But on his return, the registrar greeted them both. “Ah, Jin Haowei! And Lang Limeng. Everyone will be so happy to see you.”
Before Grayson had a chance to ask what was meant by that, people began to gather. He heard Amelia’s Chinese name over and over; she waved to everyone happily.
He also heard the other name—Jin Haowei—being shouted over and over. Once again, they were conducted to the Lang compound. This time though, they were expected. Madame Lang—whom he’d seen briefly before—and her husband were waiting for them.
Apparently Amelia had made the journey again before now. She introduced her father to Grayson. “He is, um. I’m not sure how to say this? He’s now a prefectural archivist. He was a sergeant second class during the rebellion and the second war.”
“Jin Haowei,” said the man in greeting. “How have you been?”
The exchange of gifts, guiding him through the requisite ceremonies, took the remainder of the time. It wasn’t until later that night when Madame Lang was pressing a tea on Grayson while extolling its virtues for marital purposes that he was able to ask.
“Why is everyone calling me Jin Haowei?” The question was asked both out of desperation and curiosity. It seemed better than having a long conversation with his mother-in-law about his sexual relations. And he genuinely wanted to know.
She looked at him. “You have to have a business name if you are going to operate in China. When Amelia told me about you, I thought, hmm. He will need a Chinese name. So I asked her to tell us about you so that we could pick a fitting one.”
Grayson had not known how he would be accepted. He had expected that it would be a bit of a struggle. But this was so touching a gesture that he found himself smiling.
“What does it mean?”
“I thought maybe of translating your name directly.” She made a face. “But Hunter… The translation feels too violent. And ‘Gray’ uses the same character as ash. That’s bad luck. So that won’t work either.”
Grayson exhaled. “A narrow escape indeed. I must, by all means, avoid being ashy.”
“So, I thought for a family name, I would use Jin.”
“Jin?” Amelia had come to stand in the doorway as they were talking. “I knew quite a few Jins in Shanghai.” She took out a pencil and her notebook. “This character?”
Her mother nodded. “Jin, meaning gold or metal. It’s what the wire you lay is made of.” She gave him a sly look. “And what you make as a result.”
Amelia looked pleased. “What do you think, Grayson?”
“Jin,” he repeated. “Jin. I like it.”
“Then there is Haowei.”
“Haowei.” He looked at Madame Lang. “What are the characters?”
She took out a sheet of paper. “Hao.” It was one of the more complicated characters—it would have needed seven English letters to encode. “This means grand.”
“Well.” He looked over at Amelia. “I do think I am rather grand in all respects.”
She smothered a smile.
“Flirt later,” Madame Lang said with a smile she could not quite hide. “Learn now. Wei is like this.” A great many strokes, but this would have been a four- or five-letter encoding. “It means to tie together or to link.”
“Grand linkage,” he started to say, intent on making another flirtatious remark to his wife. Then the full meaning of the name hit him. Jin Haowei. Grand linking with metal.
He’d been happy to be accepted. For people to speak to him politely. But this? This was someone spending time thinking about who he was. What he did. What he wanted to accomplish. This was a gift. A gift of understanding. A gift of acceptance. A gift of linking—not only him with Amelia, but their families.
He met his wife’s eyes and smiled at her. “Where do you think we should link next?”
Thank you
Thank you for reading The Devil Comes Courting. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Would you like to know when my next book is available?
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You can sign up for my new release email list at www.courtneymilan.com, follow me on twitter at @courtneymilan, or like my Facebook page at http://facebook.com/courtneymilanauthor.
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Reviews help other readers find books. I appreciate all reviews, whether positive or negative.
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If you’re wondering about great-great-uncles John and Henry, mentioned in here, their story is told in The Pursuit Of… The novella can be read in the collection Hamilton’s Battalion or purchased as a standalone story.
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If you want to know more about Benedict’s older sisters Judith and Camilla, and Grayson’s little brother, Adrian Hunter, their stories are available in Once Upon a Marquess (Judith and Christian) and After the Wedding (Camilla and Adrian).
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What’s next?
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The next book in the Worth Saga will be the story of the Worth half-sister that Theresa has tracked down in Hong Kong at the end of this book. You’ll meet her and see a lot more of Theresa in The Return of the Scoundrel. I do not have a release date for this book. I used to give estimated release dates, but it turns out my estimates were off by about two and a half years on this book and I don’t want to do that to any of us again.
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The next book I release will be the next book in The Wedgeford Trials series. If you haven’t started that series, The Duke Who Didn’t is a delightful book about a half-Chinese duke who hasn’t mentioned he’s a duke, and the full-Chinese woman in the small town of Wedgeford, England, who has absolutely no time for him because she has sauce to make. The Duke Who Didn’t has won a handful of awards, so maybe you will like it?
Author’s Note
I did not intend to take years to write this book. In my defense, those years—which included a whole pandemic, an attempted coup, and before that, a whole mess of wild things in the Before Pandemic Times—were pretty stressful.
But I also did not realize what a task I had set for myself.
I got the idea for this book in 2008, and I remember exactly where it came from. I was talking to my then-editor, on the last day in which she was my editor, about a book (Trial by Desire, to be specific). I had written one version. My editor didn’t like it. At all. (And there were good reasons for that). But we spoke, and the thing she suggested was that Ned, the hero, who spent a few years in China investigating the circumstances surrounding the Opium War, should return from China with a Chinese baby as a method of sparking conflict with his wife.
I think I heard her say that at a far remove. One of the causes of the second Opium War was this: Missionaries in China kept taking Chinese kids, and the Chinese didn’t actually like having their kids taken from them. There was a rumor that Christian missionaries were actually taking the children and killing them in order to remove their eyes and heart, which they were making into medicine. (I did not make that one up when it shows up in the book.)