Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

Interlude Letty

Letitia Price was not a wicked person.

Harsh, perhaps. Cold, blunt, severe: all the words one might use to describe a girl who demanded from the world the same things a man would. But only because severity was the only way to make people take her seriously, because it was better to be feared and disliked than to be considered a sweet, pretty, stupid pet; and because academia respected steel, could tolerate cruelty, but could never accept weakness.

Letty had fought and clawed for everything she had. Oh, one wouldn’t know it from looking at her, this fair English rose, this admiral’s daughter raised on a Brighton estate with half a dozen servants at hand and two hundred pounds per annum to whoever married her. Letitia Price has everything, said the ugly jealous girls at London balls. But Letty was born second after a boy, Lincoln, the apple of her father’s eye. Meanwhile her father, the admiral, could barely stand to look at her, for when he did all he saw was a shadow of the frail and late Mrs Amelia Price, killed by childbirth in a room humid with blood that smelled like the ocean.

‘I certainly don’t blame you,’ he told her, late one night, after too much wine. ‘But you’ll understand, Letitia, if I’d rather you made yourself scarce in my presence.’

Lincoln was meant for Oxford, Letty for an early marriage. Lincoln received the rotation of tutors, all recent Oxford graduates who hadn’t landed a parish elsewhere; the fancy pens, creamy stationery, and thick, glossy books on birthdays and Christmases. As for Letty – well, her father’s opinion on women’s literacy was that they needed only to be able to sign the marriage certificate.

But it was Letty who had the talent for languages, who absorbed Greek and Latin as easily as she did English. She learned from reading on her own, and from sitting with her ear pressed to the door during Lincoln’s tutoring sessions. Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. She approached language with a determined, mathematical rigour, and she broke down the thorniest of Latin constructions through sheer force of will. It was Letty who drilled her brother late at night when he couldn’t remember his vocabulary lists, who finished his translations and corrected his compositions when he got bored and went off to ride or hunt or whatever it was boys did outdoors.

If their roles had been switched, she would have been hailed as a genius. She would have been the next Sir William Jones.

But this was not in her stars. She tried to be happy for Lincoln, to project her hopes and dreams onto her brother like so many women of that era did. If Lincoln became an Oxford don, then perhaps she might become his secretary. But his mind was simply a brick wall. He hated his lessons; he despised his tutors. He thought his readings boring. All he ever wanted was to be outdoors; he could not sit still in front of a book for more than a minute before he began to fidget. And she simply couldn’t understand him, why someone with such opportunities would reject the chance to use them.

‘If I were at Oxford I would read until my eyes bled,’ she told him.

‘If you were at Oxford,’ said Lincoln, ‘the world would know to tremble.’

She loved her brother, she did. But she could not stand his ingratitude, the way he scorned all the gifts he’d been given by the world. And it felt like justice, almost, when it turned out that Oxford suited Lincoln very badly. His tutors at Balliol wrote to Admiral Price with complaints of drinking, gambling, staying out past curfew. Lincoln wrote home asking for money. His letters to Letty were brief, tantalizing, offering glimpses of a world he clearly did not appreciate – classes a snooze, don’t bother to go – not during rowing season, anyhow, you should come up and see us at Bumps next spring. In the beginning, Admiral Price wrote this off as natural, as growing pains. Young men, living away from home for the first time, always took some time to adjust – and why shouldn’t they sow their wild oats? Lincoln would pick up his books, in time.

But things only got worse. Lincoln’s marks never improved. The letters from his tutors were less patient now, more threatening. When Lincoln came home for holidays during his third year, something had changed. A rot had set in, Letty saw. Something permanent, dark. Her brother’s face was puffy, his speech slow, biting, and bitter. He said scarcely a word to either of them all vacation. Afternoons he spent alone in his room, working steadily through a bottle of scotch. Evenings he either went out and didn’t come back until the early hours, or he quarrelled with his father, and though the two of them locked the door to the study, their angry voices pierced every room in the house. You’re a disgrace, said Admiral Price. I hate it there, said Lincoln. I’m not happy. And it’s your dream, not mine.

At last Letty decided to confront him. When Lincoln left the study that night, she was in the hallway, waiting.

‘What are you looking at?’ he leered. ‘Here to gloat?’

‘You’re breaking his heart,’ she said.

‘You don’t care about his heart. You’re jealous.’

‘Of course I’m jealous. You have everything. Everything, Lincoln. And I don’t understand what’s impelled you to squander it. If your friends are a drag, cut them off. If the courses are difficult, I’ll help you – I’ll come with you, I’ll look over every paper you write—’

But he was swaying, eyes unfocused, barely listening to her. ‘Go and bring me a brandy.’

‘Lincoln, what is wrong with you?’

‘Oh, don’t you judge me.’ His lip curled. ‘Righteous Letty, brilliant Letty, should have been at Oxford except for the gap between her legs—’

‘You disgust me.’

Lincoln only laughed and turned away.

‘Don’t come home,’ she shouted after him. ‘You’re better off gone. You’re better off dead.’

The next morning a constable knocked at their door and asked if this was the residence of Admiral Price, and if he would come with them, please, to identify a body. The driver never saw him, they said. Didn’t even know he was under the cart until this morning, when the horses had a fright. It was dark, it was raining, and Lincoln had been drunk, traipsing across the road – the admiral could sue, as was his right, but they doubted the court would be on his side. It was an accident.

After this, Letty would always fear and marvel at the power of a single word. She did not need silver bars to prove how saying something could make it true.

While her father prepared for the funeral, Letty wrote to Lincoln’s tutors. She included some compositions of her own.

Once admitted, she still suffered a thousand and one humiliations at Oxford. Professors talked down to her as if she were stupid. Clerks kept trying to glance through her shirt. She had an infuriatingly long walk to every class because the faculty forced women to live in a building nearly two miles north, where the landlady seemed to confuse her tenants with housemaids and yelled if they refused to do the sweeping. Scholars would reach past her at faculty parties to shake Robin’s or Ramy’s hand; if she spoke up, they pretended she did not exist. If Ramy corrected a professor, he was bold and brilliant; if Letty did the same she was aggravating. If she wanted to take a book out of the Bodleian, she needed Ramy or Robin present to give permission. If she wanted to get around in the dark, alone and unafraid, she had to dress and walk like a man.

None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb. It was infuriating. Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women?

But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they be anything but unfailingly, desperately grateful?

But suddenly, after Canton, they were all speaking in a language that she couldn’t understand. Suddenly Letty was on the outside, and she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.

Their convictions baffled her – why, she wondered, would you dash yourself against a brick wall?

Still, she’d helped them, protected them, and kept their secrets. She loved them. She would have killed for them. And she tried not to believe the worst things about them, the things her upbringing would have had her think. They were not savages. They were not lesser, not soft-minded ingrates. They were only – sadly, dreadfully – misguided.

But oh, how she hated to see them making the same mistakes that Lincoln had.

Why could they not see how fortunate they were? To be allowed into these hallowed halls, to be lifted from their squalid upbringings into the dazzling heights of the Royal Institute of Translation! All of them had fought tooth and nail to win a seat in a classroom at Oxford. She was dazzled by her luck every day she sat in the Bodleian, thumbing through books that, without her Translator’s Privileges, she could not have requested from the stacks. Letty had defied fate to get here; they all had.

So why wasn’t that enough? They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well? Why bite the hand that fed you? Why throw it all away?

But there are larger things at stake, they told her (condescending, patronizing; as if she were an infant, as if she knew nothing at all). It’s a matter of global injustice, Letty. The plunder of the rest of the world.

She tried again to put aside her prejudices, to keep an open mind, to learn what it was that bothered them so. Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person. Of course she did not support this war. Of course she was against all kinds of prejudice and exploitation. Of course she sided with the abolitionists.

Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized.

But then they were talking about blackmail. About kidnapping, rioting, blowing up a shipyard. This was vindictive, violent, awful. And she couldn’t bear it – watching that horrible Griffin Lovell speak, that delighted glimmer in his eyes, and watching Ramy, her Ramy, nodding along. She could not believe it, what he’d become. What they’d all become.

Was it not awful enough that they’d covered up a murder? Did she have to be complicit in several more?

It was like waking up, like being doused with cold water. What was she doing here? What was she entertaining? This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion.

There was no future down this path. She saw this now. She’d been duped, strung along in this sickening charade, but this ended in only two ways: prison or the hangman. She was the only one there who wasn’t too mad to see it. And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.

Chapter Twenty-Six

A hidden door by the Vaults & Garden supply cellar revealed a cramped dirt tunnel, just large enough for them to wriggle through on their hands and knees. It felt endless. They inched forth, groping blindly. Robin wished for a light, but they had no candle, no kindling or flint; they could only trust in Anthony’s word and crawl, their shallow breaths echoing around them. At last, the ceiling of the tunnel sloped upwards, and a rush of cool air bathed their clammy skin. They pawed the earthen wall until they found a door, and then a handle; this they pushed open to find a small, low-ceilinged room, illuminated by moonlight seeping through a tiny grate above.

They stepped inside and blinked around.

Someone had been here recently. A loaf of bread sat on the desk, still so fresh that it was soft to the touch, and a half-melted candle beside it. Victoire rooted in the drawers until she found a box of matches, and then held the lit candle up to the room. ‘So this is where Griffin hid.’

The safe room felt uncannily familiar to Robin, though it took him a moment to realize why. The room’s layout – the desk beneath the grated window, the cot tucked neatly in the corner, the double bookshelves on the opposite wall – was a precise match of the dormitories on Magpie Lane. Here below Oxford, Griffin – consciously or not – had tried to re-create his college days.

‘Do you think we’re safe here for the night?’ Robin asked. ‘I mean – do you think—’

‘It doesn’t look disturbed.’ Victoire sat down gingerly on the edge of the cot. ‘I think if they knew, they would have torn this place apart.’

‘I think you’re right.’ He sat down beside her. Only now did he feel the exhaustion, seeping up his legs and into his chest. All the adrenaline of their escape had ebbed, now that they were safe, hidden in the belly of the earth. He wanted to keel over and never wake up.

Victoire leaned over to the side of the cot, where a barrel of what looked like fresh water stood. She poured some over a bunched-up shirt, then handed it to Robin. ‘Wipe.’

‘What?’

‘There’s blood,’ she said softly. ‘There’s blood all over you.’

He glanced up and looked at her, properly, for the first time since their escape. ‘There’s blood all over you.’

They sat side by side and cleaned themselves in silence. They were covered in an astonishing amount of grime; they went through one shirt each, and then another. Somehow, Griffin’s blood had got not only on Robin’s hands and arms but also across his cheeks, behind his ears, and up in the hollows where his neck met his ears, caked under layers of dust and dirt.

They took turns wiping at each other’s faces. The simple, tactile act felt good; it gave them something to focus on, distracted from all the words that hung heavy and unsaid. It felt good not trying to give them voice. They could not articulate them anyhow; they were not discrete thoughts but black, suffocating clouds. They were both thinking of Ramy and Griffin and Anthony and everyone else who’d been abruptly, brutally torn from this world. But they could not touch that abyss of grief. It was too early yet to give it a name, to shape and tame it with words, and any attempt would crush them. They could only wipe the blood from their skin and try to keep breathing.

At last, they dropped the dirty rags on the floor and leaned back against the wall, against each other. The damp air was cold, and there was no fireplace. They sat close, pulling the flimsy blanket tight around their shoulders. It was a long while before either of them spoke.

‘What do you suppose we do now?’ asked Victoire.

Such a heavy question, uttered in such a small voice. What could they do now? They had spoken of making Babel burn, but how in God’s name was that in their power? The Old Library was destroyed. Their friends were dead. Everyone bolder and better than them was dead. But the two of them were still here, and it was their duty to ensure their friends had not died in vain.

‘Griffin said you would know what to do,’ said Robin. ‘What did he mean?’

‘Only that we’d find allies,’ Victoire whispered. ‘That we had more friends than we knew, if we could just get to the safe room.’

‘We’re here.’ Robin gestured pointlessly about. ‘It’s empty.’

Victoire stood. ‘Oh, don’t be like that.’

They began searching the room for clues. Victoire took the cabinet, Robin the desk. Inside the desk drawers were stacks upon stacks of Griffin’s notes and letters. These he held up to the flickering candle, squinting. It made Robin’s chest ache to read Griffin’s handwriting in English – a cramped, spidered style that looked so similar to Robin’s own, and to their father’s. These letters, all these narrow, bold, and crowded lines, spoke of a frenetic but meticulous writer, were a glimpse into a version of Griffin that Robin had never known.

And Griffin’s network had been so much vaster than he’d suspected. He saw correspondence addressed to recipients in Boston, in New York, in Cairo, in Singapore. But the names were always coded, always obvious literary references like ‘Mr Pickwick’ and ‘King Ahab’ or names so generically English like ‘Mr Brown’ and ‘Mr Pink’ that they could not possibly be real.

‘Hm.’ Victoire held a small square of paper up to her eyes, frowning.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a letter. Addressed to you.’

‘Can I see?’

She hesitated a moment before handing it over. The envelope was thin and sealed. There on the back was his name, Robin Swift, dashed out in Griffin’s forceful scrawl. But when had he found the time to write this? It couldn’t have been after Anthony brought them to Hermes; Griffin hadn’t known where they were back then. It could only have been written after Robin had cut ties with Hermes, after Robin had declared he wanted nothing to do with him.

‘Are you going to read it?’ Victoire asked.

‘I – I don’t think I can.’ He passed it back to her. He felt terrified of the contents; it made his breath quicken to even hold it in his hand. He could not face his brother’s judgment. Not now. ‘Will you keep it for me?’

‘What if it’s something that can help?’

‘I don’t think it is,’ said Robin. ‘I think . . . it has to be something else. Please, Victoire – you can read it later, if you want, but I can’t look at it right now.’

She hesitated, then folded it into her inner pocket. ‘Of course.’

They resumed rooting through Griffin’s belongings. Apart from letters, Griffin had kept an impressive array of weapons – knives, garrotes, a number of silver bars, and at least three pistols. Robin refused to touch them; Victoire surveyed the collection, fingers skimming the barrels, before selecting one and tucking it into her belt.

‘Do you know how to use that?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Anthony taught me.’

‘Wondrous girl, you. Full of surprises.’

She snorted. ‘Oh, you just weren’t paying attention.’

But there was no list of contacts, no clues to other safe houses or possible allies. Griffin had shrouded everything in code, had created a network so invisible that, upon his death, it could never be reconstructed.

‘What’s that?’ Victoire pointed.

Up on top of the bookshelf, pushed so far back it was nearly hidden, was a lamp.

Robin reached for it, hoping wildly – yes, there it was, the familiar glint of silver embedded in the bottom. The beacon, Anthony had yelled. He thought of the burn on Griffin’s hand, of how Griffin had known, even miles away, that something awful had happened.

He turned it over, squinting. 燎. Liáo.

Griffin had made this. Liáo, in Mandarin, could mean ‘to burn’ or ‘to illuminate’. It could also refer to a signal lamp. There was a second, smaller silver bar inscribed above the first. Bēacen, it read. It looked like Latin, but Robin, raking his memory, couldn’t come up with its precise meaning or origin. Germanic, perhaps?[96]

Still, he could guess vaguely at the function of the lamp. This was how Hermes communicated. They sent signals through fire.

‘How do you think it works?’ asked Victoire.

‘Perhaps they’re all linked, somehow.’ He passed it to her. ‘That’s how Griffin knew we were in trouble – he must have been carrying one on his person.’

‘But who else has one of these?’ She turned it over in her hands, ran her fingers over the shrivelled wick. ‘Who do you think is on the other side?’

‘Friends, I hope. What do you think we should tell them?’

She thought for a moment. ‘A call to arms.’

He glanced at her. ‘We’re really doing this?’

‘I don’t see what other choice we have.’

‘You know, there’s a Chinese idiom that goes sǐ zhū bú pà kāi shuǐ tàng.[97] Dead pigs don’t fear scalding water.’

She gave him a wan smile. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

‘We’re dead men walking.’

‘But that’s what makes us frightening.’ She set the lamp down between them. ‘We’ve nothing left to lose.’

They rummaged through the desk for pen and paper, then set about composing their message. The remaining oil in the lamp looked dangerously low; the wick was burnt down to a stub. Their message would have to be as succinct and unambiguous as possible. There could be no questioning what they meant. When they’d agreed on what to say, Victoire held the candle to the lamp. There was a tentative flicker, then a sudden whoosh, until flames over a foot tall leapt and danced before their eyes.

They weren’t sure about the mechanics of the beacon. Robin had spoken the Mandarin match-pair out loud, but they could only hope that the second, mysterious match-pair was designed to endure in effect. They’d come up with an exhaustive list of every method they could think to try. They recited the message into the flame. They clapped it in Morse code. They repeated the code, this time by thrusting a metal rod through the flame, so it flickered with every dot and dash. Finally, as the oil began sputtering, they fed the paper into the lamp.

The effect was immediate. The fire tripled in size; long tongues lashed outwards and then back in around the paper, like some demonic creature devouring their words. The paper did not burn or crumple; it simply vanished. A moment later, the oil ran out, the flames sputtered to nothing, and the room dimmed.

‘You think that did it?’ Victoire asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone’s even listening.’ Robin set the lamp down. He felt unbearably tired, his limbs like lead. He did not know what they’d just set into motion. Part of him never wanted to find out, wanted to curl up in this cool, dark space and disappear. He had a duty, he knew, to finish the job, and when tomorrow came, he would summon what strength he had left to face it. But for now, he wanted to sleep like the dead. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’

At daybreak they sneaked across town to the Old Library. Dozens of policemen stood stationed around the building – perhaps they were lying in wait, to see if anyone was foolish enough to return. Robin and Victoire crept forth cautiously from the forest behind the yard. This was stupid, yes, but they could not resist the urge to tally the damage. They’d hoped they might have a chance to creep inside and retrieve some supplies, but the police presence was too thick for them to pull it off.

So instead they came to stand witness, for, despite the risks, someone had to remember the sight of the betrayal. Someone had to register the loss.

The Old Library was utterly destroyed. The whole back had been blown away, a gaping wound exposing the library’s naked insides in a way that felt cruel and humiliating. The shelves were half-bare. What books had not been burnt in the explosions were stacked up in wheelbarrows all around the building to be carted away, Robin assumed, for analysis by Babel’s own scholars. He doubted most of that work would ever see the light of day.

All that wonderful, original research, hidden away in the imperial archives for fear of what it could inspire.

Only when he crept closer did he see that bodies still lay in the rubble. He saw a pale arm, half-buried beneath fallen bricks. He saw a shoe buckle attached to a charred shin. Near the side of the Old Library he saw a mass of hair, black, dust-covered. He turned away before he could glimpse the face beneath.

‘They haven’t cleared the bodies.’ He felt dizzy.

Victoire touched a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, dear God.’

‘They haven’t cleared the bodies—’

He stood up. He didn’t know what he meant to do – pull them into the forest one by one? Dig their graves right by the library? Place a cloth, at least, over their open, staring eyes? He didn’t know, only it felt so wrong to leave them there, exposed and vulnerable.

But Victoire was already pulling him back behind the trees. ‘We can’t, you know we can’t—’

‘They’re just lying there – Anthony, Vimal, Ramy—’

They hadn’t carted them to the morgue. Hadn’t even covered them. They’d simply left the dead where they’d fallen, bleeding across the bricks and pages, were simply stepping around them on their way to excavate the library. Was this their petty revenge, retribution for a lifetime of inconvenience? Or did they simply not care?

The world has to break, he thought. Someone has to answer for this. Someone has to bleed. But Victoire yanked him down the way they’d come, and her vicelike grip was the only thing that kept him from racing into the fray.

‘There’s nothing here for us,’ she whispered. ‘It’s time, Robin. We’ve got to go.’

They’d chosen a good day for revolution.

It was the first day of term, and one of the rare days in Oxford when the weather was deceitfully marvellous; when its warmth promised more sunshine and joy than the relentless rain and sleet Hilary inevitably brought. Everything was clear blue skies and zesty hints of spring winds. Everyone would be inside today – faculty, graduate fellows, and students – and the tower lobby would be empty of clients, for this year Babel was closed for reshelving and renovations during the first week of the term. No civilians would be caught in the crossfire.

The question, then, was how to get into the tower.

They could not simply stroll up to the front door and go in. Their faces were plastered on newspapers all over London; certainly some of the scholars knew, even if the whole thing had been covered up in Oxford. The front door was still manned with half a dozen police. And by now, certainly, Professor Playfair had destroyed the blood vials that marked their belonging.

Still, they had three advantages at their disposal: Griffin’s explōdere distraction, the invisibility bar, and the fact that the wards around the door were designed to keep materials in, not out. This latter fact was only a theory, but a strong one. As far as they knew, the wards had only ever activated upon exit, not upon entrance. Thieves had always got in fine, so far as someone held the door open; it was leaving that was trouble.[98]

And if they did what they set out to do here today, they would not leave the tower for a very long time.

Victoire took a deep breath. ‘Ready?’

There was no other way. They had racked their brains all night and come up short. Nothing to do now but act.

Robin nodded.

‘Explōdere,’ he whispered, and flung Griffin’s bar across the green.

The air shattered. The bar was harmless, Robin knew in theory, but still its noise was dreadful, was the sound of cities breaking, pyramids collapsing. He felt an instinct to scarper, to find safety, and though he knew it was only the silver manifesting on his mind, he had to overcome every impulse not to run in the other direction.

‘Let’s go,’ Victoire insisted, jerking at his arm.

As expected, the police had gone across the green; the door was swinging shut behind a handful of scholars. Robin and Victoire dashed up the pavement, around the seal, and pushed their way in behind them. Robin held his breath as they stepped over the threshold, but no sirens went off; no traps were sprung. They were in; they were safe.

The lobby felt more crowded than usual. Had their message been seen, then? Had some of these people come to answer their call? He had no way of knowing who was with Hermes and who wasn’t; everyone who met his gaze gave him the same disinterested, polite nod before moving on with their business. It all felt so absurdly normal. Did no one here know the world had broken?

Across the rotunda Professor Playfair leaned against the second-floor balcony, chatting with Professor Chakravarti. Professor Chakravarti must have made a joke, for Professor Playfair laughed, shook his head, and looked out over the lobby. He met Robin’s gaze. His eyes bulged.

Robin jumped up onto a table in the centre of the lobby just as Professor Playfair rushed to the staircase.

‘Listen to me!’ he shouted.

The bustling tower paid him no heed. Victoire climbed up next to him, wielding the ceremonial bell Professor Playfair used to announce exam results. She raised it over her head and gave it three furious shakes. The tower fell silent.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin. ‘Ah. So. I’ve got to say something.’ His mind promptly went blank at the sight of so many staring faces. For several seconds he merely blinked, mute and startled, until at last the words came back to his tongue. He took a deep breath. ‘We’re shutting down the tower.’

Professor Craft pushed her way to the front of the lobby. ‘Mr Swift, what in God’s name are you doing?’

‘Hold on,’ said Professor Harding. ‘You’re not supposed to be here, Jerome said—’

‘There’s a war going on,’ Robin blurted. He winced as the words left his mouth; they were so clumsy, unpersuasive. He’d had a speech prepared, but suddenly he could remember only the highlights, and those sounded ridiculous even as he spoke them aloud. Across the lobby and along the balconies of the floors above, he saw alternating expressions of scepticism, amusement, and annoyance. Even Professor Playfair, now panting at the base of the stairs, looked more baffled than agitated. Robin felt dizzy. He wanted to vomit.

Griffin would have known how to compel them. Griffin was the storyteller, the true revolutionary; he could paint the necessary picture of imperial expansion, complicity, guilt, and responsibility with a handful of gutting phrases. But Griffin wasn’t here, and the best Robin could do was to channel his dead brother’s spirit.

‘Parliament is debating military action on Canton.’ He forced his voice to grow, to take up more space in the room than he ever had. ‘There is no just pretext, apart from the greed of the trading companies. They’re planning to force opium on the Chinese at gunpoint, and causing a diplomatic fiasco during my cohort’s voyage was the excuse to do it.’

There, he’d said something that made sense. Around the tower, impatience changed to curiosity, confusion.

‘What’s Parliament got to do with us?’ asked one of the fellows in Legal – Coalbrook or Conway, or something like that.

‘The British Empire does nothing without our help,’ said Robin. ‘We write the bars that power their guns, their ships. We polish the knives of domination. We draw up their treaties. If we withdraw our help, then Parliament can’t move on China—’

‘I still don’t see how it’s our problem,’ said Coalbrook or Conway.

‘It’s our problem because it’s our professors who are behind it,’ Victoire cut in. Her voice was shaky, but still louder, more sure than Robin’s. ‘They’re running out of silver, this whole country’s running a deficit, and some of our faculty think the way to fix it is by injecting opium into a foreign market. They’ll do anything to push this through; they’re murdering people who’ve been trying to leak it. They killed Anthony Ribben—’

‘Anthony Ribben died at sea,’ said Professor Craft.

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Victoire. ‘He’s been in hiding, working to stop the Empire from doing exactly this. They shot him last week. And Vimal Srinivasan, Ilse Dejima, and Cathy O’Nell – go up to Jericho, go to the old building behind the forest past the bridge and you’ll see the rubble, the bodies . . .’

This elicited murmurs. Vimal, Ilse, and Cathy were all well-liked in the faculty. The whispers grew; it was apparent now that they were not present, and no one could account for where they were.

‘They’re insane,’ snapped Professor Playfair. He’d regained his composure, like an actor who’d remembered his lines. He pointed a dramatic, accusing finger at the two of them. ‘They’re insane, they’re working with a band of rioting thieves, they ought to be in prison—’

But this seemed even more difficult for the room to swallow than Robin’s story. Professor Playfair’s booming voice, usually so engaging, had the contrary effect of making this seem like mere theatrics. No one else had a clue what the three of them were talking about; from the outside, it seemed as though they were all putting on a show.

‘Why don’t you tell us what happened to Richard Lovell?’ Professor Playfair demanded. ‘Where is he? What have you done with him?’

‘Richard Lovell is one of the architects of this war,’ Robin shouted. ‘He went to Canton to obtain military intelligence from British spies, he’s in direct contact with Palmerston—’

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ said Professor Craft. ‘That can’t be true, that’s—’

‘We have papers,’ Robin said. It crossed his mind, then, that those papers were now certainly destroyed or confiscated, but still, as rhetoric, it worked. ‘We have quotes, proof – it’s all there. He’s been planning this for years. Playfair’s in on it, ask him—’

‘He’s lying,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘He’s rambling, Margaret, the boy’s gone mad—’

‘But madness is incoherent.’ Professor Craft frowned, glancing back and forth between the two of them. ‘And lies are self-serving. This story – it benefits no one, certainly not these two,’ she said, pointing at Robin and Victoire, ‘and it is coherent.’

‘I assure you, Margaret—’

‘Professor.’ Robin appealed directly to Professor Craft. ‘Professor, please – he wants a war, he’s been planning it for years. Go and look in his office. In Professor Lovell’s office. Go through their papers. It’s all there.’

‘No,’ Professor Craft murmured. Her brows furrowed. Her eyes flickered across Robin and Victoire, and she seemed to register something – their hollow exhaustion, perhaps, the sag of their shoulders, or the grief seeping through their bones. ‘No, I believe you . . .’ She turned. ‘Jerome? Did you know?’

Professor Playfair paused a moment, as if deliberating whether it was worth trying to keep up the pretence. Then he huffed. ‘Don’t act so shocked. You know what runs this tower. You knew the balance of power had to shift, you knew we had to do something about the deficit—’

‘But to declare war on innocent people—’

‘Don’t pretend this is where you’ll draw the line,’ he said. ‘You were just fine with everything else – it’s not as if China has much to offer the world apart from its consumers. Why wouldn’t we—’ He stopped. He seemed to have realized his mistake, that he’d just validated their story.

It was too late. The atmosphere in the tower changed. The scepticism evaporated. Irritation turned to a dawning realization that this was not a farce, not a bout of hysteria, but something real.

The real world so seldom interfered with the tower. They didn’t know what to do with it.

‘We use the languages of other countries to enrich this one.’ Robin gazed around the tower as he spoke. He was not trying to convince Professor Playfair, he reminded himself; he had to appeal to the room. ‘We take so much knowledge that isn’t ours. The least we can do is stop this from happening. It’s the only ethical thing.’

‘Then what are you planning?’ asked Matthew Houndslow. He didn’t sound hostile; only tentative, confused. ‘It’s in Parliament’s hands now, as you said, so how—’

‘We go on strike.’

Yes, he was on solid footing now; here was a question to which he knew the answer. He lifted his chin, tried to inject his voice with all the authority of Griffin and Anthony. ‘We shut down the tower. From this day forward, no clients enter the lobby. No one creates, sells, or maintains silver bars. We deny Britain all translation services until they capitulate – and they will capitulate, because they need us. They need us more than anything. That’s how we win.’ He paused. The room was silent. He couldn’t tell if he’d convinced them, couldn’t tell if he was looking at expressions of grudging realization or incredulity. ‘Look, if we all just—’

‘But you’d need to secure the tower.’ Professor Playfair gave a short, mean laugh. ‘I mean, you’d have to subdue all of us.’

‘I suppose we do,’ said Victoire. ‘I suppose we’re doing that right now.’

Next came a very funny pause as it slowly dawned upon a building of Oxford scholars that whatever came next was a matter of force.

‘You.’ Professor Playfair pointed to the student nearest the door. ‘Go and get the constables, let them in—’

The student didn’t move. He was a second year – Ibrahim, Robin recalled, an Arabic scholar from Egypt. He seemed incredibly young, a baby-faced boy; were second years always that young? Ibrahim glanced to Robin and Victoire, then back at Professor Playfair, frowning. ‘But, sir . . .’

‘Don’t,’ Professor Craft told him, just as a pair of third years broke suddenly for the exit. One shoved Ibrahim against a shelf. Robin hurled a silver bar at the door. ‘Explōdere, explode.’ A great, horrible noise filled the lobby; this time a screeching howl. The third years scrambled away from the door like frightened rabbits.

Robin pulled another silver bar from his front pocket and waved it above his head.

‘I killed Richard Lovell with this.’ He couldn’t believe these words were coming out of his mouth. This was not him speaking; this was the ghost of Griffin, the braver, madder brother, reaching through the underworld to pull his strings. ‘If anyone takes a step towards me, and if anyone tries to call for help, I’ll destroy them.’

They all looked so terrified. They believed him.

That worried him. This had all been too easy. He’d been sure he would face more resistance, but the room seemed utterly subdued. Even the professors did not move; indeed, Professors Leblanc and De Vreese huddled together under a table, as if bracing for cannon fire. He could tell them to dance a jig, to rip the pages out of their books one by one, and they would obey.

They would obey because he threatened violence.

He couldn’t remember why the thought of acting had scared him so before. Griffin was right – the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo. But the whole world was off its hinges now. Every door was wide open. They’d moved past the realm of ideas now, into the realm of action, and this was something Oxford students were wholly unprepared for.

‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Playfair. ‘Someone apprehend them.’

A handful of graduate fellows stepped forward, looking uncertain. All Europeanists, all white. Robin cocked his head. ‘Well, come on.’

What happened next was not dignified, would never be shelved next to great epics of valour and bravery. For Oxford’s scholars were sheltered and coddled, armchair theorists who wrote of blood-stained battlefields with smooth and delicate hands. The seizure of Babel was a clumsy, silly clash of the abstract and the material. The fellows approached the table, reaching with hesitant arms. Robin kicked them away. And it felt like kicking at children, for they were too fearful to be vicious, and they weren’t nearly desperate or angry enough to really hurt him. They seemed unsure of what they even wanted to do – pull him down, grab his legs, or simply graze his ankles – and so his retaliatory blows were, similarly, perfunctory. They were playing at a fight, all of them, amateur actors given a stage direction: struggle.

‘Victoire!’ he shouted.

One of the scholars had climbed up onto the table behind her. She spun around. The scholar hesitated a moment, looked her up and down, then threw a punch. But he hit like he only knew about the action in theory, like he only knew of its component parts – plant feet, draw arm back, extend fist. He’d misjudged his distance – the effect was nothing more than a light pat on Victoire’s shoulder. She struck out with her left foot. He doubled over his shins, whining.

‘Stop!’

The fracas ceased. Somehow, Professor Playfair had acquired a gun.

‘Stop this silliness.’ He pointed it at Robin. ‘Stop this right now.’

‘Go ahead,’ Robin breathed. He had no idea where this ridiculous fount of courage came from, but he felt not a shred of fear. The gun, somehow, seemed more abstract than real, the bullet wholly incapable of touching him. ‘Go ahead, I dare you.’

He was gambling on Professor Playfair’s cowardice, on the fact that he might wield a gun, but he wouldn’t pull the trigger. Professor Playfair, like every other Babel scholar, hated getting his hands dirty. He designed lethal traps – he never wielded the blades himself. And he didn’t know how much will, or panic, it took to really kill a man.

Robin did not turn around, did not look to see what Victoire was doing. He knew. He spread his arms, keeping his eyes locked with Professor Playfair’s. ‘What’ll it be?’

Professor Playfair’s face tightened. His fingers moved, and Robin tensed, just as a shot rang out.

Professor Playfair reeled backwards, scarlet exploding across his middle. Screams erupted around the tower. Robin glanced back over his shoulder. And Victoire lowered one of Griffin’s revolvers, smoke tendrils curling up around her face, her eyes enormous.

‘There,’ she breathed, chest heaving. ‘Now we all know how it feels.’

Professor De Vreese dashed suddenly across the hall. He was going for Professor Playfair’s gun. Robin jumped down off the table, but he was too far away – but then Professor Chakravarti threw himself at Professor De Vreese’s side. They hit the floor with a whumph and began to wrestle – a clumsy, inelegant sight, two paunchy, middle-aged professors rolling around on the ground, their gowns flapping over their waists. Robin watched, astonished, as Professor Chakravarti wrenched the gun out of Professor De Vreese’s grasp and pinned him down in a messy hold.

‘Sir?’

‘Received your message,’ panted Professor Chakravarti. ‘Very well done.’

Professor De Vreese jammed his elbow at Professor Chakravarti’s nose. Professor Chakravarti lurched back. Professor De Vreese wriggled out of his hold, and the wrestling resumed.

Robin scooped the gun off the floor and pointed it down at Professor De Vreese.

‘Stand up,’ he ordered. ‘Put your hands above your head.’

‘You don’t know how to use that,’ Professor De Vreese sneered.

Robin pointed the gun at the chandelier and pulled the trigger. The chandelier exploded; glass shards sprinkled across the lobby. It was as if he’d shot into the crowd; everyone shrieked and cringed. Professor De Vreese turned and ran, but his ankle caught on a desk leg and he toppled backwards onto his bum. Robin reset the chamber, just as Griffin had shown him, and then pointed the gun at Professor De Vreese once again.

‘This isn’t a debate,’ he announced. His whole body trembled, flush with the same vicious energy he’d felt when he’d first learned to shoot. ‘This is a takeover. Would anyone else like to have a go?’

No one moved. No one spoke. They all shrank back, terrified. Some were crying; some had their hands clamped over their mouths, as if that were the only way to contain their screams. And all were watching him, waiting for him to dictate what came next.

For a moment the only sound in the tower was of Professor Playfair’s moaning.

He glanced over his shoulder at Victoire. She looked as bewildered as she felt; her gun hung limp at her side. Deep down, neither of them had expected to actually get this far. Their visions of today had involved chaos: a violent and devastating last stand; a fracas that, in all likelihood, ended in death. They’d been prepared for sacrifice; they had not been prepared to win.

But the tower had been taken so very easily, just as Griffin had always predicted. And now they had to act like the victors.

‘Nothing leaves Babel,’ Robin declared. ‘We put a lockdown on the silver-working tools. We stop routine maintenance on the city. We wait for the machine to grind to a halt, and hope they capitulate before we do.’ He didn’t know where these words were coming from, but they sounded good. ‘This country can’t last a month without us. We strike until they bend.’

‘They’ll set the troops on you,’ said Professor Craft.

‘But they can’t,’ said Victoire. ‘They can’t touch us. No one can touch us. They need us too badly.’

And that, the key to Griffin’s theory of violence, was why they might win. They’d finally worked it out. It was why Griffin and Anthony had been so confident in their struggle, why they were convinced the colonies could take on the Empire. Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

‘Then what are you going to do?’ demanded Professor De Vreese. ‘Keep us hostage the entire time?’

‘I hope you’ll join us,’ said Robin. ‘But if you don’t, you can leave the tower. Order the police away first, and then you can file out one by one. No one retrieves anything from the tower – you walk out with what’s on your person.’[99] He paused. ‘And I’m sure you understand we’ll have to destroy your blood vials if you go.’

As soon as he finished, a shuffle of bodies moved towards the door. Robin’s heart sank as he counted the numbers. Dozens were leaving – all of the Classicists, all of the Europeanists, and nearly all of the faculty. Professor Playfair was carried out still moaning, slung ignominiously between Professor De Vreese and Professor Harding.

Only six scholars remained: Professor Chakravarti, Professor Craft, two undergraduates – Ibrahim and a tiny girl named Juliana – and two graduate fellows named Yusuf and Meghana, who worked in Legal and Literature respectively. Faces of colour, faces from the colonies, except for Professor Craft.

But this could work. They could sacrifice their hold on the talent if they retained control of the tower. Babel contained the greatest concentration of silver-working resources in the country: Grammaticas, engraving pens, match-pair ledgers, and reference materials. And more than that, the silver. Professor Playfair and the others might establish a secondary translation centre elsewhere, but even if they could reconstruct everything they needed to maintain the country’s silver-work from memory, it would take them weeks, perhaps months, to acquire materials on the scale necessary to replicate the functions of the tower. By then the vote would have already happened. By then, if all went to plan, the country would have already been brought to its knees.

‘What now?’ murmured Victoire.

Blood rushed to Robin’s head as he stepped off the desk. ‘Now we tell the world what’s coming.’

At noon Robin and Victoire climbed up to the north balcony on the eighth floor. The balcony was largely decorative, designed for scholars who’d never internalized the concept of needing fresh air. No one ever stepped out there, and the door was nearly rusted shut. Robin pushed, leaning hard against the frame. When it swung suddenly open, he lurched out and found himself leaning over the ledge for one brief, terrifying moment before he regained his balance.

Oxford looked so tiny beneath him. A doll’s house, a twee approximation of the real world for boys who would never have to truly engage with it. He wondered if this was how men like Jardine and Matheson saw the world – minuscule, manipulable. If people and places moved around the lines they drew. If cities shattered when they stomped.

Below, the stone steps at the front of the tower were alight with flames. The blood vials of all but the eight scholars who’d remained within the tower had been smashed against the bricks, doused with oil poured from unused lamps, and set aflame. This was not strictly necessary; all that mattered was that the vials were removed from the tower – but Robin and Victoire had insisted on ceremony. They had learned from Professor Playfair the importance of performance, and this macabre display was a statement, a warning. The castle was stormed, the magician thrown out.

‘Ready?’ Victoire placed a stack of papers on the ledge. Babel did not possess its own printing press, so they’d spent the morning laboriously copying out each of those hundred pamphlets. The declaration borrowed both from Anthony’s coalition-building rhetoric and Griffin’s philosophy of violence. Robin and Victoire had joined their voices – one an eloquent urge to link arms in a fight for justice, the other an uncompromising threat to those who opposed them – into a clear, succinct announcement of their intentions.

We, the students of the Royal Institute of Translation, demand Britain cease consideration of an unlawful war against China. Given this government’s determination to initiate hostilities and its brutal suppression of those working to expose its motives, we have no other option to make our voices heard than to cease all translation and silver-working services by the Institute, until such time as our demands are met. We henceforth declare our strike.

Such an interesting word, Robin thought, strike.[100] It brought to mind hammers against spikes, bodies throwing themselves against an immovable force. It contained in itself the paradox of the concept; that through nonaction, and nonviolence, one might prove the devastating consequences of refusing to accommodate those one relied upon.

Below them, Oxfordians were going about their merry way. No one glanced up; no one saw the two students leaning over the tallest point in the city. The exiled translators were nowhere in sight; if Playfair had sought the police, they had not yet chosen to act. The city remained serene, clueless as to what was coming.

Oxford, we ask you to stand with us. The strike will cause great hardships for the city in days to come. We ask you to direct your ire to the government that has made such a strike our only recourse. We ask you to stand on the side of justice and fairness.

From there the pamphlets articulated the clear dangers of an influx of silver to the British economy, not only for China and the colonies, but for the working class of England. Robin did not expect anyone to read that far. He did not expect the city to support their strike; to the contrary, once the silver-work began breaking down, he expected they would hate them.

But the tower was impenetrable, and their hate did not matter. All that mattered was that they understood the cause of their inconvenience.

‘How long do you think until they reach London?’ asked Victoire.

‘Hours,’ said Robin. ‘I think this reaches the first train headed from here to Paddington.’

They had chosen the unlikeliest of places for a revolution. Oxford was not the centre of activity, it was a refuge, decades behind the rest of England in every realm but the academic. The university was designed to be a bastion of antiquity, where scholars could fancy themselves in any of the past five centuries, where scandals and turmoil were so scarce that it made the University College newsletter if a red-breast began singing near the end of an exhaustingly long sermon at Christ Church.

But though Oxford was not the seat of power, it produced the occupants thereof. Its alumni ran the Empire. Someone, perhaps this moment, was rushing to Oxford Station with news of the occupation. Someone would recognize its significance, would see it was not a petty students’ game but a crisis of national importance. Someone would get this in front of the Cabinet and the House of Lords. Then Parliament would choose what happened next.

‘Go on.’ Robin nodded to Victoire. Her Classical pronunciation was better than his. ‘Let’s see them fly.’

‘Polemikós,’ she murmured, holding a bar over the stack. ‘Polemic. Discutere. Discuss.’

She pushed the stack off the ledge. The pamphlets took flight. The wind carried them soaring across the city; over spires and turrets down onto streets, yards, and gardens; flying down chimneys, darting through grates, slipping into open windows. They accosted everyone they came across, clinging to coats, flapping in faces, sticking persistently to satchels and briefcases. Most would bat them aside, irritated. But a few would pick them up, would read the strikers’ manifesto, would slowly register what this meant for Oxford, for London, and for the Empire. And then no one would be able to ignore them. Then the entire world would be forced to look.

‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.

Victoire had gone as still as a statue, eyes fixed on the pamphlets as if she could will herself to become a bird, to fly among them. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I – you know.’

‘It’s funny.’ She did not turn to meet his eye. ‘I’m waiting for it to hit, but it simply – it never does. Not like with you.’

‘It wasn’t the same.’ He tried to find words that would comfort, that would make it out to be anything other than it was. ‘It was self-defence. And he might still survive, it might – I mean, it won’t be—’

‘It was for Anthony,’ she said in a very hard voice. ‘And that’s the last I ever want to speak of it.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The mood that afternoon was one of nervous apprehension. Like children who had kicked over an ants’ nest, they now watched fearfully to see how awful the ramifications would be. Hours had passed. Surely the escaped professors had liaised with city policy-makers by now. Surely London had read those pamphlets by now. What form would the backlash take? They had all spent years trusting in the impenetrability of the tower; its wards, until now, had shielded them from everything. Still, it felt as if they were counting down the minutes to a vicious retaliation.

‘They have to send in the constables,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Even if they can’t get in. There will be some attempted arrest, surely. If not for the strike, then for—’ She glanced at Victoire, blinked, and trailed off.

There was a brief silence.

‘The strike is illegal too,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The Combination of Workmen Act of 1825 suppresses the right to strike by trade unions and guilds.’

‘We’re not a guild, though,’ said Robin.

‘Actually, we are,’ said Yusuf, who worked in Legal. ‘It’s in the founding documents. Babel alums and students comprise the Translators’ Guild by virtue of their institutional affiliation, so by holding a strike we are in violation of the law, if you want to get technical about it.’

They looked round at each other, and then all at once burst out laughing.

But their good humour faded quickly. The association between their strike and the trade unions left a bad taste in all of their mouths, for the workers’ agitations of the 1830s – brought about directly as the result of the silver industrial revolution – had met with resounding failure. The Luddites had ended up either dead or exiled to Australia. The Lancashire spinners were forced back to work to avoid starvation within a year. The Swing Rioters, by smashing threshing machines and setting barns on fire, had secured a temporary improvement in wages and working conditions, but these were promptly reneged upon; more than a dozen rioters were hanged, and hundreds were sent to penal colonies in Australia.

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed?

There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse. Silver-powered looms and spinning machines were getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, enriching none but factory owners and financiers. Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over. There were no alternatives to Babel, no scabs. No one else could do what they did. Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.

Still no policemen had appeared by evening. This lack of response baffled them. But soon logistical problems – namely, supplies and accommodation – became the more pressing matters at hand. It was clear now that they were going to be in the tower for quite some time, with no clear end date to their strike. At some point they were going to run out of food.

There was a tiny, rarely used kitchen in the basement, where servants had once lived before the Institute stopped housing its janitorial staff for free. Occasionally scholars ducked downstairs for a snack when working late. A foray into the cabinets produced a decent amount of nonperishables – nuts, preserves, indestructible tea biscuits, and dry oats for porridge. It wasn’t much, but they wouldn’t starve overnight. And they found many, many bottles of wine, left over from years of faculty functions and garden parties.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Professor Craft when Juliana and Meghana proposed bringing the bottles upstairs. ‘Put those back. We need to keep our wits about us.’

‘We need something to pass the time,’ said Meghana. ‘And if we’re going to starve to death, we may as well go out drunk.’

‘They’re not going to starve us to death,’ Robin said. ‘They can’t allow us to die. They can’t hurt us. That’s the point.’

‘Even so,’ said Yusuf. ‘We’ve just declared our intention to break the city. I don’t think we can just wander out for a hot breakfast, do you?’

Nor could they simply poke their heads outside and put in an order to the grocer’s. They had no friends in town, no one who could act as their liaison with the outer world. Professor Craft had a brother in Reading, but there was no way of getting a letter to him, and nor was there a safe way for him to deliver foodstuffs up to the tower. And Professor Chakravarti, it turned out, had a very limited relationship with Hermes – he’d been recruited only after his promotion to junior faculty, after his ties to upper faculty rendered him too risky for deeper involvement – and he knew Hermes only through anonymous letters and drop points. No one else had responded to their beacon. As far as they knew, they were the only ones left.

‘You two didn’t think of this before you broke into the tower and started waving guns around?’ asked Professor Chakravarti.

‘We were a bit distracted,’ said Robin, embarrassed.

‘We – really, we were making it up as we went along,’ said Victoire. ‘And we didn’t have much time.’

‘Planning a revolution is not one of your strong suits.’ Professor Craft sniffed. ‘I shall see what I can do with the oats.’

Very soon a number of other problems arose. Babel was blessed with running water and indoor lavatories, but there was no place to shower. No one had an extra change of clothes, and there were of course no laundering facilities – all of them had their washing done by invisible scouts. Apart from a single cot on the eighth floor, which was used as an unofficial nap space by the graduate fellows, there were no beds, pillows, linens, or anything that might make for comfortable bedding at night except for their own coats.

‘Think of it like this,’ Professor Chakravarti said in a valiant attempt to lift their mood. ‘Who doesn’t dream of living in a library? Is there not a certain romance to our situation? Who among us would balk at a completely unhindered life of the mind?’

No one, it seemed, shared this fantasy.

‘Can’t we just duck out in the evenings?’ asked Juliana. ‘We can sneak out past midnight and be back by morning, no one will notice—’

‘That’s absurd,’ said Robin. ‘This isn’t some kind of – of optional daytime activity—’

‘We’re going to smell,’ said Yusuf. ‘It’ll be disgusting.’

‘Still, we can’t just keep going in and out—’

‘Just once then,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Just for supplies—’

‘Stop it,’ snapped Victoire. ‘Just stop it, all of you, will you? We all chose treason against the Crown. We’ll be uncomfortable for some time yet.’

At half past ten, Meghana ran up from the lobby and breathlessly announced that London was sending a telegram. They crowded around the machine, watching nervously as Professor Chakravarti took down the message and transcribed it. He blinked at it for a moment, then said, ‘They’ve more or less told us to shove it.’

‘What?’ Robin reached for the telegram. ‘There’s nothing else?’

‘PLEASE REOPEN TOWER TO REGULAR BUSINESS STOP,’ read Professor Chakravarti. ‘That’s all it says.’

‘It’s not even signed?’

‘I can only assume it’s coming direct from the Foreign Office,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘They don’t take private messages this late.’

‘There’s no word about Playfair?’ Victoire asked.

‘Just the one line,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That’s it.’

So Parliament had declined to meet their demands – or indeed to take them seriously at all. Perhaps it was silly to hope the strike would produce a response so soon, before the lack of silver had taken effect, but they had hoped at least that Parliament would acknowledge the threat. Did the MPs think this whole thing would blow over on its own? Were they trying to prevent a general panic? Was this why not a single policeman had knocked on the door, why the green outside was as serene and empty as it had ever been?

‘What now?’ Juliana asked.

No one had an answer. They couldn’t help feeling somewhat petulant, like toddlers who’d thrown tantrums but had not been rewarded for their efforts. All that trouble for such a curt response – it all seemed so pathetic.

They lingered around the telegraph machine for a few more moments, hoping it might spring to life with better news – that Parliament was greatly concerned, that they’d called a midnight debate, that crowds of protestors had flooded Trafalgar Square to demand the war be called off. But the needle remained still. One by one they slunk back upstairs, hungry and dispirited.

For the rest of the evening, Robin would occasionally step out onto the rooftop to peer over the city, scanning for any indication of change or unrest. But Oxford remained tranquil, undisturbed. Their pamphlets lay trodden in the street, stuck in grates, flapping pointlessly in the gentle night breeze. No one had even bothered to clean them up.

They had little to say to one another that night as they made their beds among the stacks, huddling under coats and spare gowns. The convivial atmosphere of that afternoon had vanished. They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.

Magdalen Tower fell the next morning.

None of them had anticipated this. They only worked out afterwards what had happened, after they’d checked the work order ledgers and realized what they could have done to prevent it. Magdalen Tower, the second-tallest building in Oxford, had relied since the eighteenth century on silver-facilitated engineering tricks to support its weight after centuries of soil erosion had eaten at its foundations. Babel scholars did routine maintenance on its supports every six months, once in January and once again in June.

In the hours that followed the disaster, they would learn that it was Professor Playfair who had overseen these biannual reinforcements for the past fifteen years, and whose notes on such procedures were locked in his office, inaccessible to the exiled Babel faculty, who had not even remembered Magdalen Tower’s upcoming appointment. They would find in their letterbox a flurry of messages from the panicked members of the city council who had expected Professor Playfair the previous evening, and who discovered only the next day that he was laid up in hospital, pumped full of laudanum and unconscious. They would learn that one council member had passed the early hours of the morning banging frantically at Babel’s door; only none of them heard or saw him, for the wards kept out all riffraff who might disrupt the scholars inside.

Meanwhile, the clock had run out on Magdalen Tower. At nine on the dot, a rumbling began at its base and spread through the entire city. At Babel, their teacups began clattering at breakfast. They thought they were experiencing an earthquake, until they rushed to the windows and saw that nothing was noticeably shaking except a single building in the distance.

Then they rushed to the rooftop and crowded around Professor Craft, who narrated what she saw from the telescope. ‘It’s – it’s breaking apart.’

By now the changes were so great they could be seen with the naked eye. Tiles dripped off the roof like raindrops. Huge chunks of turrets peeled away and crashed to the ground.

Victoire asked what no one else dared. ‘Do you think anyone’s inside?’

If they were, at least they had ample time to get out. The building had been shaking for a good fifteen minutes now. This was their ethical defence; they did not let themselves consider the alternatives.

At twenty past nine, all ten of the tower’s bells began to ring at once, without rhythm or harmony. They seemed to grow louder, building up to a terrible level; they reached a crescendo with an urgency that made Robin himself want to scream.

Then the tower collapsed, as simply and cleanly as a sandcastle kicked at the base. It took less than ten seconds for the building to fall, but nearly a minute for the rumbling to settle. Then, where Magdalen Tower had once stood was a great mound of brick, dust, and stone. And it was somehow lovely, unnervingly lovely because it was so awful, because it violated the rules of how things were supposed to move. That the city’s horizon could, in an instant, be changed this dramatically was both breathtaking and awesome.

Robin and Victoire watched, hands clasped tight.

‘We did that,’ Robin murmured.

‘That’s not even the worst of it,’ said Victoire, and he could not tell if she was delighted or scared. ‘That’s only the beginning.’

So Griffin was right. This was what it took: a show of force. If the people could not be won over by words, they would be persuaded by destruction.

Parliament’s capitulation, they reasoned, was only hours away now. For wasn’t this proof that the strike was intolerable? That the city could not ride out the tower’s refusal of service?

The professors were not so optimistic.

‘It won’t speed things along,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘If anything, it’ll slow the destruction down – they know they have to be vigilant now.’

‘But it’s a harbinger of things to come,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Right? What falls next? The Radcliffe Library? The Sheldonian?’

‘Magdalen Tower was an accident,’ said Professor Craft. ‘But Professor Chakravarti is right. It’ll put the rest of them on guard, covering for the effects that we’ve halted. It’s a race against time now – they’ll have regrouped somewhere else, surely, and they’ll be trying to construct a new translation centre as we speak—’

‘Can they do that?’ asked Victoire. ‘We’ve taken the tower. We have all the maintenance records, the tools—’

‘And the silver,’ said Robin. ‘We have all the silver.’

‘That will hurt, in time, but in the short term they will manage to plug the worst of the gaps,’ said Professor Craft. ‘They’ll wait us out – we have porridge for a week at most, Swift, and what then? We starve?’

‘Then we speed things up,’ said Robin.

‘How do you propose to do that?’ asked Victoire.

‘Resonance.’

Professor Chakravarti and Professor Craft exchanged a glance.

‘How does he know about that?’ asked Professor Craft.

Professor Chakravarti gave a guilty shrug. ‘Might have shown him.’

‘Anand!’

‘Oh, what was the harm?’

‘Well, this, clearly—’

‘What is resonance?’ Victoire demanded.

‘Up on the eighth floor,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s go, I’ll show you. It’s how the distant bars are maintained, the ones that aren’t made for endurance. The centre to the periphery. If we remove the centre, then surely they’ll begin to fail, won’t they?’

‘Well, there’s a moral line,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Withholding services, resources – that’s one thing. But deliberate sabotage—’

Robin scoffed. ‘We’re splitting ethical hairs over this? This?’

‘The city would stop running,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The country. It would be Armageddon.’

‘But that’s what we want—’

‘You want enough damage to make the threat credible,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘And no more.’

‘Then we’ll remove just a few at once.’ Robin stood up. His mind was made up. He did not want to debate this further, and he could see none of them did either; they were too anxious, and too afraid. They only wanted someone to tell them what to do. ‘One by one, until they get the general idea. Would you like to pick which ones?’

The professors declined. Robin suspected it was too much for them to deconstruct the resonance rods by themselves, for they knew too well the consequences of what they did. They needed to preserve the illusion of innocence, or at least of ignorance. But they expressed no further opposition, and so that evening Robin and Victoire went together up to the eighth floor.

‘A dozen or so, do you think?’ Victoire suggested. ‘A dozen every day, and we’ll see if we need to scale up?’

‘Perhaps two dozen to start,’ said Robin. There must have been hundreds of rods in the room. He had the impulse to kick them all down, to just grab one and use it to bat down the others. ‘Don’t we want to be dramatic?’

Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘There’s dramatic, and then there’s reckless.’

‘This whole endeavour is reckless.’

‘But we don’t even know what one would do—’

‘I only mean, we need to get their attention.’ Robin pressed a fist into a palm. ‘I want a spectacle. I want Armageddon. I want them to think that a dozen Magdalen Towers will fall every day until they listen to us.’

Victoire folded her arms. Robin didn’t like the way her eyes were searching him, as though she’d seized on some truth that he didn’t want to admit out loud.

‘It’s not revenge, what we’re doing here.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Just so we’re clear.’

He chose not to mention Professor Playfair then. ‘I know that, Victoire.’

‘Fine, then.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Two dozen.’

‘Two dozen to start.’ Robin reached down and pulled the nearest resonance rod from its fixture. It slid out with surprising ease. He’d expected some resistance, some noise or transformation symbolizing the break. ‘Is it that simple?’

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

Victoire reached out at random and pulled out a second rod, and then a third. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’

And then, like a house of cards, Oxford began to crumble.

The rapidity of its deterioration was stunning. The next day, all the bell-tower clocks stopped running, all frozen at precisely 6.37 in the morning. Later that afternoon, a great stink wafted over the city. It turned out silver had been used to facilitate the flow of sewage, which was now stuck in place, an unmoving mass of sludge. That evening, Oxford went dark. First one lamp-post started flickering, then another, and then another, until all of the lights on High Street went out. For the first time in the two decades since gas lamps were installed on its streets, Oxford passed the night shrouded in black.

‘What did you two do up there?’ Ibrahim marvelled.

‘We only took out two dozen,’ said Victoire. ‘Two dozen only, so how—’

‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’

By the morning of the third day, transportation began breaking down. Most of the carts in England used a variety of match-pairs that played with the concept of speed. The word speed in modern English was specific to a sense of rapidity, but as a number of common phrases – Godspeed, good speed to you – proved, the root meaning, deriving with the Latin spēs, meaning ‘to hope’, was associated with good fortune and success, with the broader sense of seeking one’s destination, of crossing great distances to reach one’s goal. Speed-based match-pairs using Latin, or in rare cases Old Slavic, allowed carriages to travel more quickly without risk of accident.

But drivers had become too accustomed to the bars, and thus did not correct for when they failed. Accidents multiplied. Oxford’s roads became blocked with overturned wagons and cabs that had taken corners too tightly. Up in the Cotswolds a small family of eight tumbled straight into a ravine because the driver had got used to sitting back and letting the horses take over during tricky turns.

The postal system, too, ground to a halt. For years, Royal Mail couriers with particularly heavy loads had been using bars engraved with the French-English match-pair parcelle-parcel. Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotation of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package. Fixing this bar to the postal carriage made the parcels seem a fraction of their true weight. But now these carriages, with horses straining under three times the load they were used to, were collapsing mid-route.

‘Do you think they’ve caught on yet that this is a problem?’ Robin demanded on the fourth day. ‘I mean, how long is it going to take for people to realize this won’t just go away on its own?’

But it was impossible to tell from within the tower. They had no way to gauge public opinion in either Oxford or London, except through the papers which, hilariously, were still delivered to the front door every morning. This was how they learned about the Cotswold family tragedy, the traffic accidents, and the countrywide courier slowdown. But the London papers made hardly any mention of the war on China or the strike, save for a brief announcement about some ‘internal disturbances’ at the ‘prestigious Royal Institute of Translation’.

‘We’re being silenced,’ Victoire said grimly. ‘They’re doing this on purpose.’

But how long did Parliament think it could keep things quiet? On the fifth morning, they were woken by a horribly discordant noise. It took some rooting through the ledgers to find out what was going on. Great Tom of Christ Church, the loudest bell in Oxford, had always sung a slightly imperfect B-flat note. But whatever silver-work regulated its sound had stopped working, and Great Tom now blared a devastating, eerie groan. By that afternoon, it was joined by the bells at St Martin’s, St Mary’s, and Osney Abbey, an ongoing, miserable, groaning chorus.

Babel’s wards blocked out the sound somewhat, though by that evening they’d all learned to live with a constant, dreadful murmur seeping through the walls. They wore cotton in their ears to sleep.

The bells were a funeral dirge to an illusion. The city of dreaming spires was no longer. Oxford’s degradation was visible – one could see it crumbling by the hour like a rotting gingerbread house. What became clear was how deeply Oxford relied on silver, how without the constant labour of its translation corps, of the talent it attracted from abroad, it immediately fell apart. It revealed more than the power of translation. It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.

And still this was only the beginning. The maintenance ledgers were endless, and there were hundreds of resonance rods yet to be uprooted.

‘How far are they going to let this go?’ was the question they kept asking inside the tower. For they were all amazed, and somewhat horrified, that the city had still not acknowledged the real reason behind this strike; that Parliament had still not taken action.

Privately, Robin did not want this to end. He would never confess it to the others, but deep down, where the ghosts of Griffin and Ramy resided, he did not want a speedy resolution, a nominal settlement that only papered over decades of exploitation.

He wanted to see how far he could take this. He wanted to see Oxford broken down to its foundations, wanted its fat, golden opulence to slough away; for its pale, elegant bricks to crumble to pieces; for its turrets to smash against cobblestones; for its bookshelves to collapse like dominoes. He wanted the whole place dismantled so thoroughly that it would be as if it had never been built. All those buildings assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artefacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded continuous extraction and violence – destroyed, undone.

On the sixth day, they got the city’s attention at last. A crowd assembled at the base of the tower around midmorning, shouting for the scholars to come out.

‘Oh, look,’ Victoire said sarcastically. ‘It’s a militia.’

They gathered round a fourth-floor window and peered down below. Many of the crowd were Oxford students – black-robed young men marching in defence of their town; scowling, chests puffed out. Robin recognized Vincy Woolcombe by his shock of red hair, and then Elton Pendennis, waving a torch above his head, shouting at the men behind him as if leading troops onto a battlefield. But there were women too, and children, and barkeeps and shopkeepers and farmers: a rare alliance of town and gown.

‘Probably we should go and talk to them,’ said Robin. ‘Else they’ll be out there all day.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’ asked Meghana.

Robin scoffed. ‘Are you?’

‘There’s quite a lot of them. You don’t know what they’ll do.’

‘They’re students,’ said Robin. ‘They don’t know what they want to do.’

Indeed, it seemed that the agitators had not thought through how they would actually storm the tower. They were not even shouting in unison. Most just milled around the green, confused, glancing around as if waiting for someone else to give orders. This was not the angry mob of unemployed workers that had threatened Babel’s scholars over the past year; these were schoolboys and townspeople for whom violence was a wholly unfamiliar means of getting what they wanted.

‘You’re just going to walk out there?’ Ibrahim asked.

‘Why not?’ Robin asked. ‘May as well shout back.’

‘Good Lord,’ Professor Chakravarti said suddenly, voice tight. ‘They’re trying to set this place ablaze.’

They turned back to the window. Now that the mob was drawing closer, Robin could see they had brought wagons piled high with kindling. They had torches. They had oil.

Were they going to burn them alive? Stupid, that would be so stupid – surely they understood the whole point was that Babel could not be lost, for Babel and the knowledge contained within it was precisely what they were fighting to reacquire. But perhaps rationality had fled. Perhaps there was only the mob, fuelled by the sheer fury that something they thought was theirs had been taken from them.

Some students started to pile kindling at the foot of the tower. Robin felt his first stab of worry. This was no idle threat; they really meant to set the place alight.

He shoved the window open and stuck his head outside. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘You burn us, and you’ll never get your city in working order.’

Someone hurled a glass bottle at his face. He was too high up, and the bottle spiralled down before it came close, but still Professor Chakravarti yanked Robin backwards and slammed the window shut.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘No sense reasoning with madmen, I think.’

‘Then what are we going to do?’ Ibrahim demanded. ‘They’re going to burn us alive!’

‘The tower’s made of stone,’ Yusuf said dismissively. ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘But the smoke—’

‘We’ve got something,’ Professor Chakravarti said abruptly as if only just remembering. ‘Upstairs, under the Burma files—’

‘Anand!’ Professor Craft exclaimed. ‘They’re civilians.’

‘It’s self-defence,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Justified, I think.’

Professor Craft peered back out at the crowd. Her mouth pressed in a thin line. ‘Oh, very well.’

Without further explanation, the two of them made for the staircase. The rest glanced around at each other for a moment, at a loss for what to do.

Robin reached to open the window with one hand, fumbling around his inner front pocket with the other. Victoire grasped his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Griffin’s bar,’ he murmured. ‘You know, the one—’

‘Are you mad?’

‘They’re trying to burn us alive, let’s not debate the morals—’

‘That could set all the oil alight.’ Her grip tightened, so much that it hurt. ‘That’ll kill half a dozen people. Calm down, will you?’

Robin put the bar back into his pocket, took a deep breath, and wondered at the hammering in his veins. He wanted a fight. He wanted to jump down there and bloody their faces with his fists. Wanted them to know exactly what he was, which was their worst nightmare – uncivilized, brutal, violent.

But it was over before it started. Like Professor Playfair, Pendennis and his sort were not soldiers. They liked to threaten and bluster. They liked to pretend the world obeyed their every whim. But at the end of the day, they were not meant for material struggle. They hadn’t the faintest clue how much effort it might take to bring down a tower, and Babel was the most fortified tower on earth.

Pendennis lowered his torch and set light to the kindling. The crowd cheered as the flames licked up the walls. But the fire failed to take. The flames jumped hungrily, reaching with orange tendrils as if seeking a foothold, but pointlessly fell back again. Several students ran up to the tower walls in some badly thought-out attempt to scale them, but they scarcely touched the bricks before some unseen force hurled them back against the green.

Professor Chakravarti came panting down the stairs, bearing a silver bar that read भिन्त्ते.[101] ‘Sanskrit,’ he explained. ‘It’ll split them.’

He leaned out of the window, observed the fracas for a moment, and then hurled the bar at the centre of the mob. In seconds, the crowd began to dispel. Robin couldn’t quite tell what was going on, but there seemed to be an argument on the ground, and the agitators wore looks of alternating irritation and confusion as they milled around like ducks circling each other on a pond. Then, one by one, they drifted away from the tower; to home, to dinner, to waiting wives and husbands and children.

A small number of students lingered on for a little while. Elton Pendennis was still pontificating on the green, waving his torch above his head, yelling curses that they could not hear through the wards. But the tower, clearly, was never going to catch fire. The kindling burned pointlessly against the stone, and then spluttered out. The protestors’ voices grew hoarse with shouting; their cries faltered, and then finally died out completely. By sunset, the last of the rabble had straggled home.

The translators did not have supper until nearly midnight; unseasoned gruel, peach preserves, and two tea biscuits each. After much begging, Professor Craft relented and permitted them to bring up several bottles of red wine from the cellar. ‘Well,’ she said, pouring out generous glasses with a shaky hand. ‘Wasn’t that exciting.’

The next morning, the translators commenced the fortification of Babel.

They’d never been in any real danger the day before; even Juliana, who’d quietly cried herself to sleep, now laughed at the memory. But that prenatal riot was only the beginning. Oxford would continue to crumble, and the city would only hate them more. They had to prepare for next time.

They threw themselves into the work. Suddenly the tower felt just as it did during exam season. They sat in rows on the eighth floor, heads hunched over their texts, and the only sounds in the room were pages flipping and the occasional exclamation when someone stumbled upon a promising nugget of etymology. This felt good. Here at last was something to do, something that kept them from dawdling nervously as they awaited news from the outside.

Robin rooted through stacks of notes he’d found in Professor Lovell’s office, which contained many potential match-pairs prepared for the China campaign. One excited him very much: the Chinese character 利 (lì) could mean to sharpen one’s weapon, though it also carried connotations of profit and advantage, and its logogram represented grain being cut with a knife. Knives sharpened with the 利-sharp match-pair had frightfully thin blades, and unerringly found their targets.

‘How is that useful?’ asked Victoire when he showed her.

‘It helps in a fight,’ said Robin. ‘Isn’t that the point?’

‘Do you think you’re going to get in a knife fight with someone?’

He shrugged, annoyed and now a little embarrassed. ‘It could come down to that.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want it to, don’t you?’

‘Of course not, I don’t even – of course not. But if they get in, if it becomes strictly necessary—’

‘We’re trying to defend the tower,’ she told him gently. ‘We’re just trying to keep ourselves safe. Not leave a field of blood in our wake.’

They began living like defenders under siege. They consulted classical texts – military histories, field manuals, strategic treatises – for ideas on how to run the tower. They instituted strict mealtimes and rations; no nibbling of the biscuits at midnight, as Ibrahim and Juliana had been caught doing. They hauled the rest of the old astronomy telescopes out onto the rooftop so they could keep watch over the deteriorating city. They set up a series of rotating two-hour surveillance shifts from the seventh- and eighth-floor windows so that when the next riots began, they’d see them coming from far away.

A day passed like this, and then another. It finally sank in that they’d passed the point of no return, that this was no temporary divergence; there would be no resumption of normal life. They emerged from here the victors, the harbingers of an unrecognizable Britain, or they left this tower dead.

‘They’re striking in London.’ Victoire shook his shoulders. ‘Robin, wake up.’

He bolted upright. The clock read ten past midnight; he’d just fallen asleep, preparing for a graveyard watch. ‘What? Who?’

‘Everyone.’ Victoire sounded dazed, as if she couldn’t believe it herself. ‘Anthony’s pamphlets must have worked – I mean, the ones addressing the Radicals, the ones about labour, because look—’ She waved a telegram at him. ‘Even the telegraph office. They say there’ve been crowds around Parliament all day, demanding that they withdraw the war proposal—’

‘Who’s everyone?’

‘All the strikers from a few years ago – the tailors, the shoemakers, the weavers. They’re all striking again. And there’s more – there are dock workers, factory employees, gasworks stokers – I mean, really, everyone. Look.’ She shook the telegram. ‘Look. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow.’

Robin squinted at the missive in the dim light, trying to comprehend what this meant.

A hundred miles away, white British factory workers were crowding Westminster Hall to protest a war in a country they’d never stepped foot in.

Was Anthony right? Had they forged the most unlikely of alliances? Theirs was not the first of the antisilver revolts of that decade, only the most dramatic. The Rebecca Riots in Wales, the Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham, and the Chartist uprisings in Sheffield and Bradford just earlier that year had all tried and failed to halt the silver industrial revolution. The papers had made them out to be isolated outbursts of discontent. But it was clear now that they were all connected, all caught in the same web of coercion and exploitation. What was happening to the Lancashire spinners had happened to Indian weavers first. Sweating, exhausted textile workers in silver-gilded British factories spun cotton picked by slaves in America. Everywhere the silver industrial revolution had wrought poverty, inequality, and suffering, while the only ones who benefited were those in power at the heart of the Empire. And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear. Until it did.

And if the oppressed came together, if they rallied around a common cause – here, now, was one of the impossible pivot points Griffin had spoken of so often. Here was their chance to push history off its course.

The first ceasefire offer came in from London an hour later: RESUME BABEL SERVICES. FULL AMNESTY EVEN FOR SWIFT AND DESGRAVES STOP. OTHERWISE PRISON STOP.

‘Those are very bad terms,’ said Yusuf.

‘They’re absurd terms,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘How ought we to respond?’

‘I think we don’t,’ said Victoire. ‘I think we let them sweat, that we just keep pushing them to the edge.’

‘But that’s dangerous,’ said Professor Craft. ‘They’ve opened up space for a dialogue, haven’t they? We can’t know how long it’ll stay open. Suppose we ignore them and it closes—’

‘There’s something else,’ Robin said sharply.

They watched the telegraph machine tap away in fearful, silent apprehension as Victoire took it down. ‘ARMY ON ITS WAY STOP,’ she read. ‘STAND DOWN STOP.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Juliana.

‘But what good does that do them?’ Robin asked. ‘They can’t get through the wards—’

‘We have to assume they can,’ Professor Chakravarti said grimly. ‘At least, that they will. We have to assume Jerome’s helping them.’

This set off a round of frightened babbling.

‘We’ve got to talk to them,’ said Professor Craft. ‘We’ll lose the window of negotiation—’

Said Ibrahim, ‘Suppose they put us all in prison, though—’

‘Not if we surrender—’ Juliana began.

And Victoire, firm, vehement: ‘We can’t surrender. We’ll have gained nothing—’

‘Hold on.’ Robin raised his voice over the din. ‘No – this threat, the Army – it all means it’s working, don’t you see? It means they’re scared. On the first day they still thought they could order us around. But they’ve felt the consequences now. They’re terrified. Which means if we can just hold on for a bit, if we can just keep this up, we’ll win.’

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The next morning they awoke to find that a set of barricades had mysteriously sprung up around the tower overnight. Great, tottering obstructions blocked up every major street leading towards Babel – High Street, Broad Street, Cornmarket. Was this the Army’s work? They wondered. But it all seemed too slapdash, too haphazard to be an Army operation. The barricades were made of everyday materials – upturned carts, sand-filled barrels, fallen streetlamps, iron grillwork ripped away from the fences round Oxford’s parks, and the stone rubble that had been gathering at every street corner as evidence of the city’s slow deterioration. And what benefit did the Army obtain by fencing in their own streets?

They asked Ibrahim, who’d been on watch shift, what he’d seen. But Ibrahim had fallen asleep. ‘I woke up a little before dawn,’ he said defensively. ‘By then they were already in place.’

Professor Chakravarti came rushing up from the lobby. ‘There’s a man outside who wants to talk to you two.’ He nodded to Robin and Victoire.

‘What man?’ asked Victoire. ‘Why us?’

‘Unclear,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘But he was quite adamant he speaks to whoever’s in charge. And this whole thing is your circus, isn’t it?’

They descended to the lobby together. From the window they saw a tall, broad-shouldered, bearded man waiting on the steps. He didn’t appear to be armed, nor particularly hostile, but his presence was baffling nonetheless.

He’d seen this man before, Robin realized. He wasn’t carrying his sign, but he stood the same way he always had during the mill workers’ protests: fists clenched, chin up, glaring determinedly at the tower as if he could topple it with his mind.

‘For heaven’s sake.’ Professor Craft peeked out of the window. ‘It’s one of those madmen. Don’t go out there, he’ll attack you.’

But Robin was already pulling on his coat. ‘No, he won’t.’ He had a suspicion of what was happening, and though he was afraid to hope just yet, his heart raced with excitement. ‘I think he’s here to help.’

When they opened the door,[102] the man courteously backed away, arms held high to show he had no weapon.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Robin. ‘I’ve seen you out here before.’

‘Abel.’ The man’s voice was very deep; solid, like building stone. ‘Abel Goodfellow.’

‘You threw an egg at me,’ accused Victoire. ‘That was you, last February—’

‘Yes, but it was only an egg,’ said Abel. ‘Nothing personal.’

Robin gestured to the barricades. The nearest one obstructed nearly the whole width of High Street, cutting off the main entrance to the tower. ‘This is your work?’

Abel smiled. It was an odd sight, through that beard; it made him look briefly like a gleeful little boy. ‘Do you like them?’

‘I’m not sure what the point is,’ said Victoire.

‘The Army’s on their way, haven’t you heard?’

‘And I don’t see how this stops them,’ said Victoire. ‘Unless you’re telling me you’ve also brought an army to man those walls.’

‘It’ll do a better job warding off troops than you think,’ said Abel. ‘It’s not just about the walls – though they’ll hold, you’ll see. It’s psychological. The barricades create the impression that there’s a real resistance going on, while the Army currently thinks they’ll be marching on the tower unopposed. And it emboldens our protestors – it creates a safe haven, a place to retreat.’

‘And what are you out here protesting?’ Victoire asked cautiously.

‘The silver industrial revolution, of course.’ Abel held up a crinkled, waterlogged pamphlet. One of theirs. ‘Turns out we’re on the same side.’

Victoire cocked her head. ‘Are we?’

‘Certainly where industry is concerned. We’ve been trying to convince you of the same.’

Robin and Victoire exchanged a glance. They both felt rather ashamed now of their disdain for the strikers over the past year. They’d bought into Professor Lovell’s claims, that the strikers were simply lazy, pathetic, and undeserving of basic economic dignities. But how different, really, were their causes?

‘It was never about the silver,’ said Abel. ‘You realize that now, don’t you? It was about the wage-cutting. The shoddy work. The women and children kept all day in hot airless rooms, the danger of untested machines the eye can’t track. We were suffering. And we only wanted to make you see it.’

‘I know,’ Robin said. ‘We know that now.’

‘And we weren’t there to harm any of you. Well, not seriously.’

Victoire hesitated, then nodded. ‘I can try to believe that.’

‘Anyhow.’ Abel gestured at the barricades behind him. The movement was preciously awkward, like a suitor showing off his roses. ‘We learned what you were up to, and thought we might come up and help. At least we can stop those buffoons from burning the tower down.’

‘Well, thank you.’ Robin was unsure what to make of this; he still couldn’t quite believe this was happening. ‘Do – do you want to come inside? Talk things over?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Abel. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

They stepped back through the door, and invited him in.

And so the battle lines were drawn. That afternoon commenced the strangest collaboration Robin had ever witnessed. Men who weeks ago had been screaming obscenities at Babel students now sat in the lobby among them, talking over tactics of street warfare and barrier integrity. Professor Craft and a striker named Maurice Long stood with their heads bent over a map of Oxford, discussing ideal locations for more barriers to block off Army entry points. ‘Barricades are the only good thing we ever imported from the French,’ Maurice was saying.[103] ‘Over the wide roads, we want low-level obstructions – paving stones, overturned trees, that sort of thing. It takes time to clear, and it keeps them from bringing in horses or heavy artillery. And here, if we cut off the narrower access points around the quadrangle, we can keep them restricted to High Street . . .’[104]

Victoire and Ibrahim sat at a table with several other strikers, dutifully taking down notes on what sort of silver bars might best aid their defences. The word barrels came up quite a lot; Robin, eavesdropping, gathered they were planning to raid some wine cellars for structural reinforcements.[105]

‘How many nights are you going to stay here?’ Abel gestured around the lobby.

‘As long as it takes,’ said Robin. ‘That’s the key; they can try everything they’ve got, but they’re hamstrung as long as we have the tower.’

‘Do you have beds in here?’

‘Not really. There’s a cot we take turns using, but mostly we just curl up in the stacks.’

‘Can’t be comfortable.’

‘Not at all.’ Robin gave him a wry smile. ‘Keep getting stepped on when someone heads down to use the toilet.’

Abel hummed. His eyes roved around the expansive lobby, the polished mahogany shelves, and the pristine marble flooring. ‘Quite the sacrifice.’

The British Army marched into Oxford that evening.

The scholars watched from the rooftop as red-coated troops rolled in a single column along High Street. The arrival of an armed platoon ought to have been a grand occasion, but it was hard to feel any real fear. The troops looked rather out of place among the townhouses and shops of the city centre, and the townspeople who turned out to cheer their arrival made them look more like a parade than a punitive military force. They marched slowly, making way for civilians crossing the street. It was all rather quaint and polite.

They halted when they reached the barricades. The commander, a richly mustachioed fellow decked out in medals, dismounted from his horse and strode to the first upturned wagon. He seemed deeply confused by this. He glanced around at the watching townspeople, as if awaiting some explanation.

‘Do you think that’s Lord Hill?’ Juliana wondered.

‘He’s the Commander in Chief,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘They’re not going to send in the Commander in Chief to deal with us.’

‘They ought to,’ said Robin. ‘We’re a threat to national security.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ Victoire hushed them. ‘Look, they’re talking.’

Abel Goodfellow strode out alone from behind the barricade.

The commander met Abel in the middle of the street. They exchanged words. Robin could not hear what they were saying, but the conversation seemed heated. It began in a civil manner, but then both men started gesticulating wildly; at several points he was afraid the commander was about to put Abel in handcuffs. At last they came to some agreement. Abel retreated behind the barricade, walking backwards as if making sure no one shot him in the back. The mustachioed commander returned to his battalion. Then, to Robin’s amazement, the Army began to retreat.

‘He’s given us forty-eight hours to clear out,’ Abel reported upon his return to the tower lobby. ‘After that, he says they’re going to forcibly clear the barricades.’

‘So we’ve only got two days,’ said Robin. ‘That’s not enough time.’

‘More than that,’ said Abel. ‘This is all going to play out in fits and starts. They’ll give another warning. Then another. Then a third, strongly worded this time. They’ll drag their feet for as long as they can. If they were planning to storm us, they would have done so right then and there.’

‘They were perfectly happy shooting on the Swing Rioters,’ said Victoire. ‘And the Blanketeers.’

‘Those weren’t riots over territory,’ said Abel. ‘Those were riots over policies. The rioters didn’t need to hold their ground; when they were fired upon, they scattered. But we’re embedded in the heart of a city. We’ve staked our claim on the tower, and on Oxford itself. If any of those soldiers accidentally strikes a bystander, this spirals out of their control. They can’t break the barricades without breaking the city. And that, I think, Parliament cannot afford.’ He rose to leave. ‘We’ll keep them out. You keep writing your pamphlets.’

So this, an impasse between the strikers and the Army at the barricades on High Street, became their new status quo.

When it came down to it, the tower itself would provide much better protection than Abel Goodfellow’s hotchpotch obstructions could. But the barricades had more than mere symbolic value. They covered an area large enough to allow crucial supply lines in and out of the tower. This meant the scholars now got fresh food and fresh water (dinner that night was a bounty of fluffy white rolls and roast chicken), and it meant they had a reliable source for information on what was going on beyond the tower walls.

Despite all expectations, Abel’s supporters grew in number over the following days. The workmen strikers were better at getting the message out than any of Robin’s pamphlets. They spoke the same language, after all. The British could identify with Abel in a way they could not with foreign-born translators. Striking labourers from all over England came to join their cause. Young Oxford boys, bored with being cooped up at home and looking for something to do, turned up to the barricades simply because it seemed exciting. Women joined the ranks as well, out-of-work seamstresses and factory girls.

What a sight, this influx of defenders to the tower. The barricades had the peculiar effect of building community. They were all comrades in arms behind those walls, no matter their origins, and the regular deliveries of foodstuffs to the tower came with handwritten messages of encouragement. Robin had expected only violence, not solidarity, and he wasn’t sure what to do with this show of support. It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.

One morning he discovered Abel had left them a gift – a wagon deposited before the tower doors, piled high with mattresses, pillows, and homespun blankets. A scrawled note was pinned to the top. This is on loan, it said. We’ll want these back when you’re done.

Meanwhile, inside the tower, they devoted themselves to making London fear the costs of prolonged striking.

Silver afforded London all of its modern conveniences. Silver powered the ice-making machines in the kitchens of London’s rich. Silver powered the engines of the breweries which supplied London’s pubs, and the mills which produced London’s flour. Without silver, the locomotives would cease to run. No new railways could be built. The water would run foul; the air would thicken with grime. When all the machines that mechanized the processes of spinning, weaving, carding, and roving ground to a halt, Britain’s textile industry would wholly collapse. The entire country faced possible starvation, for there was silver in the plough-frames, seed drills, threshing machines, and drainage pipes throughout Britain’s countryside.[106]

These effects would not be fully felt for months. There were still regional silver-working centres in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Birmingham, where Babel scholars who hadn’t dazzled enough during their undergraduate years to win fellowships eked out a mundane living fiddling with the bars invented by their more talented peers. These centres would function as a stopgap in the interim. But they could not fully make up the deficit – especially since, crucially, they did not have access to the same maintenance ledgers.

‘Don’t you think they’ll remember?’ asked Robin. ‘At least, the scholars who walked out with Professor Playfair?’

‘They’re academics,’ said Professor Craft. ‘All we know is the life of the mind. We don’t remember anything unless it’s written in our diaries and circled several times over. Jerome will do his very best, supposing he’s not still drugged up from surgery, but too much will slip through the cracks. This country’s going to pieces in months.’

‘And the economy is going to fail even more quickly than that,’ said Yusuf, who, alone among them, actually knew something about markets and banking. ‘It’s all the speculation, see – people have been going mad buying shares in railways and other silver-powered industries in the past decade because they all think they’re on the verge of getting rich. What happens when they realize all those shares will come to naught? The rail industry might take months to falter. The markets themselves will fail in weeks.’

Market failure. The thought was absurd, yet tantalizing. Could they win this with the threat of a stock market collapse and the inevitable bank run?

For that was the key, wasn’t it? For this to work, they had to frighten the rich and powerful. They knew the strike would have a disproportionate impact on the working poor; those living in the dirtiest, most crowded parts of London, who could not simply pack up and escape to the country when their air blackened and their water grew foul. But in another important sense, silver scarcity would most acutely hit those who had the most to gain from its development. The newest buildings – the private clubs, the dance halls, the freshly renovated theatres – would collapse first. London’s shabby tenements were built from ordinary lumber, not foundations enhanced by silver to support weight much heavier than natural materials could. The architect Augustus Pugin was a frequent collaborator of Babel’s faculty, and had made great use of silver bars in his recent projects – Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, the Alton Towers renovation, and most notably, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire. According to the work-order ledgers, all these buildings would fail by the end of the year. Sooner, if the right rods were pulled away.

How would London’s wealthy respond when the ground gave way beneath their feet?

The strikers gave fair warning. They loudly advertised this information. They wrote endless pamphlets, which Abel communicated to associates in London. Your roads will fail, they wrote. Your water will run dry. Your lights will go dark, your food will rot, and your ships sink. All this will come to pass, unless you choose peace.

‘It’s like the Ten Plagues,’ Victoire observed.

Robin had not cracked open a Bible in years. ‘The Ten Plagues?’

‘Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go,’ said Victoire. ‘But Pharaoh’s heart was unyielding, and he refused. So the Lord cast ten plagues on the Pharaoh’s land. He turned the Nile to blood. He sent locusts, frogs, and pestilence. He cast all of Egypt into darkness, and through these feats he made Pharaoh know his power.’

‘And did Pharaoh let them go?’ Robin asked.

‘He did,’ said Victoire. ‘But only after the tenth plague. Only after he had suffered the death of his firstborn son.’

Occasionally the effects of the strike reversed themselves. Sometimes the lights would flicker back on for a night, or a patchwork of roads would clear up, or news would spread that clean water silver-work was now available and selling at exorbitant prices in certain neighbourhoods of London. Occasionally the disaster the ledgers predicted did not come to pass.

This was not a surprise. The exiled scholars – Professor De Vreese, Professor Harding, and all the faculty and fellows who had not remained in the tower – had regrouped in London and established a defence society to counteract the strikers. The country now lay in the throes of an invisible battle of words and meaning; its fate teetered between the university centre and the desperate, striving periphery.

The strikers were not concerned. The exiles could not win; they simply lacked the tower’s resources. They could stick their fingers in the mud. They could not stop the river from flowing, nor the dam from bursting.

‘It’s very embarrassing,’ Victoire observed one afternoon over tea, ‘how much it all depends on Oxford, in the end. You’d think they would have known better than to put all their eggs in one basket.’

‘Well, it’s just so funny,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Technically, those supplementary stations do exist, precisely to alleviate such a crisis of dependence. Cambridge, for example, has been trying to establish a rival programme for years. But Oxford wouldn’t share any resources.’

‘Because of scarcity?’ Robin asked.

‘Because of jealousy and avarice,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Scarcity’s never been an issue.[107] We simply don’t like the Cambridge scholars. Nasty little upstarts, thinking they can make it on their own.’

‘No one goes to Cambridge unless they can’t find a job here,’ Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Sad.’

Robin cast them an amazed look. ‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’

‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’

Still Parliament refused to cooperate. Every night the Foreign Office sent them the same telegram, always worded in precisely the same way, as if shouting a message over and over again could induce obedience: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP. In a week, these offers stopped including an offer of amnesty. Shortly after that, they came with a rather redundant threat attached: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP OR ARMY WILL TAKE BACK THE TOWER STOP.

Very soon the effects of their strike became deadly.[108] One of the major breaking points, it turned out, was the roads. In Oxford, but even more so in London, traffic was the dominant problem facing city officials – how to manage the flow of carts, horses, pedestrians, stagecoaches, hackney carriages, and wagons without gridlock or accidents. Silver-work had kept pile-ups at bay by reinforcing wooden roads, regulating turnpikes, reinforcing toll gates and bridges, ensuring smooth turns by carts, replenishing the water pumps meant for suppressing dust, and keeping horses docile. Without Babel maintenance, all of these minute adjustments began to fail one by one, and dozens died as a result.

Transportation tipped the domino that led to a slew of other miseries. Grocers could not stock their shelves. Bakers could not obtain flour. Doctors could not see their patients. Solicitors could not make it to court. A dozen carriages in London’s richer neighbourhoods had made use of a match-pair by Professor Lovell that played on the Chinese character 輔 (fǔ), which meant ‘to help’ or ‘to assist’. The character had originally referred to the protective sidebars on a carriage. Professor Lovell had been due in London to touch them up mid-January. The bars failed. The carriages were now too dangerous to drive.[109]

Everything they knew would transpire in London was already happening in Oxford, for Oxford, by proximity to Babel, was the most silver-reliant city in the world. And Oxford was rotting. Its people were going broke, they were hungry, their trades had been interrupted, their rivers were blocked up, their markets had shut down. They sent out to London for food and supplies, but the roads had become perilous, and the Oxford-to-Paddington line was no longer running.

The attacks on the tower redoubled. Townspeople and soldiers together crowded the streets, shouting obscenities at the windows, skirmishing with men at the barricades. But it made no difference. They could not hurt the translators, who were the only people who could end their misery. They could not get past the tower’s wards, could not burn it down or set explosives at its base. They could only beg the scholars to stop.

We only have two demands, Robin wrote in a series of pamphlets, which had become his way of responding to the town’s outcries. Parliament knows this. Refusal to go to war, and amnesty. Your fate lies in their hands.

He requested that London capitulate before all these things came to pass. He hoped, and knew, they would not. He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.

Victoire did not like this. Every time they ascended to the eighth floor, they quarrelled over which resonance bars to pull out, and how many. He wanted to deactivate two dozen; she wanted only two. Usually, they settled on five or six.

‘You’re pushing things too fast,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even given them a chance to respond.’

‘They can respond whenever they like,’ said Robin. ‘What’s stopping them? Meanwhile, the Army’s already here—’

‘The Army’s here because you pushed them to it.’

He made an impatient noise. ‘I’m sorry I won’t be squeamish—’

‘I’m not being squeamish; I’m being prudent.’ Victoire folded her arms. ‘It’s too fast, Robin. It’s too much all at once. You need to let the debates settle. You need to let public opinion turn against the war—’

‘It’s not enough,’ he insisted. ‘They won’t reason themselves into justice now when they never have before. Fear’s the only thing that works. This is just tactics—’

‘This is not coming from tactics.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘It’s coming from grief.’

He couldn’t turn around. He didn’t want her to see his expression. ‘You said yourself you wanted this place to burn.’

‘But even more,’ said Victoire, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘I want us to survive.’

It was impossible to say, in the end, how much of a difference the pace of their destruction really made. The choice remained with Parliament. The debates continued in London.

No one knew what was going on inside the House of Lords, except that neither the Whigs nor the Radicals felt good enough about their numbers yet to call a vote. The papers revealed more about public sentiment. The mainstream rags expressed the opinion Robin had expected, which was that the war on China was a matter of defending national pride, that invasion was nothing more than a just punishment for the indignities imposed by the Chinese on the British flag, that the occupation of Babel by foreign-born students was an act of treason, that the barricades in Oxford and the strikes in London were the work of brutish malcontents, and that the government ought to hold firm against their demands. Prowar editorials stressed the ease with which China would be defeated. It would only be a little war, and not even a proper war at that; all it took was the ignition of several cannons and the Chinese would admit defeat within a day.

The papers could not seem to make up their minds about the translators. The prowar publications offered a dozen theories. They were in cahoots with the corrupt Chinese government. They were co-conspirators of mutineers in India. They were malicious ingrates with no agenda at all except a desire to hurt England, to bite the hand that had fed them – and this required no further explanation, for it was a motive that the British public were all too ready to believe. We will not negotiate with Babel, promised members of Parliament on both sides. Britain does not bow to foreigners.[110]

Yet not all the papers were against Babel or for the war. Indeed, for every headline that urged swift action in Canton, there was another by a publication (albeit smaller, more niche, more radical) that called the war a moral and religious outrage. The Spectator accused the prowar party of greed and profiteering; the Examiner called the war criminal and indefensible. JARDINE’S OPIUM WAR A DISGRACE, read one headline by the Champion. Others were not so tactful: DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA read the Political Register.

Every social faction in England had an opinion. The abolitionists put out statements of support for the strikers. So too did the suffragists, though not quite so loudly. Christian organizations printed pamphlets criticizing the spread of an illegal vice to an innocent people, though the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade.

Meanwhile, Radical publications made the argument that the opening up of China was antithetical to the interests of workers in northern England. The Chartists, a movement of disillusioned industrial and artisanal workers, came out most strongly in support of the strikers; the Chartist circular The Red Republican, in fact, put out a headline calling the translators heroes of the working class.

This gave Robin hope. The Radicals were, after all, the party that the Whigs needed to appease, and if such headlines could convince the Radicals that war was not in their long-term interests, then perhaps all this could be resolved.

And indeed, the conversation about the dangers of silver-work had fared better in the court of public opinion than did the conversation about China. Here was an issue that was close to home, that affected the average Briton in ways he could understand. The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories (although these had their rebuttals, including one refutation by Andrew Ure, who argued that factory workers would feel a good deal better if they only consumed less gin and tobacco). In 1833, the surgeon Peter Gaskell had published a thoroughly researched manuscript entitled The Manufacturing Population of England, focusing chiefly on the moral, social, and physical toll of silver-working machinery on British labourers. It had gone largely unheeded at the time, except by the Radicals, who were known to exaggerate everything. Now, the antiwar papers ran excerpts from it every day, reporting in grisly detail the coal dust inhaled by small children forced to wriggle into tunnels that adults could not, the fingers and toes lost to silver-powered machines working at inhuman speeds, the girls who’d been strangled by their own hair caught in whirring spindles and looms.

The Spectator printed a cartoon illustration of emaciated children being crushed to death under the wheels of some nebulous contraption, which they captioned WHITE SLAVES OF THE SILVER REVOLUTION. In the tower, they laughed themselves silly over this comparison, but the general public seemed genuinely horrified. Someone asked a member of the House of Lords why he supported exploiting children in factories; he replied quite flippantly that employing children under the age of nine had been outlawed in 1833, which led to more general outcry over the suffering of ten- and eleven-year-olds in the country.

‘Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’

‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?’

‘No,’ said Robin, feeling embarrassed. ‘They don’t.’

The Spectator story seemed to greatly affect Professor Craft in particular. Robin found her sitting with it at the tea table, red in the eyes, long after the others had finished their breakfast. She hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief when she saw him approach.

He sat down beside her. ‘Are you all right, Professor?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She cleared her throat, paused, then nudged the paper. ‘It’s just . . . it’s a side of the story we don’t often think about, isn’t it?’

‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’

She seemed not to hear him. She stared out of the window at the green below, where the strikers’ protest grounds had been turned into what looked like a military camp. ‘My first patented match-pair improved the efficiency of equipment at a mine in Tyneshire,’ she said. ‘It kept coal-laden trolleys firmly on their tracks. The mine owners were so impressed they invited me up for a visit, and of course I went; I was so excited about contributing something to the country. I remember being shocked at all the little children in the pits. When I asked, the miners said that they were completely safe, and that helping out in the mines kept them from trouble when their parents were at work.’

She took a shaky breath. ‘Later they told me that the silver-work made the trolleys impossible to move off the tracks, even when there were people in the way. There was an accident. One little boy lost both his legs. They stopped using the match-pair when they couldn’t figure out a workaround, but I didn’t give it a second thought. By then I’d received my fellowship. I had a professorship in sight, and I’d moved on to other, bigger projects. I didn’t think about it. I simply didn’t think about it, for years, and years and years.’

She turned back towards him. Her eyes were wet. ‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Robin.

Victoire glanced up. ‘What is it?’

They were holed up in an office on the sixth floor, poring through the ledgers to find portents of future disasters. They’d already been through the Oxford town appointments up to the next year. London’s maintenance schedules were harder to find – Babel’s bookkeeping was astonishingly bad, and the categorization system used by its clerks seemed not to be organized by date, which would have been logical, or by language, which would have made less but at least some sense, but by the postal code of the London neighbourhood in question.

Robin tapped his ledger. ‘I think we might be close to a breaking point.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re due for maintenance on Westminster Bridge in a week. They contracted for silver-work at the same time that the New London Bridge was built in 1825, and the bars were meant to expire after fifteen years. That’s now.’

‘So what happens?’ asked Victoire. ‘The turnstiles lock in?’

‘I don’t think so, it was quite a major . . . F is code for foundation, isn’t it?’ Robin trailed off, then fell silent. His eyes darted up and down the ledger, trying to confirm what was in front of him. It was quite a large entry, a list of silver bars and match-pairs in various languages that stretched nearly half a page. A good number of them had corresponding numbers in a subsequent column – an indication they employed resonance links. He turned the page, then blinked. The column continued over the next two pages. ‘I think it just falls right into the river.’

Victoire leaned back and exhaled very slowly, deflating.

The implications were enormous. Westminster Bridge was not the only bridge to cross the Thames, but it saw the heaviest traffic. And if Westminster Bridge fell into the river, then no steamers, no houseboats, no sculls or canoes would be able to get around the wreckage. If Westminster Bridge went down, the whole city stopped moving.

And in the weeks to come, when the bars that kept the Thames clean of sewage and pollution from gas factories and chemical works at last expired, the waters would revert to a state of diseased and putrid fermentation. Fish would float belly-up to the surface, dead and stinking. Urine and feces, already moving sluggishly through sewer drains, would solidify.

Egypt would suffer her ten plagues.

But as Robin explained this, Victoire’s face mirrored none of his glee. Rather, she was looking at him with a very odd expression, brows furrowed and lips pursed, and it turned his insides with discomfort.

‘It’s Armageddon,’ he insisted, spreading his hands in the air. How could he make her see? ‘It’s the worst possible thing that could happen.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Except once you’ve played it, we’ve nothing left.’

‘We won’t need anything else,’ he said. ‘We only need to turn the screws once, to push them to the limit—’

‘A limit you know they’ll ignore? Please, Robin—’

‘Then what’s the alternative? Defanging ourselves?’

‘It’s giving them time, it’s letting them see the consequences—’

‘What more is there to see?’ He had not meant to yell. He took a deep breath. ‘Victoire, please, I just think we need to escalate, otherwise—’

‘I think you want it to fall,’ she accused. ‘I think this is just retribution for you, because you want to see it fall.’

‘And why not?’

They’d had this argument before. The ghosts of Anthony and Griffin loomed between them: one guided by the conviction that the enemy would at least act in rational self-interest, if not altruism, and the other guided less by conviction, less by telos, and more by sheer, untrammelled rage.

‘I know it hurts.’ Victoire’s throat pulsed. ‘I know – I know it feels impossible to move on. But your motivating goal cannot be to join Ramy.’

A silence. Robin considered denying this. But there was no point lying to Victoire, or to himself.

‘Doesn’t it kill you?’ His voice broke. ‘Knowing what they’ve done? Seeing their faces? I can’t imagine a world where we coexist with them. Doesn’t it split you apart?’

‘Of course it does,’ she cried. ‘But that’s no excuse not to keep living.’

‘I’m not trying to die.’

‘What do you think making this bridge collapse does, then? What do you think they’ll do to us?’

‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘End this strike? Open up the tower?’

‘If I tried,’ she said, ‘could you stop me?’

They both stared at the ledger. Neither of them spoke for a very long time. They did not want to follow this conversation where it might lead. Neither of them could bear any more heartbreak.

‘A vote,’ Robin proposed at last, unable to take this any longer. ‘We can’t – we can’t just break the strike like this. It’s not up to us. Let’s not decide, Victoire.’

Victoire’s shoulders sagged. He saw such sorrow on her face. She lifted her chin, and for a moment he thought she might argue further, but all she did then was nod.

The vote came out narrowly in Robin’s favour. Victoire and the professors were against; all the students were for. The students agreed with Robin that they had to push Parliament to the breaking point, but they were not thrilled about it. Ibrahim and Juliana both hugged their arms against their chest as they voted, as if shrinking from the idea. Even Yusuf, who usually took great pleasure in helping Robin compose threatening pamphlets to London, stared down at his feet.

‘So that’s that,’ said Robin. He’d won, but it did not feel like such a victory. He could not meet Victoire’s eye.

‘When does this happen?’ Professor Chakravarti asked.

‘This Saturday,’ Robin said. ‘The timing’s marvellous.’

‘But Parliament isn’t going to capitulate by Saturday.’

‘Then I suppose we’ll hear about the bridge when it’s collapsed.’

‘And you are comfortable with this?’ Professor Chakravarti glanced about, as if trying to gauge the moral temperature of the room. ‘Dozens of people will die. There are whole crowds there trying to get on boats at all times of day; what happens when—’

‘That’s not our choice,’ said Robin. ‘It’s theirs. It’s inaction. It’s killing by letting die. We’re not even touching the resonance rods, it’s going to fall on its own—’

‘You know very well that doesn’t matter,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Don’t mince the ethics. Westminster Bridge falling down is your choice. But innocent people can’t determine the whims of Parliament.’

‘But it’s their government’s duty to look out for them,’ said Robin. ‘That’s the entire point of Parliament, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we don’t have the option of civility. Or grace. It’s an indiscriminate torch, I’ll admit that, but that’s what the stakes demand. You can’t put the moral blame on me.’ He swallowed. ‘You can’t.’

‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’

‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’

‘Even so, there are lines you can’t cross.’

‘Lines? If we play by the rules, then they’ve already won—’

‘You’re trying to win by punishing the city,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That means the whole city, everyone in it – men, women, children. There are sick children who can’t get their medicine. There are whole families with no income and no source of food. This is more than an inconvenience to them, it’s a death threat.’

‘I know,’ said Robin, frustrated. ‘That’s the point.’

They glared at each other, and Robin thought he understood now the way that Griffin had once looked at him. This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it?

Professor Chakravarti stood. ‘I can’t follow you down this path.’

‘Then you ought to leave the tower,’ Robin said promptly. ‘It’ll help keep your conscience clear.’

‘Mr Swift, please, listen to reason—’

‘Turn out your pockets.’ Robin raised his voice, speaking over the ringing in his ears. ‘Take nothing with you – not silver, not ledgers, not notes you’ve written to yourself.’ He kept waiting for someone to interrupt him; for Victoire to intervene, to tell him he was wrong, but no one spoke. He took this silence as tacit approval. ‘And if you leave, I’m sure you know, you can’t come back.’

‘There is no path to victory here,’ warned Professor Chakravarti. ‘This will only make them hate you.’

Robin scoffed. ‘They can’t hate us any more than they do.’

But no, that was not true; they both knew it. The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet.

That might change after the bridge fell.

But then, Robin thought, invoking hatred might be good. Hatred might force respect. Hatred might force the British to look them in the eyes and see not an object, but a person. Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him. And the system cannot survive the shock.

‘Oderint dum metuant,’ he said.[111] ‘That’s our path to victory.’

‘That’s Caligula,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘You’re invoking Caligula?’

‘Caligula got his way.’

‘Caligula was assassinated.’

Robin shrugged, wholly unbothered.

‘You know,’ said Professor Chakravarti, ‘you know, one of the most commonly misunderstood Sanskrit concepts is ahimsa. Nonviolence.’

‘I don’t need a lecture, sir,’ said Robin, but Professor Chakravarti spoke over him.

‘Many think ahimsa means absolute pacifism, and that the Indian people are therefore a sheepish, submissive people who will bend the knee to anything. But in the Bhagavad Gita, exceptions are made for a dharma yuddha. A righteous war. A war in which violence is applied as the last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause.’ He shook his head. ‘This is how I have justified this strike, Mr Swift. But what you’re doing here is not self-defence; it has trespassed into malice. Your violence is personal, it is vindictive, and this I cannot support.’

Robin’s throat pulsed. ‘Then take your blood vial before you go, sir.’

Professor Chakravarti examined him for a moment, nodded, and then began turning out the contents of his pockets onto the middle table. A pencil. A notebook. Two blank silver bars.

Everyone watched, silent.

Robin felt a flash of irritation. ‘Would anyone else like to voice a complaint?’ he snapped.

No one else said a word. Professor Craft stood and walked away up the stairs. A moment later, Ibrahim joined her, then Juliana; and then the rest until only Robin and Victoire stood in the lobby, watching Professor Chakravarti stride down the front steps towards the barricades.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The mood in the tower turned sombre after Professor Chakravarti left.

In the early days of the strike, they’d been too occupied with the exigencies of their situation – with pamphleteering, ledgers research, and barricade fortifications – to pay attention to the sheer danger they were in. It had all been so monumental, so unifying. They’d delighted in each other’s company. They’d talked long into the nights, learning about one another, marvelling at how astonishingly similar their histories were. They’d been plucked from their motherlands at a very young age, thrown into England, and instructed to thrive or be deported. So many of them were orphans, all ties to their countries severed except that of language.[112]

But the frantic preparations of those early days had now given way to gloomy, suffocating hours. All the pieces had been laid on the board; all hands were shown. They had no threats left to make other than ones they’d already shouted from the rooftops. What stretched before them now was only time, a ticking down to the inevitable collapse.

They’d issued their ultimatum, sent out their pamphlets. Westminster Bridge fell in seven days, unless. Unless.

This decision had left a bad taste in their mouths. They’d said all there was to say, and no one wanted pick apart the implications. Introspection was dangerous; they only wanted to get through the day. Now, more often than not, they drifted to separate corners of the tower, reading or researching or doing whatever it was they did to make the time pass. Ibrahim and Juliana spent all their waking hours together. Sometimes the rest of them speculated whether the two might be falling in love, but they found they could never sustain that conversation; it made them think of the future, of how this might all end up, and that made them too sad. Yusuf kept to himself. Meghana occasionally took tea with Robin and Victoire, and they would exchange stories about their overlapping acquaintances – she’d graduated recently, and had been close to both Vimal and Anthony – but as the days drew on she also started withdrawing into herself. And Robin wondered, sometimes, whether she and Yusuf were now regretting their decision to stay.

Life in the tower, life on strike – at first so novel and strangely exciting – took on a routine, monotonous air. Things were hard going at first. It was both funny and embarrassing, how little they’d learned about how to keep their living quarters in order. No one knew where the brooms were kept, so the floors remained dusty and littered with crumbs. No one knew how to do laundry – they tried producing a match-pair using the word bleach and words derived from the Proto-Indo-European root bhel (‘shining white, to flash, to burn’), but all this did was temporarily turn their clothes white and scorching-hot to the touch.

They still congregated for meals three times a day on the hour, if only because that made rationing simpler. Their luxury items had quickly disappeared. There was no coffee after the first week; they were close to running out of tea by the second. Their solution to this was to dilute the tea more and more until they were drinking little more than slightly discoloured water. There was no milk or sugar to speak of. Meghana argued they ought to just enjoy the last few teaspoons in a properly, full-brewed cup, but Professor Craft vehemently disagreed.

‘I can give up milk,’ she said. ‘But I cannot give up tea.’

Victoire was Robin’s anchor during that week.

She was furious with him, he knew. The first two days they spent together in begrudging silence – but together, still, because they needed each other for solace. They spent hours by the sixth-floor window, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor. He did not press his point. She made no recriminations. There was nothing more to say. The course was set.

By the third day the silence became unbearable, so they began to talk; small nothings at first, and then everything that came to mind. Sometimes they reminisced about Babel, about the golden years before everything turned upside down. Sometimes they suspended reality, managed to forget everything that had happened, and gossiped about their college days as if the most important matter at hand was whether Colin Thornhill and the Sharp twins would get into fisticuffs over Bill Jameson’s pretty, visiting sister.

It was four days before they could bring themselves to broach the subject of Letty.

Robin did it first. Letty had lingered in the back of both their memories like a festering sore they didn’t dare touch, and he couldn’t keep circling around it anymore. He wanted to take a burning knife and dig into the rot.

‘Do you think she was always going to turn on us?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it was difficult for her, what she did?’

Victoire didn’t need to ask who he meant. ‘It was like an exercise in hope,’ she said after a pause. ‘Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.’

‘Do you think there’s anything you could have said that might have changed her mind?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘Do you?’

His mind did what it always did, which was to summon a Chinese character in lieu of the thought he was afraid of. ‘When I think of Letty, I think about the character xì.’ He drew it in the air for her: 隙. ‘It’s most commonly used to mean “a crack or a fissure”. But in Classical Chinese texts, it also means “a grudge, or a feud”. According to rumours, the Qing Emperor uses a bar engraved with the xì-feud match-pair installed under a stone mural of the imperial lineage. And when cracks appear, it shows that someone is plotting against him.’ He swallowed. ‘I think those cracks were always there. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about them. And all it took was pressure for the whole thing to collapse.’

‘You think she resented us that much?’

He paused, deliberating the weight and impact of his words. ‘I think she killed him on purpose.’

Victoire observed him for a long moment before she responded, simply, ‘Why?’

‘I think she wanted him dead,’ he continued hoarsely. ‘You could see it on her face – she wasn’t scared, she knew what she was doing, she could have aimed at any one of us, and she knew it was Ramy she wanted.’

‘Robin . . .’

‘She loved him, you know,’ he said. The words came out of him like a torrent now; the floodgates were broken, and the waters could not be stopped. No matter how devastating, how tragic, he had to say it out loud, had to burden someone else with this awful, awful suspicion. ‘She told me, the night of the commemoration ball – she spent nearly an hour weeping into my shoulder because she wanted to dance with him, and he wouldn’t even look at her. He never looked at her, he didn’t . . .’ He had to stop; his tears threatened to choke him.

Victoire gripped his wrist. ‘Oh, Robin.’

‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘A brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’

Victoire said nothing for a long time. She gazed out over the crumbling city, thinking. At last, she pulled a rumpled piece of paper from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. ‘You should have this.’

Robin unfolded it. It was the daguerreotype portrait of the four of them, folded and refolded so many times that thin white lines crisscrossed the image. But their faces were printed so clearly. Letty, glaring proudly, her face a bit strained after such a long time. Ramy’s hands affectionately on both her and Victoire’s shoulders. Victoire’s half-smile; chin tilted down, eyes raised and luminous. His own awkward shyness. Ramy’s grin.

He took a sharp breath. His chest tightened, as if his ribs were constricting, squeezing his heart like a vice. He hadn’t realized he could still hurt so much.

He wanted to rip it to shreds. But it was the only remaining likeness he had of Ramy.

‘I hadn’t realized you’d kept it.’

‘Letty kept it,’ said Victoire. ‘She kept it framed in our room. I took it out the night before the garden party. I don’t think she noticed.’

‘We look so young.’ He marvelled at their expressions. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since they’d posed for that daguerreotype. ‘We look like children.’

‘We were happy then.’ Victoire glanced down, fingers tracing their fading faces. ‘I thought about burning it, you know. I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see . . . to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I . . . I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything. She was so alone, you know. All she wanted was a group of friends, people who could understand what she’d been through. And she thought she’d finally found that in us.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘And I suppose, when it all fell apart – I suppose she felt just as betrayed as we did.’

Ibrahim, they noticed, spent a great deal of time writing in a leather-bound notebook.

‘It’s a chronicle,’ he told them when asked. ‘Of what happened inside the tower. Everything that was said. All the decisions that were made. Everything we stood for. Would you like to contribute?’

‘As a co-author?’ asked Robin.

‘As an interview subject. Tell me your thoughts. I’ll write them down.’

‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ Robin felt very tired, and for some reason the sight of those pages of scribbles filled him with dread.

‘I only want to be thorough,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I’ve got Professor Craft’s and the graduate fellows’ statements already. I just thought – well, if this all turns upside down . . .’

‘You think we’re going to lose,’ said Victoire.

‘I think no one knows how this is going to end,’ said Ibrahim. ‘But I know what they’ll say about us if it ends badly. When those students in Paris died at the barricades, everyone called them heroes. But if we die here, no one’s going to think we’re martyrs. And I just want to make sure some record of us exists, a record that doesn’t make us out to be the villains.’ Ibrahim glanced at Robin. ‘But you don’t like this project, do you?’

Had he been glaring? Robin hastily rearranged his face. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You look repelled.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I just . . .’ Robin didn’t know why he found it so hard to put the words together. ‘I suppose I just don’t like thinking of us as history when we haven’t even yet made a mark on the present.’

‘We’ve made our mark,’ said Ibrahim. ‘We’re already in the history books, for better or for worse. Here’s a chance to intervene against the archives, no?’

‘What sort of things are going in it?’ Victoire asked. ‘Broad strokes only? Or personal observations?’

‘Anything you like,’ said Ibrahim. ‘What you had for breakfast, if you want. How you while away the hours. But I’m most interested, of course, in how we all got here.’

‘I suppose you want to know about Hermes,’ said Robin.

‘I want to know everything you’d care to tell me.’

Robin felt a very heavy weight on his chest then. He wanted to start talking, to spill out everything he knew and have it preserved in ink, but the words died on his tongue. He didn’t know how to articulate that the problem was not the existence of the record itself, but the fact that it wasn’t enough, that it was such an insufficient intervention against the archives that it felt pointless.

There was so much to say. He didn’t know where to begin. He had never thought before about the lacuna of written history they existed in and the oppressive swath of denigrating narrative they fought against, and now that he did, it seemed insurmountable. The record was so blank. No chronicle of the Hermes Society existed at all except this one. Hermes had operated like the best of clandestine societies, erasing its own history even as it changed Britain’s. No one would celebrate their achievements. No one would even know what they were.

He thought of the Old Library, destroyed and dismantled, all those mountains of research locked away and hidden forever from view. He thought of that envelope, lost to ash; of the dozens of Hermes associates who’d never been contacted, who might never know what had happened. He thought of all those years Griffin spent abroad – fighting, struggling, railing against a system that was infinitely more powerful than he was. Robin would never know the full extent of what his brother had done, what he’d suffered. So much history, erased.

‘It just scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be all we ever were.’

Ibrahim nodded to his notebook. ‘Worth getting some of it down, then.’

‘It’s a good idea.’ Victoire took a seat. ‘I’ll play. Ask me anything. Let’s see if we can change some future historian’s mind.’

‘Perhaps we’ll be remembered like the Oxford Martyrs,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Perhaps we’ll get a monument.’

‘The Oxford Martyrs were tried for heresy and burned at the stake,’ said Robin.

‘Ah,’ said Ibrahim, eyes twinkling. ‘But Oxford’s an Anglican university now, isn’t it?’

Robin wondered in the days that followed if what they’d felt that night was a shared sense of mortality, akin to how soldiers felt sitting in trenches at war. For it was war, what was breaking out on those streets. Westminster Bridge had not fallen, not yet, but the accidents continued and the shortages grew worse. London’s patience was strained. The public demanded retribution, demanded action, in some form or another. And since Parliament would not vote no on the China invasion, they simply increased their pressure on the Army.

It appeared the guardsmen had orders to leave the tower itself alone, but were permitted to aim at individual scholars when they got the chance. Robin stopped venturing outside when a rendezvous with Abel Goodfellow was interrupted by a spate of rifle fire. Once, a window shattered next to Victoire’s head when she was searching the stacks for a book. They all dropped to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to the basement, where they were protected by walls on all sides. Later they found a bullet lodged in the shelf just behind where she’d been standing.

‘How is this possible?’ demanded Professor Craft. ‘Nothing penetrates these windows. Nothing gets through these walls.’

Curious, Robin examined the bullet: thick, warped, and unnaturally cold to the touch. He held it up to the light and saw a thin band of silver lining the base of the casing. ‘I suppose Professor Playfair thought of something.’

That raised the stakes. Babel was not impenetrable. This was not a strike any longer, but a siege. If the soldiers broke through the barricades, if soldiers wielding Professor Playfair’s inventions reached the front door, their strike was effectively over. Professor Craft and Professor Chakravarti had replaced Professor Playfair’s wards on their first night in the tower, but even they admitted they were not as good at this as Professor Playfair had been; they were not sure how well their own defences would hold up.

‘Let’s stay away from windows from now on,’ Victoire suggested.

For now the barricades held, though outside, the skirmishing had turned vicious. Initially Abel Goodfellow’s strikers had fought a purely defensive war from behind the barricades. They reinforced their structures, they ran supply lines, but they did not provoke the guardsmen. Now the streets had turned bloody. Soldiers fired regularly now on the barricaders, and the barricaders struck back in turn. They made incendiary devices with cloth, oil, and bottles and hurled them at the Army camps. They climbed the rooftops of the Radcliffe Library and the Bodleian, from which they threw paving stones and poured boiling water onto the troops below.

It shouldn’t have been so evenly matched, civilians against guardsmen. In theory, they shouldn’t have lasted a week. But many of Abel’s men were veterans, men discharged from an army falling into disrepair after the defeat of Napoleon. They knew where to find firearms. They knew what to do with them.

The translators helped. Victoire, who’d been reading furiously through French dissident literature, composed the match-pair élan-energy, the latter of which bore connotations of a particular French revolutionary zeal, and which could be traced back to the Latin lancea, meaning ‘lance’. Carried through was an association with throwing and momentum, and it was this latent distortion into the English energy that helped the barricaders’ projectiles fly further, hit truer, and make more of an impact than bricks and cobblestones ought to have been able to do.

They’d come up with a few wilder ideas which bore no fruit. The word seduce came from the Latin seducere, meaning ‘to lead astray’, from which the late-fifteenth-century definition ‘to persuade one to abandon their allegiance’ came about. This seemed promising, but they could not think of a way to manifest it without sending the girls into the front lines, which no one was willing to suggest, or dressing up Abel’s men in women’s clothes, which seemed unlikely to work. There was also the German word Nachtmahr, a now rarely used word for ‘nightmare’, which also referred to a malicious entity that sat upon the sleeper’s chest. Some experimentation proved this match-pair made bad dreams worse when one had them, but seemed unable to induce them in the first place.

One morning, Abel showed up in the lobby with several long, slender cloth-wrapped parcels. ‘Can any of you shoot?’ he asked.

Robin imagined aiming one of those rifles at a living body and pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure that he could do it. ‘Not well.’

‘Not with those,’ said Victoire.

‘Then let some of my men in there,’ said Abel. ‘You’ve got the best vantage point in the city. Pity if you don’t use it.’

Day after day, the barricades held. Robin found it amazing that they didn’t shatter under the weight of the near constant cannon fire, but Abel was confident they could hold out indefinitely as long as they kept scrounging up new materials to bolster the damaged sections.

‘It’s because we’ve built them in V-shaped structures,’ he explained. ‘The cannonballs hit the protrusion, which only packs the materials in more tightly.’

Robin was sceptical. ‘They can’t hold forever, though.’

‘No, perhaps not.’

‘And what happens when they come pouring through?’ Robin asked. ‘Will you flee? Or will you stay and fight?’

Abel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘At the French barricades, revolutionaries would march up to the soldiers with their shirts open and shout at them to shoot, if they dared.’

‘Did they?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes they shot them dead on sight. But other times – well, think about it. You’re looking someone in the eyes. They’re around your age, or younger. From the same city. Possibly the same neighbourhood. Possibly you know them, or you see in their face someone you could know. Would you pull the trigger?’

‘I suppose not,’ Robin admitted, though a small voice in his mind whispered, Letty did.

‘Every soldier’s conscience has a limit,’ said Abel. ‘I suppose they’ll try to arrest us. But firing on townspeople? Carrying out a massacre? I’m not so sure. But we’ll force that split. We’ll see what happens.’

It will all be over soon. They tried to reassure themselves at night when they looked out over the city, saw the torchlight and cannon fire burning bright. They needed only to hold out until Saturday. Parliament could not sustain this any longer than they could. They could not let Westminster Bridge fall.

Then, always, the strange, tentative imagining of what a ceasefire might look like. Should they write up a contract with terms of amnesty? Yusuf took charge of this, drafting a treaty that saved them from the gallows. When the tower resumed normal functioning, would they be a part of it? What did scholarship look like in the age after empire, when they knew Britain’s silver stores would dwindle into nothing? They had never considered these questions before, but now, when the outcome of this strike stood on a razor’s edge, their only comfort was in prognosticating the future in such detail that it seemed possible.

But Robin couldn’t bring himself to try. He couldn’t bear those conversations; he excused himself whenever they occurred.

There was no future without Ramy, without Griffin, without Anthony and Cathy and Ilse and Vimal. As far as he was concerned, time had stopped when Letty’s bullet had left the chamber. All there was now was the fallout. What happened after was for someone else to struggle through. Robin only wanted it all to end.

Victoire found him on the rooftop, hugging his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth to the sound of gunfire. She sat down beside him. ‘Bored with legal terminology?’

‘It feels like a game,’ he said. ‘It feels ludicrous – and I know this, all of this, was ludicrous to begin with, but that – talking about after – just feels like an exercise in fantasy.’

‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’

‘They were better than us.’

‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’

Chapter Thirty

Westminster Bridge fell.[113]

Chapter Thirty-One

Westminster Bridge fell, and Oxford broke out in open warfare.

They were crowded around the telegraph machine, waiting anxiously for an update, when one of the gunmen rushed in from upstairs and caught his breath before announcing, ‘They’ve killed a girl.’

They followed him to the rooftop. With his naked eye Robin could see a commotion up north in Jericho, a frenzied movement of the crowd, but it took a moment of fumbling with a telescope before he honed in on what the gunmen were pointing at.

Soldiers and labourers at the Jericho barricade had just exchanged fire, the gunman told them. Usually this led to nothing – warning shots echoed throughout the city at all times, and the sides usually took turns firing before retreating back down behind the barricades. Symbolic; it was all supposed to be symbolic. But this time a body had toppled.

The telescope lens revealed a startling amount of detail. The victim was young, she was white, she was fair-haired and pretty, and the blood blossoming from her stomach stained the ground a vivid, unmistakable scarlet. Against the slate-grey cobblestones, it looked like a flag.

She wasn’t wearing trousers. The women who’d joined the barricades usually wore trousers. She had on a shawl and a flowing skirt, and an upturned basket still hung from her left arm. She could have been on her way to buy groceries. She could have been on her way home to a husband, to parents, to children.

Robin straightened up. ‘Was it—’

‘It wasn’t us,’ said the other gunman. ‘Look at the angle. She’s turned away from the barricades. It wasn’t one of ours, I tell you.’

Shouts from below. Shots whistled above their heads. Startled, they hurried back down the stairs into the safety of the tower.

They congregated in the basement, huddled nervously, eyes darting around like frightened children who had just done something very naughty. This was the first civilian casualty of the barricades, and it was momentous. The line had been breached.

‘It’s over,’ said Professor Craft. ‘This is open warfare on English soil. This all needs to end.’

A debate broke open then.

‘But it wasn’t our fault,’ said Ibrahim.

‘They don’t care if it’s our fault,’ said Yusuf. ‘We started it—’

‘Then do we surrender?’ demanded Meghana. ‘After all this? We just stop?’

‘We don’t stop,’ said Robin. The strength of his voice stunned him. It came from someplace beyond him. It sounded older; it sounded like Griffin’s. And it must have resonated, for the voices quieted, and all faces turned towards him, scared, expectant, hopeful. ‘This is when the tides turn. This was the most foolish thing they could have done.’ Blood thundered in his ears. ‘Before, the whole city was against us, don’t you see? But now the Army’s messed up. They’ve shot one of the townsfolk. There’s no coming back from that. Do you think Oxford’s going to support the Army now?’

‘If you’re right,’ Professor Craft said slowly, ‘then things are about to get much worse.’

‘Good,’ said Robin. ‘As long as the barricades hold.’

Victoire was watching him with narrowed eyes, and he knew what she suspected – that this did not weigh on his conscience at all, that he wasn’t nearly as distressed as the others.

Well, why not admit it? He was not ashamed. He was right. This girl, whoever she was, was a symbol; she proved that empire had no restraints, that empire would do anything to protect itself. Go on, he thought; do it again; kill more of them; turn the streets red with the blood of your own. Show them who you are. Show them their whiteness won’t save them. Here, at last, was an unforgivable offence with a clear perpetrator. The Army had killed this girl. And if Oxford wanted vengeance, there was only one way to get it.

That night Oxford’s streets exploded into proper violence. The fighting started at the far end of the city, at Jericho where the first blood was shed, and gradually spread as more and more points of conflict developed. The cannon fire was constant. The whole city was awake with shouts and rioting, and Robin saw on those streets more people than he had ever imagined lived in Oxford.

The scholars clustered by the windows, peeking out in between spates of sniper fire.

‘This is insane,’ Professor Craft kept whispering. ‘Absolutely insane.’

Insane was not enough to cover it, Robin thought. English was insufficient to describe all this. His mind wandered to old Chinese texts, the idioms they employed about dynastic collapse and change. 天翻地覆; tiānfāndìfù. The heavens fell, and the earth collapsed in on itself. The world turned upside down. Britain was spilling its own blood, Britain was gouging out its own flesh, and nothing after this could go back to the way it had been before.

At midnight Abel summoned Robin to the lobby.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘We’re nearing the end of the road.’

‘What do you mean?’ Robin asked. ‘This is good for us – they’ve provoked the entire city, haven’t they?’

‘It won’t last,’ said Abel. ‘They’re angry now, but they’re not soldiers. They’ve got no endurance. I’ve seen this before. By the early hours of the night, they’ll start straggling home. And I’ve just had word from the Army that at dawn, they’ll start firing on whoever’s still out there.’

‘But what about the barricades?’ Robin asked, desperate. ‘They’re still up—’

‘We’re down to the last circle of barriers. High Street is all we’ve got. There’s no pretence of civility any longer. They’ll break through; it’s not a question of if, but when. And the fact is, we’re a civilian uprising and they’re a trained, armed battalion with reinforcements to spare. If history is anything to go by, if this really does become a battle, then we’re going to get crushed. We aren’t keen on a repeat of Peterloo.’[114] Abel sighed. ‘The illusion of restraint could only ever last so long. I hope we’ve bought you time.’

‘I suppose they were happy to fire on you after all,’ said Robin.

Abel cast him a rueful look. ‘I suppose it doesn’t feel good to be right.’

‘Well then.’ Robin felt a roil of frustration but forced it down; it wasn’t fair to blame Abel for these developments, nor was it fair to ask him to stay any longer, when all he would face was near certain death or arrest. ‘Thank you, I suppose. Thank you for everything.’

‘Hold on,’ said Abel. ‘I didn’t come just to announce we were abandoning you.’

Robin shrugged. He tried not to sound resentful. ‘It’ll be over very quickly without those barricades.’

‘I’m telling you this is your chance to get out. We’ll start ferrying people away before the shooting gets properly vicious. A few of us will stay to defend the barricades, and that’ll distract them long enough to get the rest out to the Cotswolds, at least.’

‘No,’ Robin said. ‘No, thank you, but we can’t. We’re staying in the tower.’

Abel arched an eyebrow. ‘All of you?’

What he meant: Can you make that decision? Can you tell me everyone in there wants to die? And he was right to ask, because no, Robin could not speak for all seven remaining scholars; in fact, he realized, he had no idea what they would choose to do next.

‘I’ll ask,’ he said, chastened. ‘How long—’

‘Within the hour,’ said Abel. ‘Sooner, if you can. Would rather not tarry.’

Robin steeled himself a moment before going back upstairs. He didn’t know how to tell them this was the end. His face kept threatening to crumple, to reveal the scared boy hiding behind the ghost of his older brother. He had roped all these people into this last stand; he could not bear the sight of their faces when he told them it was over.

Everyone was on the fourth floor, clustered at the east window. He joined them. Outside, soldiers were marching forth on the lawn, advancing at an oddly hesitant pace.

‘What are they doing?’ wondered Professor Craft. ‘Is this a charge?’

‘You’d think they’d charge with more of them,’ said Victoire.

She had a point. More than a dozen troops had halted on High Street, but only five soldiers proceeded the rest of the way towards the tower. As they watched, the soldiers parted, and a solitary figure stepped through their ranks up to the final remaining barricade.

Victoire drew in a sharp breath.

It was Letty. She waved a white flag.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They sent everyone else upstairs before they opened the door. Letty was not here to negotiate with the crowd; they would not have sent an undergraduate to do so. This was personal; Letty was here for a reckoning.

‘Let her through,’ Robin told Abel.

‘Pardon?’

‘She’s here to talk. Tell them to let her through.’

Abel spoke a word to his man, who ran across the green to inform the barricaders. Two men climbed on top of the barricade and bent down. A moment later Letty was lifted over the top, then lowered none-too-gently down onto the other side.

She made her way across the green, shoulders hunched, flag trailing behind her on the pavement. She did not raise her eyes until she met them at the threshold.

‘Hello, Letty,’ said Victoire.

‘Hello,’ Letty murmured. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

She looked miserable. She had clearly not been sleeping; her clothes were dirty and rumpled, her cheeks hollow, and her eyes red and puffy from crying. The way she hunched her shoulders around her, as if flinching from a blow, made her look very small. And despite himself, despite everything, all Robin wanted then was to give her a hug.

This instinct startled him. As she’d approached the tower he’d entertained, briefly, the thought of killing her – if only her death did not doom them all, if only he could just throw his own life into the bargain. But it was so hard to look at her now and not see a friend. How could you love someone who had hurt you so badly? Up close, staring her in the eyes, he had trouble believing that this Letty, their Letty, had done the things she had. She looked grief-stricken, vulnerable, the wretched heroine of a terrible fairy tale.

But that, he reminded himself, was the advantage of the image Letty occupied. In this country, she had the face and colouring that inspired sympathy. Among them, no matter what happened, Letty alone could walk out of here innocent.

He nodded at her flag. ‘Here to surrender?’

‘Here to negotiate,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘Then come in,’ said Victoire.

Letty, invited, stepped through the door. It slammed shut behind her.

For a moment the three of them only looked at each other. They stood uncertain in the middle of the lobby, an unbalanced triangle. It felt so fundamentally wrong. There had always been four of them; they had always come in pairs, an even set, and all Robin could think of was the acute absence of Ramy among them. They were not themselves without him; without his laughter, his quick, easy wit, his sudden turns of conversation that made them feel like they were spinning plates. They were no longer a cohort. Now they were only a wake.

Victoire asked, in a flat and toneless voice, ‘Why?’

Letty flinched, but only just barely. ‘I had to,’ she said, chin high, unwavering. ‘You know it’s all I could have done.’

‘No,’ said Victoire. ‘I don’t.’

‘I couldn’t betray my country.’

‘You didn’t have to betray us.’

‘You were in the thrall of a violent criminal organization,’ said Letty. The words came out so smoothly Robin could only assume they had been rehearsed. ‘And unless I pretended I agreed with you, unless I played along, I didn’t see how I was going to get out of there alive.’

Did she truly believe that? Robin wondered. Was that how she’d always seen them? He couldn’t believe these words were coming out of her mouth, that this was the same girl who’d once stayed up late with them, laughing so hard their ribs had ached. Only Chinese had a character that encapsulated how much simple words could hurt: 刺, cì, the character for thorns, for stabs, for criticism. Such a flexible character. In a phrase, 刺言, 刺語, it meant ‘barbed, stinging words’. 刺 could mean ‘to goad’. 刺 could also mean ‘to murder’.

‘So what’s this, then?’ Robin asked. ‘Parliament’s had enough?’

‘Oh, Robin.’ Letty gave him a plaintive look. ‘You need to surrender.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not how negotiation works, Letty.’

‘I mean it. I’m trying to warn you. They don’t even want me to be here, but I begged them, I wrote to my father, I pulled every string I had.’

‘Warn us about what?’ Victoire asked.

‘They’re going to storm the tower at dawn. And they’re going to destroy your resistance with guns. No more waiting. It’s over.’

Robin crossed his arms. ‘Good luck with getting their city back, then.’

‘But that’s just it,’ said Letty. ‘They’ve held back because they thought they could starve you out. They don’t want you dead. Believe it or not, they don’t like shooting at scholars. You’re all very useful, you’re right about that. But the country can’t stand it anymore. You’ve pushed them to the edge.’

‘Seems like the logical thing then would be to agree to our demands,’ said Victoire.

‘You know they can’t do that.’

‘They’re going to destroy their own city?’

‘Do you think Parliament cares what you destroy?’ Letty demanded, impatient. ‘Those men aren’t bothered about what you’re doing to Oxford, or to London. They laughed when the lights went dark, and they laughed when the bridge fell down. Those men want the city destroyed. They think it’s grown too big and unwieldy already, that its dark, squalid slums are overriding all its civilized boroughs. And you know it’s the poor who will suffer the most. The rich can ride out to the country and stay on their summer estates where they’ll have clean air and clean water until spring. The poor will die in droves. Listen, you two. The people who run this country care more about the pride of the British Empire than they do mild inconveniences, and they’ll let the city collapse before they bow to the demands of what they see as a handful of – of Babblers.’

‘Say what you mean,’ said Victoire.

‘Of foreigners.’

‘That’s quite a sense of pride,’ said Robin.

‘I know,’ said Letty. ‘It’s what I grew up with. I know how deep it runs. Believe me on this. You have no idea how much they’re willing to bleed for the sake of their pride. These men let Westminster Bridge fall. What else can you threaten them with?’

Silence, then. Westminster Bridge was the trump card. What rebuttal could they offer?

‘So you mean to talk us into our deaths,’ Victoire said finally.

‘I don’t,’ said Letty. ‘I mean to save you.’

She blinked, and suddenly tears traced two thin, clear lines down her face. This was not an act; they knew Letty could not act. She was heartbroken, truly heartbroken. She loved them; Robin did not doubt it; at least she really believed that she loved them. She wanted them safe and sound, only her version of a successful resolution was to put them behind bars.

‘I didn’t want any of this,’ she said. ‘I just want things to go back to the way they were. We had a future together, all of us.’

Robin bit back a laugh. ‘What did you imagine?’ he asked quietly. ‘That we would keep eating lemon biscuits together while this country declared war on our motherlands?’

‘They’re not your motherlands,’ said Letty. ‘They don’t have to be.’

‘They do have to be,’ said Victoire. ‘Because we’ll never be British. How can you still not understand? That identity is foreclosed to us. We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.’

Letty’s face tightened.

The truce was over; the walls were up; they had reminded her why she’d abandoned them, which was that she could never really, properly, be one of them. And Letty, if she could not belong to a place, would rather tear the whole thing down.

‘You realize that if I walk out of here with a no, they’ll come in prepared to kill all of you.’

‘But they can’t do that.’ Victoire glanced at Robin as if for confirmation. ‘The whole point of this strike was that they need us; they can’t risk us.’

‘Please understand.’ Letty’s voice hardened. ‘You gave them a headache. Well done you. But you are, in the end, expendable. All of you. Losing you would be a minor setback, but the imperial project involves more than a few scholars. And it will span more than a few decades. This nation is trying to achieve what no other civilization has done throughout history, and if mowing you down means a temporary delay, then they’ll do it. They’ll train new translators.’

‘They won’t,’ said Robin. ‘No one will work for them after this.’

Letty scoffed. ‘Of course they will. We knew very well what they were up to, didn’t we? They told us on the very first day. And we still loved it here. They’ll always be able to find new translators. They’ll relearn what they lost. And they’ll just keep going, because no one else will be there to stop them.’ She seized Robin’s hand. The gesture was so sudden, so shocking that he didn’t have time to pull away. Her skin was icy cold, her grip so strong he was afraid she might snap his fingers off. ‘You can’t change things if you’re dead, Birdie.’

Violently, he shook her off. ‘Don’t call me Birdie.’

She pretended not to hear this. ‘Don’t lose sight of your end goal. If you want to fix the Empire, your best course is to work within it.’

‘Like you do?’ asked Robin. ‘Like Sterling Jones did?’

‘At least we’re not wanted by the police. At least we have the freedom to act.’

‘Do you think the state’s ever going to change, Letty? I mean, have you ever thought about what happens if you win?’

She shrugged. ‘We will win a quick, bodiless war. And after that, all the silver in the world.’

‘And then what? Your machines get faster. Wages fall. Inequality increases. Poverty increases. Everything Anthony predicted will happen. The revels will be unsustainable. What then?’

‘I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.’ Letty’s lip curled. ‘As it were.’

‘You won’t,’ said Robin. ‘There’s no solution. You’re on a train that you can’t jump off, don’t you see? This can’t end well for anyone. Liberation for us means liberation for you as well.’

‘Or,’ said Letty, ‘it’ll just keep going faster and faster, and we’ll let it, because if the train’s speeding past everyone else, we may as well be riding it.’

There was no arguing with that. But, if they were being honest with themselves, there had never been any arguing with Letty.

‘This isn’t worth it,’ Letty continued. ‘All those bodies in the streets – and for what? To make a point? Ideological righteousness is well and fine, but by God, Robin, you’re letting people die for a cause you must know is bound to fail. And you will fail,’ she continued, relentlessly. ‘You don’t have the numbers. You don’t have the public support, you don’t have the votes, and you don’t have the momentum. You don’t understand how determined the Empire is to reclaim its silver. You think you’re prepared to make sacrifices? They will do anything it takes to smoke you out. You should know that they don’t plan on losing all of you. They just need to kill some of you. They’ll take the rest prisoner, and then they’ll break your strike.

‘Tell me – if you’d just seen your friends die, if you had a gun pointed at your head, wouldn’t you go back to work? They’ve already arrested Chakravarti, you know. They’ll torture him until he cooperates. Go on, tell me – when push comes to shove, how many people in this tower are going to stick to their principles?’

‘We’re not all as spineless as you,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re here, aren’t they? They’re with us.’

‘I ask again. How long do you think that’ll last? They haven’t yet lost one of their own. How do you think they’ll feel when the first body of your revolution hits the floor? When there’s a gun to their temple?’

Victoire pointed to the door. ‘Get out.’

‘I’m trying to save you,’ Letty insisted. ‘I’m your last shot at salvation. Surrender now, come out peacefully, and cooperate with restoration. You won’t be in prison for long. They need you, you said it yourself – you’ll be back at Babel in no time, doing the work you always dreamed of. It’s the best offer you’ll get. That’s all I came here to say. Take it, or you’ll die.’

Then we’ll die, Robin almost said, but stopped himself. He couldn’t sentence everyone upstairs to death. She knew that.

She had them beat. There was no arguing their way out of this. She had them utterly cornered; there was nothing she hadn’t foreseen, no more tricks to pull out of their sleeves.

Westminster Bridge had fallen. What more could they threaten?

He hated what came out of his lips next. It felt like surrender, like bowing. ‘We can’t decide for them all.’

‘Then call a meeting.’ Letty’s lip curled. ‘Poll the room, get a consensus with whatever little form of democracy you’ve got running here.’ She placed the white flag down on a table. ‘But have an answer for us by dawn.’

She turned to go.

Robin rushed forward. ‘Letty, wait.’

She paused, one hand on the door.

‘Why Ramy?’ he asked.

She froze. She looked like a statue; under the moonlight, her cheeks shone a pale, marble white. This was how he should always have seen her, he thought. Cold. Bloodless. Devoid of anything that made her a living, breathing, loving, hurting human being.

‘You aimed,’ he said. ‘You pulled the trigger. And you’re a terribly good shot, Letty. Why him? What did Ramy ever do to you?’

He knew what. They both knew; there was no question. But Robin wanted to give it a name, wanted to make sure Letty knew what he knew, wanted to pull the memory fresh between them, sharp and vicious, because he could see the pain it brought to Letty’s eyes and because she deserved it.

Letty stared at him for a long time. She did not move, save for the rapid rise and fall of her chest. When she spoke, her voice was high and cold.

‘I didn’t,’ she said; and Robin could tell from the way she narrowed her eyes and drawled her words, punctuating them just so, like daggers, what was going to come next. His own words, thrown back in his face. ‘I didn’t think at all. I panicked. And then I killed him.’

‘Murder’s not that simple,’ he said.

‘It turns out it is, Birdie.’ She cast him a scornful look. ‘Isn’t that how we got here?’

‘We loved you,’ Victoire whispered. ‘Letty, we would have died for you.’

Letty did not answer. She turned on her heel, threw the door open, and fled into the night.

The door slammed shut, and then there was silence. They weren’t ready to take the news upstairs. They didn’t know what they could say.

‘You think she means it?’ Robin asked finally.

‘She absolutely does,’ said Victoire. ‘Letty doesn’t flinch.’

‘Then do we let her win?’

‘How,’ Victoire asked slowly, ‘do you think we make her lose?’

An awful weight hung between them. Robin knew his answer, only not how to utter it. Victoire knew everything in his heart except this. It was the one thing he’d concealed from her – in part because he did not want to make her share this burden, and in part because he was afraid of how she might respond.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Robin.’

‘We destroy the tower,’ he said. ‘And we destroy ourselves.’

She didn’t flinch; she only seemed to deflate, as if she’d been waiting for confirmation. He hadn’t pretended as well as he’d thought; she’d expected this from him. ‘You can’t.’

‘There’s a way.’ Robin misinterpreted her words on purpose, hoping, rather, that her objection was one of logistics. ‘You know there is. They showed us at the very beginning.’

Victoire went very still then. Robin knew what she was imagining. The shrill, vibrating bar in Professor Playfair’s hands, screaming as if in pain, shattering into a thousand sharp, glinting pieces. Multiply that over and over. Instead of a bar, imagine a tower. Imagine a country.

‘It’s a chain reaction,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll finish the job on its own. Remember? Playfair showed us how it’s done. If it so much as touches another bar, the effect transmits across the metal. It doesn’t stop, it just keeps going, until it renders all the silver unusable.’

How much silver lined the walls of Babel? When this was over, all those bars would be worthless. Then the cooperation of the translators wouldn’t matter. Their facilities would be gone. Their library, gone. The Grammaticas, gone. Their resonance rods, their silver, useless, gone.

‘How long have you been planning this?’ Victoire demanded.

‘Since the beginning,’ he said.

‘I hate you.’

‘It’s the only way we have left to win.’

‘It’s your suicide plan,’ she said angrily. ‘And don’t tell me that it’s anything but. You want this; you’ve always wanted this.’

But that was just it, Robin thought. How did he explain the weight crushing his chest, the constant inability to breathe? ‘I think – ever since Ramy and Griffin – no, ever since Canton, I . . .’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve felt I didn’t have the right.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true. They were better men, and they died—’

‘Robin, that’s not how it works—’

‘And what did I do? I lived a life I shouldn’t have, I had what millions of people didn’t – all that suffering, Victoire, and the whole time I was drinking champagne—’

‘Don’t you dare.’ She raised a hand as if to slap him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re just some fragile academic who can’t handle the weight of the world now that you’ve seen it – that’s absolute tripe, Robin. You’re not some foppish dandy who faints at the first mention of suffering. You know what those men are? They’re cowards, romantics, idiots who never did a thing to change the world they found so upsetting, hiding away because they felt so guilty—’

‘Guilty,’ he repeated. ‘Guilty, that’s exactly what I am. Ramy told me once that I didn’t care about doing the right thing, that I just wanted to take the easy way out.’

‘He was right,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s the coward’s way, you know it—’

‘No, listen.’ He gripped her hands. They were trembling. She tried to pull away, but he squeezed her fingers between his. He needed her with him. Needed to make her understand, before she hated him forever for abandoning her to the dark. ‘He’s right. You’re right. I know it, I’m trying to say it – he was right. I’m so sorry. But I don’t know how to go on.’

‘Day by day, Birdie.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘You go on, day by day. Just as we’ve been doing. It’s not hard.’

‘No, it’s – Victoire, I can’t.’ He didn’t want to cry; if he started crying, then all his words would disappear and he would never manage to say what he needed to. He ploughed through before his tears could catch up. ‘I want to believe in the future we’re fighting for, but it’s not there, it’s just not there, and I can’t take things day by day when I’m too horrified by the thought of tomorrow. I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I wanted a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility. But this – this is my way out.’

She shook her head. She was weeping freely now; both of them were. ‘Don’t say this to me.’

‘Someone’s got to speak the words. Someone has to stay.’

‘Then aren’t you going to ask me to stay with you?’

‘Oh, Victoire.’

What else was there to say? He could not ask this of her, and she knew he would never dare. Yet the question hung between them, unanswered.

Victoire’s gaze was fixed steadily on the window, at the black lawn outside, at the torchlit barricades. She cried, steadily and silently; the tears kept streaming down her cheeks and she kept wiping them away, pointlessly. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. This was the first time, since all this had started, that he couldn’t read her heart.

At last she took a deep breath and lifted her head. Without turning around, she asked, ‘Did you ever read that poem the abolitionists love? That one by Bicknell and Day. It’s called The Dying Negro.’

Robin had read it, in fact, in an abolitionist pamphlet he’d picked up in London. He’d found it striking; he still remembered it in detail. It described the story of an African man who, facing the prospects of capture and return to slavery, killed himself instead.[115] Robin had found it romantic and moving at the time, but now, seeing Victoire’s expression, he realized it was anything but.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘It was – tragic.’

‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko.[116] I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.’

She fell against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, rocking back and forth.

‘I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?’

Her shoulders crumpled. Robin held her tight against him. What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to.

‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’

Chapter Thirty-Three

‘The whole tower?’ asked Professor Craft.

She was the first to speak. The rest of them stared at Robin and Victoire in varying states of disbelief, and even Professor Craft seemed like she was still wrapping her mind around the idea as she spoke its implications out loud. ‘That’s decades – centuries – of research, that’s everything, buried – lost – oh, but who knows how many . . .’ She trailed off.

‘And the ramifications for England will be much worse,’ said Robin. ‘This country runs on silver. Silver pumps through its blood; England can’t live without it.’

‘They’d build it all back—’

‘Eventually, yes,’ said Robin. ‘But not before the rest of the world has time to muster a defence.’

‘And China?’

‘They won’t go to war. They won’t be able to. Silver powers the gunships, you see. Silver feeds the Navy. For months after this, perhaps years, they’ll no longer be the strongest nation in the world. And what happens next is anyone’s guess.’

The future would be fluid. It was just as Griffin had predicted. One individual choice, made at just the right time. This was how they defied momentum. This was how they altered the tracks of history.

And in the end, the answer had been so obvious – to simply refuse to participate. To remove their labour – and the fruits of their labour – permanently from the offering.

‘That can’t be it,’ said Juliana. Her voice trailed up at the end; it was a question, not a declaration. ‘There’s got to be – there must be some other way—’

‘They’re storming us at dawn,’ said Robin. ‘They’ll shoot a few of us to make an example, and then hold the rest of us at gunpoint until we start repairing the damage. They’ll put us in chains, and they’ll put us to work.’

‘But the barricades—’

‘The barricades will fall,’ whispered Victoire. ‘They’re just walls, Juliana. Walls can be destroyed.’

Silence first; then resignation, then acceptance. They already lived in the impossible; what more was the fall of the most eternal thing they’d ever known?

‘Then I suppose we’ll have to get out fast,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Right after the chain reaction starts.’

But you can’t get out fast, Robin almost said before he stopped himself. The rejoinder was obvious. They couldn’t get out fast, because they couldn’t get out at all. A single incantation would not do. If they were not thorough, the tower might collapse partway, but its remains would be salvageable, easily repurposed. The only things they would have inflicted would be expense and frustration. They would have suffered for nothing.

No; for this plan to work – to strike a blow against empire from which it could not recover – they had to stay, and say the words again and again, and activate as many nodes of destruction as they could.

But how did he tell a room full of people that they needed to die?

‘I . . .’ he started, but the words stuck in his throat.

He didn’t have to explain. They’d all figured it out; they were all reaching the same conclusion, one after the other, and the change in their eyes was heartbreaking.

‘I’m going through with it,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking all of you to come with me – Abel can get you out if you won’t – but all I mean is . . . I just – I can’t do it by myself.’

Victoire looked away, arms crossed.

‘We won’t need everyone,’ he continued, desperate to fill the silence with words because, perhaps the more he spoke it, the less awful it sounded. ‘I suppose a diversity of languages would be good, to amplify the effect – and of course, we’ll want people standing in all corners of the tower, because . . .’ His throat pulsed. ‘But we don’t need everyone.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Professor Craft.

‘I . . . thank you, Professor.’

She gave him a wobbly smile. ‘I suppose I wasn’t going to get tenure on the other side of this anyhow.’

He saw them all making the same calculation then: the finality of death against the persecution, prison, and possible execution they would face on the outside. Surviving Babel did not necessarily mean survival. And he could see them asking themselves if they could come to terms, now, with their own deaths; if that would, in the end, be easier.

‘You’re not afraid,’ Meghana told him, asked him.

‘No,’ said Robin. But that was all he could say. He didn’t understand his heart himself. He felt resolved, but perhaps that was only the adrenaline; perhaps his fear and hesitation were only pushed temporarily behind a flimsy wall, which would shatter upon closer examination. ‘No, I’m not, I . . . just – I’m ready. But we won’t need everyone.’

‘Possibly the younger students . . .’ Professor Craft cleared her throat. ‘The ones who don’t know any silver-working, I mean. There’s no reason—’

‘I want to stay.’ Ibrahim cast Juliana an anxious glance. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t want to run.’

Juliana, pale as paper, said nothing.

‘There is a way out?’ Yusuf asked Robin.

‘There is. Abel’s men can ferry you out of the city, they’ve promised; they’re waiting for us. But you’ll have to go as soon as you can. And then you’ll have to run. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop running.’

‘There are no terms of amnesty?’ Meghana asked.

‘There are if you work for them,’ said Robin. ‘If you help them restore things back to how they were. Letty made that offer, she wanted you to know. But you’ll always be under their thumb. They’ll never let you go. She intimated as much – they’ll own you, and they’ll make you feel grateful for it.’

At this, Juliana reached out and took Ibrahim’s hand. He squeezed her fingers. Both their knuckles turned white, and the sight of this was so intimate that Robin blinked and glanced away.

‘But we can still run,’ said Yusuf.

‘You can still run,’ said Robin. ‘You wouldn’t be safe anywhere in this country—’

‘But we could go home.’

Victoire’s voice was so soft that they could barely hear her. ‘We can go home.’

Yusuf nodded, considered this a moment, and then moved to stand beside her.

And it was that simple, the determination of who fled and who died. Robin, Professor Craft, Meghana, Ibrahim, and Juliana on one side. Yusuf and Victoire on the other. No one pleaded or begged, and no one changed their minds.

‘So.’ Ibrahim looked very small. ‘When—’

‘Dawn,’ said Robin. ‘They’re coming at dawn.’

‘Then we’d better stack the bars,’ said Professor Craft. ‘And we’d better place them properly, if we only get one go.’

‘What’s the word?’ Abel Goodfellow demanded. ‘They’re inching right up to us.’

‘Send your men home,’ Robin said.

‘What?’

‘As quick as you can. Get out of the barricades and go on the run. There’s not much time. The Guards – they don’t care about casualties anymore.’

Abel registered this, then nodded. ‘Who’s coming with us?’

‘Just two. Yusuf. Victoire. They’re saying their goodbyes, they’ll be ready soon.’ Robin pulled a wrapped parcel from inside his jacket. ‘There’s also this.’

Abel must have read something in his face, heard something in his voice, because his eyes narrowed. ‘And what are the rest of you up to in there?’

‘I shouldn’t tell you.’

Abel raised the parcel. ‘Is this a suicide note?’

‘It’s a written record,’ said Robin. ‘Of everything that’s happened in this tower. What we stood for. There’s a second copy, but in case it gets lost – I know you’ll find some way to get this out there. Print it all over England. Tell them what we did. Make them remember us.’ Abel looked like he wanted to argue, but Robin shook his head. ‘Please, my mind’s made up, and there’s not much time. I can’t explain this, and I think it’s best if you don’t ask.’

Abel watched him for a moment, then seemed to think better of what it was he was about to say. ‘You’ll end this?’

‘We’re going to try.’ Robin’s chest felt very tight. He was so exhausted; he wanted to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He wanted this to be over. ‘But I can’t tell you more tonight. I just need you to go.’

Abel thrust out his arm. ‘Then this, I suppose, is goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ Robin grasped his palm and shook it. ‘Oh – and the blankets, I forgot—’

‘Think nothing of it.’ Abel wrapped his other hand over Robin’s. His grip was so warm, solid. Robin felt a catch in his throat; he was grateful that Abel was making this easy, that he hadn’t forced him to justify himself. He had to go swiftly, resolute to the very end.

‘Good luck, Robin Swift.’ Abel squeezed his hand. ‘God be with you.’

They spent the hours before dawn arranging hundreds of silver bars into pyramids at vulnerable points around the tower – around the base supports, beneath the windows, along the walls and bookshelves, and in veritable pyramids around the Grammaticas. They could not predict the scope, the scale, of the destruction, but they would prepare for it as well as they could, would make it near impossible to salvage any material from the remains.

Victoire and Yusuf left an hour after midnight. Their farewells were brief, constrained. It was an impossible parting; there was too much and yet nothing to say, and there was a sense that everyone was holding back for fear of opening the floodgates. If they said too little, they would regret it forever. If they said too much, they’d never bring themselves to part.

‘Safe travels,’ Robin whispered, embracing Victoire.

She choked out a laugh. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

They clung to each other for a long time, long enough that at last, once everyone had left to give them privacy, they were the only two standing in the lobby. Finally she stepped back, glanced round, eyes darting back and forth as if she was unsure whether to speak.

‘You don’t think this will work,’ said Robin.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You’re thinking it.’

‘I’m just terrified that we’ll make this grand statement.’ She lifted her hands, let them fall. ‘And they’ll see it only as a temporary setback, something to recover from. That they’ll never understand what we meant.’

‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think they were ever going to listen.’

‘No, I don’t think they were.’ She was crying again. ‘Oh, Robin, I don’t know what to—’

‘Just go,’ he said. ‘And write to Ramy’s parents, will you? I just – they ought to know.’

She nodded, gave him one last, tight squeeze, and then darted out the door to the green where Yusuf and Abel’s men were waiting. One last wave – Victoire’s stricken expression under the moonlight – and then they were gone.

Then there was nothing to do but wait for the end.

How did one make peace with one’s own death? According to the accounts of the Crito, the Phaedo, and the Apology, Socrates went to his death without distress, with such preternatural calm that he refused multiple entreaties to escape. In fact, he’d been so cheerfully blasé, so convinced that dying was the just thing to do, that he beat his friends over their heads with his reasoning, in that insufferably righteous way of his, even as they burst into tears. Robin had been so struck, upon his first foray into the Greek texts, by Socrates’s utter indifference to his end.

And surely it was better, easier to die with such good cheer; no doubts, no fears, one’s heart at rest. He could, in theory, believe it. Often, he had thought of death as a reprieve. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy. He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

Still, facing the moment, he was terrified.

They wound up sitting on the floor in the lobby, taking comfort in the silence of the group, listening to each other breathe. Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca’s Troades, of Lucan’s Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quoted to them Cicero, Horace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

Seneca the Younger, describing Cato: una manu latam libertati viam faciet.[117]

Virgil, describing Dido: Sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.[118]

None of it really sank in; none of it moved them, for theorizing about death never could. Words and thoughts always ran up against the immovable limit of the imminent, permanent ending. Still, her voice, steady and unflinching, was a comfort; they let it wash over their ears, lulling them in these final hours.

Juliana glanced out of the window. ‘They’re moving across the green.’

‘It’s not dawn,’ said Robin.

‘They’re moving,’ she said simply.

‘Well then,’ said Professor Craft, ‘We’d better get on with it.’

They stood.

They would not face their ends together. Each man and woman to their station – to the pyramids of silver distributed on different floors and different wings across the building, positioned thus to reduce the chances that any part of the tower might remain intact. When the walls tumbled down upon them, they would be alone, and this was why, as the moment drew near, it felt so impossible to part.

Tears streamed down Ibrahim’s face.

‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered. ‘There must be some other – I don’t want to die.’

They all felt the same, a desperate hope for some chance of escape. In these last moments, the seconds weren’t enough. In theory this decision they’d made was something beautiful. In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die.

But even as they trembled, not one of them broke. It was only a wish, after all. And the Army was on its way.

‘Let’s not tarry,’ said Professor Craft, and they ascended the stairs to their respective floors.

Robin remained in the centre of the lobby beneath the broken chandelier, surrounded by eight pyramids of silver bars as tall as he stood. He took a deep breath, watching the second hand tick across the clock above the door.

Oxford’s bell towers had long gone mute. As the minute drew near, the only indication of the time was the synchronized ticking of the grandfather clocks, all positioned in the same place on every floor. They’d chosen six o’clock on the dot; an arbitrary time, but they needed a final moment, an immovable fact on which to fix their will.

One minute to six.

He loosed a shaky breath. His thoughts flew about, casting desperately for anything to think about that was not this. He landed not on coherent memories but on hyperspecific details – the salty weight of the air at sea, the length of Victoire’s eyelashes, the hitch in Ramy’s voice just before he burst out into full-bellied laughter. He clung to them, lingered there as long as he could, refused to let his mind go anywhere else.

Twenty seconds.

The warm grittiness of a scone at Vaults. Mrs Piper’s sweet, floury hugs. Buttery lemon biscuits melting into nectar on his tongue.

Ten.

The bitter taste of ale, and the biting sting of Griffin’s laughter. The sour stink of opium. Dinner at the Old Library; fragrant curry and the burnt bottoms of oversalted potatoes. Laughter, loud and desperate and hysterical.

Five.

Ramy, smiling. Ramy, reaching.

Robin placed his hand on the nearest pyramid, closed his eyes, and breathed, ‘Fānyì. Translate.’

The sharp ring echoed through the room, a siren’s screech, reverberating through his bones. A death rattle, resounding all the way up and down the tower, for everyone had carried out their duty; no one had balked.

Robin exhaled, trembling. No space for hesitation. No time for fear. He moved his hand to the bars in the next pile and whispered again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ Again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ And again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’

He felt a shifting beneath his feet. He saw the walls trembling. Books tumbled off the shelves. Above him, something groaned.

He thought he’d be scared.

He thought he’d be fixated on the pain; on how it might feel when eight thousand tons of rubble collapsed on him at once; on whether death might be instant, or whether it might come in horribly small increments when his hands and limbs were crushed, when his lungs struggled to expand in an ever-tinier space.

But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’

‘Me too,’ Ramy said.

‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’

‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’

‘Because you’re fascinating.’

‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

The ceiling was starting to crumble; first streams of pebbles, then whole chunks of marble, exposing planks, breaking beams. The shelves collapsed. Sunlight streaked the room where before there had been no windows. Robin looked up and saw Babel, falling in and upon him, and beyond that, the sky before dawn.

He shut his eyes.

But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face.

She smiles. She says his name.