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

Chapter One

By the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton’s narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive.

The air was rank, the floors slippery. A jug of water sat full, untouched by the bed. At first the boy had been too scared of retching to drink; now he was too weak to lift the jug. He was still conscious, though he’d sunk into a drowsy, half-dreaming haze. Soon, he knew, he’d fall into a deep sleep and fail to wake up. That was what had happened to his grandparents a week ago, then his aunts a day after, and then Miss Betty, the Englishwoman, a day after that.

His mother had perished that morning. He lay beside her body, watching as the blues and purples deepened across her skin. The last thing she’d said to him was his name, two syllables mouthed without breath. Her face had then gone slack and uneven. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth. The boy tried to close her filmy eyes, but her lids kept sliding back open.

No one answered when Professor Lovell knocked. No one exclaimed in surprise when he kicked through the front door – locked, because plague thieves were stripping the houses in the neighbourhood bare, and though there was little of value in their home, the boy and his mother had wanted a few hours of peace before the sickness took them too. The boy heard all the commotion from upstairs, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

By then he only wanted to die.

Professor Lovell made his way up the stairs, crossed the room, and stood over the boy for a long moment. He did not notice, or chose not to notice, the dead woman on the bed. The boy lay still in his shadow, wondering if this tall, pale figure in black had come to reap his soul.

‘How do you feel?’ Professor Lovell asked.

The boy’s breathing was too laboured to answer.

Professor Lovell knelt beside the bed. He drew a slim silver bar out of his front pocket and placed it over the boy’s bare chest. The boy flinched; the metal stung like ice.

‘Triacle,’ Professor Lovell said first in French. Then, in English, ‘Treacle.’

The bar glowed a pale white. There came an eerie sound from nowhere; a ringing, a singing. The boy whined and curled onto his side, his tongue prodding confusedly around his mouth.

‘Bear with it,’ murmured Professor Lovell. ‘Swallow what you taste.’

Seconds trickled by. The boy’s breathing steadied. He opened his eyes. He saw Professor Lovell more clearly now, could make out the slate-grey eyes and curved nose – yīnggōubí, they called it, a hawk’s-beak nose – that could only belong on a foreigner’s face.

‘How do you feel now?’ asked Professor Lovell.

The boy took another deep breath. Then he said, in surprisingly good English, ‘It’s sweet. It tastes so sweet . . .’

‘Good. That means it worked.’ Professor Lovell slipped the bar back into his pocket. ‘Is there anyone else alive here?’

‘No,’ whispered the boy. ‘Just me.’

‘Is there anything you can’t leave behind?’

The boy was silent for a moment. A fly landed on his mother’s cheek and crawled across her nose. He wanted to brush it off, but he didn’t have the strength to lift his hand.

‘I can’t take a body,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Not where we’re going.’

The boy stared at his mother for a long moment.

‘My books,’ he said at last. ‘Under the bed.’

Professor Lovell bent beneath the bed and pulled out four thick volumes. Books written in English, spines battered from use, some pages worn so thin that the print was barely still legible. The professor flipped through them, smiling despite himself, and placed them in his bag. Then he slid his arms under the boy’s thin frame and lifted him out of the house.

In 1829, the plague that later became known as Asiatic Cholera made its way from Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal to the Far East – first to Siam, then Manila, then finally the shores of China on merchant ships whose dehydrated, sunken-eyed sailors dumped their waste into the Pearl River, contaminating the waters where thousands drank, laundered, swam, and bathed. It hit Canton like a tidal wave, rapidly working its way from the docks to the inland residential areas. The boy’s neighbourhood had succumbed within weeks, whole families perishing helplessly in their homes. When Professor Lovell carried the boy out of Canton’s alleys, everyone else on his street was already dead.

The boy learned all this when he awoke in a clean, well-lit room in the English Factory, wrapped in blankets softer and whiter than anything he’d ever touched. These only slightly reduced his discomfort. He was terribly hot, and his tongue sat in his mouth like a dense, sandy stone. He felt as though he were floating far above his body. Every time the professor spoke, sharp pangs shot through his temples, accompanied by flashes of red.

‘You’re very lucky,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This illness kills almost everything it touches.’

The boy stared, fascinated by this foreigner’s long face and pale grey eyes. If he let his gaze drift out of focus, the foreigner morphed into a giant bird. A crow. No, a raptor. Something vicious and strong.

‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’

The boy wet his parched lips and uttered a response.

Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘English. Use your English.’

The boy’s throat burned. He coughed.

‘I know you have English.’ Professor Lovell’s voice sounded like a warning. ‘Use it.’

‘My mother,’ breathed the boy. ‘You forgot my mother.’

Professor Lovell did not respond. Promptly he stood and brushed at his knees before he left, though the boy could scarcely see how any dust could have accumulated in the few minutes in which he’d been sitting down.

The next morning the boy was able to finish a bowl of broth without retching. The morning after that he managed to stand without much vertigo, though his knees trembled so badly from disuse he had to clutch the bedframe to keep from falling over. His fever receded; his appetite improved. When he woke again that afternoon, he found the bowl replaced with a plate with two thick slices of bread and a hunk of roast beef. He devoured these with his bare hands, famished.

He spent most of the day in dreamless sleep, which was regularly interrupted by the arrival of one Mrs Piper – a cheery, round woman who plumped his pillows, wiped his forehead with deliciously cool wet cloths, and spoke English with such a peculiar accent that the boy always had to ask her several times to repeat herself.

‘My word,’ she chuckled the first time he did this. ‘Must be you’ve never met a Scot.’

‘A . . . Scot? What is a Scot?’

‘Don’t you worry about that.’ She patted his cheek. ‘You’ll learn the lay of Great Britain soon enough.’

That evening, Mrs Piper brought him his dinner – bread and beef again – along with news that the professor wanted to see him in his office. ‘It’s just upstairs. The second door to the right. Finish your food first; he’s not going anywhere.’

The boy ate quickly and, with Mrs Piper’s help, got dressed. He didn’t know where the clothes had come from – they were Western in style, and fitted his short, skinny frame surprisingly well – but he was too tired then to inquire further.

As he made his way up the stairs he trembled, whether from fatigue or trepidation, he didn’t know. The door to the professor’s study was shut. He paused a moment to catch his breath, and then he knocked.

‘Come in,’ called the professor.

The door was very heavy. The boy had to lean hard against the wood to budge it open. Inside, he was overwhelmed by the musky, inky scent of books. There were stacks and stacks of them; some were arrayed neatly on shelves, while others were messily piled up in precarious pyramids throughout the room; some were strewn across the floor, while others teetered on the desks that seemed arranged at random within the dimly lit labyrinth.

‘Over here.’ The professor was nearly hidden behind the bookcases. The boy wound his way tentatively across the room, afraid the slightest wrong move might send the pyramids tumbling.

‘Don’t be shy.’ The professor sat behind a grand desk covered with books, loose papers, and envelopes. He gestured for the boy to take a seat across from him. ‘Did they let you read much here? English wasn’t a problem?’

‘I read some.’ The boy sat gingerly, taking care not to tread on the volumes – Richard Hakluyt’s travel notes, he noticed – amassed by his feet. ‘We didn’t have many books. I ended up re-reading what we had.’

For someone who had never left Canton in his life, the boy’s English was remarkably good. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. This was thanks to an Englishwoman – one Miss Elizabeth Slate, whom the boy had called Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there – his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a foreigner – but someone must have been paying her wages because she had never left, not even when the plague hit. Her Cantonese was passably good, decent enough for her to make her way around town without trouble, but with the boy, she spoke exclusively in English. Her sole duty seemed to be taking care of him, and it was through conversation with her, and later with British sailors at the docks, that the boy had become fluent.

He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside London – a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about. Regardless, he and Miss Betty used to sit together under candlelight, laboriously tracing their fingers over each word as they sounded them out loud. When he grew older, he spent entire afternoons poring over the worn pages on his own. But a dozen books were hardly enough to last six months; he always read each one so many times over he’d nearly memorized them by the time the next shipment came.

He realized now, without quite grasping the larger picture, that those parcels must have come from the professor.

‘I do quite enjoy it,’ he supplied feebly. Then, thinking he ought to say a bit more, ‘And no – English was not a problem.’

‘Very good.’ Professor Lovell picked a volume off the shelf behind him and slid it across the table. ‘I suppose you haven’t seen this one before?’

The boy glanced at the title. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘That’s fine.’ The professor opened the book to a page in the middle and pointed. ‘Read out loud for me. Start here.’

The boy swallowed, coughed to clear his throat, and began to read. The book was intimidatingly thick, the font very small, and the prose proved considerably more difficult than the breezy adventure novels he’d read with Miss Betty. His tongue tripped over words he didn’t know, words he could only guess at and sound out.

‘The par . . . particular ad-advantage which each col-o-colonizing country derives from the col . . . colonies which par . . . particularly belong to it, are of two different kinds; first, those common advantages which every empire de . . . rives?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Derives . . . from the provinces subject to its dom . . . dom . . .’[2]

‘That’s enough.’

He had no idea what he’d just read. ‘Sir, what does—’

‘No, that’s all right,’ said the professor. ‘I hardly expect you to understand international economics. You did very well.’ He set the book aside, reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a silver bar. ‘Remember this?’

The boy stared, wide-eyed, too apprehensive even to touch it.

He’d seen bars like that before. They were rare in Canton, but everyone knew about them. Yínfúlù, silver talismans. He’d seen them embedded in the prows of ships, carved into the sides of palanquins, and installed over the doors of warehouses in the foreign quarter. He’d never figured out precisely what they were, and no one in his household could explain. His grandmother called them rich men’s magic spells, metal amulets carrying blessings from the gods. His mother thought they contained trapped demons who could be summoned to accomplish their masters’ orders. Even Miss Betty, who made loud her disdain for indigenous Chinese superstition and constantly criticized his mother’s heeding of hungry ghosts, found them unnerving. ‘They’re witchcraft,’ she’d said when he asked. ‘They’re devil’s work is what they are.’

So the boy didn’t know what to make of this yínfúlù, except that it was a bar just like this one that had several days ago saved his life.

‘Go on.’ Professor Lovell held it out towards him. ‘Have a look. It won’t bite.’

The boy hesitated, then received it in both hands. The bar was very smooth and cold to the touch, but otherwise it seemed quite ordinary. If there was a demon trapped inside, it hid itself well.

‘Can you read what it says?’

The boy looked closer and noticed there was indeed writing, tiny words engraved neatly on either side of the bar: English letters on one side, Chinese characters on the other. ‘Yes.’

‘Say them out loud. Chinese first, then English. Speak very clearly.’

The boy recognized the Chinese characters, though the calligraphy looked a bit strange, as if drawn by someone who had seen them and copied them out radical by radical without knowing what they meant. They read: 囫圇吞棗.

‘Húlún tūn zǎo,’ he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable. He switched to English. ‘To accept without thinking.’

The bar began to hum.

Immediately his tongue swelled up, obstructing his airway. The boy grasped, choking, at his throat. The bar dropped to his lap, where it vibrated wildly, dancing as if possessed. A cloyingly sweet taste filled his mouth. Like dates, the boy thought faintly, black pushing in at the edges of his vision. Strong, jammy dates, so ripe they were sickening. He was drowning in them. His throat was wholly blocked, he couldn’t breathe—

‘Here.’ Professor Lovell leaned over and pulled the bar from his lap. The choking sensation vanished. The boy slumped over the desk, gulping for air.

‘Interesting,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘I’ve never known it to have such a strong effect. What does your mouth taste of?’

‘Hóngzǎo.’ Tears streamed down the boy’s face. Hastily he switched to English. ‘Dates.’

‘That’s good. That’s very good.’ Professor Lovell observed him for a long moment, then dropped the bar back into the drawer. ‘Excellent, in fact.’

The boy wiped tears from his eyes, sniffling. Professor Lovell sat back, waiting for the boy to recover somewhat before he continued. ‘In two days, Mrs Piper and I will depart this country for a city called London in a country called England. I’m sure you’ve heard of both.’

The boy gave an uncertain nod. London existed to him like Lilliput did: a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him.

‘I propose to bring you with us. You will live at my estate, and I will provide you with room and board until you’ve grown old enough to make your own living. In return, you will take courses in a curriculum of my design. It will be language work – Latin, Greek, and of course, Mandarin. You will enjoy an easy, comfortable life, and the best education that one can afford. All I expect in return is that you apply yourself diligently to your studies.’

Professor Lovell clasped his hands together as if in prayer. The boy found his tone confusing. It was utterly flat and dispassionate. He could not tell if Professor Lovell wanted him in London or not; indeed, this seemed less like an adoption and more like a business proposal.

‘I urge you to strongly consider it,’ Professor Lovell continued. ‘Your mother and grandparents are dead, your father unknown, and you have no extended family. Stay here, and you won’t have a penny to your name. All you will ever know is poverty, disease, and starvation. You’ll find work on the docks if you’re lucky, but you’re still small yet, so you’ll spend a few years begging or stealing. Assuming you reach adulthood, the best you can hope for is backbreaking labour on the ships.’

The boy found himself staring, fascinated, at Professor Lovell’s face as he spoke. It was not as though he had never encountered an Englishman before. He had met plenty of sailors at the docks, had seen the entire range of white men’s faces, from the broad and ruddy to the diseased and liver-spotted to the long, pale, and severe. But the professor’s face presented an entirely different puzzle. His had all the components of a standard human face – eyes, lips, nose, teeth, all healthy and normal. His voice was a low, somewhat flat, but nevertheless human voice. But when he spoke, his tone and expression were entirely devoid of emotion. He was a blank slate. The boy could not guess his feelings at all. As the professor described the boy’s early, inevitable death, he could have been reciting ingredients for a stew.

‘Why?’ asked the boy.

‘Why what?’

‘Why do you want me?’

The professor nodded to the drawer which contained the silver bar. ‘Because you can do that.’

Only then did the boy realize that this had been a test.

‘These are the terms of my guardianship.’ Professor Lovell slid a two-page document across the desk. The boy glanced down, then gave up trying to skim it; the tight, looping penmanship looked nigh illegible. ‘They’re quite simple, but take care to read the entire thing before you sign it. Will you do this tonight before you go to bed?’

The boy was too shaken to do anything but nod.

‘Very good,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘One more thing. It occurs to me you need a name.’

‘I have a name,’ said the boy. ‘It’s—’

‘No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that. Did Miss Slate give you a name?’

She had, in fact. When the boy turned four, she had insisted he adopt a name by which Englishmen could take him seriously, though she’d never elaborated which Englishmen those might be. They’d chosen something at random from a children’s rhyming book, and the boy liked how firm and round the syllables felt on his tongue, so he harboured no complaint. But no one else in the household had ever used it, and soon Miss Betty had dropped it as well. The boy had to think hard for a moment before he remembered.

‘Robin.’[3]

Professor Lovell was quiet for a moment. His expression confused the boy – his brows were furrowed, as if in anger, but one side of his mouth curled up, as if delighted. ‘How about a surname?’

‘I have a surname.’

‘One that will do in London. Pick anything you like.’

The boy blinked at him. ‘Pick . . . a surname?’

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

‘The English reinvent their names all the time,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The only families who keep theirs do it because they have titles to hold on to, and you certainly haven’t got any. You only need a handle to introduce yourself by. Any name will do.’

‘Then can I take yours? Lovell?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘They’ll think I’m your father.’

‘Oh – of course.’ The boy’s eyes cast desperately around the room, searching for some word or sound to latch on to. They landed on a familiar volume on the shelf above Professor Lovell’s head – Gulliver’s Travels. A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die. He thought he understood now how Gulliver felt.

‘Swift?’ he ventured. ‘Unless—’

To his surprise, Professor Lovell laughed. Laughter was strange coming out of that severe mouth; it sounded too abrupt, almost cruel, and the boy couldn’t help but flinch. ‘Very good. Robin Swift you’ll be. Mr Swift, good to meet you.’

He rose and extended his hand across the desk. The boy had seen foreign sailors greeting each other at the docks, so he knew what to do. He met that large, dry, uncomfortably cool hand with his own. They shook.

Two days later, Professor Lovell, Mrs Piper, and the newly christened Robin Swift set sail for London. By then, thanks to many hours of bed rest and a steady diet of hot milk and Mrs Piper’s abundant cooking, Robin was well enough to walk on his own. He lugged a trunk heavy with books up the gangplank, struggling to keep pace with the professor.

Canton’s harbour, the mouth from which China encountered the world, was a universe of languages. Loud and rapid Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, English, and Chinese floated through the salty air, intermingling in an implausibly mutually intelligible pidgin which almost everyone understood, but which only a few could speak with ease. Robin knew it well. He’d gained his first instruction in foreign languages running about the quays; he’d often translated for sailors in exchange for a tossed penny and a smile. Never had he imagined he might follow the linguistic fragments of this pidgin back to their source.

They walked down the waterfront to join the boarding line for the Countess of Harcourt, one of the East India Company ships that took on a small number of commercial passengers on each voyage. The sea was loud and choppy that day. Robin shivered as frigid seaside gusts cut viciously through his coat. He badly wanted to be on the ship, inside a cabin or anywhere with walls, but something held up the boarding line. Professor Lovell stepped to the side to have a look. Robin followed him. At the top of the gangplank, a crewman was berating a passenger, acerbic English vowels piercing through the morning chill.

‘Can’t you understand what I’m saying? Knee how? Lay ho? Anything?’

The target of his ire was a Chinese labourer, stooped from the weight of the rucksack he wore slung over one shoulder. If the labourer uttered a response, Robin couldn’t hear it.

‘Can’t understand a word I’m saying,’ complained the crewman. He turned to the crowd. ‘Can anyone tell this fellow he can’t come aboard?’

‘Oh, that poor man.’ Mrs Piper nudged Professor Lovell’s arm. ‘Can you translate?’

‘I don’t speak the Cantonese dialect,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, go on up there.’

Robin hesitated, suddenly frightened.

‘Go.’ Professor Lovell pushed him up the plank.

Robin stumbled forward into the fray. Both the crewman and the labourer turned to look at him. The crewman merely looked annoyed, but the labourer seemed relieved – he seemed to recognize immediately in Robin’s face an ally, the only other Chinese person in sight.

‘What’s the matter?’ Robin asked him in Cantonese.

‘He won’t let me aboard,’ the labourer said urgently. ‘But I have a contract with this ship until London, look, it says so right here.’

He shoved a folded sheet of paper at Robin.

Robin opened it. The paper was written in English, and it did indeed look like a lascar contract – a certificate of pay to last for the length of one voyage from Canton to London, to be specific. Robin had seen such contracts before; they had grown increasingly common over the past several years as the demand for indentured Chinese servants grew concurrently with overseas difficulties with the slave trade. This was not the first contract he’d translated; he’d seen work orders for Chinese labourers to board for destinations as far away as Portugal, India, and the West Indies.

It all looked in order to Robin. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘What’s he telling you?’ asked the crewman. ‘Tell him that contract’s no good. I can’t have Chinamen on this ship. Last ship I sailed that carried a Chinaman got filthy with lice. I’m not taking risks on people who can’t wash. Couldn’t even understand the word bath if I yelled it at him, this one. Hello? Boy? Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Robin switched hastily back to English. ‘Yes, I’m just – give me a moment, I’m just trying to . . .’

But what should he say?

The labourer, uncomprehending, cast Robin an imploring look. His face was creased and sun-browned, leathered in a way that made him look sixty, though he was likely only in his thirties. All lascars aged quickly; the work wrecked their bodies. Robin had seen that face a thousand times before at the docks. Some tossed him sweets; some knew him well enough to greet him by name. He associated that face with his own kind. But he’d never seen one of his elders turn to him with such total helplessness.

Guilt twisted his gut. Words collected on his tongue, cruel and terrible words, but he could not turn them into a sentence.

‘Robin.’ Professor Lovell was at his side, gripping his shoulder so tightly it hurt. ‘Translate, please.’

This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

But what could he possibly say? He saw the crewman’s blistering irritation. He saw the rustling impatience of the other passengers in the queue. They were tired, they were cold, they couldn’t understand why they hadn’t boarded yet. He felt Professor Lovell’s thumb digging a groove into his collarbone, and a thought struck him – a thought so frightening that it made his knees tremble – which was that should he pose too much of a problem, should he stir up trouble, then the Countess of Harcourt might simply leave him behind onshore as well.

‘Your contract’s no good here,’ he murmured to the labourer. ‘Try the next ship.’

The labourer gaped in disbelief. ‘Did you read it? It says London, it says the East India Company, it says this ship, the Countess—’

Robin shook his head. ‘It’s no good,’ he said, then repeated this line, as if doing so might make it true. ‘It’s no good, you’ll have to try the next ship.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ demanded the labourer.

Robin could hardly force his words out. ‘It’s just no good.’

The labourer gaped at him. A thousand emotions worked through that weathered face – indignation, frustration, and finally, resignation. Robin had been afraid the labourer might argue, might fight, but quickly it became clear that for this man, such treatment was nothing new. This had happened before. The labourer turned and made his way down the gangplank, shoving passengers aside as he did. In a few moments he was gone from sight.

Robin felt very dizzy. He escaped back down the gangplank to Mrs Piper’s side. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Oh, you’re shaking, poor thing.’ She was immediately on him like a mother hen, enveloping him within her shawl. She spoke a sharp word to Professor Lovell. He sighed, nodded; then they bustled through to the front of the line, from which they were whisked straight to their cabins while a porter collected their luggage and carried it behind them.

An hour later, the Countess of Harcourt left the port.

Robin was settled on his bunk with a thick blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and he would have happily stayed there all day, but Mrs Piper urged him back above deck to watch the receding shoreline. He felt a sharp ache in his chest as Canton disappeared over the horizon, and then a raw emptiness, as if a grappling hook had yanked his heart out of his body. It had not registered until now that he would not step foot on his native shore again for many years, if ever. He wasn’t sure what to make of this fact. The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

He watched the ocean for a long time, indifferent to the wind, staring until even his imagined vision of the shore faded away.

He spent the first few days of the voyage sleeping. He was still recuperating; Mrs Piper insisted he take daily walks above deck for his health, but initially he could manage only a few minutes at a time before he had to lie down. He was fortunate to be spared the nausea of seasickness; a childhood along docks and rivers had habituated his senses to the roiling instability. When he felt strong enough to spend whole afternoons above deck, he loved sitting by the railings, watching the ceaseless waves changing colour with the sky, feeling the ocean spray on his face.

Occasionally Professor Lovell would chat with him as they paced the deck together. Robin learned quickly that the professor was a precise and reticent man. He offered up information when he thought Robin needed it, but otherwise, he was happy to let questions lie.

He told Robin they would reside in his estate in Hampstead when they reached England. He did not say whether he had family at that estate. He confirmed that he had paid Miss Betty all those years, but did not explain why. He intimated that he’d known Robin’s mother, which was how he’d known Robin’s address, but he did not elaborate on the nature of their relationship or how they’d met. The only time he acknowledged their prior acquaintance was when he asked Robin how his family came to live in that riverside shack.

‘They were a well-off merchant family when I knew them,’ he said. ‘Had an estate in Peking before they moved south. What was it, gambling? I suppose it was the brother, wasn’t it?’

Months ago Robin would have spat at anyone for speaking so cruelly about his family. But here, alone in the middle of the ocean with no relatives and nothing to his name, he could not summon the ire. He had no fire left in him. He was only scared, and so very tired.

In any case, all this accorded with what Robin had been told of his family’s previous wealth, which had been squandered completely in the years after his birth. His mother had complained about it bitterly and often. Robin was fuzzy on the details, but the story involved what so many tales of decline in Qing dynasty China did: an aging patriarch, a profligate son, malicious and manipulative friends, and a helpless daughter whom, for some mysterious reason, no one would marry. Once, he’d been told, he’d slept in a lacquered crib. Once, they’d enjoyed a dozen servants and a chef who cooked rare delicacies imported from northern markets. Once, they’d lived in an estate that could have housed five families, with peacocks roaming about the yard. But all Robin had ever known was the little house on the river.

‘My mother said that my uncle lost all their money at the opium houses,’ Robin told him. ‘Debtors seized their estate, and we had to move. Then my uncle went missing when I was three, and it was just us and my aunts and grandparents. And Miss Betty.’

Professor Lovell made a noncommittal hum of sympathy. ‘That’s too bad.’

Apart from these talks, the professor spent most of the day holed up in his cabin. They saw him only semi-regularly in the mess for dinners; more often Mrs Piper had to fill a plate with hardtack and dried pork and take it to his room.

‘He’s working on his translations,’ Mrs Piper told Robin. ‘He’s always picking up scrolls and old books on these trips, you see, and he likes to get a head start on rendering them into English before he gets back to London. They keep him so busy there – he’s a very important man, a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, you know – and he says sea voyages are the only time he gets any peace and quiet. Isn’t that funny. He bought some nice rhyming dictionaries in Macau – lovely things, though he won’t let me touch them, the pages are so fragile.’

Robin was startled to hear that they’d been to Macau. He had not been aware of any Macau trip; naively, he’d imagined he was the only reason why Professor Lovell had come to China at all. ‘How long were you there? In Macau, I mean.’

‘Oh, two weeks and some change. It would have been just two, but we were held up at customs. They don’t like letting foreign women onto the mainland – I had to dress up and pretend to be the professor’s uncle, can you imagine!’

Two weeks.

Two weeks ago, Robin’s mother was still alive.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ Mrs Piper ruffled his hair. ‘You look pale.’

Robin nodded, and swallowed down the words he knew he could not say.

He had no right to be resentful. Professor Lovell had promised him everything, and owed him nothing. Robin did not yet fully understand the rules of this world he was about to enter, but he understood the necessity of gratitude. Of deference. One did not spite one’s saviours.

‘Do you want me to take this plate down to the professor?’ he asked.

‘Thank you, dear. That’s very sweet of you. Come and meet me above deck afterwards and we’ll watch the sun go down.’

Time blurred. The sun rose and set, but without the regularity of routine – he had no chores, no water to fetch or errands to run – the days all seemed the same no matter the hour. Robin slept, reread his old books, and paced the decks. Occasionally he struck up a conversation with the other passengers, who always seemed delighted to hear a near pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent out of the mouth of this little Oriental boy. Recalling Professor Lovell’s words, he tried very hard to live exclusively in English. When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them.

He quashed his memories too. His life in Canton – his mother, his grandparents, a decade of running about the docks – it all proved surprisingly easy to shed, perhaps because this passage was so jarring, the break so complete. He’d left behind everything he’d known. There was nothing to cling to, nothing to escape back to. His world now was Professor Lovell, Mrs Piper, and the promise of a country on the other side of the ocean. He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive. He pulled on his English accent like a new coat, adjusted everything he could about himself to make it fit, and, within weeks, wore it with comfort. In weeks, no one was asking him to speak a few words in Chinese for their entertainment. In weeks, no one seemed to remember he was Chinese at all.

One morning, Mrs Piper woke him very early. He made some noises of protest, but she insisted. ‘Come, dear, you won’t want to miss this.’ Yawning, he pulled on a jacket. He was still rubbing his eyes when they emerged above deck into a cold morning shrouded in mist so thick Robin could hardly see the prow of the ship. But then the fog cleared, and a grey-black silhouette emerged over the horizon, and that was the first glimpse Robin ever had of London: the Silver City, the heart of the British Empire, and in that era, the largest and richest city in the world.

Chapter Two

London was drab and grey; was exploding in colour; was a raucous din, bursting with life; was eerily quiet, haunted by ghosts and graveyards. As the Countess of Harcourt sailed inland down the River Thames into the dockyards at the beating heart of the capital, Robin saw immediately that London was, like Canton, a city of contradictions and multitudes, as was any city that acted as a mouth to the world.

But unlike Canton, London had a mechanical heartbeat. Silver hummed through the city. It glimmered from the wheels of cabs and carriages and from horses’ hooves; shone from buildings under windows and over doorways; lay buried under the streets and up in the ticking arms of clock towers; was displayed in shopfronts whose signs proudly boasted the magical amplifications of their breads, boots, and baubles. The lifeblood of London carried a sharp, tinny timbre wholly unlike the rickety, clacking bamboo that underwrote Canton. It was artificial, metallic – the sound of a knife screeching across a sharpening steel; it was the monstrous industrial labyrinth of William Blake’s ‘cruel Works / Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other’.[4]

London had accumulated the lion’s share of both the world’s silver ore and the world’s languages, and the result was a city that was bigger, heavier, faster, and brighter than nature allowed. London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved. London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.

But the scales had not yet tipped, and the revels, for now, could be sustained. When Robin, Professor Lovell, and Mrs Piper stepped ashore at the Port of London, the docks were a flurry of the colonial trade at its apex. Ships heavy with chests of tea, cotton, and tobacco, their masts and crossbeams studded with silver that made them sail more quickly and safely, sat waiting to be emptied in preparation for the next voyage to India, to the West Indies, to Africa, to the Far East. They sent British wares across the world. They brought back chests of silver.

Silver bars had been used in London – and indeed, throughout the world – for a millennium, but not since the height of the Spanish Empire had any place in the world been so rich in or so reliant on silver’s power. Silver lining the canals made the water fresher and cleaner than any river like the Thames had a right to be. Silver in the gutters disguised the stink of rain, sludge, and sewage with the scent of invisible roses. Silver in the clock towers made the bells chime for miles and miles further than they should have, until the notes clashed discordantly against each other throughout the city and over the countryside.

Silver was in the seats of the two-wheeled Hansom cabs Professor Lovell hailed when they had cleared customs – one for the three of them, and a second for their trunks. As they settled in, tightly nestled against each other in the tiny carriage, Professor Lovell reached over his knees and pointed out a silver bar embedded in the floor of the carriage.

‘Can you read what that says?’ he asked.

Robin bent over, squinting. ‘Speed. And . . . spes?’

‘Spēs,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It’s Latin. It’s the root word of the English speed, and it means a nexus of things involving hope, fortune, success, and reaching one’s goal. Makes the carriages run a bit more safely and quickly.’

Robin frowned, running his finger along the bar. It seemed so small, too innocuous to produce such a profound effect. ‘But how?’ And a second, more urgent question. ‘Will I—’

‘In time.’ Professor Lovell patted him on the shoulder. ‘But yes, Robin Swift. You’ll be one of the few scholars in the world that knows the secrets of silver-working. That’s what I’ve brought you here to do.’

Two hours in the cab brought them to a village called Hampstead several miles north of London proper, where Professor Lovell owned a four-storey house made of pale red brick and white stucco, surrounded by a generous swath of neat green shrubbery.

‘Your room is at the top,’ Professor Lovell told Robin as he unlocked the door. ‘Up the stairs and to the right.’

The house was very dark and chilly inside. Mrs Piper went about pulling open the curtains, while Robin dragged his trunk up the spiralling staircase and down the hall as instructed. His room consisted of only a little furniture – a writing desk, a bed, and a sitting chair – and was bare of any decorations or possessions except for the corner bookshelf, which was packed with so many titles that his treasured collection felt paltry in comparison.

Curious, Robin approached. Had those books been prepared especially for him? That felt unlikely, though many of the titles looked like things he would enjoy – the top shelf alone had a number of Swifts and Defoes, novels by his favourite authors he hadn’t known existed. Ah, there was Gulliver’s Travels. He pulled the book off the shelf. It seemed well-worn, some pages creased and dog-eared and others stained by tea or coffee.

He replaced the book, confused. Someone else must have lived in this room before him. Some other boy, perhaps – someone his age, who loved Jonathan Swift just as much, who had read this copy of Gulliver’s Travels so many times that the ink at the top right where one’s finger turned the page was starting to fade.

But who could that have been? He’d assumed Professor Lovell had no children.

‘Robin!’ Mrs Piper bellowed from downstairs. ‘You’re wanted outside.’

Robin hurried back down the stairs. Professor Lovell waited by the door, looking impatiently at his pocket-watch.

‘Will your room do?’ he asked. ‘Has everything you need?’

Robin nodded effusively. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Good.’ Professor Lovell nodded to the waiting cab. ‘Get in, we’ve got to make you an Englishman.’

He meant this literally. For the rest of the afternoon, Professor Lovell took Robin on a series of errands in the service of assimilating him into British civil society. They saw a physician who weighed him, examined him, and reluctantly declared him fit for life on the island: ‘No tropical diseases nor fleas, thank heavens. He’s a bit small for his age, but raise him on mutton and mash and he’ll be fine. Now let’s have a smallpox jab – roll that sleeve up, please, thank you. It won’t hurt. Count to three.’ They saw a barber, who clipped Robin’s unruly, chin-length curls into a short, neat crop above his ears. They saw a hatter, a bootmaker, and finally a tailor, who measured every inch of Robin’s body and showed him several bolts of cloth among which Robin, overwhelmed, chose at random.

As the afternoon wound down, they went to the courthouse for an appointment with a solicitor who drafted a set of papers which, Robin was told, would make him a legal citizen of the United Kingdom and a ward under the guardianship of Professor Richard Linton Lovell.

Professor Lovell signed his name with a flourish. Then Robin went up to the solicitor’s desk. The surface was too high for him, so a clerk dragged over a bench on which he could stand.

‘I thought I had signed this already.’ Robin glanced down. The language seemed quite similar to the guardianship contract that Professor Lovell had given him in Canton.

‘Those were the terms between you and me,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This makes you an Englishman.’

Robin scanned the looping script – guardian, orphan, minor, custody. ‘You’re claiming me as a son?’

‘I’m claiming you as a ward. That’s different.’

Why?, he almost asked. Something important hinged on that question, though he was still too young to know what precisely it was. A moment stretched between them, pregnant with possibility. The solicitor scratched his nose. Professor Lovell cleared his throat. But the moment passed without comment. Professor Lovell was not forthcoming, and Robin already knew better than to press. He signed.

The sun had long set by the time they returned to Hampstead. Robin asked if he might head up to bed, but Professor Lovell urged him to the dining room.

‘You can’t disappoint Mrs Piper; she’s been in the kitchen all afternoon. At least push your food around on your plate for a bit.’

Mrs Piper and her kitchen had enjoyed a glorious reunion. The dining room table, which seemed ridiculously large for just the two of them, was piled with pitchers of milk, white rolls of bread, roast carrots and potatoes, gravy, something still simmering in a silver-gilded tureen, and what looked like an entire glazed chicken. Robin hadn’t eaten since that morning; he should have been famished, but he was so exhausted that the sight of all that food made his stomach twist.

Instead, he turned his eyes to a painting that hung behind the table. It was impossible to ignore; it dominated the entire room. It depicted a beautiful city at dusk, but it was not London, he didn’t think. It seemed more dignified. More ancient.

‘Ah. Now that,’ Professor Lovell followed his gaze, ‘is Oxford.’

Oxford. He’d heard that word before, but he wasn’t sure where. He tried to parse the name, the way he did with all unfamiliar English words. ‘A . . . a cow-trading centre? Is it a market?’

‘A university,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘A place where all the great minds of the nation can congregate in research, study, and instruction. It’s a wonderful place, Robin.’

He pointed to a grand domed building in the middle of the painting. ‘This is the Radcliffe Library. And this,’ he gestured to a tower beside it, the tallest building in the landscape, ‘is the Royal Institute of Translation. This is where I teach, and where I spend the majority of the year when I’m not in London.’

‘It’s lovely,’ said Robin.

‘Oh, yes.’ Professor Lovell spoke with uncharacteristic warmth. ‘It’s the loveliest place on earth.’

He spread his hands through the air, as if envisioning Oxford before him. ‘Imagine a town of scholars, all researching the most marvellous, fascinating things. Science. Mathematics. Languages. Literature. Imagine building after building filled with more books than you’ve seen in your entire life. Imagine quiet, solitude, and a serene place to think.’ He sighed. ‘London is a blathering mess. It’s impossible to get anything done here; the city’s too loud, and it demands too much of you. You can escape out to places like Hampstead, but the screaming core draws you back in whether you like it or not. But Oxford gives you all the tools you need for your work – food, clothes, books, tea – and then it leaves you alone. It is the centre of all knowledge and innovation in the civilized world. And, should you progress sufficiently well in your studies here, you might one day be lucky enough to call it home.’

The only appropriate response here seemed to be an awed silence. Professor Lovell gazed wistfully at the painting. Robin tried to match his enthusiasm, but could not help glancing sideways at the professor. The softness in his eyes, the longing, startled him. In the little time he’d known him, Robin had never seen Professor Lovell express such fondness for anything.

Robin’s lessons began the next day.

As soon as breakfast concluded, Professor Lovell instructed Robin to wash and return to the drawing room in ten minutes. There waited a portly, smiling gentleman named Mr Felton – a first class at Oxford, an Oriel man, mind you – and yes, he’d make sure Robin was up to Oxford’s Latinate speed. The boy was starting a bit late compared to his peers, but if he studied hard, that could be easily remedied.

Thus began a morning of memorizing basic vocabulary – agricola, terra, aqua – which was daunting, but then seemed easy compared to the head-spinning explanations of declensions and conjugations which followed. Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar – he knew what worked in English because it sounded right – and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself. Noun, verb, subject, predicate, copula; then the nominative, genitive, accusative cases . . . He absorbed a bewildering amount of material over the next three hours, and had forgotten half of it by the time the lesson ended, but he came away with a deep appreciation of language and all the words for what you could do with it.

‘That’s all right, lad.’ Mr Felton, thankfully, was a patient fellow, and seemed sympathetic to the mental brutalization he’d subjected Robin to. ‘You’ll have much more fun after we’ve finished laying the groundwork. Just wait until we get to Cicero.’ He peered down at Robin’s notes. ‘But you’ve got to be more careful with your spelling.’

Robin couldn’t see where he’d gone wrong. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You’ve forgotten nearly all the macron marks.’

‘Oh.’ Robin suppressed a noise of impatience; he was very hungry, and just wanted to be done so he could go to lunch. ‘Those.’

Mr Felton rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’

Mr Felton departed at lunchtime, after assigning a list of nearly a hundred vocabulary words to memorize before the following morning. Robin ate alone in the drawing room, mechanically shoving ham and potatoes into his mouth as he blinked uncomprehendingly at his grammar.

‘More potatoes, dear?’ Mrs Piper asked.

‘No, thank you.’ The heavy food, combined with the tiny font of his readings, was making him sleepy. His head throbbed; what he really would have liked then was a long nap.

But there was no reprieve. At two on the dot, a thin, grey-whiskered gentleman who introduced himself as Mr Chester arrived at the house, and for the next three hours, they commenced Robin’s education in Ancient Greek.

Greek was an exercise in making the familiar strange. Its alphabet mapped onto the Roman alphabet, but only partly so, and often letters did not sound how they looked – a rho (P) was not a P, and an eta (H) was not an H. Like Latin, it made use of conjugations and declensions, but there were a good deal more moods, tenses, and voices to keep track of. Its inventory of sounds seemed further from English than Latin’s did, and Robin kept struggling not to make Greek tones sound like Chinese tones. Mr Chester was harsher than Mr Felton, and became snippy and irritable when Robin kept flubbing his verb endings. By the end of the afternoon, Robin felt so lost that it was all he could do to simply repeat the sounds Mr Chester spat at him.

Mr Chester left at five, after also assigning a mountain of readings that hurt Robin to look at. He carried the texts to his room, then stumbled, head spinning, to the dining room for supper.

‘How did your classes go?’ Professor Lovell inquired.

Robin hesitated. ‘Just fine.’

Professor Lovell’s mouth quirked up in a smile. ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it?’

Robin sighed. ‘Just a tad, sir.’

‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

‘But I don’t see why they have to be quite so complicated,’ Robin said with sudden vehemence. He couldn’t help it; his frustration had been mounting since noon. ‘I mean, why so many rules? Why so many endings? Chinese doesn’t have any of those; we haven’t got tenses or declensions or conjugations. Chinese is much simpler—’

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Every language is complex in its own way. Latin just happens to work its complexity into the shape of the word. Its morphological richness is an asset, not an obstacle. Consider the sentence He will learn. Tā huì xué. Three words in both English and Chinese. In Latin, it takes only one. Disce. Much more elegant, you see?’

Robin wasn’t sure he did.

This routine – Latin in the morning, Greek in the afternoon – became Robin’s life for the foreseeable future. He was grateful for this, despite the toil. At last, he had some structure to his days. He felt less unrooted and bewildered now – he had a purpose, he had a place, and even though he still couldn’t quite fathom why this life had fallen to him, of all the dock boys in Canton, he took to his duties with determined, uncomplaining diligence.

Twice a week he had conversational practice with Professor Lovell in Mandarin.[5] At first, he could not understand the point. These dialogues felt artificial, stilted, and most of all, unnecessary. He was fluent already; he didn’t stumble over vocabulary recall or pronunciations the way he did when he and Mr Felton conversed in Latin. Why should he answer such basic questions as how he found his dinner, or what he thought about the weather?

But Professor Lovell was adamant. ‘Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,’ he said. ‘Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.’

‘But I thought you wanted me to start thinking in English,’ Robin said, confused.

‘I want you to live in English,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This is true. But I still need you to practise your Chinese. Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.’

He spoke as if this had happened before.

‘You’ve grown up with solid foundations in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. That’s very fortunate – there are adults who spend their lifetimes trying to achieve what you have. And even if they do, they achieve only a passable fluency – enough to get by, if they think hard and recall vocabulary before speaking – but nothing close to a native fluency where words come unbidden, without lag or labour. You, on the other hand, have already mastered the hardest parts of two language systems – the accents and rhythm, those unconscious quirks that adults take forever to learn, and even then, not quite. But you must maintain them. You can’t squander your natural gifts.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Robin. ‘If my talents lie in Chinese, then what do I need Latin and Greek for?’

Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘To understand English.’

‘But I know English.’

‘Not as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do. And you’ll need to attain that mastery of Chinese as well. That begins with practising what you have.’

Professor Lovell was right. It was, Robin discovered, startlingly easy to lose a language that had once felt as familiar as his own skin. In London, without another Chinese person in sight, at least not in the circles of London where he lived, his mother tongue sounded like babble. Uttered in that drawing room, the most quintessentially English of spaces, it didn’t feel like it belonged. It felt made-up. And it scared him, sometimes, how often his memory would lapse, how the syllables he’d grown up around could suddenly sound so unfamiliar.

He put twice the effort into Chinese that he did into Greek and Latin. For hours a day he practised writing out his characters, labouring over every stroke until he achieved a perfect replica of the characters in print. He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered.

But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.

He could fix it, though. He would. Through practice, through memorization, through daily compositions – it wasn’t the same as living and breathing Mandarin, but it was close enough. He was of an age when the language had made a permanent impression on his mind. But he had to try, really try, to make sure that he did not stop dreaming in his native tongue.

At least thrice a week Professor Lovell received a variety of guests in his sitting room. Robin supposed they must have also been scholars, for often they came bearing stacks of books or bound manuscripts, which they would pore over and debate about until the late hours of the night. Several of these men, it turned out, could speak Chinese, and Robin sometimes hid out over the banister, eavesdropping on the very strange sound of Englishmen discussing the finer points of Classical Chinese grammar over afternoon tea. ‘It’s just a final particle,’ one of them would insist, while the others cried, ‘Well, they can’t all be final particles.’

Professor Lovell seemed to prefer that Robin keep out of sight when company came. He never explicitly forbade Robin’s presence, but he would make a note to say that Mr Woodbridge and Mr Ratcliffe were visiting at eight, which Robin interpreted to mean that he ought to make himself scarce.

Robin had no issue with this arrangement. Admittedly, he found their conversations fascinating – they spoke often of far-flung things like expeditions to the West Indies, negotiations over cotton prints in India, and violent unrest throughout the Near East. But as a group, they were frightening; a procession of solemn, erudite men, all dressed in black like a murder of crows, each more intimidating than the last.

The only time he barged in on one of these gatherings was by accident. He’d been out in the garden, taking his daily physician-recommended turn, when he overheard the professor and his guests loudly discussing Canton.

‘Napier’s an idiot,’ Professor Lovell was saying. ‘He’s playing his hand too early – there’s no subtlety. Parliament’s not ready, and he’s irritating the compradors besides.’

‘You think the Tories will want to move in at any point?’ asked a man with a very deep voice.

‘Perhaps. But they’ll have to get a better stronghold in Canton if they’re going to bring ships in.’

At this point Robin could not help but venture into the sitting room. ‘What about Canton?’

The gentlemen all turned to regard him at once. There were four of them, all very tall, and all either spectacled or monocled.

‘What about Canton?’ Robin asked again, suddenly nervous.

‘Shush,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, your shoes are filthy, you’re tracking mud everywhere. Take them off and go and have a bath.’

Robin persisted. ‘Is King George going to declare war on Canton?’

‘He can’t declare war on Canton, Robin. No one declares war on cities.’

‘Then is King George going to invade China?’ he persisted.

For some reason this made the gentlemen laugh.

‘Would that we could,’ said the man with the deep voice. ‘It’d make this whole enterprise a lot easier, wouldn’t it?’

A man with a great grey beard peered down at Robin. ‘And where would your loyalties lie? Here, or back home?’

‘My goodness.’ The fourth man, whose pale blue eyes Robin found unnerving, bent down to inspect him, as if through a massive, invisible magnifying glass. ‘Is this the new one? He’s even more of your spitting image than the last—’

Professor Lovell’s voice cut through the room like glass. ‘Hayward.’

‘Really, it’s uncanny, I mean, look at his eyes. Not the colour, but the shape—’

‘Hayward.’

Robin glanced back and forth between them, baffled.

‘That’s quite enough,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, go.’

Robin muttered an apology and hurried up the stairs, muddy boots forgotten. Over his shoulder, he heard fragments of Professor Lovell’s response: ‘He doesn’t know, I don’t like giving him ideas . . . No, Hayward, I won’t—’ But by the time he reached the safety of the landing, where he could lean over the banister and listen in without being caught, they had already changed the topic to Afghanistan.

That night, Robin stood before his mirror, staring intently at his face for so long that eventually it began to seem alien.

His aunts liked to say he had the kind of face that could blend in anywhere – his hair and eyes, both a softer shade of brown than the indigo-black that coloured the rest of his family, could have plausibly marked him as either the son of a Portuguese sailor or the heir to the Qing Emperor. But Robin had always attributed this to some accidental arrangement of nature that ascribed him features that could have belonged anywhere on the spectrum of either race, white or yellow.

He had never wondered whether he might not be full-blooded Chinese.

But what was the alternative? That his father was white? That his father was—

Look at his eyes.

That was incontrovertible proof, wasn’t it?

Then why would his father not claim Robin as his own? Why was he only a ward, and not a son?

But even then, Robin was not too young to understand there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged. He had a roof over his head, three guaranteed meals a day, and access to more books than he could read in a lifetime. He did not, he knew, have the right to demand anything more.

He made a decision then. He would never question Professor Lovell, never probe at the empty space where the truth belonged. As long as Professor Lovell did not accept him as a son, Robin would not attempt to claim him as a father. A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

He dried himself, dressed, and sat down at his desk to finish his translation exercise for the evening. He and Mr Felton had moved on to Tacitus’s Agricola now.

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.

Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.[6]

When Michaelmas term began in early October, Professor Lovell departed for Oxford, where he would stay for the next eight weeks. He would do this for each of Oxford’s three academic terms, returning only during the breaks. Robin relished these periods; even though his classes did not pause, it felt possible to breathe and relax then without risk of disappointing his guardian at every turn.

It also meant that, without Professor Lovell breathing over his shoulder, he had the freedom to explore the city.

Professor Lovell gave him no allowance, but Mrs Piper occasionally let him have some small change for fares, which he saved up until he could get to Covent Garden by carriage. When he learned from a paperboy about the horse-drawn omnibus service, he rode it almost every weekend, crisscrossing the heart of London from Paddington Green to the Bank. His first few trips alone terrified him; several times he grew convinced he would never find his way back to Hampstead again and would be doomed to live out his life as a waif on the streets. But he persisted. He refused to be cowed by London’s complexity, for wasn’t Canton, too, a labyrinth? He determined to make the place home by walking every inch of it. Bit by bit London grew to feel less overwhelming, less like a belching, contorted pit of monsters that might swallow him up at any corner and more like a navigable maze whose tricks and turns he could anticipate.

He read the city. London in the 1830s was exploding with print. Newspapers, magazines, journals, quarterlies, weeklies, monthlies, and books of every genre were flying off the shelves, tossed on doorsteps, and hawked from the corners of nearly every street. He pored over newsstand copies of The Times, the Standard, and the Morning Post; he read, though did not fully comprehend, articles in academic journals like Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review; he read penny satirical papers like Figaro in London, melodramatic pseudo-news like colourful crime reports and a series on the dying confessions of condemned prisoners. For cheaper stuff, he entertained himself with the Bawbee Bagpipe. He stumbled on a series called The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white. He discovered Fleet Street, the heart of London publishing, where newspapers came off the printing presses still hot. He went back there time and time again, bringing home stacks of yesterday’s papers for free from piles that were dumped on the corner.

He didn’t understand half of what he read, even if he could decipher all the individual words. The texts were packed with political allusions, inside jokes, slang, and conventions that he’d never learned. In lieu of a childhood spent absorbing it all in London, he tried devouring the corpus instead, tried to plough through references to things like Tories, Whigs, Chartists, and Reformers and memorize what they were. He learned what the Corn Laws were and what they had to do with a Frenchman named Napoleon. He learned who the Catholics and Protestants were, and how the (he thought, at least) small doctrinal differences between the two were apparently a matter of great and bloody importance. He learned that being English was not the same as being British, though he was still hard-pressed to articulate the difference between the two.

He read the city, and he learned its language. New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you. In London’s East End he encountered Cockney rhyming slang, which initially presented a great mystery, for he had no clue how Hampstead could come to mean ‘teeth.’[7] But once he learned about the omitted rhyming component, he had great fun coming up with his own. (Mrs Piper was not very amused when he began referring to dinner as the ‘meal of saints’.)[8]

Long after he learned the proper meanings of words and phrases that had once confused him, his mind still formed funny associations around them. He imagined the Cabinet as a series of massive shelves where men in fancy dress were arranged like dolls. He thought the Whigs were named for their wigs, and the Tories for the young Princess Victoria. He imagined Marylebone was composed of marble and bone, that Belgravia was a land of bells and graves, and that Chelsea was named for shells and the sea. Professor Lovell kept a shelf of Alexander Pope titles in his library, and for a full year Robin thought The Rape of the Lock was about fornication with an iron bolt instead of the theft of hair.[9]

He learned that a pound was worth twenty shillings, and a shilling was worth twelve pence – clarity on florins, groats, and farthings would have to come in time. He learned there were many types of British people, just as there were many types of Chinese people, and that being Irish or Welsh was distinct in important ways from being English. He learned Mrs Piper was from a place called Scotland, which made her a Scot, and also explained why her accent, lilting and rhotic, sounded so different from Professor Lovell’s crisp, straight intonations.

He learned that London in 1830 was a city that could not decide what it wanted to be. The Silver City was the largest financial centre of the world, the leading edge of industry and technology. But its profits were not shared equally. London was as much a city of plays at Covent Garden and balls in Mayfair as it was a city of teeming slums around St Giles. London was a city of reformers, a place where the likes of William Wilberforce and Robert Wedderburn had urged the abolition of slavery; where the Spa Fields riots had ended with the leaders charged for high treason; where Owenites had tried to get everyone to join their utopian socialist communities (he was still not sure what socialism was yet); and where Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published only forty years ago, had inspired waves of loud, proud feminists and suffragists in its wake. He discovered that in Parliament, in town halls, and on the streets, reformers of every stripe were fighting for the soul of London, while a conservative, landed ruling class fought back against attempts at change at every turn.

He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be. And he understood that silver lay behind it all. For when the Radicals wrote about the perils of industrialization, and when the Conservatives refuted this with proof of the booming economy; when any of the political parties spoke about slums, housing, roads, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing; when anyone spoke about Britain and the Empire’s future at all, the word was always there in papers, pamphlets, magazines, and even prayer books: silver, silver, silver.

From Mrs Piper, he learned more than he’d imagined possible about English food and England. Adjusting to this new palate took some time. He had never thought much about food when he lived in Canton – the porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, and vegetable dishes that comprised his daily meals had seemed unremarkable to him. They were the staples of a poor family’s diet, a far cry from high Chinese cuisine. Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

He took more pleasure in learning about the food than in eating it. This education came unprompted – dear Mrs Piper was the chatty sort, and would happily lecture as she served up lunch if Robin displayed even the slightest interest in what was on his plate. He was told that potatoes, which he found quite tasty in any form, were not to be served around important company, for they were considered lower-class. He found that newly invented silver-gilded dishes were used to keep food warm throughout a meal, but that it was rude to reveal this trickery to guests, and so the bars were always embedded on the very bottoms of the platters. He learned that the practice of serving food in successive courses was adopted from the French, and that the reason it was not yet a universal norm was a lingering resentment over that little man Napoleon. He learned, but did not quite understand, the subtle distinctions between lunch, luncheon, and a noon dinner. He learned he had the Roman Catholics to thank for his favourite almond cheesecakes, for the prohibition of dairy during fast days had forced English cooks to innovate with almond milk.

One night Mrs Piper brought out a round, flat circle: some kind of baked dough that had been cut into triangular wedges. Robin took one and tentatively bit at the corner. It was very thick and floury, much denser than the fluffy white rolls his mother used to steam every week. It was not unpleasant, just surprisingly heavy. He took a large gulp of water to guide the bolus down, then asked, ‘What’s this?’

‘That’s a bannock, dear,’ said Mrs Piper.

‘Scone,’ corrected Professor Lovell.

‘It’s properly a bannock—’

‘The scones are the pieces,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The bannock is the entire cake.’

‘Now look here, this is a bannock, and all the itty pieces are bannocks as well. Scones are those dry, crumbly things you English love to shove in your mouths—’

‘I assume you’re excepting your own scones, Mrs Piper. No one in their right mind would accuse those of being dry.’

Mrs Piper did not succumb to flattery. ‘It’s a bannock. They’re bannocks. My grandmother called them bannocks, my mother called them bannocks, so bannocks they are.’

‘Why’s it – why are they – called bannocks?’ Robin asked. The sound of the word made him imagine a monster of the hills, some clawed and gristly thing that wouldn’t be satisfied unless given a sacrifice of bread.

‘Because of Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Bannock comes from panicium, meaning “baked bread”.’

This seemed plausible, if disappointingly mundane. Robin took another bite of the bannock, or scone, and this time relished the thick, satisfying way it settled on his stomach.

He and Mrs Piper quickly bonded over a deep love of scones. She made them every which way – plain, served with a bit of clotted cream and raspberry jam; savoury and studded with cheese and garlic chives; or dotted through with bits of dried fruit. Robin liked them best plain – why ruin what was, in his opinion, perfect from conception? He had just learned about Platonic forms, and was convinced scones were the Platonic ideal of bread. And Mrs Piper’s clotted cream was wonderful, light and nutty and refreshing all at once. Some households simmered milk for nearly a full day on the stove to get that layer of cream on top, she told him, but last Christmas Professor Lovell had brought her a clever silver-work contraption that could separate the cream in seconds.

Professor Lovell liked plain scones the least, though, so sultana scones were the staple of their afternoon teas.

‘Why are they called sultanas?’ Robin asked. ‘They’re just raisins, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not sure, dear,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘Perhaps it’s where they’re from. Sultana does sound rather Oriental, doesn’t it? Richard, where are these grown? India?’

‘Asia Minor,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘And they’re sultanas, not sultans, because they haven’t got seeds.’

Mrs Piper winked at Robin. ‘Well, there you have it. It’s all about the seeds.’

Robin didn’t understand this joke, but he knew he didn’t like sultanas in his scones; when Professor Lovell wasn’t looking, he picked out his sultanas, slathered the denuded scone in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth.

Apart from scones, Robin’s other great indulgence was novels. The two dozen tomes he’d received every year in Canton had been a meagre trickle. Now he had access to a veritable flood. He was never without a book, but he had to get creative in squeezing leisure reading into his schedule – he read at the table, scarfing down Mrs Piper’s meals without a second thought to what he was putting in his mouth; he read while walking in the garden, though this made him dizzy; he even tried reading in the bath, but the wet, crumpled fingerprints he left on a new edition of Defoe’s Colonel Jack shamed him enough to make him give up the practice.

He enjoyed novels more than anything else. Dickens’s serials were well and fun, but what a pleasure it was to hold the weight of an entire, finished story in his hands. He read any genre he could get his hands on. He enjoyed all of Jane Austen’s oeuvre, though it took much consulting with Mrs Piper to understand the social conventions Austen described. (Where was Antigua? And why was Sir Thomas Bertram always going there?[10]) He devoured the travel literature of Thomas Hope and James Morier, through whom he met the Greeks and the Persians, or at least some fanciful version of them. He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.

Upon his return from Oxford that first term, Professor Lovell took Robin to a bookshop – Hatchards on Piccadilly, just opposite Fortnum & Mason. Robin paused outside the green-painted entrance, gaping. He’d passed by bookshops many times during his jaunts about the city, but never had he imagined he might be allowed to go inside. He had somehow developed the idea that bookshops were only for wealthy grown-ups, that he’d be dragged out by the ear if he dared to enter.

Professor Lovell smiled when he saw Robin hesitating at the doors.

‘And this is just a shop for the public,’ he said. ‘Wait until you see a college library.’

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

‘Pick one,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You ought to know the feeling of acquiring your first book.’

Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures? Robin didn’t know the first title from the second, and he was too dazzled by the sheer amount of text to flip through and decide. His eyes alighted on a title: The King’s Own by Frederick Marryat, an author he was, so far, unfamiliar with. But new, he thought, was good.

‘Hm. Marryat. I haven’t read him, but I’m told he’s popular with boys your age.’ Professor Lovell turned the book over in his hands. ‘This one, then? You’re sure?’

Robin nodded. If he didn’t decide now, he knew, he’d never leave. He was like a starved man in a pastry shop, dazzled by his options, but he did not want to try the professor’s patience.

Outside, the professor handed him the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. Robin hugged it to his chest, willing himself not to rip it open until they’d returned home. He thanked Professor Lovell profusely, and stopped only when he noticed this made the professor look somewhat uncomfortable. But then the professor asked him whether it felt good to hold the new book in his hands. Robin enthusiastically agreed and, for the first time he could remember, they traded smiles.

Robin had planned to save The King’s Own until that weekend, when he had a whole afternoon without classes to slowly savour its pages. But Thursday afternoon came, and he found he couldn’t wait. After Mr Felton left, he wolfed down the plate of bread and cheese Mrs Piper had set out and hurried upstairs to the library, where he curled up in his favourite armchair and started to read.

He was immediately enchanted. The King’s Own was a tale of naval exploits; of revenge, daring, and struggle; of ship battles and far-flung travels. His mind drifted to his own voyage from Canton, and he reframed those memories in the context of the novel, imagined himself battling pirates, building rafts, winning medals for courage and valour—

The door creaked open.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Professor Lovell.

Robin glanced up. His mental image of the Royal Navy navigating choppy waters had been so vivid, it took him a moment to remember where he was.

‘Robin,’ Professor Lovell said again, ‘what are you doing?’

Suddenly the library felt very cold; the golden afternoon darkened. Robin followed Professor Lovell’s gaze to the ticking clock above the door. He’d completely forgotten the time. But those hands couldn’t possibly be right, it couldn’t have been three hours since he’d sat down to read.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still somewhat dazed. He felt like a traveller from far away, plucked from the Indian Ocean and dropped into this dim, chilly study. ‘I didn’t – I lost track of time.’

He couldn’t read Professor Lovell’s expression at all. That scared him. That inscrutable wall, that inhuman blankness, was infinitely more frightening than fury would have been.

‘Mr Chester has been downstairs for over an hour,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘I wouldn’t have kept him waiting for even ten minutes, but I’ve only just returned to the house.’

Robin’s gut twisted with guilt. ‘I’m very sorry, sir—’

‘What are you reading?’ Professor Lovell interrupted.

Robin hesitated for a moment, then held out The King’s Own.[11] ‘The book you bought me, sir – there’s a big battle going on, I just wanted to see what—’

‘Do you think it matters what that infernal book is about?’

In years to come, whenever Robin looked back on that memory, he was appalled by how brazenly he had acted next. He must have been panicked out of his mind, because it was absurdly foolish, in retrospect, how he had simply closed the Marryat book and headed for the door, as if he could merely hurry down to class, as if a fault of this magnitude could be so easily forgotten.

As he neared the door, Professor Lovell drew his hand back and brought his knuckles hard against Robin’s left cheek.

The force of the blow thrust him to the floor. He didn’t register pain so much as shock; the reverberation in his temples didn’t hurt, not yet – that came later, after several seconds passed and the blood began rushing to his head.

Professor Lovell wasn’t finished. As Robin rose to his knees, dazed, the professor pulled the poker from beside the fireplace and swung it diagonally against the right side of Robin’s torso. Then he brought it down again. And again.

Robin would have been more frightened if he’d ever suspected Professor Lovell of violence, but this beating was so unexpected, so wholly out of character, that it felt surreal more than anything else. It didn’t occur to him to beg, to cry, or even to scream. Even as the poker cracked against his ribs for the eighth, ninth, tenth, time – even as he tasted blood on his teeth – all he felt was a deep bewilderment that this was happening at all. It felt absurd. He seemed to be caught in a dream.

Professor Lovell, too, did not look like a man in the throes of a tempestuous rage. He was not shouting; his eyes were not wild; his cheeks had not even turned red. He seemed simply, with every hard and deliberate blow, to be attempting to inflict maximum pain with the minimum risk of permanent injury. For he did not strike Robin’s head, nor did he apply so much force that Robin’s ribs would crack. No; he only dealt bruises that could be easily hidden and that, in time, would heal completely.

He knew very well what he was doing. He seemed to have done this before.

After twelve strikes, it all stopped. With just as much poise and precision, Professor Lovell returned the poker to the mantel, stepped back, and sat down at the table, regarding Robin silently as the boy climbed to his knees and wiped the blood, as best he could, from his face.

After a very long silence, he spoke. ‘When I brought you from Canton, I made clear my expectations.’

A sob had finally built up in Robin’s throat, a choking, delayed emotional reaction, but he swallowed it down. He was terrified of what Professor Lovell would do if he made a noise.

‘Get up,’ Professor Lovell said coldly. ‘Sit down.’

Automatically, Robin obeyed. One of his molars felt loose. He probed at it, wincing when a fresh, salty spurt of blood coated his tongue.

‘Look at me,’ Professor Lovell said.

Robin lifted his eyes.

‘Well, that’s one good thing about you,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.’

Robin’s nose prickled. Tears threatened to burst forth, and he strained to hold them back. He felt as if a spike were being driven through his temples. He was so overcome with pain then that he could not breathe, and still it seemed the most important thing was to display no hint of suffering at all. He had never felt so wretched in his life. He wanted to die.

‘I won’t tolerate laziness under this roof,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Translation is no easy occupation, Robin. It demands focus. Discipline. You are already at a disadvantage for your lack of an early education in Latin and Greek, and you’ve only six years to make up the difference before you begin at Oxford. You cannot sloth. You cannot waste time on daydreams.’

He sighed. ‘I hoped, based on Miss Slate’s reports, that you had grown to be a diligent and hardworking boy. I see now that I was wrong. Laziness and deceit are common traits among your kind. This is why China remains an indolent and backwards country while her neighbours hurtle towards progress. You are, by nature, foolish, weak-minded, and disinclined to hard work. You must resist these traits, Robin. You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood. I’ve gambled greatly on your capacity to do so. Prove to me that it was worth it, or purchase your own passage back to Canton.’ He cocked his head. ‘Do you wish to return to Canton?’

Robin swallowed. ‘No.’

He meant it. Even after this, even after the miseries of his classes, he could not imagine an alternate future for himself. Canton meant poverty, insignificance, and ignorance. Canton meant the plague. Canton meant no more books. London meant all the material comforts he could ask for. London meant, someday, Oxford.

‘Then decide now, Robin. Dedicate yourself to excelling at your studies, make the sacrifices that entails, and promise me you will never embarrass me so much again. Or take the first packet home. You’ll be back on the streets with no family, no skills, and no money. You’ll never get the kinds of opportunities I’m offering you again. You’ll only ever dream of seeing London again, much less Oxford. You will never, ever touch a silver bar.’ Professor Lovell leaned back, regarding Robin through cold, scrutinizing eyes. ‘So. Choose.’

Robin whispered a response.

‘Louder. In English.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said hoarsely. ‘I want to stay.’

‘Good.’ Professor Lovell stood up. ‘Mr Chester is waiting downstairs. Collect yourself and go to class.’

Somehow Robin made it through the entirety of that class, sniffling, too dazed to focus, a great bruise blooming on his face while his torso throbbed from a dozen invisible hurts. Mercifully, Mr Chester said nothing about the incident. Robin went through a list of conjugations and got all of them wrong. Mr Chester patiently corrected him in a pleasant if forcedly even tone. Robin’s tardiness had not shortened the class – they went far past suppertime, and those were the longest three hours of Robin’s life.

The next morning, Professor Lovell acted as if nothing had happened. When Robin came down for breakfast, the professor asked if he’d finished his translations. Robin said he had. Mrs Piper brought out eggs and ham for breakfast, and they ate in a somewhat frenzied silence. It hurt to chew, and at times to swallow – Robin’s face had swollen even more overnight – but Mrs Piper only suggested he cut his ham into smaller pieces when he coughed. They all finished their tea. Mrs Piper cleared the plates away, and Robin went to retrieve his Latin textbooks before Mr Felton arrived.

It never occurred to Robin to run, not then, and not once in the weeks that followed. Some other child might have been frightened, might have seized the first chance to escape into London’s streets. Some other child suited to better, kinder treatment might have realized that such nonchalance on the part of adults like Mrs Piper, Mr Felton, and Mr Chester to a badly bruised eleven-year-old was frightfully wrong. But Robin was so grateful for this return to equilibrium that he couldn’t find it in himself to even resent what had happened.

After all, it never happened again. Robin made sure it did not. He spent the next six years studying to the point of exhaustion. With the threat of expatriation looming constantly above him, he devoted his life to becoming the student Professor Lovell wanted to see.

Greek and Latin grew more entertaining after the first year, after he’d assembled enough building blocks of each language to piece together fragments of meaning for himself. From then on it felt less like groping in the dark whenever he encountered a new text and more like filling in the blanks. Figuring out the precise grammatical formulation of a phrase that had been frustrating him gave him the same sort of satisfaction he derived from reshelving a book where it belonged or finding a missing sock – all the pieces fitted together, and everything was whole and complete.

In Latin, he read through Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and Juvenal; in Greek, he tackled Xenophon, Homer, Lysias, and Plato. In time, he realized he was quite good at languages. His memory was strong, and he had a knack for tones and rhythm. He soon reached a level of fluency in both Greek and Latin that any Oxford undergraduate would have been jealous of. In time, Professor Lovell stopped commenting on his inherited inclination to sloth, and instead nodded in approval at every update on Robin’s rapid progress through the canon.

History, meanwhile, marched on around them. In 1830, King George IV had died and was succeeded by his younger brother, William IV, the eternal compromiser who pleased no one. In 1831, another cholera epidemic swept through London, leaving thirty thousand dead in its wake. The brunt of its impact fell on the poor and the destitute; those living in close, cramped quarters who could not escape each other’s tainted miasmas.[12] But the neighbourhood in Hampstead was untouched – to Professor Lovell and his friends in their remote walled estates, the epidemic was something to mention in passing, wince about in sympathy, and quickly forget.

In 1833, a momentous thing happened – slavery was abolished in England and its colonies, to be replaced by a six-year apprenticeship term as a transition to freedom. Among Professor Lovell’s interlocutors, this news was taken with the mild disappointment of a lost cricket match.

‘Well, that’s ruined the West Indies for us,’ Mr Hallows complained. ‘The abolitionists with their damned moralizing. I still believe this obsession with abolition is a product of the British needing to at least feel culturally superior now that they’ve lost America. And on what grounds? It isn’t as if those poor fellows aren’t equally enslaved back in Africa under those tyrants they call kings.’[13]

‘I wouldn’t give up on the West Indies just yet,’ Professor Lovell said. ‘They’re still allowing a legal kind of forced labour—’

‘But without ownership, it takes the teeth out of it all.’

‘Perhaps that’s for the best, though – freedmen do work better than slaves after all, and slavery is in fact more expensive than a free labour market—’

‘You’ve been reading too much of Smith. Hobart and MacQueen had the right idea – just smuggle in a ship full of Chinamen,[14] that’ll do the trick. They’re so very industrious and orderly, Richard should know—’

‘No, Richard thinks they’re lazy, don’t you, Richard?’

‘Now, what I wish,’ interrupted Mr Ratcliffe, ‘is that all these women would stop taking part in those anti-slavery debates. They see too much of themselves in their situation; it puts ideas in their head.’

‘What,’ asked Professor Lovell, ‘is Mrs Ratcliffe unsatisfied with her domestic situation?’

‘She’d like to think that it’s a hop and a skip from abolition to women’s suffrage.’ Mr Ratcliffe let out a nasty laugh. ‘That would be the day.’

And with that, the conversation turned to the absurdity of women’s rights.

Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were pieces to be moved and manipulated at will.

But if the world was an abstract object for them, it was even more abstract to him, for he had no stake in any of these matters. Robin processed that era through the myopic world of Lovell Manor. Reforms, colonial uprisings, slave revolts, women’s suffrage, and the latest Parliamentary debates all meant nothing to him. All that mattered were the dead languages before him, and the fact that one day, a day that drew ever closer as the years trickled by, he would matriculate at the university he knew only from the painting on the wall – the city of knowledge, the city of dreaming spires.

It all ended without circumstance, without celebration. One day Mr Chester told Robin as he packed up his books that he’d enjoyed their lessons, and that he wished him well at university. This was how Robin discovered he was to be sent up to Oxford the next week.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Professor Lovell when asked. ‘Did I forget to tell you? I’ve written to the college. They’ll be expecting you.’

Supposedly there was an application process, some exchange of letters of introduction and guarantees of funding that secured his position. Robin was involved with none of this. Professor Lovell simply informed him he was due to move into his new lodgings on 29th September, so he’d best have his bags packed by the evening of the 28th. ‘You’ll arrive a few days before the start of term. We’ll ride up together.’

The night before they left, Mrs Piper baked Robin a plate of small, hard, round biscuits so rich and crumbly they seemed to melt away in his mouth.

‘It’s shortbread,’ she explained. ‘Now, they’re very rich, so don’t eat them all at once. I don’t make them much, as Richard thinks sugar ruins a boy, but you’ve deserved it.’

‘Shortbread,’ Robin repeated. ‘Because they don’t last long?’

They had been playing this game since the night of the bannock debate.

‘No, dear.’ She laughed. ‘Because of the crumble. Fat “shortens” the pastry. That’s what short means, you know – it’s how we get the word shortening.’

He swallowed the sweet, fatty lump and chased it down with a gulp of milk. ‘I’ll miss your etymology lessons, Mrs Piper.’

To his surprise, her eyes turned red at the corners. Her voice grew thick. ‘Write home whenever you need a sack of victuals,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much of what goes on inside those colleges, but I know their food is something awful.’

Chapter Three

The next morning Robin and Professor Lovell took a cab to a station in central London, where they transferred to a stagecoach bound all the way for Oxford. As they waited to board, Robin entertained himself by trying to guess at the etymology of stagecoach. Coach was obvious, but why stage? Was it because the flat, wide carriage looked something like a stage? Because entire troupes of actors might have travelled thus, or performed atop one? But that was a stretch. A carriage looked like a lot of things, but he couldn’t imagine how a stage – a raised public platform – was the obvious association. Why not a basketcoach? An omnicoach?

‘Because the journey happens in stages,’ Professor Lovell explained when Robin gave up. ‘Horses don’t want to run all the way from London to Oxford, and usually neither do we. But I detest travellers’ inns, so we’re doing the single-day run; it’s about ten hours with no stops, so use that lavatory before we go.’

They shared their stagecoach with nine other passengers – a well-dressed little family of four and a group of slouching gentlemen in drab suits and elbow patches who Robin assumed were all professors. Robin sat squeezed between Professor Lovell and one of the suited men. It was too early for conversation. As the carriage bounced along the cobblestones, the passengers either dozed or stared blankly in various directions.

It took Robin a while to realize the woman across from him was staring over her knitting. When he met her eyes, she promptly turned to Professor Lovell and asked, ‘Is that an Oriental?’

Professor Lovell jerked his head up, roused from slumber. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I was asking about your boy,’ said the woman. ‘Is he from Peking?’

Robin glanced at Professor Lovell, suddenly very curious what he might say.

But Professor Lovell only shook his head. ‘Canton,’ he said curtly. ‘Further south.’

‘Ah,’ said the woman, clearly disappointed when he wouldn’t elaborate.

Professor Lovell went back to sleep. The woman looked Robin up and down again with an unsettlingly eager curiosity, then turned her attention to her children. Robin remained silent. Suddenly his chest felt very tight, though he couldn’t understand why this was.

The children wouldn’t stop staring at him; their eyes were wide and their mouths gaped in a way that would have been precious if they didn’t make Robin feel as if he’d sprouted another head. After a moment the boy tugged on his mother’s sleeve and made her bend down so he could whisper in her ear.

‘Oh.’ She chuckled, then glanced at Robin. ‘He’d like to know if you can see.’

‘I – what?’

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.) ‘With your eyes like that – can you see everything? Or is it only in little slits?’

‘I can see perfectly well,’ Robin said quietly.

The boy, disappointed, turned his attention to pinching his sister. The woman resumed her knitting as if nothing had happened.

The little family got off at Reading. Robin found he breathed more easily when they were gone. He could also stretch his legs over the aisle to give his stiff knees a respite without the mother shooting him a startled, suspicious look, as if she’d caught him in the act of trying to pick her pockets.

The last ten or so miles to Oxford were an idyllic stretch of green pastureland, punctuated by the occasional herd of cows. Robin tried reading a guidebook entitled The University of Oxford and Her Colleges, but found himself with a throbbing headache, and so began nodding off. Some stagecoaches were outfitted with silver-work to make the ride feel as smooth as skates on ice, but theirs was an older model, and the constant jostling was exhausting. He awoke to wheels rumbling against cobblestones and glanced around to discover they had arrived in the middle of High Street, right before the walled gates of his new home.

Oxford was composed of twenty-two colleges, all with their own residential complexes, coats of arms, dining halls, customs, and traditions. Christ Church, Trinity, St John’s, and All Souls boasted the largest endowments and therefore the nicest grounds. ‘You’ll want to make friends there, if only to have a look at the gardens,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You can safely ignore anyone from Worcester or Hertford. They’re poor and ugly,’ whether he was referring to the people or the gardens, Robin couldn’t be sure, ‘and their food is bad.’ One of the other gentlemen gave him a sour look as they stepped off the coach.

Robin would live in University College. His guidebook informed him that it was commonly referred to as ‘Univ’, that it housed all students enrolled in the Royal Institute of Translation, and that in aesthetic it was ‘sombre and venerable, a look befitting of the university’s oldest daughter’. It certainly looked like a Gothic sanctuary; its front wall was all turrets and uniform windows against smooth white stone.

‘Well, here you are.’ Professor Lovell stood with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking slightly uncomfortable. Now that they’d been to the porter’s lodge, acquired Robin’s keys, and dragged Robin’s trunks off High Street onto the paved sidewalk, it seemed obvious that a parting was imminent. Professor Lovell simply didn’t know how to go about it. ‘Well,’ he said again. ‘You have a few days before classes start, so you ought to spend them getting to know the city. You’ve got a map – yes, there – though the place is small enough you’ll learn it by heart after a few strolls. Perhaps seek out the members of your cohort; they’ll likely have moved in by now. My residence here is up north in Jericho; I’ve written you directions in that envelope. Mrs Piper will join me there next week, and we’ll expect you at dinner the Saturday after next. She’ll be very happy to see you.’ All this he rattled off like a memorized checklist. He seemed to have a hard time looking Robin in the eyes. ‘Are you all set?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Robin. ‘I’ll be very happy to see Mrs Piper as well.’

They blinked at each other. Robin felt that surely there were other words that should be said, words to mark this occasion – his growing up, leaving home, his entering university – as momentous. But he couldn’t imagine what they might be, and apparently neither could Professor Lovell.

‘Well, then.’ Professor Lovell gave him a curt nod and turned halfway towards High Street, as if confirming he was no longer needed. ‘You can manage your trunks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, then,’ Professor Lovell said again, then headed back out to High Street.

It was an awkward phrase to end on, two words that suggested more to come. Robin watched him for a moment, half expecting him to turn around, but Professor Lovell seemed focused solely on hailing a cab. Strange, yes. But this did not bother Robin. This was how things had always been between them: conversations unfinished, words best left unsaid.

Robin’s lodgings were in Number 4, Magpie Lane[15] – a green-painted building halfway down the crooked, narrow alley that connected High Street and Merton Street. Someone else was already standing at the front door, fiddling with the lock. He had to be a new student – satchels and trunks were scattered on the cobblestones around him.

He was, Robin saw as he drew closer, very clearly not native to England. South Asia was more likely. Robin had seen sailors with the same colouring in Canton, all from ships arriving from India. The stranger had smooth dusky skin, a tall and graceful build, and the longest, darkest eyelashes that Robin had ever seen. His eyes flickered up and down Robin’s frame before settling on his face, questioning – determining, Robin suspected, just how foreign Robin was in return.

‘I’m Robin,’ Robin burst out. ‘Robin Swift.’

‘Ramiz Rafi Mirza,’ the other boy pronounced proudly, extending his hand. He spoke with such proper English diction he sounded nearly like Professor Lovell. ‘Or just Ramy, if you like. And you – you’re here for the Translation Institute, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ said Robin, then added, on a hunch, ‘I’m from Canton.’

Ramy’s face relaxed. ‘Calcutta.’

‘Did you just get in?’

‘To Oxford, yes. To England, no – I came in through Liverpool on a ship four years ago and I’ve been holed up in a big, boring estate in Yorkshire until now. My guardian wanted me to acclimatize to English society before I matriculated.’

‘Mine too,’ Robin said eagerly. ‘What did you think?’

‘Awful weather.’ One side of Ramy’s mouth quirked up. ‘And the only thing I can eat here is fish.’

They beamed at each other.

Robin felt a strange, bursting feeling in his chest then. He’d never met someone else in his situation, or anything like it, and he strongly suspected that should he keep probing, he would uncover a dozen more similarities. He had a thousand questions, but he didn’t know where to start. Was Ramy also orphaned? Who was his sponsor? What was Calcutta like? Had he been back since? What brought him to Oxford? He was suddenly anxious – he felt his tongue stiffen, unable to choose a word – and there was also the matter of the keys, and their scattered trunks, which made the alley look as if a hurricane had emptied a ship’s hold onto the street—

‘Should we—’ Robin managed, just as Ramy asked, ‘Shall we open that door?’

They both laughed. Ramy smiled. ‘Let’s drag these inside.’ He nudged a trunk with his toe. ‘Then I’ve got a box of very nice sweets which I think we should open, yes?’

Their quarters were across the hall from one another – rooms six and seven. Each unit consisted of a large bedroom and a sitting room equipped with a low table, empty bookshelves, and a couch. The couch and table both seemed too formal, so they sat cross-legged on the floor of Ramy’s room, blinking like shy children as they regarded each other, unsure what to do with their hands.

Ramy pulled a colourfully wrapped parcel from one of his trunks and set it on the floor between them. ‘Sending-off gift from Sir Horace Wilson, my guardian. He gave me a bottle of port, too, but I threw that away. What would you like?’ Ramy ripped the parcel open. ‘There’s toffee, caramel, peanut brittle, chocolates, and all kinds of candied fruits . . .’

‘Oh, goodness – I’ll have some toffee, thank you.’ Robin hadn’t spoken to another person near his age in as long as he could remember.[16] He was only now realizing how badly he wanted a friend, but he didn’t know how to make one, and the prospect of trying but failing suddenly terrified him. What if Ramy found him dull? Annoying? Oversolicitous?

He took a bite of toffee, swallowed, and placed his hands in his lap.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Calcutta?’

Ramy grinned.

In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in the span of minutes. Ramy seemed just as flushed and excited as Robin felt. They talked and talked. No topics seemed taboo; everything they brought up was either a point of instant agreement – scones are better without sultanas, thank you – or a cause for fascinating debate – no, London’s lovely, actually; you country mice are just prejudiced because you’re jealous. Only don’t swim in the Thames.

At some point they began reciting poems to each other – lovely chains of Urdu couplets Ramy told him were called ghazals, and Tang poetry which Robin frankly didn’t love but which sounded impressive. And he so badly wanted to impress Ramy. He was so witty, so well-read and funny. He had sharp, scathing opinions on everything – British cuisine, British manners, and the Oxbridge rivalry (‘Oxford is larger than Cambridge, but Cambridge is prettier, and anyhow I think they only established Cambridge as overflow for the mediocre talent.’) He’d travelled half the world; he’d been to Lucknow, Madras, Lisbon, Paris, and Madrid. He described his native India as a paradise: ‘The mangoes, Birdie’ (he’d already started calling Robin ‘Birdie’), ‘they’re ridiculously juicy, you can’t buy anything similar on this sorry little island. It’s been years since I’ve had one. I’d give anything to see a proper Bengal mango.’

‘I’ve read Arabian Nights,’ Robin offered, drunk on excitement and trying to seem worldly as well.

‘Calcutta’s not in the Arab world, Birdie.’

‘I know.’ Robin blushed. ‘I just meant—’

But Ramy had already moved on. ‘You didn’t tell me you read Arabic!’

‘I don’t, I read it in translation.’

Ramy sighed. ‘Whose?’

Robin tried hard to remember. ‘Jonathan Scott’s?’

‘That’s a terrible translation.’ Ramy waved his arm. ‘Throw it away. For one thing, it’s not even a direct translation – it went into French first, and then English – and for another, it’s not remotely like the original. What’s more, Galland – Antoine Galland, the French translator – did his very best to Frenchify the dialogue and to erase all cultural details he thought would confuse the reader. He translates Haroun Alraschid’s concubines as dames ses favourites. Favourite ladies. How do you get “favourite ladies” from “concubines”? And he entirely cuts out some of the more erotic passages, and injects cultural explanations whenever he feels like it – tell me, how would you like to read an epic with a doddering Frenchman breathing down your neck at all the raunchy bits?’

Ramy gesticulated wildly as he spoke. It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know. Robin leaned back and watched Ramy’s lovely, agitated face, both amazed and delighted.

He could have cried then. He’d been so desperately lonely, and had only now realized it, and now he wasn’t, and this felt so good he didn’t know what to do with himself.

When at last they grew too sleepy to finish their sentences, the sweets were half-gone and Ramy’s floor was littered with wrappers. Yawning, they waved each other good night. Robin tripped back to his own quarters, swung the door shut, then turned around to face his empty rooms. This was his home for the next four years – the bed under the low, sloping ceiling where he would wake every morning, the leaking tap over the sink where he would wash his face, and the desk in the corner that he would hunch over every evening, scribbling by candlelight until wax dripped onto the floorboards.

For the first time since he’d arrived at Oxford, it struck him that he was to make a life here. He imagined it stretched out before him: the gradual accumulation of books and trinkets in those spare bookshelves; the wear and tear of those crisp new linen shirts still packed in his trunks, the change of seasons seen and heard through the wind-rattled window above his bed that wouldn’t quite shut. And Ramy, right across the hall.

This wouldn’t be so bad.

The bed was unmade, but he was too tired now to fiddle with the sheets or search for covers, so he curled up on his side and pulled his coat over him. In a very short while he was fast asleep and smiling.

Classes would not begin until the third of October, which left three full days in which Robin and Ramy were free to explore the city.

These were three of the happiest days of Robin’s life. He had no readings or classes; no recitations or compositions to prepare. For the first time in his life he was in full control of his own purse and schedule, and he went mad with freedom.

They spent their first day shopping. They went to Ede & Ravenscroft to be fitted for gowns; to Thornton’s Bookshop for the entirety of their course list; to the home-goods stands at Cornmarket for teapots, spoons, bed linens, and Argand lamps. After acquiring everything they assumed necessary for student life, they both found they had a generous fraction of their stipends left over, with no danger of running out – their scholarship allowed them to withdraw the same amount from the bursary every month.

So they were profligate. They bought bags of candied nuts and caramels. They rented the college punts and spent the afternoon driving each other into the Cherwell’s banks. They went to the Queen’s Lane coffeehouse, at which they spent a ridiculous amount of money on a variety of pastries neither of them had ever tried. Ramy was very fond of flapjacks – ‘They make oats taste so good,’ he said, ‘I understand the joys of being a horse,’ – while Robin preferred sticky sweet buns so drenched in sugar they made his teeth ache for hours.

In Oxford, they stuck out like sore thumbs. This rattled Robin at first. In London, which was slightly more cosmopolitan, foreigners never drew such prolonged stares. But Oxford’s townsfolk seemed constantly startled by their presence. Ramy attracted more attention than Robin did. Robin was foreign only when viewed up close and in certain lights, but Ramy was immediately, visibly other.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, when the baker asked if he was from Hindustan, speaking in an exaggerated accent Robin had never heard before. ‘I’ve got quite a big family there. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually royalty, fourth in line to the throne – what throne? Oh, just a regional one; our political system is very complicated. But I wanted to experience a normal life – get a proper British education, you know – so I’ve left my palace for here.’

‘Why did you talk like that?’ Robin asked him once they were out of earshot. ‘And what do you mean, you’re actually royalty?’

‘Whenever the English see me, they try to determine what kind of story they know me from,’ Ramy said. ‘Either I’m a dirty thieving lascar, or I’m a servant in some nabob’s house. And I realized in Yorkshire that it’s easier if they think I’m a Mughal prince.’

‘I’ve always just tried to blend in,’ said Robin.

‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

That marked the difference between them. Ever since his arrival in London, Robin had tried to keep his head down and assimilate, to play down his otherness. He thought the more unremarkable he seemed, the less attention he would draw. But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle. He was bold to the extreme. Robin found him incredible and a little bit terrifying.

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time.

‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’

‘Then are you—?’

‘No.’ Ramy snorted. ‘Well. Perhaps once. That’s the family story, anyhow; my father says we were aristocrats in the Mughal court, or something like that. But not anymore.’

‘What happened?’

Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

That evening they paid far too much money for a hamper of rolls, cheese, and sweet grapes, which they brought to a hill in South Park on the eastern part of campus for a picnic. They found a quiet spot near a thicket of trees, secluded enough that Ramy could conduct his sunset prayer, and sat cross-legged on the grass, pulling bread apart with their bare hands, interrogating each other about their lives with the eager fascination of boys who, for many years, thought they were the only ones in their particular situation.

Ramy deduced very quickly that Professor Lovell was Robin’s father. ‘Has to be, right? Otherwise, why’s he so cagey about it? And otherwise to that otherwise, how’d he come to know your mother? Does he know that you know, or is he really still trying to hide it?’

Robin found his frankness alarming. He’d got so used to ignoring the issue that it was odd to hear it described in such blunt terms. ‘I don’t know. About any of it, I mean.’

‘Hm. Does he look like you?’

‘A bit, I think. He teaches here, he does East Asian languages – you’ll meet him, you’ll see.’

‘You’ve never asked him about it?’

‘I’ve never tried,’ said Robin. ‘I . . . I don’t know what he would say.’ No, that wasn’t true. ‘I mean, I just don’t think he would answer.’

They’d known each other for less than a day at that point, yet Ramy could read Robin’s face well enough not to push the subject.

Ramy was far more open about his own background. He had spent the first thirteen years of his life in Calcutta, the older brother to three younger sisters in a family employed by a wealthy nabob named Sir Horace Wilson, and the next four in a Yorkshire countryside estate as a consequence of impressing Wilson, reading Greek and Latin, and trying not to claw out his eyes from boredom.

‘Lucky you got your education in London,’ Ramy said. ‘At least you had somewhere to go at the weekends. My whole adolescence was hills and moors, and not a single person under forty in sight. Did you ever see the King?’

This was another talent of Ramy’s: switching subjects so nimbly that Robin found himself struggling to keep up.

‘William? No, not really, he doesn’t come out in public much. Especially recently, what with the Factory Act and the Poor Law – the reformers were always rioting in the streets, it wouldn’t have been safe.’

‘Reformers,’ Ramy repeated jealously. ‘Lucky you. All that ever happened in Yorkshire was a marriage or two. Sometimes the hens got out, on a good day.’

‘I didn’t get to participate, though,’ Robin said. ‘My days were rather monotonous, to be honest. Endless studying – all in preparation for here.’

‘But we’re here now.’

‘Cheers to that.’ Robin settled back with a sigh. Ramy passed him a cup – he’d been mixing elderflower syrup with honey and water – and they clinked and drank.

From their vantage point at South Park they could look over the whole of the university, draped in a golden blanket at sunset. The light made Ramy’s eyes glow, made his skin shine like burnished bronze. Robin had the absurd impulse to place his hand against Ramy’s cheek; indeed, he’d half lifted up his arm before his mind caught up with his body.

Ramy glanced down at him. A curl of black hair fell in his eyes. Robin found it absurdly charming. ‘You all right?’

Robin leaned back on his elbows, turning his gaze to the city. Professor Lovell was right, he thought. This was the loveliest place on earth.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I’m just perfect.’

The other residents of Number 4, Magpie Lane filled in over the weekend. None of them were translation students. They introduced themselves as they moved in: Colin Thornhill, a wide-eyed and effusive solicitor-in-training who talked only in full paragraphs and about himself; Bill Jameson, an affable redhead studying to be a surgeon who seemed perpetually worried about how much things cost; and at the end of the hall, a pair of twin brothers, Edgar and Edward Sharp, who were second years nominally pursuing an education in the Classics but who, as they loudly proclaimed, were more ‘just interested in the social aspect until we come into our inheritances.’

On Saturday night, they congregated for drinks in the common room adjoining the shared kitchen. Bill, Colin, and the Sharps were all seated around the low table when Ramy and Robin walked in. They’d been told to come at nine, but the wine had clearly been flowing for a while – empty bottles littered the floor around them, and the Sharp brothers were slouched against each other, both visibly drunk.

Colin was holding forth on the differences between the student gowns. ‘You can tell everything about a man from his gown,’ he said importantly. He had a peculiar, overpronounced, suspiciously exaggerated accent that Robin couldn’t place but quite disliked. ‘The bachelor’s gown loops at the elbow and terminates at a point. The gentleman-commoner’s gown is silk and plaited at the sleeves. The commoner’s gown has no sleeves, and has plaits at the shoulder, and you can tell the servitors and the commoners apart because their gowns don’t have plaits, and their caps don’t have tassels—’

‘Good Lord,’ said Ramy as he sat down. ‘Has he been going on about this all this time?’

‘For ten minutes at least,’ Bill said.

‘Oh, but proper academic dress is of the utmost importance,’ Colin insisted. ‘It’s how we display our status as Oxford men. It’s considered one of the seven deadly sins to wear an ordinary tweed cap with a gown, or to use a walking stick with a gown. And I once heard of a fellow who, not knowing the kinds of gowns, told the tailor he was a scholar, so of course he needed a scholar’s gown, only to be laughed out of hall the next day when it transpired that he was not a scholar, for he’d won no scholarship, but merely a paying commoner—’

‘So what gowns do we wear?’ Ramy cut in. ‘Just so I know if we told our tailor the right thing.’

‘Depends,’ Colin said. ‘Are you a gentleman-commoner or a servitor? I pay tuition, but not everyone does – what’s your arrangement with the bursar?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Ramy. ‘Do you think the black robes will do? All I know is we got the black ones.’

Robin snorted. Colin’s eyes bulged slightly. ‘Yes, but the sleeves—’

‘Leave off him,’ Bill said, smiling. ‘Colin’s very concerned with status.’

‘They take gowns very seriously here,’ Colin said solemnly. ‘I read it in my guidebook. They won’t even let you into lectures if you’re not in the proper attire. So are you a gentleman-commoner or a servitor?’

‘They’re neither.’ Edward turned to Robin. ‘You’re Babblers, aren’t you? I heard all Babblers are on scholarships.’

‘Babblers?’ Robin repeated. It was the first time he’d heard the term.

‘The Translation Institute,’ Edward said impatiently. ‘You’ve got to be, right? They don’t let your kind in otherwise.’

‘Our kind?’ Ramy arched an eyebrow.

‘So what are you, anyway?’ Edgar Sharp asked abruptly. He’d seemed on the verge of falling asleep, but now he made a mighty effort to sit up, squinting as if trying to see Ramy through a fog. ‘A Negro? A Turk?’

‘I’m from Calcutta,’ Ramy snapped. ‘Which makes me Indian, if you like.’

‘Hm,’ said Edward.

‘“London streets, where the turbaned Moslem, bearded Jew, and woolly Afric, meet the brown Hindu,”’ said Edgar in a sing-song tone. Beside him, his twin snorted and took another swig of port.

Ramy, for once, had no riposte; he only blinked at Edgar, amazed.

‘Right,’ Bill said, picking at his ear. ‘Well.’

‘Is that Anna Barbauld?’ Colin asked. ‘Lovely poet. Not as deft with wordplay as the male poets, of course, but my father loves her stuff. Very romantic.’

‘And you’re a Chinaman, aren’t you?’ Edgar fixed his lidded gaze on Robin. ‘Is it true that the Chinese break their women’s feet with bindings so that they can’t walk?’

‘What?’ Colin snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I read about it,’ Edgar insisted. ‘Tell me, is it meant to be erotic? Or is it just so that they can’t run away?’

‘I mean . . .’ Robin had no idea where to begin with this. ‘It’s not done everywhere – my mother didn’t have her feet bound, and there’s quite a lot of opposition where I’m from—’

‘So it’s true,’ Edgar crowed. ‘My God. You people are perverse.’

‘Do you really drink little boys’ urine for medicine?’ Edward inquired. ‘How’s it collected?’

‘Suppose you shut up and stick to dribbling wine down your front,’ Ramy said sharply.

Any hopes of fraternity fizzled out quite quickly after that. A round of whist was proposed, but the Sharp brothers did not know the rules and were too drunk to learn. Bill begged a headache and left for bed early. Colin went on another long tirade about the intricacies of hall etiquette, including the very long Latin grace he suggested they all learn by heart that night, but no one listened. The Sharp brothers, in a strange show of contrition, then asked Robin and Ramy some polite if inane questions about translation, but it was clear they were not too interested in the answers. Whatever esteemed company the Sharps were seeking at Oxford, they had clearly not found it here. In half an hour the gathering was over, and all parties slunk back to their respective rooms.

Some noise had been made that night about a house breakfast. But when Ramy and Robin appeared in the kitchen the next morning, they found a note for them on the table.

We’ve gone to a café the Sharps know in Iffley. Didn’t think you’d like it – see you later. – CT

‘I suppose,’ Ramy said drily, ‘it’s going to be them and us.’

Robin didn’t mind this one bit. ‘I like just us.’

Ramy cast him a smile.

They spent their third day together touring the jewels of the university. Oxford in 1836 was in an era of becoming, an insatiable creature feeding on the wealth which it bred. The colleges were constantly renovating; buying up more land from the city; replacing medieval buildings with newer, lovelier halls; constructing new libraries to house recently acquired collections. Almost every building in Oxford had a name – derived not from function or location, but from the wealthy and powerful individual who inspired its creation. There was the massive, imposing Ashmolean Museum, which housed the cabinet of curiosities donated by Elias Ashmole, including a dodo’s head, hippopotamus skulls, and a three-inch-long sheep’s horn that was supposed to have grown out of the head of an old woman in Cheshire named Mary Davis; the Radcliffe Library, a domed library that somehow appeared even larger and grander from the inside than from the outside; and the Sheldonian Theatre, ringed by massive stone busts known as the Emperor Heads, all of whom looked like ordinary men who had stumbled upon Medusa.

And there was the Bodleian – oh, the Bodleian, a national treasure in its own right: home of the largest collection of manuscripts in England (‘Cambridge has only got a hundred thousand titles,’ sniffed the clerk who admitted them, ‘and Edinburgh’s only got a paltry sixty-three’), whose collection only continued to expand under the proud leadership of the Reverend Doctor Bulkeley Bandinel, who had a book-buying budget of nearly £2,000 a year.

It was the Reverend Doctor Bandinel himself who came to greet them on their first tour of their library and guided them to the Translators’ Reading Room. ‘Couldn’t let a clerk do it,’ he sighed. ‘Normally we let the fools wander about on their own and ask around for directions if they get lost. But you translators – you truly appreciate what’s going on here.’

He was a heavy-set man with droopy eyes and a similarly droopy demeanour whose mouth seemed permanently slumped in a frown. Yet as he moved through the building, his eyes lit up with genuine pleasure. ‘We’ll start in the main wings, then traipse over to the Duke Humphreys. Follow along, feel free to have a look – books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless, so don’t be nervous. We’re quite proud of our last few major acquisitions. There’s the Richard Gough map collection donated in 1809 – the British Museum didn’t want them, can you believe it? And then the Malone donation ten or so years ago – it greatly expanded our Shakespearean materials. Oh, and just two years ago, we received the Francis Douce collection – that’s thirteen thousand volumes in French and English, though I suppose neither of you is specializing in French . . . Arabic? Oh, yes – right this way; the Institute has the bulk of Arabic materials at Oxford, but I’ve got some poetry volumes from Egypt and Syria that may interest you . . .’

They left the Bodleian dazed, impressed, and a bit intimidated by the sheer amount of material at their disposal. Ramy made an imitation of Reverend Doctor Bandinel’s hanging jowls, but could summon no real malice; it was difficult to disdain a man who so clearly adored the accumulation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

They ended the day with a tour of University College by Billings, a senior porter. It turned out that thus far they had seen only a small corner of their new home. The college, which lay just to the east of the houses on Magpie Lane, boasted two green quadrangle courtyards and an arrangement of stone buildings that resembled castle keeps. As they walked, Billings rattled off a list of namesakes and biographies of those namesakes, including donors, architects, and otherwise significant figures. ‘ . . . now, the statues over the entrances are of Queen Anne and Queen Mary, and in the interior, James II and Dr Radcliffe . . . And those brilliant painted windows in the chapel were done by Abraham van Linge in 1640, yes, they’ve held up very well, and the glass painter Henry Giles of York did the east window . . . There’s no service on, so we can take a poke around inside; follow me.’

Inside the chapel, Billings paused before a bas-relief monument. ‘I suppose you’ll know who that is, being translation students and all.’

They knew. Robin and Ramy both had been hearing the name constantly since their arrival at Oxford. The bas-relief was a memorial to the University College alum and widely recognized genius who in 1786 published a foundational text identifying Proto-Indo-European as a predecessor language linking Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek. He was now perhaps the single best-known translator on the continent, save for his nephew, the recently graduated Sterling Jones.

‘It’s Sir William Jones.’ Robin found the scene depicted in the frieze somewhat discomfiting. Jones was positioned at a writing desk, one leg crossed pertly over the other, while three figures, clearly meant to be Indians, sat submissively on the floor before him like children receiving a lesson.

Billings looked proud. ‘That’s right. Here he is translating a digest on the Hindu laws, and there are some Brahmins on the floor to assist him. We are, I believe, the only college whose walls are graced with Indians. But then Univ has always had a special link to the colonies.[17] And those tigers’ heads, as you know, are emblematic of Bengal.’

‘Why’s he the only one with a table?’ Ramy asked. ‘Why are the Brahmins on the floor?’

‘Well, I suppose Hindus preferred it that way,’ said Billings. ‘They like sitting cross-legged, you see, for they find it more comfortable.’

‘Very illuminating,’ said Ramy. ‘I never knew.’

They spent Sunday night in the depths of the Bodleian bookcases. They’d been assigned a reading list upon registration, but both, faced with a sudden deluge of freedom, had left it off until the last possible moment. The Bodleian was supposed to close by 8.00 p.m. on weekends. They reached its doors at 7.45 p.m., but mention of the Translation Institute seemed to hold immense power, for when Ramy explained what they needed, the clerks told them they could stay as late as they liked. The doors would be unlocked for the night staff; they could leave at their own convenience.

By the time they emerged from the stacks, satchels heavy with books and eyes dizzy from squinting at tiny fonts, the sun had long gone down. At night, the moon conspired with streetlamps to bathe the city in a faint, otherworldly glow. The cobblestones beneath their feet seemed like roads leading into and out of different centuries. This could be the Oxford of the Reformation, or the Oxford of the Middle Ages. They moved within a timeless space, shared by the ghosts of scholars past.

The journey back to college took less than five minutes, but they detoured up and around Broad Street to lengthen their walk. This was the first time they’d been out so late; they wanted to savour the city at night. They moved in silence, neither daring to break the spell.

A burst of laughter drifted from across the stone walls when they passed New College. As they turned down Holywell Lane, they saw a group of six or seven students, all garbed in black gowns, though from the sway of their walk they must have just departed not from a lecture but from a pub.

‘Balliol, you think?’ Ramy murmured.

Robin snorted.

They’d been three days at University College, but they’d already learned the intercollegiate pecking order and associated stereotypes. Exeter was genteel but unintellectual; Brasenose was rowdy and lush with wine. Their neighbouring Queen’s and Merton were safely ignored. Balliol boys, who paid near the highest tuitions at the University, next to Oriel, were better known for running up the tab than for showing up for their tutorials.

The students glanced their way as they approached. Robin and Ramy nodded towards them, and a few of them nodded back, a mutual acknowledgment between gentlemen of the university.

The street was wide, and the two groups were walking on opposite sides. They would have passed each other without commotion, except that one of the boys pointed suddenly at Ramy and shouted, ‘What’s that? Did you see that?’

His friends pulled him along, laughing.

‘Come on, Mark,’ one said. ‘Let them go—’

‘Hold it,’ said the boy called Mark. He shrugged his friends off. He stood still on the street, squinting at Ramy with drunken concentration. His hand hung in midair, still pointing. ‘Look at his face – you see it?’

‘Mark, please,’ said the boy furthest down the road. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’

None of them were laughing any more.

‘That’s a Hindu,’ said Mark. ‘What’s a Hindu doing here?’

‘Sometimes they visit,’ said one of the other boys. ‘Remember the two foreigners last week, those Persian sultans or whatever they were—’

‘I think I do, those fellows in turbans—’

‘But he’s got a gown.’ Mark raised his voice at Ramy. ‘Hey! What have you got a gown for?’

His tone turned vicious. The atmosphere was no longer so cordial; the scholarly fraternity, if it had ever existed, evaporated.

‘You can’t wear a gown,’ Mark insisted. ‘Take that off.’

Ramy took a step forward.

Robin gripped his arm. ‘Don’t.’

‘Hello, I’m talking to you.’ Mark was now crossing the street towards them. ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you speak English? Take off that gown, do you hear me? Take it off.’

Clearly Ramy wanted to fight – his fists were clenched, his knees bent in preparation to spring. If Mark drew any closer, this night would end in blood.

So Robin began to run.

He hated it as he did so, he felt like such a coward, but it was the only act he could imagine that didn’t end in catastrophe. For he knew that Ramy, shocked, would follow. Indeed – seconds later he heard Ramy’s footsteps behind him, his hard breathing, the curses he muttered under his breath as they sprinted down Holywell.

The laughter – for there was laughter again, though it was no longer born of mirth – seemed to amplify behind them. The Balliol boys hooted like monkeys; their cackles stretched alongside their shadows against the brick walls. For a moment Robin was terrified they were being chased, that the boys were hot on their heels, footsteps hammering all around them. But it was only the blood thundering in his ears. The boys had not followed them; they were too drunk, too easily amused, and certainly, by now, distracted in pursuit of their next entertainment.

Even so, Robin didn’t stop until they reached High Street. The way was clear. They were alone, panting in the dark.

‘Damn it,’ Ramy muttered. ‘Damn it—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said.

‘Don’t be,’ Ramy said, though he wouldn’t meet Robin’s eye. ‘You did the right thing.’

Robin wasn’t sure either of them believed that.

They were much further from home now, but they were at least back under the streetlamps, where they could see trouble coming from further off.

They walked awhile in silence. Robin could think of nothing appropriate to say; any words that came to mind died immediately on his tongue.

‘Damn it,’ Ramy said again. He stopped abruptly, one hand on his satchel. ‘I think – hold on.’ He dug through his books, then cursed again. ‘I left my notebook behind.’

Robin’s gut twisted. ‘On Holywell?’

‘In the Bod.’ Ramy pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose and groaned. ‘I know where – right on the corner of the desk; I was going to place it on top because I didn’t want the pages crumpled, only I got so tired I must have forgotten.’

‘Can’t you leave it until tomorrow? I don’t think the clerks will move it, and if they do we could just ask—’

‘No, it’s got my revision notes, and I’m nervous they’ll make us do a recitation tomorrow. I’ll just head back—’

‘I’ll get it,’ Robin said quickly. This felt like the right thing to do; it felt like making amends.

Ramy frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

There was no fight in his voice. They both knew what Robin would not say out loud – that Robin, at least, could pass for white in the dark, and that if Robin came across the Balliol boys alone, they wouldn’t give him a second glance.

‘I won’t be twenty minutes,’ Robin vowed. ‘I’ll drop it outside your door when I’m back.’

Oxford took on a sinister air now that he was alone; the lights were no longer warm but eerie, stretching and warping his shadow against the cobblestones. The Bodleian was locked, but a night clerk noticed him waving at the window and let him in. He was, thankfully, one of the staff from before, and he let Robin into the west wing without question. The Reading Room was pitch-black and freezing. All the lamps were off; Robin could only just see by the moonlight streaming in at the far end of the room. Shivering, he snatched Ramy’s notebook, shoved it into his satchel, and hurried out the door.

He’d just made it past the quadrangle when he heard whispers.

He should have quickened his pace, but something – the tones, the shape of the words – compelled him to stop. Only after he’d paused to strain his ears did he realize he was listening to Chinese. One Chinese phrase, uttered over and over again with increasing urgency.

‘Wúxíng.’

Robin crept cautiously around the walled corner.

There were three people in the middle of Holywell Street, all slim youths dressed entirely in black, two men and a woman. They were struggling with a trunk. The bottom must have dropped out, because what were unmistakably silver bars were strewn across the cobblestones.

All three glanced up as Robin approached. The man whispering furiously in Chinese had his back to Robin; he turned around last, only after his associates had gone stock-still. He met Robin’s eyes. Robin’s heart caught in his throat.

He could have been looking in a mirror.

Those were his brown eyes. His own straight nose, his own chestnut hair that even fell over his eyes the same way, swooping messily from left to right.

The man held a silver bar in his hand.

Robin realized instantly what he was trying to do. Wúxíng – in Chinese, ‘formless, shapeless, incorporeal’.[18] The closest English translation was ‘invisible’. These people, whoever they were, were trying to hide. But something had gone wrong, for the silver bar was only barely working; the three youths’ images flickered under the streetlamp, and occasionally they seemed translucent, but they were decidedly not hidden.

Robin’s doppelgänger cast him a plaintive look.

‘Help me,’ he begged. Then in Chinese, ‘Bāngmáng.’[19]

Robin didn’t know what it was that compelled him to act – the recent terror of the Balliol boys, the utter absurdity of this scene, or the disorienting sight of his doppelgänger’s face – but he stepped forward and put his hand on the bar. His doppelgänger relinquished it without a word.

‘Wúxíng,’ Robin said, thinking of the myths his mother had told him, of spirits and ghosts hiding in the dark. Of shapelessness, of nonbeing. ‘Invisible.’

The bar vibrated in his hand. He heard a sound from nowhere, a breathy sigh.

All four of them disappeared.

No, disappeared was not quite the word for it. Robin didn’t have the words for it; it was lost in translation, a concept that neither the Chinese nor the English could fully describe. They existed, but in no human form. They were not merely beings that couldn’t be seen. They weren’t beings at all. They were shapeless. They drifted, expanded; they were the air, the brick walls, the cobblestones. Robin had no awareness of his body, where he ended and the bar began – he was the silver, the stones, the night.

Cold fear shot through his mind. What if I can’t go back?

Seconds later a constable rushed up to the end of the street. Robin caught his breath, squeezing the bar so hard that pangs of pain shot up his arm.

The constable stared right at him, squinting, seeing nothing but darkness.

‘They’re not down here,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Try chasing them up Parks . . .’

His voice faded as he sprinted away.

Robin dropped the bar. He couldn’t maintain his hold on it; he was barely aware of its presence anymore. He didn’t so much as use his hand and open his fingers as he did violently thrust the bar away to try to separate his essence from the silver.

It worked. The thieves rematerialized in the night.

‘Hurry,’ urged the other man, a youth with pale blond hair. ‘Shove it in your shirts and let’s leave the trunk behind.’

‘We can’t just leave it,’ said the woman. ‘They’ll trace it.’

‘Pick up the pieces then, come on.’

All three began scooping the silver bars off the ground. Robin hesitated for a moment, arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. Then he bent down to help them.

The absurdity of this had not yet sunk in. Dimly he realized that whatever was happening had to be very illegal. These youths could not be associated with Oxford, the Bodleian, or the Translation Institute, or else they wouldn’t be skulking about at midnight, clad in black and hiding from the police.

The right and obvious thing to do was to raise the alarm.

But somehow, helping seemed the only option. He didn’t question this logic, he simply acted. It felt like falling into a dream, like stepping into a play where he already knew his lines, though everything else was a mystery. This was an illusion with its own internal logic, and for some reason he couldn’t quite name, he didn’t want to break it.

At last all the silver bars had been shoved down shirt fronts and into pockets. Robin gave the ones he’d picked up to his doppelgänger. Their fingers touched, and Robin felt a chill.

‘Let’s go,’ said the blond man.

But none of them moved. They all looked at Robin, visibly uncertain what to do with him.

‘What if he—’ began the woman.

‘He won’t,’ Robin’s doppelgänger said firmly. ‘Will you?’

‘Of course not,’ Robin whispered.

The blond man looked unconvinced. ‘Would be easier to just—’

‘No. Not this time.’ Robin’s doppelgänger looked Robin up and down for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘You’re a translator, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Robin breathed. ‘Yes, I’ve only just got here.’

‘The Twisted Root,’ said his doppelgänger. ‘Find me there.’

The woman and the blond man exchanged a glance. The woman opened her mouth as if to object, paused, and then closed it.

‘Fine,’ said the blond man. ‘Now let’s go.’

‘Wait,’ Robin said desperately. ‘Who are – when should—’

But the thieves had broken into a run.

They were startlingly fast. Just seconds later, the street was empty. They’d left no trace they’d ever been there – they’d picked up every last bar, had even run away with the broken ruins of the trunk. They could have been ghosts. Robin could have imagined this entire encounter, and the world would have looked no different at all.

Ramy was still awake when Robin returned. He opened his door at the first knock.

‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the notebook.

‘Of course.’

They stood looking at each other in silence.

There was no question about what had happened. They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.

And they never would say it out loud. It hurt too much to consider the truth. It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.

‘Well,’ Robin said lamely, ‘good night.’

Ramy nodded and, without speaking, closed his door.

Chapter Four

Sleep felt impossible. Robin kept seeing the face of his doppelgänger floating in the dark. Had he, fatigued and rattled, imagined the whole thing? But the streetlamps had shone so brightly, and his twin’s features – his fear, his panic – were so sharply etched into his memory. He knew it was not a projection. It had not quite felt like looking into a mirror, where all his features were reflected backwards, a false representation of what the world saw, but a gut recognition of sameness. Whatever was in that man’s face was in his as well.

Was that why he had helped him? Some instinctive sympathy?

He was only beginning to fathom the weight of his actions. He’d stolen from the university. Was it a test? Stranger rituals were practised at Oxford. Had he passed or failed? Or would constables come banging on his door the next morning and ask him to leave?

But I can’t be sent down, he thought. I’ve only just got here. Suddenly the delights of Oxford – the warmth of his bed, the smell of new books and new clothes – made him squirm in discomfort, for now all he could think about was how soon he might lose it all. He tossed and turned in sweaty sheets, conjuring up more and more detailed visions of how the morning might go – how the constables would pull him from his bed, how they’d shackle his wrists and drag him to the gaol, how Professor Lovell would sternly ask Robin never to contact him or Mrs Piper again.

At last he fell asleep from exhaustion. He woke to a persistent tapping at his door.

‘What are you doing?’ Ramy demanded. ‘You haven’t even washed?’

Robin blinked at him. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s Monday morning, you dolt.’ Ramy was already dressed in his black gown, cap in hand. ‘We’re due at the tower in twenty minutes.’

They made it in time, but barely; they were half running down the greens of the quadrangle to the Institute, gowns flapping in the wind, when the bells rang for nine.

Two slim youths awaited them on the green – the other half of their cohort, Robin assumed. One was white; the other was Black.

‘Hello,’ said the white one as they approached. ‘You’re late.’

Robin gaped at her, trying to catch his breath. ‘You’re a girl.’

This was a shock. Robin and Ramy had both grown up in sterile, isolated environments, kept far away from girls their own age. The feminine was an idea that existed in theory, the stuff of novels or a rare phenomenon to be glimpsed from across the street. The best description Robin knew of women came from a treatise he’d once flipped through by a Mrs Sarah Ellis,[20] which labelled girls ‘gentle, inoffensive, delicate, and passively amiable’. As far as Robin was concerned, girls were mysterious subjects imbued not with a rich inner life but with qualities that made them otherworldly, inscrutable, and possibly not human at all.

‘Sorry – I mean, hello,’ he managed. ‘I didn’t mean to – anyhow.’

Ramy was less subtle. ‘Why are you girls?’

The white girl gave him a look of such withering scorn that Robin wilted on Ramy’s behalf.

‘Well,’ she drawled, ‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

‘The university has asked us to dress like this so as to not upset or distract the young gentlemen,’ the Black girl explained. Her English carried a faint accent, which Robin thought resembled French, though he wasn’t sure. She shook her left leg at him, displaying trousers so crisp and stiff they looked like they’d been purchased yesterday. ‘Not every faculty is as liberal as the Translation Institute, you see.’

‘Is it uncomfortable?’ Robin asked, trying valiantly to prove his own lack of prejudice. ‘Wearing trousers, I mean?’

‘It’s not, in fact, since we have two legs and not fish tails.’ She extended her hand to him. ‘Victoire Desgraves.’

He shook it. ‘Robin Swift.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Swift? But surely—’

‘Letitia Price,’ the white girl interjected. ‘Letty, if you like. And you?’

‘Ramiz.’ Ramy halfway extended his hand, as if unsure whether he wanted to touch the girls or not. Letty decided for him and shook it; Ramy winced in discomfort. ‘Ramiz Mirza. Ramy to friends.’

‘Hello, Ramiz.’ Letty glanced around. ‘So we’re the whole cohort, then.’

Victoire gave a little sigh. ‘Ce sont des idiots,’ she said to Letty.

‘Je suis tout à fait d’accord,’ Letty murmured back.

They both burst into giggles. Robin could not understand French, but felt distinctly that he had been judged and found wanting.

‘There you are.’

They were saved from further conversation by a tall, slender Black man who shook all their hands and introduced himself as Anthony Ribben, a postgraduate specializing in French, Spanish, and German. ‘My guardian fancied himself a Romanticist,’ he explained. ‘He hoped I’d follow his passion for poetry, but when it became apparent I had more than just a passing talent for languages, he had me sent here.’

He paused expectantly, which prompted them to respond with their own languages.

‘Urdu, Arabic, and Persian,’ said Ramy.

‘French and Kreyòl,’ said Victoire. ‘I mean – Haitian Creole, if you think that counts.’

‘That counts,’ Anthony said cheerfully.

‘French and German,’ said Letty.

‘Chinese,’ Robin said, feeling somewhat inadequate. ‘And Latin and Greek.’

‘Well, we’ve all got Latin and Greek,’ said Letty. ‘It’s an entry requirement, isn’t it?’

Robin’s cheeks flushed; he hadn’t known.

Anthony looked amused. ‘A nicely cosmopolitan group, aren’t you? Welcome to Oxford! How are you finding it?’

‘Lovely,’ said Victoire. ‘Though . . . I don’t know, it’s strange. It doesn’t quite feel real. It feels like I’m at the theatre, and I keep waiting for the curtains to come down.’

‘That doesn’t go away.’ Anthony headed towards the tower, gesturing for them to follow. ‘Especially once you’ve gone through these doors. They’ve asked me to show you about the Institute until eleven, and then I’ll leave you with Professor Playfair. Will this be your first time inside?’

They gazed up at the tower. It was a magnificent building – a gleaming white edifice built in the neoclassical style, eight storeys tall and ringed with ornamental pillars and high stained-glass windows. It dominated the skyline of High Street, and made the nearby Radcliffe Library and University Church of St Mary the Virgin look quite pathetic in comparison. Ramy and Robin had walked past it countless times over the weekend, marvelling at it together, but always from a distance. They hadn’t dared approach. Not then.

‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ Anthony sighed with satisfaction. ‘You never get used to the sight. Welcome to your home for the next four years, believe it or not. We call it Babel.’

‘Babel,’ Robin repeated. ‘Is that why—?’

‘Why they call us Babblers?’ Anthony nodded. ‘A joke as old as the Institute itself. But some first year at Balliol thinks he conceived it for the first time every September, and so we’ve been doomed to that unwieldy moniker for decades.’

He strode briskly up the front steps. At the top a blue and gold seal was carved into the stone before the door, the Oxford University coat of arms. Dominus illuminatio mea, it read. The Lord is my light. The moment Anthony’s foot touched the seal, the heavy wooden door swung out on its own accord, revealing a golden, lamplit interior of staircases, bustling dark-robed scholars, and books upon books upon books.

Robin paused, too dazzled to follow. Of all the marvels of Oxford, Babel seemed the most impossible – a tower out of time, a vision from a dream. Those stained-glass windows, that high, imposing dome; it all seemed to have been pulled straight from the painting in Professor Lovell’s dining room and dropped whole onto this drab grey street. An illumination in a medieval manuscript; a door to a fairy land. It seemed impossible that they should come here every day to study, that they had the right to enter at all.

Yet here it stood, right in front of them, waiting.

Anthony beckoned, beaming. ‘Well, come on in.’

‘Translation agencies have always been indispensable tools of – nay, the centres of – great civilizations. In 1527, Charles V of Spain created the Secretaría de Interpretación de Lenguas, whose employees juggled over a dozen languages in service of governing his empire’s territories. The Royal Institute of Translation was founded in London in the early seventeenth century, though it didn’t move to its current home in Oxford until 1715 and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, after which the British decided it might be prudent to train young lads to speak the languages of the colonies the Spanish had just lost. Yes, I’ve memorized all this, and no, I didn’t write it, but I’ve been giving this tour since my first year on account of my immense personal charisma, so I’ve got quite good at it. Through the foyer this way.’

Anthony had the rare skill of talking smoothly while walking backwards. ‘There’s eight floors to Babel,’ he said. ‘The Book of Jubilees claims the historical Tower of Babel reached a height of over five thousand cubits – that’s nearly two miles – which is of course impossible, though our Babel is the tallest building in Oxford, and likely all of England, excepting St Paul’s. We’re nearly three hundred feet tall, not counting the basement, which means our total height is twice that of the Radcliffe Library—’

Victoire lifted her hand. ‘Is the tower—’

‘Larger on the inside than it seems on the outside?’ Anthony asked. ‘Indeed.’ Robin had not noticed this at first, but now felt disoriented by the contradiction. Babel’s exterior was massive, but it still did not appear tall enough to admit the high ceilings and towering shelves of each interior floor. ‘It’s a pretty trick of silver-working, though I’m not sure of the match-pair involved. It’s been like this since I got here; we take it for granted.’

Anthony guided them through a throng of townsfolk standing in busy queues before cashier windows. ‘We’re in the lobby now – all business gets conducted here. Local tradesmen ordering bars for their equipment, city officials requesting public works maintenance, that sort of thing. It’s the only area of the tower accessible to civilians, though they don’t interact with scholars much – we’ve got clerks to process their requests.’ Anthony waved for them to follow him up the central staircase. ‘This way.’

The second floor was the Legal Department, which was full of dour-faced scholars scratching at paper and flipping through thick, musty reference volumes.

‘It’s always busy here,’ said Anthony. ‘International treaties, overseas trade, that sort of thing. The gears of empire, the stuff that makes the world go round. Most Babel students end up here after graduation, as the pay is good and they’re always hiring. They do quite a lot of pro bono work here, too – the whole southwest quadrant is a team working on translating the Code Napoléon into other European languages.[21] But we charge a pretty penny for the rest. This is the floor that draws the largest income – except silver-working, of course.’

‘Where’s silver-working?’ Victoire asked.

‘Eighth floor. Up at the very top.’

‘For the view?’ Letty asked.

‘For the fires,’ said Anthony. ‘When fires start you’d rather they be at the top of the building so everyone has time to get out.’

No one could tell if he was joking.[22]

Anthony led them up another flight of stairs. ‘The third floor is the landing base for the live interpreters.’ He gestured around the largely empty room, which showed few signs of use except for several stained teacups lying askew and the occasional stack of paper on a desk corner. ‘They’re almost never here, but they need a place to prepare briefing files in confidence when they are, so they get this entire space. They accompany dignitaries and foreign service officials on their trips abroad, attending balls in Russia and taking tea with sheikhs in Arabia and whatnot. I’m told all the travel gets quite exhausting, so there aren’t too many career interpreters who come out of Babel. They’re usually natural polyglots who picked up their languages elsewhere – they had missionary parents, or they spent summers with foreign relatives, for example. Babel graduates tend to avoid it.’

‘Why?’ Ramy asked. ‘It sounds fun.’

‘It’s a cushy posting if what you want is to travel abroad on someone else’s money,’ said Anthony. ‘But academics by nature are a solitary, sedentary lot. Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.’

‘You have a dim view of academics,’ said Victoire.

‘I have a view informed by experience. You’ll understand in time. Alums who apply for interpreting jobs always quit within the first two years. Even Sterling Jones – Sir William Jones’s nephew, mind you – couldn’t hack it for more than eight months, and they had him travelling first class wherever he went. Anyway, live interpretation isn’t considered all that glamorous, because all that really matters is that you get your basic points across without offending anyone. You don’t get to play around with the intricacies of language, which is of course where the real fun is.’

The fourth floor was a good deal busier than the third. The scholars also appeared to be younger: messy-haired and patch-sleeved types compared with the polished, well-dressed folks in Legal.

‘Literature,’ Anthony explained. ‘That is, the businesses of translating foreign novels, stories, and poems into English and – less frequently – vice versa. It’s a bit low on the prestige rung, to be honest, but it’s a more coveted placement than interpretation. One considers a postgraduation appointment to Literature the natural first step towards becoming a Babel professor.’

‘Some of us actually like it here, mind you.’ A young man wearing postgraduate gowns strode up next to Anthony. ‘These are the first years?’

‘That’s all of them.’

‘Not a big class, are you?’ The man waved cheerfully at them. ‘Hello. Vimal Srinivasan. I’ve just graduated last term; I do Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and German.’[23]

‘Does everyone here introduce themselves with their languages?’ Ramy asked.

‘Of course,’ Vimal said. ‘Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull. Anyhow, welcome to the best floor in the tower.’

Victoire was peering around the shelves with great interest. ‘So do you get your hands on every book that’s published abroad?’

‘Most of them, yes,’ said Vimal.

‘All the French releases? As soon as they come out?’

‘Yes, greedy,’ he said, with absolutely no malice. ‘You’ll find our book-buying budget is effectively limitless, and our librarians like to maintain a thorough collection. Though we can’t translate everything that comes through here; we just haven’t the manpower. Translating ancient texts still occupies a good part of our time.’

‘Which is why they’re the only department that runs a deficit every year,’ said Anthony.

‘Bettering one’s understanding of the human condition is not a matter of profit.’ Vimal sniffed. ‘We’re always updating the classics – between the past century and now, we’ve become a lot better at certain languages, and there’s no reason why classics should remain so inaccessible. I’m currently working on a better Latin version of the Bhagavad Gita—’

‘Never mind that Schlegel just put one out,’ Anthony quipped.

‘Over ten years ago,’ Vimal dismissed. ‘And the Schlegel Gita is dreadful; he said himself that he hadn’t grasped the basic philosophy that underlies the whole thing. Which shows, because he’s used about seven different words for yoga—’

‘Anyway,’ Anthony said, ushering them away, ‘that’s Literature. One of the worst applications of a Babel education, if you ask me.’

‘You don’t approve?’ Robin asked. He shared Victoire’s delight; a life spent on the fourth floor, he thought, would be wonderful.

‘Me, no.’ Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m here for silver-working. I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot, as Vimal knows. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.’

The fifth and sixth floors housed both instruction rooms and reference materials – the primers, grammars, readers, thesauruses, and at least four different editions of every dictionary published in what Anthony claimed was every language spoken in the world.

‘Well, the dictionaries are really scattered all over the tower, but here’s where you come if you need to do some archival heavy lifting,’ Anthony explained. ‘Right in the middle, you see, so no one ever has to walk more than four flights to get what they need.’

In the centre of the sixth floor, a series of red-bound books sat on crimson velvet cloth beneath a glass display case. The way the soft lamplight gleamed against their leather covers made them look quite magical – more like magicians’ grimoires than common reference materials.

‘These are the Grammaticas,’ said Anthony. ‘They look impressive, but it’s all right, you can touch. They’re meant to be consulted. Just wipe your fingers on the velvet first.’

The Grammaticas were bound volumes of varying thicknesses but identical binding, arranged alphabetically by the Romanized name of the language and by publication date within those languages. Some Grammatica sets – notably the European languages – took up entire display cases on their own; others, largely the Oriental languages, contained very few volumes. The Chinese Grammaticas spanned only three volumes; the Japanese and Korean Grammaticas contained only one volume each. Tagalog, surprisingly, spanned five volumes.

‘But we can’t take credit for that,’ said Anthony. ‘All of that translation work was done by the Spanish; that’s why you’ll also see Spanish-to-English translator credits behind the cover pages. And a good deal of the Caribbean and South Asian Grammaticas – here they are – are still in progress. Those languages weren’t of interest at Babel until after the Peace of Paris, which of course dumped a great deal of territory into Britain’s imperial holdings. Similarly, you’ll find most of the African Grammaticas are translated into English from German – it’s the German missionaries and philologists who are doing the most work there; we haven’t had anyone doing African languages for years.’

Robin couldn’t help himself. He reached eagerly for the Oriental language Grammaticas and began thumbing through the front material. Written on the cover page of each volume in very neat, tiny handwriting were the names of those scholars who had produced the first edition of each Grammatica. Nathaniel Halhed had written the Bengali Grammatica, Sir William Jones the Sanskrit Grammatica. This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.

‘It’s only recently that we’ve done much in Oriental languages at all,’ said Anthony. ‘We were lagging behind the French there for quite a while. Sir William Jones made some headway introducing Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian to the courses lists when he was a fellow here – he started the Persian Grammatica in 1771 – but he was the only one doing any serious work in those languages until 1803.’

‘What happened then?’ asked Robin.

‘Then Richard Lovell joined the faculty,’ said Anthony. ‘I hear he’s something like a genius with Far Eastern languages. He’s contributed two volumes to the Chinese Grammatica alone.’

Reverently, Robin reached out and pulled the first volume of the Chinese Grammatica towards him. The tome felt inordinately heavy, each page weighted down by ink. He recognized Professor Lovell’s cramped, neat handwriting on each page. It covered an astonishing breadth of research. He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did.

‘Why are these under display cases?’ asked Victoire. ‘Seems rather difficult to take them out.’

‘Because these are the only editions in Oxford,’ said Anthony. ‘There are backups at Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Foreign Offices in London. Those are updated annually to account for new findings. But these are the only comprehensive, authoritative collections of knowledge of every language that exist. New work is added by hand, you’ll notice – it costs too much to reprint every time new additions are made, and besides, our printing presses can’t handle that many foreign scripts.’

‘So if a fire tore through Babel, we could lose a full year of research?’ asked Ramy.

‘A year? Try decades. But that’ll never happen.’ Anthony tapped the table, which Robin noticed was inlaid with dozens of slim silver bars. ‘The Grammaticas are better protected than the Princess Victoria. These books are impervious to fire, flood, and attempted removal by anyone who isn’t in the Institute register. If anyone tried to steal or damage one of these, they’d be struck by an unseen force so powerful they’d lose all sense of self and purpose until the police arrived.’

‘The bars can do that?’ Robin asked, alarmed.

‘Well, something close,’ Anthony said. ‘I’m just guessing. Professor Playfair does the protective wards, and he likes to be mysterious about them. But yes, the security of this tower would astound you. It looks like your standard Oxford building, but if anyone ever tried to break in, they’d find themselves bleeding out on the street. I’ve seen it happen.’

‘That’s a lot of protection for a research building,’ said Robin. His palms felt suddenly clammy; he wiped them on his gown.

‘Well, of course,’ said Anthony. ‘There’s more silver in these walls than in the vaults of the Bank of England.’

‘Truly?’ Letty asked.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel is one of the richest places in the entire country. Would you like to see why?’

They nodded. Anthony snapped his fingers and beckoned for them to follow him up the stairs.

The eighth floor was the only part of Babel that lay hidden behind doors and walls. The other seven were designed following an open floor plan, with no barriers surrounding the staircase, but the stairs to the eighth floor led to a brick hallway which in turn led to a heavy wooden door.

‘Fire barrier,’ Anthony explained. ‘In case of accidents. Seals off the rest of the building so that the Grammaticas don’t get burnt if something up here explodes.’ He leaned his weight against the door and pushed.

The eighth floor looked more like a workshop than a research library. Scholars stood bent around worktables like mechanics, holding assortments of engraving tools to silver bars of all shapes and sizes. Whirring, humming, drilling sounds filled the air. Something exploded near the window, causing a shower of sparks followed by a round of cursing, but no one so much as glanced up.

A portly, grey-haired white man stood waiting for them in front of the workstations. He had a broad, smile-wrinkled face and the sort of twinkling eyes that could have placed him anywhere between forty and sixty. His black master’s gowns were coated with so much silver dust that he shimmered whenever he moved. His eyebrows were thick, dark, and extraordinarily expressive; they seemed ready to leap off his face with enthusiasm whenever he spoke.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m Professor Jerome Playfair, chair of the faculty. I dabble in French and Italian, but my first love is German. Thank you, Anthony, you’re free to go. Are you and Woodhouse all set for your Jamaica trip?’

‘Not yet,’ said Anthony. ‘Still need to track down the Patois primer. I suspect Gideon took it without signing it out again.’

‘Get on, then.’

Anthony nodded, tipped an imaginary hat at Robin’s cohort, and retreated back through the heavy door.

Professor Playfair beamed at them. ‘So now you’ve seen Babel. How are we all doing?’

For a moment, no one spoke. Letty, Ramy, and Victoire all seemed as stunned as Robin felt. They’d been exposed to a great deal of information at once, and the effect was that Robin wasn’t sure the ground he stood on was real.

Professor Playfair chuckled. ‘I know. I had the same impression on my first day here as well. It’s rather like an induction into a hidden world, isn’t it? Like taking food in the seelie court. Once you know what happens in the tower, the mundane world doesn’t seem half as interesting.’

‘It’s dazzling, sir,’ said Letty. ‘Incredible.’

Professor Playfair winked at her. ‘It’s the most wonderful place on earth.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Now I’d like to tell a story. Forgive me for being dramatic, but I like to mark this occasion – your first day, after all, in what I believe is the most important research centre in the world. Would that be all right?’

He didn’t need their approval, but they nodded regardless.

‘Thank you. Now, we know this following story from Herodotus.’ He paced several steps before them, like a player marking out his position on the stage. ‘He tells us of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who once formed a pact with Ionian sea raiders to defeat the eleven kings who had betrayed him. After he had overthrown his enemies, he gave large tracts of land to his Ionian allies. But Psammetichus wanted an even better guarantee that the Ionians would not turn on him as his former allies once had. He wanted to prevent wars based on misunderstandings. So he sent young Egyptian boys to live with the Ionians and learn Greek so that when they grew up, they could serve as interpreters between the two peoples.

‘Here at Babel, we take inspiration from Psammetichus.’ He peered around, and his sparkling gaze landed on each of them in turn as he spoke. ‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.

‘You’ve noticed by now, surely, that Babel alone among the Oxford faculties accepts students not of European origin. Nowhere else in this country will you find Hindus, Muslims, Africans, and Chinamen studying under the same roof. We accept you not despite, but because of your foreign backgrounds.’ Professor Playfair emphasized this last part as if it was a matter of great pride. ‘Because of your origins, you have the gift of languages those born in England cannot imitate. And you, like Psammetichus’s boys, are the tongues that will speak this vision of global harmony into being.’

He clasped his hands before him as if in prayer. ‘Anyhow. The postgrads make fun of me for that spiel every year. They think it’s trite. But I think the situation calls for such gravity, don’t you? After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

This was, Robin thought, the kindest thing anyone had ever had to say about his being foreign-born. And though the story made his gut squirm – for he had read the relevant passage of Herodotus, and recalled that the Egyptian boys were nevertheless slaves – he felt also a thrum of excitement at the thought that perhaps his unbelonging did not doom him to existing forever on the margins, that perhaps, instead, it made him special.

Next, Professor Playfair gathered them around an empty worktable for a demonstration. ‘Now, the common man thinks that silver-working is equivalent to sorcery.’ He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows as he spoke, shouting so they could hear him over the din. ‘They think that the power of the bars lies in the silver itself, that silver is some inherently magical substance which contains the power to alter the world.’

He unlocked the left drawer and pulled out a blank silver bar. ‘They’re not wholly wrong. There is indeed something special about silver that makes it an ideal vehicle for what we do. I like to think that it was blessed by the gods – it’s refined with mercury, after all, and Mercury is the messenger god, no? Mercury, Hermes. Does silver not then have an inextricable link to hermeneutics? But let’s not get too romantic. No, the power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing – the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.’

He glanced up, took in their baffled faces. ‘You have questions. Don’t worry. You won’t start working with silver until near the end of your third year. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the relevant theory before then. What matters now is that you understand the magnitude of what we do here.’ He reached for an engraving pen. ‘Which is, of course, the casting of spells.’

He began carving a word into one end of the bar. ‘I’m just showing you a simple one. The effect will be quite subtle, but see if you feel it.’

He finished writing on that end, then held it up to show them. ‘Heimlich. German for the secret and clandestine, which is how I’ll translate it to English. But heimlich means more than just secrets. We derive heimlich from a Proto-Germanic word that means “home”. Put together this constellation of meaning, and what do you get? Something like the secret, private feeling you get from being somewhere you belong, secluded from the outside world.’

As he spoke, he wrote the word clandestine on the flip side of the bar. The moment he finished, the silver began to vibrate.

‘Heimlich,’ he said. ‘Clandestine.’

Once again Robin heard a singing without a source, an inhuman voice from nowhere.

The world shifted. Something bound them – some intangible barrier blurred the air around them, drowned out the surrounding noise, made it feel as though they were the only ones on a floor they knew was crowded with scholars. They were safe here. They were alone. This was their tower, their refuge.[24]

They were no strangers to this magic. They had all seen silver-work in effect before; in England it was impossible to avoid. But it was one thing to know the bars could work, that silver-work was simply the foundation of a functioning, advanced society. It was another thing to witness with their own eyes the warping of reality, the way words seized what no words could describe and invoked a physical effect that should not be.

Victoire had her hand to her mouth. Letty was breathing hard. Ramy blinked very rapidly, as if trying to hold back tears.

And Robin, watching the still quivering bar, saw clearly now that it was all worth it. The loneliness, the beatings, the long and aching hours of study, the ingesting of languages like bitter tonic so that he could one day do this – it was all worth it.

‘One last thing,’ Professor Playfair said as he accompanied them down the stairs. ‘We’ll need to take your blood.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Letty.

‘Your blood. It won’t take long.’ Professor Playfair led them through the lobby to a small, windowless room hidden behind the shelves, which was empty save for a plain table and four chairs. He gestured for them to sit, then strode to the back wall, where a series of drawers were concealed inside the stone. He pulled out the top drawer, revealing stacks and stacks of tiny glass vials within. Each one was labelled with the name of the scholar whose blood it contained.

‘It’s for the wards,’ Professor Playfair explained. ‘Babel sees more robbery attempts than all of the banks in London combined. The doors keep most of the riffraff out, but the wards need some way to distinguish scholars from intruders. We’ve tried hair and fingernails, but they’re too easy to steal.’

‘Thieves can steal blood,’ said Ramy.

‘They can,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But they’d have to be much more determined about the whole endeavour, wouldn’t they?’

He pulled a handful of syringes from the bottom drawer. ‘Sleeves up, please.’

Reluctantly, they pushed up their gowns.

‘Shouldn’t we have a nurse in here?’ asked Victoire.

‘Don’t you worry.’ Professor Playfair tapped the needle. ‘I’m quite good at this. Won’t take me too long to find a vein. Who’s first?’

Robin volunteered; he didn’t want to suffer the anticipation of watching the others. Ramy went next, and then Victoire, and then Letty. The whole procedure took less than fifteen minutes, with none the worse for the wear, though Letty had turned disturbingly green by the time the needle left her arm.

‘Have a hearty lunch,’ Professor Playfair told her. ‘Blood pudding’s good, if they have any.’

Four new glass vials were added to the drawer, all labelled with neat, tiny handwriting.

‘Now you’re part of the tower,’ Professor Playfair told them as he locked the drawers. ‘Now the tower knows you.’

Ramy made a face. ‘Bit creepy, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.’

Babel shared a buttery in the Radcliffe quadrangle with several other humanities faculties. The food there was supposedly very good, but it was closed until start of classes tomorrow, so instead they headed back to the college just in time for the tail end of lunch service. All the hot food was gone, but afternoon tea and its trappings were on offer until supper. They loaded trays with teacups, teapots, sugar bowls, milk jugs, and scones, then navigated the long wooden tables in hall until they found an unoccupied one in the corner.

‘So you’re from Canton, then?’ asked Letty. She had a very forceful personality, Robin had noticed; she asked all her questions, even the benign ones, in the tone of an interrogator.

He’d just bitten into a scone; it was dry and stale, and he had to take a sip of tea before he could answer. She turned her gaze on Ramy before he could. ‘And you – Madras? Bombay?’

‘Calcutta,’ Ramy said pleasantly.

‘My father was stationed in Calcutta,’ she said. ‘Three years, from 1825 to 1828. Could be you saw him around.’

‘Lovely,’ said Ramy as he slathered jam over his scone. ‘Could be he pointed a gun at my sisters once.’

Robin snorted, but Letty blanched. ‘I’m only saying I’ve met Hindus before—’

‘I’m Muslim.’

‘Well, I’m just saying—’

‘And you know,’ now Ramy was buttering his scone with great vim, ‘it’s very irritating, actually, the way everyone wants to equate India with Hinduism. “Oh, Muslim rule is an aberration, an intrusion; the Mughals just interlopers, but tradition – that’s Sanskrit, that’s the Upanishads.”’ He lifted his scone to his mouth. ‘But you don’t even know what any of those words mean, do you?’

They’d got off to a bad start. Ramy’s humour did not always work on new acquaintances. One needed to take his glib tirades in one’s stride, and Letitia Price seemed capable of anything but that.

‘So, Babel,’ Robin interjected before Ramy could say anything else. ‘Nice building.’

Letty cast him an amazed look. ‘Quite.’

Ramy, rolling his eyes, coughed and set down his scone.

They sipped their tea in silence. Victoire clinked her spoon nervously around her cup. Robin stared out of the window. Ramy tapped his fingers against the table but stopped when Letty shot him a glare.

‘How have you found the place?’ Victoire tried valiantly to rescue their conversation. ‘Oxfordshire, I mean. I feel like we’ve only seen a fraction of it so far, it’s so big. I mean, not like London or Paris, but there are so many hidden corners, don’t you think?’

‘It’s incredible,’ Robin said with a bit too much enthusiasm. ‘It’s unreal, every single building – we spent the first three days just walking around, staring. We saw all the tourist attractions – the Oxford Museum, the Christ Church gardens—’

Victoire arched an eyebrow. ‘And they’re letting you in wherever you go?’

‘Actually, no.’ Ramy set down his teacup. ‘Remember, Birdie, the Ashmolean—’

‘Right,’ said Robin. ‘They seemed so certain we were going to steal something, they made us turn out our pockets on the way in and out, as if they were convinced we’d stolen the Alfred Jewel.’

‘They wouldn’t let us in at all,’ Victoire said. ‘They said unchaperoned ladies weren’t allowed.’

Ramy snorted. ‘Why?’

‘Probably because of our nervous dispositions,’ said Letty. ‘They couldn’t have us fainting against the paintings.’

‘But the colours are so exciting,’ said Victoire.

‘Battlefields and breasts.’ Letty put the back of her hand to her forehead. ‘Too much for my nerves.’

‘So what’d you do?’ Ramy asked.

‘We came back when a different docent was on shift and pretended this time to be men.’ Victoire deepened her voice. ‘Excuse me, we’re just countryside lads visiting our cousins here and we’ve nothing to do when they’re in class—’

Robin laughed. ‘You didn’t.’

‘It worked,’ Victoire insisted.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘No, really.’ Victoire smiled. She had, Robin noticed, enormous and very pretty doe-like eyes. He liked listening to her speak; every sentence felt like she was pulling laughter out from inside him. ‘They must have thought we were about twelve, but it worked like a dream—’

‘Until you got excited,’ Letty cut in.

‘All right, it worked until we were just past the docent—’

‘But then she saw a Rembrandt she liked and let out this squeak—’ Letty made a chirping noise. Victoire shoved at her shoulder, but she was laughing too.

‘“Excuse me, miss.”’ Victoire pulled down her chin in imitation of the disapproving docent. ‘“You’re not supposed to be here, I think you’ve got turned around—”’

‘So it was nerves, after all—’

That was all it took. The ice melted. In an instant they were all laughing – a bit harder, perhaps, than the joke justified, but what mattered was that they were laughing at all.

‘Has anyone else found you out?’ Ramy asked.

‘No, they all just think we’re particularly slim freshers,’ Letty said. ‘Though once someone yelled at Victoire to take off her gown.’

‘He tried to pull it off me.’ Victoire’s gaze dropped to her lap. ‘Letty had to beat him off with her umbrella.’

‘Similar thing happened to us,’ Ramy said. ‘Some drunkards from Balliol started shouting at us one night.’

‘They don’t like dark skin in their uniforms,’ said Victoire.

‘No,’ said Ramy, ‘they don’t.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Victoire. ‘Did they – I mean, did you get away all right?’

Robin cast Ramy a concerned glance, but Ramy’s eyes were still crinkled with good humour.

‘Oh, yes.’ He threw his arm around Robin’s shoulders. ‘I was ready to break some noses, but this one did the prudent thing – started running like the hounds of hell were behind him – so then I couldn’t do anything but run as well.’

‘I don’t like conflict,’ Robin said, blushing.

‘Oh, no,’ said Ramy. ‘You’d disappear into the stones if you could.’

‘You could have stayed,’ Robin quipped. ‘Fought them off single-handed.’

‘What, and leave you to the scary dark?’ Ramy grinned. ‘Anyway, you looked absurd. Sprinting like your bladder was bursting and you couldn’t find a privy.’

And then they were laughing again.

Soon it became apparent that no topics were off limits. They could talk about anything, share all the indescribable humiliations they felt being in a place they were not supposed to be, all the lurking unease that until now they’d kept to themselves. They offered up everything about themselves because they had, at last, found the only group of people for whom their experiences were not so unique or baffling.

Next they traded stories about their educations before Oxford. Babel, apparently, always anointed its chosen ones at a young age. Letty, who was from down south in Brighton, had dazzled family friends with her prodigious memory ever since she could speak; one such friend, who knew some Oxford dons, secured her a set of tutors and had her drilled in French, German, Latin, and Greek until she was old enough to matriculate.

‘Though I almost didn’t make it.’ Letty blinked, eyelashes fluttering madly. ‘Father said he’d never pay for a woman’s education, so I’m grateful for the scholarship. I had to sell a set of bracelets to pay for the coach fare up.’

Victoire, like Robin and Ramy, had come to Europe with a guardian. ‘Paris,’ she clarified. ‘He was a Frenchman, but he had acquaintances at the Institute, and he was going to write to them when I was old enough. Only then he died, and for a while I wasn’t sure I’d get to come.’ Her voice faltered a bit. She took a sip of tea. ‘But I managed to get in touch with them, and they arranged to bring me over,’ she concluded vaguely.

Robin suspected this was not the full extent of this story, but he, too, was practised in the art of papering over pain, and he did not pry.

One thing united them all – without Babel, they had nowhere in this country to go. They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom; they did not want to give them back.

By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them. The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire’s sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial, or when they all knew Letty was about to come to class with a paper bag full of lemon biscuits because it was a Wednesday morning and Taylor’s bakery put out lemon biscuits on Wednesdays. But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

Later, when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day, to this hour at this table, and wonder why they had been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another. Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side?

But the answer was obvious – that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.

The girls were not allowed to live in college, which was why they hadn’t crossed paths with Robin and Ramy until the first day of instruction. Instead, Victoire and Letty lodged about two miles away in the servant annex of one of the Oxford day schools, which was apparently a common arrangement for Babel’s female students. Robin and Ramy accompanied them home because it seemed the gentlemanly thing to do, but Robin hoped this would not become a nightly routine, as the road really was quite far away and there was no omnibus at this hour.

‘They couldn’t put you anywhere closer?’ Ramy asked.

Victoire shook her head. ‘All of the colleges said our proximity risked corrupting the gentlemen.’

‘Well, that’s not fair,’ said Ramy.

Letty shot him a droll look. ‘Say more.’

‘But it’s not so bad,’ said Victoire. ‘There are some fun pubs on this street – we like the Four Horsemen, the Twisted Root, and there’s this place called Rooks and Pawns where you can play chess—’

‘Sorry,’ said Robin. ‘Did you say the Twisted Root?’

‘It’s up ahead on Harrow Lane near the bridge,’ said Victoire. ‘You won’t like it, though. We took a peek and walked right back out – it’s awfully dirty inside. Run your finger around the glass and you’ll find a wadge of grease and dirt a quarter of an inch thick.’

‘Not a haunt for students, then?’

‘No, Oxford boys wouldn’t be seen dead there. It’s for town, not gown.’

Letty pointed out a herd of meandering cows up ahead, and Robin let the conversation drift. Later, after they’d seen the girls safely home, he told Ramy to head back to Magpie Lane on his own.

‘I forgot I’ve got to go and see Professor Lovell,’ he said. Jericho was conveniently closer to this part of town than it was to Univ. ‘It’s a long walk; I don’t want to drag you over there.’

‘I thought your dinner wasn’t until next weekend,’ said Ramy.

‘It is, but I’ve just remembered I was supposed to visit sooner.’ Robin cleared his throat; he felt terrible lying to Ramy’s face. ‘Mrs Piper said she had some cakes for me.’

‘Thank heavens.’ Amazingly, Ramy suspected nothing. ‘Lunch was inedible. Are you sure you don’t want company?’

‘I’m all right. It’s been quite a day, and I’m tired, and I think it’ll be nice just to walk for a bit in silence.’

‘Fair enough,’ Ramy said pleasantly.

They parted on Woodstock Road. Ramy went down south straight back to the college. Robin cut right in search of the bridge Victoire had pointed out, unsure of what he was looking for except for the memory of a whispered phrase.

The answer found him. Halfway through Harrow Lane he heard a second pair of footsteps behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a dark figure following him up the narrow road.

‘Took you long enough,’ said his doppelgänger. ‘I’ve been skulking here all day.’

‘Who are you?’ Robin demanded. ‘What are you – why do you have my face?’

‘Not here,’ said his doppelgänger. ‘The pub’s round this corner, let’s go inside—’

‘Answer me,’ Robin demanded. A belated sense of danger had only now kicked in; his mouth had gone dry; his heart was hammering furiously. ‘Who are you?’

‘You’re Robin Swift,’ said the man. ‘You grew up without a father but with an inexplicable English nursemaid and a never-ending supply of books in English, and when Professor Lovell turned up to carry you off to England, you said farewell to your motherland for good. You think the professor might be your father, but he hasn’t admitted that you are his own. You’re quite sure he never will. Does that make sense?’

Robin couldn’t speak. His mouth opened, and his jaw worked pointlessly, but he simply had nothing to say.

‘Come with me,’ said his doppelgänger. ‘Let’s have a drink.’