English with a shake of her head. “Your father always had his head in the clouds. I told him to give you a practical name.”
“I didn’t remember my own name.”
“Ei ya.” Her mother shook her head mournfully. “You never could remember names as a child! But I never imagined you would forget your own.”
Amelia started laughing through her tears until she was choking on something between mirth and sadness.
“Come,” her mother said. “We’ll send those louts away.”
“No, you won’t,” someone shouted.
“Come inside,” her mother said, waving a dismissive hand at the crowd. “Tell me about yourself. Are you married? What are you doing with yourself?”
“Oh.” Amelia straightened and realized that in the shock of the moment, she’d rudely forgotten Grayson’s existence. “This is—”
She turned, looking for him. But he was gone. She searched the crowd, but he would have stood out—both his height and color would have made it impossible for him to blend in. That was so like him. Slipping away at inopportune moments.
She turned back to her mother, a smile on her lips. “I’m sure I’ll be able to introduce you to him eventually. I came with Captain Grayson Hunter. He’s my, um.” Oh. Drat. She’d lost the word again. “Employer,” she said in English.
Her mother gave her a confused look.
“We’ve been working on a telegraph system. It’s a way of sending messages over very long distances.”
“Ei.” Her mother shook her head and smiled. “Just like your father. Always wanting to fiddle with something new. You used to help him when you were younger, you know.”
“My father?” She reached out and clutched her mother’s hands. “Tell me about my father. I have no memory of him.”
“Of course.” The woman reached out and patted Amelia’s hand. “But you should meet him too, you know. He’s off in Changzhou, but he should be back in a day or so. And you need to meet your little sister—she’s just married—and your younger brothers. You’ve come home. It’s time to celebrate.”
Chapter Thirty
It was long past midnight when Grayson heard Amelia return to the inn. She was still accompanied by a retinue of people squawking away at her good-naturedly. He heard her shoo them away, laughing. Heard the door next to his own room click shut and the tinkle of mule’s bells and laughing exchanges as people left for the evening.
He checked his watch. Almost one.
He shut his eyes, not wanting to imagine her readying herself for sleep. His room seemed very dark and still around him in comparison with the rest of the world. A shout of laughter from the street drifted his way. The clop of some animal’s hooves. Then, from her room, through the thin walls, he heard the faint splash of water.
He didn’t want to imagine Amelia washing, but the image came to mind anyway. He could imagine her dampening a cloth, tracing it down her neck, beads of water forming momentarily on her lips before her tongue darted out, licking them away.
What passed for a bed in his room was a bench of brick. In the winter, he supposed the little grate could hold a small fire, making it a cozy place to sleep. The nights were warm enough now that the brick was cold. He shifted on the thick mats covering the bench.
The bench doubled as a place to set his trunk. Grayson, being rather taller than the typical Chinese man, found the space mildly cramping. He shifted, turning first, then tossing.
He thinks she should marry the district magistrate’s son.
It was foolish, foolish, foolish to feel jealousy over a man she had not yet met. Beyond foolish when he would do nothing himself. But Grayson knew what it was like to talk with her, hold her, kiss her. The magistrate’s son would never understand what it was to yearn the way she did. To need. To burn. He would never understand Amelia the way Grayson did.
But maybe he would give her what she had longed for. He might give her a place to belong, a connection to the family and the people she had lost.
It wasn’t as if Grayson got a vote in who she was to marry. Still, he could not help himself. He hated the magistrate’s son.
That emotion, ridiculous as it was, felt more welcome than the shock that had gone through him when Amelia had locked eyes with her mother. He’d told Amelia a little about his family, about the difficulty he was having. He was accustomed to it at this point; it was a problem, and he was going to solve it. He knew, after all, what it was like to have a wound in his family made by war and ambition.
Watching them meet, watching barriers of time and lies and distance and language fall away, watching the light in Amelia’s eyes be answered by her mother’s had awoken something in him, some deep, sparking yearning.
He wanted that. He remembered what it was like to feel loved without reservation or condition, to be able to come home and to feel like he had a place there.
God. He wanted that.
When the transpacific line was finished. When he could sit with his parents and show them what he’d done. Grayson inhaled. He’d have it too. He would.