She didn’t ask what happened. It was in her expression as she matched his pose, leaning against the railing and angling her head to his.
‘Flush with coin one day, completely let out the next.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘Do you know what happened?’
He had her attention. He did not need to ask, but he found he wanted to hear her voice. And so he held back until she spoke.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Please.’
How sweet that word was on her lips.
‘Every waking moment, I thought of nothing but money. How could I get more, when could I gamble with it. You would think that when I was flush, I would be a generous, carefree man.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t, though sometimes I pretended to be. I counted every penny, I measured every man by his coin and how I could get some of it.’
She nodded. ‘I know many such people.’
‘I was miserable. As was everyone I gambled with. We drank, we had a jolly good time while doing it, but eventually, it consumed us.’
‘The gambling?’
‘The money. Everything was money. Win or lose, everything was money, and I hated it. I’d lost the ability to laugh purely because something was funny, to sing because it was joyful.’ He looked to her mouth, a soft bud hidden in shadow. ‘To kiss a girl because she is beautiful.’
It was too dark to see if her cheeks flushed, but he thought they did. He imagined she was remembering. That her body was heating, and her thoughts were on something a great deal more intimate than their conversation.
‘Did you quit gambling?’
‘For the most part. Penny stakes sometimes, but the temptation is always there. I need more money, you see. A lot more money.’
‘Why?’
‘For my sisters’ dowries. To repair the estate. To keep all of us—my family and our retainers—in food and good cheer. None of that can happen without coin.’ He stretched an arm out towards India. They’d been on the ship together for more than a month and had only recently left that coastline on their way to Egypt. ‘It’s why I came to India. I wanted to learn how to make more coin.’
‘But you left without any,’ she said. ‘I heard you in the marketplace. You gave your last rupee to that boy.’
He nodded. ‘I didn’t like how they made their money. Graham is the best of fellows, and even he was turning mean. Squeezing work out of peasants. Insulting artists to steal their work for pennies, then sell it for thousands back home.’ He sighed. ‘If such a thing turned Graham mean, I would become a monster within a month.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I must find another way.’
‘You think you are too kind to do it?’ she asked.
‘I think their way of making money will turn me cruel. Just as gambling did.’
‘Then I will do it,’ she said. ‘I will make the money, and you can help your family.’
She didn’t understand. ‘You cannot make it fast enough for what I need.’ He twisted so that he looked at her more directly. ‘What I need to know from you is something else.’ He touched her chin so that she met his gaze. ‘How do you make money fun?’
‘What?’
He winced, struggling to express his words. ‘You love it. You bargain like a native even when you don’t know the language. And when you are done, everyone seems happy, you included.You do not doubt yourself and you don’t hoard. How is this possible? When you are so sweet?’
She didn’t answer. Her expression was open, but her brows were tight as she probably tried to sort through his foreign words. He sighed. He was being foolish to imagine anyone had the answers he sought. If Graham had no answer for him, then what could a half-Chinese woman know?
He heard nothing for a long while. Just the beating of his own heart to the steady drumbeat of despair. And then her touch. Fingertips skating across the back of his hand in a stroke so gentle, he had to close his eyes to be sure the sensation was real.
‘I learned,’ she finally said. ‘From a boy named Ah-Lan. He is the one who saved me when I was dying.’