The Celerity had laid the shore end of the cable out to the deeper waters where the Victory waited. Now the entire crew was on deck, waiting and watching the start of this final leg. The shore cable would be spliced to the two thousand miles of cable in the Victory’s hold, and then…
Grayson held his breath as the cable was passed up. Lightfoot spliced the cables, then checked the connection.
“We have current,” Lightfoot announced.
The cheer that arose was sheer excitement. Grayson found himself smiling alongside his crew. The sea was calm and Captain Ellis was in charge. Grayson left them and slipped down to the cargo hold. Lightfoot joined him a few minutes later.
“Mr. Lightfoot.”
“Captain Hunter.”
“Is the current steady enough to send a message?
The telegraphic engineer checked a few things, letting the galvanometer trail a message on thin paper before nodding. “Aye, sir. I believe so.”
“Then send this one. T1S43G.”
They’d set up the codes in advance with the Hong Kong office.
“Aye sir.” Mr. Lightfoot set up the telegraph and a chronometer. Watching him brought Amelia to mind. The way she’d frowned and puzzled on the question of how best to send telegrams at sea. The way she’d worked with Lightfoot back then.
They presently had a circuit to a station thousands of miles away.
The code aboard ship was even more terse than most commercial ciphers in general usage. Those six characters would convey all of this: To: Hong Kong office. Shore cable has been laid. Splice is successful. We are on our way. Captain Hunter.
He waited as Mr. Lightfoot sent the message once, then again, then a final time.
Finally the answer came—the single letter D.
“Received, sir. Anything else?”
He could not help but think of her at a time like this. Grayson nodded. “T74S602G.”
Mr. Lightfoot tilted his head. “That’s someone in the Shanghai office. Anyone I know?”
Grayson met his gaze with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh very well,” Lightfoot said. “I know it’s to Mrs. Smith. And, of course, this is a fine business telegram you’re sending, not anything personal. Because she’s definitely not your girl. Is she?”
There was a question there—and also, there wasn’t, not with the knowing smirk on Lightfoot’s face.
I want you to be happy, she’d said.
Happy. The emotion seemed so prosaic. So ordinary. So impossibly out of reach.
Maybe. Maybe, once the line across the Pacific was laid. Maybe if he could settle things with his parents. Maybe then…
He wasn’t sure if he could be happy even then, not with the grief that never went away in the center of his soul. But maybe he could have something.
He looked down at Lightfoot. The man was giving him a look, and well he should. He knew Grayson had run off with Amelia for weeks in the middle of one of the busiest times in his life. He had probably even heard that she had shown up in Hong Kong.
“She’s not,” he said quietly. “She’s not my anything. Not really.”
“Is she not?”
“No,” Grayson said. “She’s just my everything.”
Grayson thought of Amelia a week out from Myriad Island.
He was on a gray sea with gray clouds overhead, with China to the southwest and the country he’d been born in to the southeast. On that day, he counted seventeen rays of sunlight through clouds.
Later that day, he slipped into his cabin and opened the seventeenth envelope. It contained a little pencil drawing of a tablet of paper. There was a wooden mechanical arm over it, bearing a pen nib. He had absolutely no idea what he was looking at, but the sketch showed signs of having been erased and drawn over multiple times.
Underneath, there was a simple notation: I can already tell this won’t work! Next to it was a little sticklike drawing of someone in a skirt shaking stick fists in frustration.
He found himself smiling.
Before he went to sleep, he found Mr. Lightfoot. “How’s the connection?”
“Not ideal,” the man replied. “But workable.”
Grayson nodded. “When you can, send this.” He set down the paper.
“T74S602G.” Lightfoot looked up at him. “You’ve sent this message already.”
“Yes, but I haven’t sent it today.”
Two days later, Grayson sat at the stern of his ship, listening to the steady click, click of cable spooling into water. The noise was barely audible above the sound of the steam engine and the swoosh of the screw propulsion. He counted thirty-two clicks before his attention wavered.
Envelope 32 was a sketch of an angry cat. A large-eared mouse hid between two bookshelves, contentedly munching on a piece of cheese, while the cat pawed futilely at the gap.
Lightfoot took one look at Grayson’s face when he came down. “T74S602G again, Captain Hunter?”
“Precisely.”
A week after that, he was jolted to wakefulness by the quiet sounds of the ship. The now-still waters of the Pacific Ocean lapped around his boat. He counted the sound of those waves, rhythmic and comforting, and when he lost count at seventy-two, he picked that envelope. This one was a short letter, in which Amelia started by admitting she was a letter-writing enthusiast.
“That comes as no shock to me,” Grayson told the letter out loud.
She talked about writing to her brother Leland. About sending letters up the Yangtze to her mother and father. About how she was awaiting a reply from the sister she had only recently discovered. She mentioned that further correspondence with Mrs. Acheson was proving difficult.
As for my British mother, I am not sure what to say to her yet. But I am thinking about what it means to be a bridge. What must I do in that capacity? Every possibility makes my heart feel sick.
None of Grayson’s thoughts on the matter would fit into their telegraphic code, and the commercial cipher they’d developed contained no cursing. That night, when he went down to the telegraphic station in the hold, Lightfoot just shook his head. “Is it going to be T74S602G once again?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then shouldn’t it go without saying?”
“It can.” Grayson thought about their last conversation. About her telling him she wanted him to be happy. He wanted her to know he was considering it, that he didn’t know how to go forward but he hadn’t forgotten her wish. “But perhaps, I need to say it. To remind myself.”
He returned to his cabin. He lay in bed and thought of the half-opened pile of envelopes she had given him.
I wish for you to be happy, she’d said. It hurt her that he wasn’t. He had to do it. It was that simple. He’d been happy before. How hard could it be?
The problem, Grayson knew, was less that he felt unhappy and more that he didn’t allow himself to feel much of anything at all. If he did, it wouldn’t be happiness that came.
He shook his head.
Three days later, after he’d spent seventy-seven hours fighting through a squall that demanded his constant attention to make sure the cable would not snap as it was paying out, he stumbled into his room in the middle of the day. But he was so tired he could scarcely sleep. He tossed and turned. He counted his breaths, heavy in the stillness after the storm, and then opened envelope 94.