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

Chapter Five

They found a table in the back corner of the Twisted Root. Robin’s doppelgänger ordered them two glasses of a light golden ale. Robin drained half his glass in three desperate gulps and felt somewhat steadier, though no less confused.

‘My name,’ said his doppelgänger, ‘is Griffin Lovell.’

Upon closer inspection, he and Robin were not so alike after all. He was several years older, and his face bore a hard maturity that Robin’s hadn’t yet acquired. His voice was deeper, less forgiving, more assertive. He was several inches taller than Robin, though he was also much thinner; indeed, he appeared composed entirely of sharp edges and angles. His hair was darker, his skin paler. He looked like a print illustration of Robin, the lighting contrasts amplified and the colour blanched out.

He’s even more of your spitting image than the last.

‘Lovell,’ Robin repeated, trying to find his bearings. ‘Then you’re—?’

‘He’ll never admit it,’ said Griffin. ‘But he won’t with you either, will he? Do you know he’s got a wife and children?’

Robin choked. ‘What?’

‘It’s true. A girl and a boy, seven and three. Darling Philippa and little Dick. The wife’s name is Johanna. He’s got them squirrelled away in a lovely estate in Yorkshire. It’s partly how he gets funding for voyages abroad – he came from nothing, but she’s terribly rich. Five hundred pounds a year, I’m told.’

‘But then does—?’

‘Does she know about us? Absolutely not. Though I don’t think she’d care if she did, apart from the obvious reputational problems. There’s no love lost in that marriage. He wanted an estate and she wanted bragging rights. They see each other about twice a year, and the rest of his time he lives here, or in Hampstead. We’re the children he spends the most time with, funnily enough.’ Griffin cocked his head. ‘At least, you are.’

‘Am I dreaming?’ Robin mumbled.

‘You wish. You look ghastly. Drink.’

Robin reached mechanically for his glass. He was no longer trembling, but his head felt very fuzzy. Drinking didn’t help, but it at least gave him something to do with his hands.

‘I’m sure you’ve got loads of questions,’ said Griffin. ‘I’ll try to answer them, but you’ll have to be patient. I’ve got questions too. What do you call yourself?’

‘Robin Swift,’ said Robin, puzzled. ‘You know that.’

‘But that’s the name you prefer?’

Robin was not sure what he meant by this. ‘I mean, there’s my first – I mean, my Chinese name, but no one – I don’t—’

‘Fine,’ said Griffin. ‘Swift. Nice name. How’d you come up with that?’

‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ Robin admitted. It sounded very silly when he said it out loud. Everything about Griffin made him feel like a child in contrast. ‘It – it’s one of my favourite books. Professor Lovell said to pick whatever I liked, and that was the first name that came to mind.’

Griffin’s lip curled. ‘He’s softened a bit, then. Me, he took to a street corner before we signed the papers and told me foundlings were often named after the places they’d been abandoned. Said I could walk the city until I found a word that didn’t sound too ridiculous.’

‘Did you?’

‘Sure. Harley. Nowhere special in particular, I just saw it above a shop and I liked the way it sounded. The shapes your mouth has to make, the release of the second syllable. But I’m no Harley, I’m a Lovell, just as you’re no Swift.’

‘So we’re—’

‘Half-brothers,’ said Griffin. ‘Hello, brother. It’s lovely to meet you.’

Robin set down his glass. ‘I’d like to have the full story now.’

‘Fair enough.’ Griffin leaned forward. At dinnertime the Twisted Root was just crowded enough that the hubbub cast a shroud of noise over any individual conversation, but still Griffin lowered his voice to such a quiet murmur that Robin had to strain to hear. ‘Here’s the long and short of it. I’m a criminal. My colleagues and I regularly steal silver, manuscripts, and engraving materials from Babel and funnel them across England to our associates throughout the world. What you did last night was treason, and if anyone found out, you’d be locked up in Newgate for twenty years at least, but only after they’d tortured you in an attempt to get to us.’ All this he uttered very quickly, with hardly any change in tone or volume. When finished, he leaned back, looking satisfied.

Robin did the only thing he could think to do, which was take another heady gulp of ale. When he set the glass down, temples throbbing, the only word he managed was ‘Why?’

‘Easy,’ said Griffin. ‘There’s people who need silver more than wealthy Londoners.’

‘But – I mean, who?’

Griffin didn’t respond at once. He looked Robin up and down for several seconds, examining his face as if searching for something – some further resemblance, some crucial, innate quality. Then he asked, ‘Why did your mother die?’

‘Cholera,’ Robin said after a pause. ‘There was an outbreak—’

‘I didn’t ask how,’ said Griffin. ‘I asked why.’

I don’t know why, Robin wanted to say, but he did. He’d always known, he’d just forced himself not to dwell on it. In all this time, he had never let himself ask this particular formulation of the question.

Oh, two weeks and some change, said Mrs Piper. They’d been in China for over two weeks.

His eyes stung. He blinked. ‘How do you know about my mother?’

Griffin leaned back, arms folded behind his head. ‘Why don’t you finish that drink?’

Outside, Griffin set off briskly down Harrow Lane, tossing rapid-fire questions from out of the side of his mouth. ‘So where are you from?’

‘Canton.’

‘I was born in Macau. I don’t remember if I ever went to Canton. So when did he bring you over?’

‘To London?’

‘No, you dolt, to Manila. Yes, London.’

His brother, Robin thought, could be quite an ass. ‘Six – no, seven years ago now.’

‘Incredible.’ Griffin turned left onto Banbury Road without warning; Robin hastened to follow. ‘No wonder he never went looking for me. Had something better to focus on, didn’t he?’

Robin lurched forward, tripping on the cobblestones. He righted himself and hurried after Griffin. He’d never had ale before, only weak wines at Mrs Piper’s table, and the hops left his tongue feeling numb. He had a strong urge to vomit. Why had he drunk so much? He felt dazed, twice as slow at putting together his thoughts – but of course that was the point. It was clear Griffin had wanted him off-kilter, unguarded. Robin suspected Griffin liked to keep people unbalanced.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘South. Then west. Doesn’t matter; it’s just that the best way to avoid being overheard is to always be on the move.’ Griffin pivoted down Canterbury Road. ‘If you’re standing still, then your tail can hide and catch the whole conversation, but it makes things harder for them when you’re weaving about.’

‘Your tail?’

‘One should always assume.’

‘Can we go to a bakery, then?’

‘A bakery?’

‘I told my friend I’d gone to see Mrs Piper.’ Robin’s head was still spinning, but the memory of his lie stuck out with clarity. ‘I can’t go home empty-handed.’

‘Fine.’ Griffin led them down Winchester Road. ‘Will Taylor’s do? There’s nothing else still open.’

Robin ducked inside the shop and hastily purchased a selection of the plainest pastries he could find – he didn’t want Ramy to grow suspicious the next time they passed Taylor’s glass display. He had a burlap sack in his room; he could discard the shop boxes when he got home and dump the cakes in there.

Griffin’s paranoia had infected him. He felt marked, coated in scarlet paint, certain that someone would call him a thief even as he paid. He couldn’t meet the baker’s eye as he received his change.

‘Anyhow,’ Griffin said when Robin emerged. ‘How would you like to steal for us?’

‘Steal?’ They were strolling at an absurd pace again. ‘You mean from Babel?’

‘Obviously, yes. Keep up.’

‘But why do you need me?’

‘Because you’re a part of the institution and we’re not. Your blood’s in the tower, which means there are doors you can open that we can’t.’

‘But why . . .’ Robin’s tongue kept tripping over a flood of questions. ‘What for? What do you do with what you steal?’

‘Just what I told you. We redistribute it. We’re Robin Hood. Ha, ha. Robin. No? All right. We send bars and silver-working materials all over the world to people who need them – people who don’t have the luxury of being rich and British. People like your mother. See, Babel’s a dazzling place, but it’s only dazzling because it sells its match-pairs to a very limited customer base.’ Griffin glanced over his shoulder. There was no one around them save a washerwoman lugging a basket down the other end of the street, but he quickened his pace regardless. ‘So are you in?’

‘I – I don’t know.’ Robin blinked. ‘I can’t just – I mean, I still have so many questions.’

Griffin shrugged. ‘So ask anything you want. Go on.’

‘I – all right.’ Robin tried to arrange his confusion into sequential order. ‘Who are you?’

‘Griffin Lovell.’

‘No, the collective you—’

‘The Hermes Society,’ Griffin said promptly. ‘Just Hermes, if you like.’

‘The Hermes Society.’ Robin turned that name over in his mouth. ‘Why—’

‘It’s a joke. Silver and mercury, Mercury and Hermes, Hermes and hermeneutics. I don’t know who came up with it.’

‘And you’re a clandestine society? No one knows about you?’

‘Certainly Babel does. We’ve had a – well, it’s been quite back and forth, shall we say? But they don’t know much, and certainly not as much as they’d like to. We’re very good at staying in the shadows.’

Not that good, Robin thought, thinking of curses in the dark, silver scattered across cobblestones. He said instead, ‘How many of you are there?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘Do you have a headquarters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you show me where it is?’

Griffin laughed. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘But – there’s more of you, surely?’ Robin persisted. ‘You could at least introduce me—’

‘Can’t, and won’t,’ said Griffin. ‘We’ve just barely met, brother. For all I know, you could go running to Playfair the moment we part.’

‘But then how—’ Robin threw up his arms in frustration. ‘I mean, you’re giving me nothing, and asking me for everything.’

‘Yes, brother, that’s really how secret societies with any degree of competence work. I don’t know what sort of person you are, and I’d be a fool to tell you more.’

‘You see why this makes things very difficult for me, though?’ Robin thought Griffin was brushing off some rather reasonable concerns. ‘I don’t know a thing about you either. You could be lying, you could be trying to frame me—’

‘If that were true you’d have been sent down by now. So that’s out. What do you think we’re lying about?’

‘Could be you’re not using the silver to help other people at all,’ said Robin. ‘Could be the Hermes Society is a great fraud, could be you’re reselling what you steal to get rich—’

‘Do I look like I’m getting rich?’

Robin took in Griffin’s lean, underfed frame, his frayed black coat, and his unkempt hair. No – he had to admit, the Hermes Society did not seem like a scheme for personal profit. Perhaps Griffin was using the stolen silver for some other secret means, but personal gain did not seem like one of them.

‘I know it’s a lot at once,’ Griffin said. ‘But you’ve simply got to trust me. There’s no other way.’

‘I want to. I mean – I’m just – this is so much.’ Robin shook his head. ‘I’ve only just arrived here, I’ve only just seen Babel for the first time, and I don’t know you or this place well enough to have the slightest idea what’s going on—’

‘Then why’d you do it?’ Griffin asked.

‘I – what?’

‘Last night.’ Griffin cast him a sideways look. ‘You helped us, without question. You didn’t even hesitate. Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robin said truthfully.

He’d asked himself this a thousand times. Why had he activated that bar? It wasn’t merely because the whole situation – the midnight hour, the moonlight glow – had been so dreamlike that rules and consequences seemed to disappear, or because the sight of his doppelgänger had made him doubt reality itself. He’d felt some deeper compulsion he couldn’t explain. ‘It just seemed right.’

‘What, you didn’t realize you were helping a ring of thieves?’

‘I knew you were thieves,’ Robin said. ‘I just . . . I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong.’

‘I’d trust your instinct on that,’ said Griffin. ‘Trust me. Trust that we’re doing the right thing.’

‘And what is the right thing?’ Robin asked. ‘In your view? What’s all this for?’

Griffin smiled. It was a peculiar, condescending smile, a mask of amusement that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Now you’re asking the right questions.’

They’d looped back round to Banbury Road. The University Parks loomed lush before them, and Robin half hoped they would cut south to Parks Road – it was getting late, and the night was quite cold – but Griffin took them north, further from the city centre.

‘Do you know what the majority of bars are used for in this country?’

Robin took a wild guess. ‘Doctors’ practices?’

‘Ha. Adorable. No, they’re used for sitting room decorations. That’s right – alarm clocks that sound like real roosters, lights that dim and brighten on vocal demand, curtains that change colour throughout the day, that sort of thing. Because they’re fun, and because the British upper class can afford them, and whatever rich Britons want, they get.’

‘Fine,’ said Robin. ‘But just because Babel sells bars to meet popular demand—’

Griffin cut him off. ‘Would you like to know the second and third largest sources of income at Babel?’

‘Legal?’

‘No. Militaries, both state and private,’ said Griffin. ‘And then slave traders. Legal makes pennies in comparison.’

‘That’s . . . that’s impossible.’

‘No, that’s just how the world works. Let me paint you a picture, brother. You’ve noticed by now that London sits at the centre of a vast empire that won’t stop growing. The single most important enabler of this growth is Babel. Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent the same way it hoards silver and uses them to produce translation magic that benefits England and England only. The vast majority of all silver bars in use in the world are in London. The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful. And that’s wrong. That’s predatory. That’s fundamentally unjust.’

Griffin had a habit of crisply punctuating each sentence with an open hand, like a conductor bearing down again and again over the same note. ‘But how does this happen?’ he continued. ‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism. Ask yourself why the Literature Department only translates works into English and not the other way around, or what the interpreters are being sent abroad to do. Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire. Consider – Sir Horace Wilson, who’s the first endowed chair in Sanskrit in Oxford history, spends half his time conducting tutorials for Christian missionaries.

‘The point of it all is to keep amassing silver. We possess all this silver because we cajole, manipulate, and threaten other countries into trade deals that keep the cash flowing homeward. And we enforce those trade deals with the very same silver bars, now inscribed with Babel’s work, that make our ships faster, our soldiers hardier, and our guns more deadly. It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world.

‘We are that outside force. Hermes. We funnel silver away to people, communities, and movements that deserve it. We aid slave revolts. Resistance movements. We melt down silver bars made for cleaning doilies and use them to cure disease instead.’ Griffin slowed down; turned to look Robin in the eyes. ‘That’s what this is all for.’

This was, Robin had to admit, a very compelling theory of the world. Only it seemed to implicate nearly everything he held dear. ‘I – I see.’

‘So why the hesitation?’

Why indeed? Robin tried to sort through his confusion, to find a reason for prudence that did not simply boil down to fear. But that was precisely it – fear of consequences, fear of breaking the gorgeous illusion of the Oxford he’d won admission to, the one Griffin had just sullied before he’d been able to properly enjoy it.

‘It’s just so sudden,’ he said. ‘And I’ve only just met you, there’s so much I don’t know.’

‘That’s the thing about secret societies,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re easy to romanticize. You think it’s this long courting process – that you’ll be inducted, shown a whole new world, shown all the levers and people at play. If you’ve formed your only impression of secret societies from novels and penny dreadfuls, then you might expect rituals and passwords and secret meetings in abandoned warehouses.

‘But that’s not how things work, brother. This is not a penny dreadful. Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.’ Griffin’s tone softened. ‘You should understand, what I’m asking you to do is very dangerous. People die over these bars – I’ve watched friends die over these bars. Babel would like to crush the life out of us, and you don’t want to know what happens to the Hermes members they catch. We exist because we’re decentralized. We don’t put all of our information in one place. So I can’t ask you to take your time reviewing all the information. I’m asking you to take a chance on a conviction.’

For the first time, Robin registered that Griffin was not as confident, not as intimidating as his rapid-fire speech made him sound. He stood, hands wedged in his pockets, shoulders hunched and shivering against the biting autumn wind. And he was so visibly nervous. He was twitching, fidgeting; his eyes darted over his shoulder every time he finished a sentence. Robin was confused, distressed, but Griffin was scared.

‘It’s got to be like this,’ Griffin insisted. ‘Minimal information. Quick judgment calls. I’d love to show you my whole world – I promise, it’s not fun being alone – but the fact remains you’re a Babel student who I’ve known for less than a day. The time may come when I trust you with everything, but that’ll only be when you’ve proven yourself, and when I’ve got no other options. For now, I’ve told you what we do, and what we need from you. Will you join us?’

This audience, Robin realized, was drawing to an end. He was being asked to make a final decision – and if he said no, he suspected, then Griffin would simply vanish from the Oxford he knew, would fade so effectively into the shadows that Robin would be left wondering if he’d imagined the entire encounter. ‘I want to – I do, really, but I still don’t – I just need time to think. Please.’

He knew this would frustrate Griffin. But Robin was terrified. He felt he’d been led to the edge of a precipice and told, with no assurances, to jump. He felt as he had seven years ago, when Professor Lovell had slid a contract before him and calmly asked that he sign away his future. Only then he’d had nothing, so there had been nothing to lose. This time he had everything – food, clothing, shelter – and no guarantee of survival at the other end.

‘Five days, then,’ said Griffin. He looked cross, but he made no recriminations. ‘You get five days. There’s a lone birch in the Merton College gardens – you’ll know it when you see it. Scratch a cross in the trunk by Saturday if it’s a yes. Don’t bother if it’s a no.’

‘Just five?’

‘If you don’t know the layout of this place by then, kid, there’s no getting through to you at all.’ Griffin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Do you know the way home?’

‘I – no, actually.’ Robin hadn’t been paying attention; he had no idea where they were. The buildings had receded into the background; now they were surrounded only by rolling green.

‘We’re in Summertown,’ said Griffin. ‘Pretty, though a bit boring. Woodstock’s at the end of this green – just take a left and walk all the way down south until things start looking familiar. We’ll part here. Five days.’ Griffin turned to go.

‘Wait – how do I reach you?’ Robin asked. Now that Griffin’s departure seemed imminent, he was somehow reluctant to part ways. He had a sudden fear that if he let Griffin out of his sight then he might disappear for good, that this would all turn out to be a dream.

‘I told you – you don’t,’ said Griffin. ‘If there’s a cross on the tree, I reach you. Gives me insurance in case you turn out to be an informant, you see?’

‘Then what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’

‘What do you mean? You’re still a Babel student. Act like one. Go to class. Go out drinking and get into brawls. No – you’re soft. Don’t get into brawls.’

‘I . . . fine. All right.’

‘Anything else?’

Anything else? Robin wanted to laugh. He had a thousand other questions, none of which he thought Griffin would answer. He took the chance on just one. ‘Does he know about you?’

‘Who?’

‘Our – Professor Lovell.’

‘Ah.’ This time, Griffin did not glibly rattle off an answer. This time, he paused before he spoke. ‘I’m not sure.’

This surprised Robin. ‘You don’t know?’

‘I left Babel after my third year,’ Griffin said quietly. ‘I’d been with Hermes since I started, but I was on the inside like you. Then something happened, and it wasn’t safe anymore, so I ran. And since then I’ve . . .’ He trailed off, then cleared his throat. ‘But that’s beside the point. All you need to know is you probably shouldn’t mention my name at dinner.’

‘Well, that goes without saying.’

Griffin turned to go, paused, then turned back around. ‘One more thing. Where do you live?’

‘Hm? Univ – we’re all at University College.’

‘I know that. What room?’

‘Oh.’ Robin blushed. ‘Number four, Magpie Lane, room seven. The house with the green roof. I’m in the corner. With the sloping windows facing Oriel chapel.’

‘I know it.’ The sun had long set. Robin could no longer see Griffin’s face, half-hidden in shadow. ‘That used to be my room.’

Chapter Six

Professor Playfair’s introductory class to Translation Theory met at Tuesday mornings on the fifth floor of the tower. They’d barely been seated when he began to lecture, filling the narrow classroom with his booming showman’s voice.

‘By now you are each passably fluent in at least three languages, which is a feat in its own right. Today, however, I will try to impress upon you the unique difficulty of translation. Consider how tricky it is merely to say the word hello. Hello seems so easy! Bonjour. Ciao. Hallo. And on and on. But then say we are translating from Italian into English. In Italian, ciao can be used upon greeting or upon parting – it does not specify either, it simply marks etiquette at the point of contact. It is derived from the Venetian s-ciào vostro, meaning something akin to “your obedient servant”. But I digress. The point is, when we bring ciao into English – if we are translating a scene where the characters disperse, for example – we must impose that ciao has been said as goodbye. Sometimes this is obvious from context, but sometimes not – sometimes we must add new words in our translation. So already things are complicated, and we haven’t moved past hello.

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language[25] – but we will revisit that later.’

Robin found himself searching Professor Playfair’s face as he spoke. He was not sure what he was looking for. Some evidence of evil, perhaps. The cruel, selfish, lurking monster Griffin had sketched. But Professor Playfair seemed only a cheerful, beaming scholar, enamoured by the beauty of words. Indeed, in daylight, in the classroom, his brother’s grand conspiracies felt quite ridiculous.

‘Language does not exist as a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts,’ Professor Playfair went on. ‘If it did, then translation would not be a highly skilled profession – we would simply sit a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the Buddha on our shelves in no time. Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully elucidated by Cicero and Hieronymus: verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone—’

‘Word for word,’ Letty said promptly. ‘And sense for sense.’

‘Good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘That is the dilemma. Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Letty. ‘Shouldn’t a faithful translation of individual words produce an equally faithful text?’

‘It would,’ said Professor Playfair, ‘if, again, words existed in relation to each other in the same way in every language. But they do not. The words schlecht and schlimm both mean “bad” in German, but how do you know when to use one or the other? When do we use fleuve or rivière in French? How do we render the French esprit into English? We ought not merely translate each word on its own, but must rather evoke the sense of how they fit the whole of the passage. But how can that be done, if languages are indeed so different? These differences aren’t trivial, mind you – Erasmus wrote an entire treatise on why he rendered the Greek logos into the Latin sermo in his translation of the New Testament. Translating word-for-word is simply inadequate.’

‘That servile path thou nobly dost decline,’ Ramy recited, ‘of tracing word by word, and line by line.’

‘Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, not the effect of poetry, but pains,’ Professor Playfair finished. ‘John Denham. Very nice, Mr Mirza. So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases. After all, the Latin translatio means “to carry across”. Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain.

‘And we have not yet moved past the lexical. If translation were only a matter of finding the right themes, the right general ideas, then theoretically we could eventually make our meaning clear, couldn’t we? But something gets in the way – syntax, grammar, morphology and orthography, all the things that form the bones of a language. Consider the Heinrich Heine poem “Ein Fichtenbaum”. It’s short, and its message is quite easy to grasp. A pine tree, longing for a palm tree, represents a man’s desire for a woman. Yet translating it into English has been devilishly tricky, because English doesn’t have genders like German does. So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum and the feminine einer Palme. You see? So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how to distort with deliberation.’

He tapped the book lying on his desk. ‘You’ve all finished Tytler, yes?’

They nodded. They’d been assigned the introductory chapter of Essay on Principles of Translation by Lord Alexander Fraser Tytler Woodhouselee the night before.

‘Then you’ll have read that Tytler recommends three basic principles. Which are – yes, Miss Desgraves?’

‘First, that the translation conveys a complete and accurate idea of the original,’ said Victoire. ‘Second, that the translation mirrors the style and manner of writing of the original. And third, that the translation should read with all the ease of the original composition.’

She spoke with such confident precision, Robin thought she must have been reading from the text. He was very impressed when he glanced over and saw her consulting nothing but blank space. Ramy, too, had this talent for perfect recall – Robin was beginning to feel a bit intimidated by his cohort.

‘Very good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘This sounds basic enough. But what do we mean by the “style and manner” of the original? What does it mean for a composition to read “easily”? What audience do we have in mind when we make these claims? These are the questions we will tackle this term, and such fascinating questions they are.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘Allow me again to descend into theatrics by discussing our namesake, Babel – yes, dear students, I can’t quite escape the romanticism of this institution. Indulge me, please.’

His tone conveyed no regret at all. Professor Playfair loved this dramatic mysticism, these monologues that must have been rehearsed and perfected over years of teaching. But no one complained. They loved it too.

‘It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth.

‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.’

‘Oh, no, this one is easy,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s Syriac.’

‘Very funny, Mr Mirza.’ Robin did not know if Ramy was indeed joking, but no one else made a comment. Professor Playfair ploughed ahead. ‘For me, however, it matters not what the Adamic language was, for it’s clear we have lost any access to it. We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world’s languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try. We will never touch heaven from this mortal plane, but our confusion is not infinite. We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.’ Professor Playfair sighed, moved by his own performance. Robin thought he saw actual tears form in the corners of his eyes.

‘Magic.’ Professor Playfair pressed a hand against his chest. ‘What we are doing is magic. It won’t always feel that way – indeed, when you do tonight’s exercise, it’ll feel more like folding laundry than chasing the ephemeral. But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’

Robin raised his hand. ‘Do you mean, then, that our purpose here is to bring mankind closer together as well?’

Professor Playfair cocked his head. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I only . . .’ Robin faltered. It sounded silly as he said it, a child’s fancy, not a serious scholarly query. Letty and Victoire were frowning at him; even Ramy was wrinkling his nose. Robin tried again – he knew what he meant to ask, only he couldn’t think of an elegant or subtle way to phrase it. ‘Well – since in the Bible, God split mankind apart. And I wonder if – if the purpose of translation, then, is to bring mankind back together. If we translate to – I don’t know, bring about that paradise again, on earth, between nations.’

Professor Playfair looked baffled by this. But quickly his features reassembled into a sprightly beam. ‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.’

Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays they had language tutorials, which, after Professor Playfair’s lecture, felt like reassuring solid ground.

They were required to take Latin together three times a week, regardless of regional speciality. (Greek, at this stage, could be dropped for anyone not specializing in Classics.) Latin was taught by a woman named Professor Margaret Craft, who could not have been more different from Professor Playfair. She rarely smiled. She delivered her lectures without feeling and by rote memory, never glancing once at her notes, although she flipped through these as she spoke, as if she’d long ago memorized her place on the page. She did not ask their names – she only ever referred to them with a pointed finger and a cold, abrupt ‘You.’ She came off at first as utterly humourless, but when Ramy read aloud one of Ovid’s dryer injections – fugiebat enim, ‘for she was fleeing’, after Jove begs Io not to flee – she burst out in a fit of girlish laughter that made her seem twenty years younger; indeed, like a schoolgirl who might have sat among them. Then the moment passed, and her mask resumed its place.

Robin did not like her. Her lecturing voice had an awkward, unnatural rhythm with unexpected pauses that made it hard to follow her line of argument, and the two hours they spent in her classroom seemed to drag for an eternity. Letty, however, seemed rapt. She gazed at Professor Craft with shining admiration. When they filed out at the end of class, Robin hung by the door to wait as she collected her things so they could all walk to the Buttery together. But she instead went up to Professor Craft’s desk.

‘Professor, I was wondering if I could speak with you for—’

Professor Craft rose. ‘Class is over, Miss Price.’

‘I know, but I wanted to ask you for a moment – if you have spare time – I mean, just as a woman at Oxford, I mean, there aren’t so many of us, and I hoped to hear your advice—’

Robin felt then he should stop listening, out of some vague sense of chivalry, but Professor Craft’s chilly voice cut through the air before he could reach the stairs.

‘Babel hardly discriminates against women. It’s simply that so few of our sex are interested in languages.’

‘But you’re the only woman professor at Babel, and we all – that is, all the girls here and I – we think that’s quite admirable, so I wanted—’

‘To know how it’s done? Hard work and innate brilliance. You know that already.’

‘It’s different for women, though, and surely you’ve experienced—’

‘When I have relevant topics for discussion, I will bring them up in class, Miss Price. But class is over. And you’re now infringing on my time.’

Robin hastened around the corner and down the winding steps before Letty could see him. When she sat down with her plate in the Buttery, he saw her eyes were a bit pink around the edges. But he pretended not to notice, and if Ramy or Victoire did, they said nothing.

On Wednesday afternoon, Robin had his solo tutorial in Chinese. He’d half expected to find Professor Lovell in the classroom, but his instructor turned out to be Professor Anand Chakravarti, a genial and understated man who spoke English with such a pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent that he might have been raised in Kensington.

Chinese class was a wholly different exercise from Latin. Professor Chakravarti didn’t lecture at Robin or make him do recitations. He conducted this tutorial as a conversation. He asked questions, Robin tried his best to answer, and they both tried to make sense out of what he’d said.

Professor Chakravarti began with questions so basic that Robin at first couldn’t see how they were worth answering, until he picked apart their implications and realized they were far beyond his scope of understanding. What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing?

It was an odd exercise to analyse and dismantle a language he thought he knew like the back of his hand, to learn to classify words by ideogram or pictogram, and to memorize an entire vocabulary of new terms, most having to do with morphology or orthography. It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.

Then came the harder questions. Which Chinese words could be traced back to recognizable pictures? Which couldn’t? Why was the character for ‘woman’ – 女 – also the radical used in the character for ‘slavery’? In the character for ‘good’?

‘I don’t know,’ Robin admitted. ‘Why is it? Are slavery and goodness both innately feminine?’

Professor Chakravarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know either. These are questions Richard and I are still trying to answer. We’re far from a satisfactory edition of the Chinese Grammatica, you see. When I was studying Chinese, I had no good Chinese-English resources – I had to make do with Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens de la grammaire chinoise and Fourmont’s Grammatica Sinica. Can you imagine? I still associate both Chinese and French with a headache. But I think we’ve made progress today, actually.’

Then Robin realized what his place here was. He was not simply a student but a colleague, a rare native speaker capable of expanding the bounds of Babel’s scant existing knowledge. Or a silver mine to be plundered, said Griffin’s voice, though he pushed the thought away.

The truth was, it felt exciting to contribute to the Grammaticas. But he still had much to learn. The second half of their tutorial was spent on readings in Classical Chinese, which Robin had dabbled in at Professor Lovell’s home but had never tackled in a systematic manner. Classical Chinese was to vernacular Mandarin what Latin was to English; one could guess at the gist of a phrase, but the rules of grammar were unintuitive and impossible to grasp without rigorous reading practice. Punctuation was a guessing game. Nouns could be verbs when they felt like it. Often, characters had different and contradictory meanings, either of which produced valid possible interpretations – the character 篤, for instance, could mean both ‘to restrict’ and ‘large, substantial’.

That afternoon they tackled the Shijing – the Book of Songs – which was written in a discursive context so far removed from contemporary China that even readers of the Han period would have considered it written in a foreign language.

‘I propose we break here,’ Professor Chakravarti said after twenty minutes of debating the character 不, which in most contexts meant a negative ‘no, not’, but in the given context seemed instead like a word of praise, which didn’t track with anything they knew about the word. ‘I suspect we’ll have to leave this as an open question.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Robin said, frustrated. ‘How can we just not know? Could we ask someone about all this? Couldn’t we go on a research trip to Peking?’

‘We could,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘But it makes things a bit hard when the Qing Emperor has decreed it punishable by death to teach a foreigner Chinese, you see.’ He patted Robin’s shoulder. ‘We make do with what we have. You’re the next best thing.’

‘Isn’t there anyone else here who speaks Chinese?’ Robin asked. ‘Am I the only student?’

A strange look came over Professor Chakravarti’s face then. Robin was not supposed to know about Griffin, he realized. Probably Professor Lovell had sworn the rest of the faculty to secrecy; probably, according to the official record, Griffin did not exist.

Still, he couldn’t help but press. ‘I heard there was another student, a few years before me. Also from the coast.’

‘Oh – yes, I suppose there was.’ Professor Chakravarti’s fingers drummed anxiously against the desk. ‘A nice boy, though not quite as diligent as you are. Griffin Harley.’

‘Was? What happened to him?’

‘Well – it’s a sad story, really. He passed away. Just before his fourth year.’ Professor Chakravarti scratched his temple. ‘He fell ill on an overseas research trip and didn’t make it home. It happens all the time.’

‘It does?’

‘Yes, there’s always a certain . . . risk, entailed in the profession. There’s so much travel, you know. You expect attrition.’

‘But I still don’t understand,’ said Robin. ‘Surely there’s any number of Chinese students who would love to study in England.’

Professor Chakravarti’s fingers quickened against the wood. ‘Well, yes. But first there’s the matter of national loyalties. It’s no good recruiting scholars who might run home to the Qing government at any moment, you know. Second, Richard is of the opinion that . . . well. One requires a certain upbringing.’

‘Like mine?’

‘Like yours. Otherwise, Richard thinks . . .’ Professor Chakravarti was using this construction quite a lot, Robin noticed, ‘that the Chinese tend towards certain natural inclinations. Which is to say, he doesn’t think Chinese students would acclimatize well here.’

Lowly, uncivilized stock. ‘I see.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you,’ Professor Chakravarti said quickly. ‘You’re raised properly, and all that. Wonderfully diligent, I don’t expect that will be a problem.’

‘Yes.’ Robin swallowed. His throat felt very tight. ‘I’ve been very lucky.’

On the second Saturday after his arrival to Oxford, Robin made his way north for dinner with his guardian.

Professor Lovell’s Oxford residence was only a shade more humble than his Hampstead estate. It was a bit smaller, and enjoyed a mere front and back garden instead of an expansive green, but it was still more than someone on a professor’s salary should have been able to afford. Trees bearing plump red cherries lined the hedges by the front door, though cherries could hardly still be in season at the turn of autumn. Robin suspected that if he bent down to check the grass by their roots, he would find silver bars in the soil.

‘Dear boy!’ He’d scarce rung the bell when Mrs Piper was upon him, brushing leaves from his jacket and turning him in circles to examine his reedy frame. ‘My heavens, you’re so thin already—’

‘The food’s horrible,’ he said. A great big smile spread over his face; he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. ‘Just like you said. Dinner yesterday was salt herrings—’

She gasped. ‘No.’

‘—cold beef—’

‘No!’

‘—and stale bread.’

‘Inhumane. Don’t you worry, I’ve cooked enough to make up for it.’ She patted his cheeks. ‘How’s college life besides? How do you like wearing those floppy black gowns? Have you made any friends?’

Robin was about to answer when Professor Lovell came down the stairs.

‘Hello, Robin,’ he said. ‘Come in. Mrs Piper, his coat—’ Robin shrugged it off and handed it to Mrs Piper, who examined the ink-stained cuffs with disapproval. ‘How goes the term?’

‘Challenging, just as you warned.’ Robin felt older as he spoke, his voice somehow deeper. He’d left home only a week ago, but he felt like he’d aged years, and could present himself now as a young man and not a boy. ‘But challenging in a way that’s enjoyable. I’m learning quite a lot.’

‘Professor Chakravarti says you’ve made some good contributions to the Grammatica.’

‘Not as much as I’d like,’ said Robin. ‘There are particles in Classical Chinese that I’ve just no idea what to do with. Half the time our translations feel like guesswork.’

‘I’ve felt that way for decades.’ Professor Lovell gestured towards the dining room. ‘Shall we?’

They might as well have been back in Hampstead. The long table was arranged precisely the same way Robin was used to, with him and Professor Lovell sitting at opposite ends and a painting to Robin’s right, which this time depicted the Thames rather than Oxford’s Broad Street. Mrs Piper poured their wine and, with a wink at Robin, disappeared back into the kitchen.

Professor Lovell raised his glass to him, then drank. ‘You’re taking theory with Jerome and Latin with Margaret, correct?’

‘Right. It’s fairly good going.’ Robin took a sip of wine. ‘Though Professor Craft lectures like she wouldn’t notice if she were speaking to an empty room, and Professor Playfair seems to have missed a calling for the stage.’

Professor Lovell chuckled. Robin smiled, despite himself; he had never been able to make his guardian laugh before.

‘Did he give you his Psammetichus speech?’

‘He did,’ said Robin. ‘Did all that really happen?’

‘Who knows, except that Herodotus tells us so,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘There’s another good Herodotus story, again about Psammetichus. Psammetichus wanted to determine which language was the foundation of all earthly languages, so he gave two newborn infants to a shepherd with the instructions that they should not be allowed to hear human speech. For a while all they did was babble, as infants do. Then one day one of the infants stretched out his little hands to the shepherd and exclaimed bekos, which is the Phrygian word for bread. And so Psammetichus decided the Phrygians must have been the first race on earth, and Phrygian the first language. Pretty story, isn’t it?’

‘I’m assuming no one accepts that argument,’ said Robin.

‘Heavens, no.’

‘But could that really work?’ asked Robin. ‘Could we actually learn anything from what infants utter?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The issue is it’s impossible to isolate infants from an environment with language if you want them to develop as infants should. Might be interesting to buy a child and see – but, well, no.’ Professor Lovell tilted his head. ‘It’s fun to entertain the possibility of an original language, though.’

‘Professor Playfair mentioned something similar,’ said Robin. ‘About a perfect, innate, and unadulterated language. The Adamic language.’

He felt more confident talking to the professor now that he’d spent some time at Babel. They were on more of an equal footing; they could communicate as colleagues. Dinner felt less like an interrogation and more like a casual conversation between two scholars in the same fascinating field.

‘The Adamic language.’ Professor Lovell made a face. ‘I don’t know why he fills your minds with that stuff. It’s a pretty metaphor, certainly, but every few years we get an undergraduate who’s determined to discover the Adamic language in Proto-Indo-European, or otherwise wholly invent it on his own, and it always takes either a stern talking-to or a few weeks of failure for him to come back to his senses.’

‘You don’t think that an original language exists?’ Robin asked.

‘Of course I don’t. The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs. My point being, these things are contingent. Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually. But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’

‘Like Voltaire,’ Robin said, emboldened by his wine and rather excited that he could remember the relevant quote. ‘Like what he writes in his preface to his translation of Shakespeare. I have tried to soar with the author where he soars.’

‘Quite right,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘But how does Frere put it? The language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more. But what do we know of thought and feeling except as expressed through language?’

‘Is that what powers the silver bars?’ Robin asked. This conversation was starting to get away from him; he sensed a depth to Professor Lovell’s theorizing into which he wasn’t prepared to follow, and he needed to bring things back to the material before he got lost. ‘Do they work by capturing that pure meaning – whatever gets lost when we invoke it through crude approximations?’

Professor Lovell nodded. ‘It is as close to a theoretical explanation as we can get. But I also think that as languages evolve, as their speakers become more worldly and sophisticated, as they gorge on other concepts and swell and morph to encompass more over time – we approach something close to that language. There’s less room for misunderstanding. And we’ve only begun to work out what that means for silver-working.’

‘I suppose that means the Romanticists might eventually run out of things to say,’ said Robin.

He was only joking, but Professor Lovell nodded vigorously at this. ‘You’re quite right. French, Italian, and Spanish dominate the faculty, but their new contributions to the silver-working ledgers dwindle by the year. There’s simply too much communication across the continent. Too many loanwords. Connotations change and converge as French and Spanish grow closer to English, and vice versa. Decades from now, the silver bars we use from Romance languages might no longer have any effect. No, if we want to innovate, then we must look to the East. We need languages that aren’t spoken in Europe.’

‘That’s why you specialize in Chinese,’ said Robin.

‘Precisely.’ Professor Lovell nodded. ‘China, I’m quite sure, is the future.’

‘And that’s why you and Professor Chakravarti have been trying to diversify the cohorts?’

‘Who’s been gossiping to you about departmental politics?’ Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘Yes, there are hurt feelings this year because we only took one Classicist, and a woman at that. But that’s how it has to be. The cohort above you are going to have a tough time finding jobs.’

‘If we’re talking about the spread of language, I wanted to ask . . .’ Robin cleared his throat. ‘Where do all those bars go? I mean, who buys them?’

Professor Lovell gave him a curious look. ‘To those who can afford them, of course.’

‘But Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wide use,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, in Calcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indians are contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’

‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a great deal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’re often less able to pay the export fees.’

‘But we have silver bars in charities and hospitals and orphanages here,’ said Robin. ‘We have bars that can help people who need them most. None of that exists anywhere else in the world.’

He was playing a dangerous game, he knew. But he had to seek clarity. He could not construct Professor Lovell and all his colleagues as the enemy in his mind, could not wholly buy into Griffin’s damning assessment of Babel, without some confirmation.

‘Well, we can’t expend energy researching any frivolous application,’ Professor Lovell scoffed.

Robin tried a different line of argument. ‘It’s just that – well, it only seems fair there ought to be some kind of exchange.’ He was regretting now that he’d drunk so much. He felt loose, vulnerable. Too passionate for what should have been an intellectual discussion. ‘We take their languages, their ways of seeing and describing the world. We ought to give them something in return.’

‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

There was some logic in this, but the conclusion still made Robin uncomfortable. Surely things were not so simple; surely this still masked some unfair coercion or exploitation. But he could not formulate an objection, could not figure out where the fault in the argument lay.

‘The Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘He has plenty of scholars. He even has linguists who understand English. So why doesn’t he fill his court with silver bars? Why is it that the Chinese, rich as their language is, have no grammars of their own?’

‘It could be they don’t have the resources to get started,’ said Robin.

‘Then why should we just hand them to them?’

‘But that’s not the point – the point is that they need it, so why doesn’t Babel send scholars abroad on exchange programmes? Why don’t we teach them how it’s done?’

‘Could be that all nations hoard their most precious resources.’

‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’ said Robin. ‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all the Grammaticas under lock and key in the tower? Why don’t we ever host foreign scholars, or send scholars to help open translation centres elsewhere in the world?’

‘Because as the Royal Institute of Translation, we serve the interests of the Crown.’

‘That seems fundamentally unjust.’

‘Is that what you believe?’ A cold edge crept into Professor Lovell’s voice. ‘Robin Swift, do you think what we do here is fundamentally unjust?’

‘I only want to know,’ said Robin, ‘why silver could not save my mother.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Well, I’m sorry about your mother.’ Professor Lovell picked up his knife and began cutting into his steak. He seemed flustered, discomfited. ‘But the Asiatic Cholera was a product of Canton’s poor public hygiene, not the unequal distribution of bars. And anyhow, there’s no silver match-pair that can bring back the dead—’

‘What excuse is that?’ Robin set down his glass. He was properly drunk now, and that made him combative. ‘You had the bars – they’re easy to make, you told me so yourself – so why—’

‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.’

The doorbell rang. Robin flinched; his fork clattered against his plate and fell to the floor. He scooped it up, deeply embarrassed. Mrs Piper’s voice carried down the hall. ‘Oh, what a surprise! They’re having dinner now, I’ll bring you in—’ and then a blond, handsome, and elegantly dressed gentleman strode into the dining room, bearing a stack of books in his hand.

‘Sterling!’ Professor Lovell set down his knife and stood to greet the stranger. ‘I thought you were coming in late.’

‘Finished up in London earlier than expected—’ Sterling’s eyes caught Robin’s, and the whole of him went rigid. ‘Oh, hello.’

‘Hello,’ Robin said, flustered and shy. This was the famous Sterling Jones, he realized. William Jones’s nephew, the star of the faculty. ‘It’s – nice to meet you.’

Sterling said nothing, only perused him for a long moment. His mouth twisted oddly, though Robin could not read the attendant expression. ‘My goodness.’

Professor Lovell cleared his throat. ‘Sterling.’

Sterling’s eyes lingered on Robin’s face for another moment, and then he looked away.

‘Welcome, anyhow.’ He said this like an afterthought; he had already turned his back on Robin, and the words sounded forced and awkward. He set the books on the table. ‘You were right, Dick, it’s precisely the Ricci dictionaries that are the key. We’ve been missing what happens when we go through Portuguese. That, I can help with. Now I think if we daisy-chain the characters I’ve marked here, and here—’

Professor Lovell was flipping through the pages. ‘This is waterlogged. I hope you didn’t pay him in full—’

‘I paid nothing, Dick, do you think me a fool?’

‘Well, after Macau—’

They fell into a heated discussion. Robin was entirely forgotten.

He looked on, feeling tipsy and out of place. His cheeks burned. He had not finished his food, but it seemed very awkward to keep eating now. He had no appetite besides. His earlier confidence vanished. He felt again like a stupid little boy, laughed away and dismissed by those crow-like visitors in Professor Lovell’s sitting room.

And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks. It was a very strange mix of emotions. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to sort through them.

But we haven’t finished, he wanted to tell his father. We were discussing my mother.

He felt his chest constrict, as if his heart were a caged beast straining to burst out. That was curious. This dismissal was nothing he hadn’t experienced before. Professor Lovell had never acknowledged Robin’s feelings, or offered care or comfort, only abruptly changed the subject, only thrown up a cold, indifferent wall, only minimized Robin’s hurts so that it seemed frivolous to bring them up at all. Robin had grown used to it by now.

Only now – perhaps because of the wine, or perhaps it had all been building up for so long that things were past the tipping point – he felt he wanted to scream. Cry. Kick the wall. Anything, if only to make his father look him in the face.

‘Oh, Robin.’ Professor Lovell glanced up. ‘Tell Mrs Piper we’d like some coffees before you go, will you?’

Robin grabbed his coat and left the room.

He did not turn from High Street onto Magpie Lane.

Instead he went further and passed into the grounds of Merton College. At night, the gardens were twisted and eerie; black branches reached like fingers from behind a bolted iron gate. Robin fiddled uselessly with the lock, then hauled himself panting over a narrow gap between the spikes. He wandered a few feet into the garden before realizing he did not know what a birch looked like.

He stepped back and glanced around, feeling rather foolish. Then a patch of white caught his eye – a pale tree, surrounded by a cluster of mulberry bushes, trimmed to curl slightly upwards as if in adulation. A knob protruded from the white tree’s trunk; in the moonlight, it looked like a bald head. A crystal ball.

As good a guess as any, Robin thought.

He thought of his brother in his flapping raven’s cloak, brushing his fingers over this pale wood by moonlight. Griffin did love his theatrics.

He wondered at the hot coil in his chest. The long, sobering walk had not dimmed his anger. He still felt ready to scream. Had dinner with his father infuriated him so? Was this the righteous indignation that Griffin spoke of? But what he felt was not as simple as revolutionary flame. What he felt in his heart was not conviction so much as doubt, resentment, and a deep confusion.

He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

One nasty thought crept into his mind – It’s because you’re a wounded little boy, and you wish they had paid you more attention – but he pushed this away. Surely he could not be so petty; surely he was not merely lashing out at his father because he felt dismissed.

He had seen and heard enough. He knew what Babel was at its roots, and he knew enough to trust his gut.

He ran his finger over the wood. His nails would not do. A knife would have been ideal, but he’d never carried one. At last, he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and pressed the tip into the knob. The wood gave purchase. He scratched hard several times to make the cross visible – his fingers ached, and the nib was irreversibly ruined – but at last he left his mark.

Chapter Seven

The following Monday, Robin returned to his room after class to find a slip of paper wedged under his windowsill. He snatched it up. Heart hammering, he shut his door and sat down on the floor, squinting at Griffin’s cramped handwriting.

The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense.

At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code.

The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after.

Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn.

Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow.

Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed the details to memory, then tossed both the original and his decryption into the fireplace, watching intently until every scrap had shrivelled to ash.

On Wednesday, it poured. It had been misty all afternoon, and Robin had watched the darkening sky with accumulating dread. When he left Professor Chakravarti’s office at six, a soft drizzle was slowly turning the pavement grey. By the time he reached Magpie Lane, the rain had thickened to a steady patter.

He locked himself in his room, put his assigned Latin readings on his desk, and tried to at least stare at them until the hour came.

By half past eleven, the rain had announced its permanence. It was the kind of rain that sounded cold; even in the absence of vicious winds, snow, or hail, the very pattering against cobblestones felt like cubes of ice hammering against one’s skin. Robin saw now the reasoning behind Griffin’s instructions – on a night like this, you couldn’t see more than a few feet past your own nose, and even if you could, you wouldn’t care to look. Rain like this made you walk with your head down, shoulders hunched, indifferent to the world until you got to somewhere warm.

At a quarter to midnight, Robin threw on a coat and stepped into the hallway.

‘Where are you going?’

He froze. He’d thought Ramy was asleep.

‘Forgot something in the stacks,’ he whispered.

Ramy cocked his head. ‘Again?’

‘I suppose it’s our curse,’ Robin whispered, trying to keep his expression blank.

‘It’s pouring. Go and get it tomorrow.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What is it?’

My readings, Robin almost said, but that couldn’t be right, because he’d purportedly been working on them all night. ‘Ah – just my diary. It’ll keep me up if I leave it, I’m nervous about anyone seeing my notes—’

‘What’s in there, a love letter?’

‘No, it’s just – it makes me nervous.’

Either he was a spectacular liar, or Ramy was too sleepy to care. ‘Make sure I get up tomorrow,’ he said, yawning. ‘I’m spending all night with Dryden, and I don’t like it.’

‘Will do,’ Robin promised, and hastened out the door.

The punishing rainfall made the ten-minute walk up High Street feel like an eternity. Babel shone in the distance like a warm candle, each floor still fully lit as if it were the middle of the afternoon, though hardly any silhouettes were visible through the windows. Babel’s scholars worked round the clock, but most took their books home with them by nine or ten, and anyone still there at midnight was not likely to leave the tower until morning.

When he reached the green, he paused and peered around. He saw no one. Griffin’s letter had been so vague; he didn’t know if he should wait until he glimpsed one of the Hermes operatives, or if he should go ahead and follow his orders precisely.

Do not deviate from my instructions.

The bells rang for midnight. He hurried up to the entrance, mouth dry, breathless. When he reached the stone steps, two figures materialized from the darkness – both black-clad youths whose faces he could not make out in the rain.

‘Go on,’ one of them whispered. ‘Hurry.’

Robin stepped up to the door. ‘Robin Swift,’ he said, softly but clearly.

The wards recognized his blood. The lock clicked.

Robin pulled the door open and paused for the briefest moment on the doorstep, just long enough for the figures behind him to slink into the tower. He never saw their faces. They dashed up the staircase like wraiths, quick and silent. Robin stood in the foyer, shivering as rain dripped down his forehead, watching the clock as the seconds ticked towards the five-minute mark.

It was all so easy. When the time came, Robin turned and strode out the door. He felt a slight bump at his waist, but otherwise perceived nothing: no whispers, no clinks of silver bars. The Hermes operatives were swallowed by the dark. In seconds, it was as if they had never been there at all.

Robin turned and walked back toward Magpie Lane, shivering violently, dizzy with the sheer audacity of what he’d just done.

He slept badly. He kept tossing in his bed in a nightmarish fugue, soaking his sheets with sweat, tortured by half dreams, anxious extrapolations in which the police kicked down his door and dragged him off to gaol, declaring they’d seen everything and knew everything. He did not fall properly asleep until the early morning, and by then he was so exhausted he missed the morning bells. He did not awake until the scout knocked at his door, asking if he’d like his floors swept that day.

‘Oh – yes, sorry, just give me a moment and I’ll be out.’ He splashed water on his face, dressed, and dashed out the door. His cohort had arranged to meet in a study room on the fifth floor to compare their translations before class, and now he was terribly late.

‘There you are,’ said Ramy when he arrived. He, Letty, and Victoire were all seated around a square table. ‘I’m sorry I left without you, but I thought you’d gone already – I knocked twice but you never answered.’

‘It’s all right.’ Robin took a seat. ‘I didn’t sleep well – must have been the thunder, I think.’

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Victoire looked concerned. ‘You’re sort of . . .’ She waved a hand vaguely before her face. ‘Pale?’

‘Just nightmares,’ he said. ‘Happens, um, sometimes.’

This excuse sounded stupid the moment it left his mouth, but Victoire gave his hand a sympathetic pat. ‘Of course.’

‘Could we start?’ Letty asked sharply. ‘We’ve just been dithering around with vocabulary because Ramy wouldn’t let us go on without you.’

Robin hastily shuffled through his pages until he found last night’s assigned Ovid. ‘Sorry – yes, of course.’

He’d feared he would never sit through the entire meeting. But somehow, the warm sunlight against the cool wood, the scratch of ink against parchment, and Letty’s crisp, clear dictation pulled his exhausted mind into focus, made Latin, not his impending expulsion, seem like the most pressing order of the day.

The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent they had drastically different translation styles. Letty, who was a stickler for grammatical structures that adhered to the Latin as much as possible, seemed ready to forgive the most astoundingly awkward manipulations of prose, while Ramy, her polar opposite, was always ready to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes he insisted would better deliver the point, even when this meant insertion of completely novel clauses. Victoire seemed constantly frustrated with the limits of English – ‘It’s so awkward, French would suit this better’ – and Letty always vehemently agreed, which made Ramy snort, at which point the topic of Ovid was abandoned for a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars.

‘Feeling better?’ Ramy asked Robin when they adjourned.

He was, actually. It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him. He was astonished by how ordinary the rest of the day felt, how calmly he could sit among his cohort as Professor Playfair lectured and pretend that Tytler was the foremost subject on his mind. In the light of day, the exploits of last night seemed a faraway dream. The tangible and solid consisted of Oxford, of coursework and professors and freshly baked scones and clotted cream.

Still, he could not erase the lurking dread that this was all a cruel joke, that the curtains would come down any minute on this charade. For how could there not be some consequence? Such an act of betrayal – of stealing from Babel itself, the institution to which he’d literally given his blood – should surely have made this life impossible.

Anxiety hit him properly midafternoon. What had last night seemed like such a thrilling, righteous mission now seemed incredibly stupid. He couldn’t focus on Latin; Professor Craft had to snap her fingers in front of his eyes before he realized she’d asked him three times over to scan a line. He kept imagining horrible scenarios with vivid detail – how the constables would burst in, point, and yell, There he is, the thief; how his cohort would stare, stunned; how Professor Lovell, who was for some reason both prosecutor and judge, would coldly sentence Robin to the noose. He imagined the fireplace poker, coming down again and again, cold and methodical, snapping every single one of his bones.

But the visions remained only that. No one came to arrest him. Their class proceeded slowly, blandly, uninterrupted. His terror faded. By the time Robin and his cohort reassembled in hall for supper, he found it astonishingly easy to pretend to himself that last night had never happened. And once they were seated with their food – cold potatoes and steak so tough it took all their might to hack off chewable bits – laughing at Professor Craft’s irritated corrections of Ramy’s embellished translations, it indeed felt like only a distant memory.

A new note awaited him under the windowsill when he returned home that night. He unfolded it with shaking hands. The message scrawled within was very brief, and this time Robin managed to decode it in his head.

Await further contact.

His disappointment confused him. Hadn’t he spent the day wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare? He could just imagine Griffin’s mocking voice – What, did you want a pat on the back? A biscuit for a job well done?

He now found himself hoping for more. But he had no way of knowing when he might hear from Griffin again. Griffin had warned Robin their contact would be sporadic, that entire terms might pass before he was in touch again. Robin would be summoned when he was needed, and no sooner. He found no note at his windowsill the next evening, or the evening after that.

Days passed, and then weeks.

You’re still a Babel student, Griffin had told him. Act like one.

It turned out this was very easy to do. As the memories of Griffin and Hermes receded into the back of his mind, into nightmares and the dark, his life at Oxford and at Babel rose to the forefront in glaring, dazzling colour.

It stunned him, how quickly he fell in love with the place and the people. He hadn’t even noticed it happening. His first term had him spinning in place, dazed and exhausted; his classes and coursework formed a rote pattern of frenzied readings and late, bleary-eyed nights against which his cohort was his only source of joy and solace. The girls, bless them, quickly forgave Robin and Ramy for their first impressions. Robin discovered he and Victoire shared the same unabashed love of literature of all kinds from Gothic horrors to romances, and they took great pleasure in swapping and discussing the latest batch of penny dreadfuls brought in from London. And Letty, once she’d been persuaded the boys were indeed not too stupid to be at Oxford, became a great deal more tolerable. She turned out to possess both an acerbic wit and a keen understanding of the British class structure by virtue of her upbringing, which made for infinitely amusing commentary when it wasn’t aimed at either of them.

‘Colin’s the sort of bottom-feeding middle-class leech who likes to pretend he’s got connections because his family knows a mathematics tutor in Cambridge,’ she would say after a visit to Magpie Lane. ‘If he wants to be a solicitor, he could just get an apprenticeship at the Inns of Court, but he’s here because he wants the prestige and connections, only he’s not half charming enough to acquire them. He’s got the personality of a wet towel: damp, and he clings.’

At this point she would do an impression of Colin’s wide-eyed, oversolicitous greetings while the rest of them roared with laughter.

Ramy, Victoire, and Letty – they became the colours of Robin’s life, the only regular contact he had with the world outside his coursework. They needed each other because they had no one else. The older students at Babel were aggressively insular; they were too busy, too intimidatingly brilliant and impressive. Two weeks into the term Letty boldly asked a graduate fellow named Gabriel if she might join the French reading group, but was swiftly rejected with the particular disdain only the French could muster. Robin tried to befriend a Japanese third-year student named Ilse Dejima,[26] who spoke with a faint Dutch accent. They crossed paths often on their ways in and out of Professor Chakravarti’s office, but the few times he tried to say hello to her she made a face as if he were mud on her boots.

They tried to befriend the second-year cohort, too, a group of five white boys who lived just across the way on Merton Street. But this went south immediately when one of them, Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinner that the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other . . . more exotic languages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink about diversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’

Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’

‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away from equally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’

‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin.

‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.

So it was Ramy, Letty, and Victoire who became such constant interlocutors that Robin started seeing Oxford through their eyes. Ramy would adore that purple scarf hanging in the window of Ede & Ravenscroft; Letty would laugh herself silly at the puppy-eyed young man sitting outside Queen’s Lane Coffeehouse with a book of sonnets; Victoire would be so excited that a new batch of scones had just been put out at Vaults & Garden but because she would be stuck in her French tutorial until noon, Robin absolutely had to buy one, wrap it up in his pocket, and save it for her for when class was let out. Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group.

They were not without their rifts. They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do. Robin and Victoire had a long-running debate over the superiority of English versus French literature, wherein both were oddly, fiercely loyal to their adopted countries. Victoire insisted that England’s best theorists could not hold a candle to Voltaire or Diderot, and Robin would have given her the benefit of the doubt if only she didn’t keep scoffing at the translations he took out from the Bodleian on the grounds that ‘They’re nothing compared to the original, you might as well not read it at all.’ Victoire and Letty, though normally quite close, seemed to always get snippy on issues of money and whether Letty truly counted as poor as she claimed to be just because her father had cut her off.[27] And Letty and Ramy bickered most of all, largely over Ramy’s claim that Letty had never stepped foot in the colonies and therefore shouldn’t opine on the supposed benefits of the British presence in India.

‘I do know a thing or two about India,’ Letty would insist. ‘I’ve read all sorts of essays, I’ve read Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—’

‘Oh, yes?’ Ramy would ask. ‘The one where India is a lovely Hindu nation, overrun by tyrannical Muslim invaders? That one?’

At which point Letty would always get defensive, sullen, and irritable until the next day. But this was not entirely her fault. Ramy seemed particularly determined to provoke her, to dismantle her every assertion. Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English, and Robin suspected Ramy would not be satisfied until he’d got Letty to declare treason against her own country.

Still, their fights could not really pull them apart. Rather, these arguments only drew them closer together, sharpened their edges, and defined the ways they fitted differently into the puzzle of their cohort. They spent all their time together. On weekends, they sat at a corner table outside the Vaults & Garden café, interrogating Letty on the oddities of English, of which only she was a native speaker. (‘What does corned mean?’ Robin would demand. ‘What is corned beef? What are you all doing to your beef?’[28] ‘And what is a welcher?’[29] Victoire would ask, looking up from her latest penny serial. ‘Letitia, please, what in God’s name is a jigger-dubber?’[30])

When Ramy complained that the food in hall was so bad that he was visibly dropping weight (this was true; the Univ kitchens, when they weren’t serving the same rotation of tough boiled meat, unsalted roast vegetables, and indistinguishable pottages, put out inexplicable and inedible dishes with names like ‘India Pickle’, ‘Turtle Dressed the West India Way’, and something called ‘China Chilo’, very little of which was halal), they stole into the kitchen and cobbled a dish out of chickpeas, potatoes, and an assortment of spices Ramy had scrounged together from Oxford’s markets. The result was a lumpy scarlet stew so spicy that they all felt like they’d been punched in the nose. Ramy refused to accept defeat; instead, he argued, this was further proof of his grand thesis that there was something fundamentally wrong with the British, since if they’d been able to get their hands on real turmeric and mustard seeds then the dish would have tasted much better.

‘There are Indian restaurants in London,’ Letty objected. ‘You can get curries with rice in Piccadilly—’

‘Only if you want bland mash,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘Finish your chickpeas.’

Letty, sniffling miserably, refused to take another bite. Robin and Victoire stoically kept shovelling spoonfuls into their mouths. Ramy told them they were all cowards – in Calcutta, he claimed, infants could eat ghost peppers without batting an eye. But even he had trouble finishing the fiery-red mass on his plate.

Robin didn’t realize what he had, what he’d been searching for and had finally obtained, until one night halfway through the term when they were all in Victoire’s rooms. Hers were improbably the largest of any of their quarters because none of the other boarders wanted to share with her, which meant not only did she have a bedroom all to herself but also the bathroom and the spacious sitting room where they’d taken to congregating to finish their coursework after the Bodleian closed at nine. That night they were playing cards, not studying, because Professor Craft was in London for a conference, which meant they had the evening off. But the cards were soon forgotten because an intense stench of ripe pears suddenly pervaded the room and none of them could figure out what it was, because they hadn’t been eating pears, and because Victoire swore she didn’t have any stashed away in her room.

Then Victoire was rolling on the ground, both laughing and shrieking because Letty kept screaming, ‘Where is the pear? Where is it, Victoire? Where is the pear?’ Ramy made a joke about the Spanish Inquisition, so Letty, playing along, ordered Victoire to turn out all her coat pockets to prove none of them concealed the core. Victoire obeyed but turned up nothing, which sent them into further shrieks of hysterics. And Robin sat at the table, watching them, smiling as he waited for the card game to resume until he realized that it wouldn’t because they were all laughing too much and, besides, Ramy’s cards were splayed across the floor face-up, so continuing was pointless. Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.

A family.

He felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did.

He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellion; he could not acquire Griffin’s hatred of this place.

Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now. Babel, his friends, and Oxford – they had unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again. The world felt less dark.

He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?

He was not ready to commit fully to Hermes. But by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.

Later, it would amaze Robin that it never seriously crossed his mind to tell any of them about the Hermes Society. After all, by the end of Michaelmas term, he had come to trust them with his life; he had no doubt that if he fell into the frozen Isis, any one of them would have dived in to save him. Yet Griffin and the Hermes Society belonged to bad dreams and shadows; his cohort was sun and warmth and laughter, and he could not imagine bringing those worlds together.

Only once was he ever tempted to say something. At lunch one day, Ramy and Letty were arguing – once again – over the British presence in India. Ramy regarded the occupation of Bengal as an ongoing travesty; Letty thought the British victory at Plassey was more than fair retaliation for what she considered the horrific treatment of hostages by Siraj-ud-daulah, and that the British need never have intervened if the Mughals had not been such terrible rulers.

‘And it’s not as if you have had it all so bad,’ said Letty. ‘There are plenty of Indians in the civil administration, as long as they’re qualified—’

‘Yes, where “qualified” means an elite class that speaks English and acts like toadies to the British,’ said Ramy. ‘We’re not being ruled, we’re being misruled. What’s happening to my country is nothing short of robbery. It’s not open trade; it’s financial bleeding, it’s looting, and sacking. We’ve never needed their help, and they’ve only constructed that narrative out of a misplaced sense of superiority.’

‘If you think that, then what are you doing in England?’ Letty challenged.

Ramy looked at her as if she were crazy. ‘Learning, woman.’

‘Ah, to acquire the weapons to bring down the Empire?’ She scoffed. ‘You’re going to take some silver bars home and start a revolution, are you? Shall we march into Babel and declare your intentions?’

For once, Ramy did not have a quick riposte. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said after a pause.

‘Oh, really?’ Letty had found the spot where it hurt; now she was like a dog with a bone and she wouldn’t let go. ‘Because it seems to me that the fact that you’re here, enjoying an English education, is precisely what makes the English superior. Unless there’s a better language institute in Calcutta?’

‘There’s plenty of brilliant madrasas in India,’ Ramy snapped. ‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.’

‘So you’re here to ship silver back to those mutinying sepoys, are you?’

Perhaps he should, Robin almost said. Perhaps that’s precisely what the world needs.

But he stopped himself before he opened his mouth. Not because he was afraid of breaking Griffin’s confidence, but because he could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves. And because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden, silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.

Chapter Eight

In the last weeks of November, Robin assisted in three more thefts for the Hermes Society. They all followed the efficient, clockwork routine of the first – a note by his windowsill, a rainy night, a midnight rendezvous, and minimal contact with his accomplices save for a quick glance and nod. He never got a closer look at the other operatives. He didn’t know if they were the same people every time. He never found out what they stole or what they used it for. All he knew was that Griffin had said his contribution aided a vaguely defined fight against empire, and all he could do was trust Griffin’s word.

He kept hoping that Griffin would summon him for another chat outside the Twisted Root, but it seemed his half-brother was too busy leading a global organization of which Robin was only a very small part.

Robin was nearly caught during his fourth theft, when a third year named Cathy O’Nell strode through the front door as he was waiting in the foyer. Cathy was, unfortunately, one of the chattier upperclassmen; she specialized in Gaelic, and perhaps due to the sheer loneliness of being one of two people in her subfield, she went out of her way to befriend everyone in the faculty.

‘Robin!’ She beamed at him. ‘What are you doing here so late?’

‘Forgot my Dryden reading,’ he lied, patting his pocket as if he’d just stashed the book there. ‘Turns out I left it in the lobby.’

‘Oh, Dryden, that’s miserable. I remember Playfair had us discussing him for weeks. Thorough, but dry.’

‘Awfully dry.’ He hoped badly she’d get on with it; it was already five past twelve.

‘Is he making you compare translations in class?’ Cathy asked. ‘Once he interrogated me for nearly half an hour over my word choice of red instead of apple-like. I’d nearly sweated through my shirt by the end.’

Six minutes past. Robin’s eyes darted to the staircase, then back at Cathy, then back at the staircase until he realized Cathy was watching him expectantly.

‘Oh.’ He blinked. ‘Erm. Speaking of Dryden, I should really get on—’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, the first year is really so difficult and here I am keeping you—’

‘Anyway, nice to see you—’

‘Let me know if I can be of any assistance,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s a lot at first, but the terms do get easier, I promise.’

‘Sure. I will do – bye.’ He felt awful being so curt. She was so nice, and such offers were particularly generous coming from the upperclassmen. But all he could think of then was his accomplices upstairs, and what might happen if they came down at the same time that Cathy went up.

‘Good luck, then.’ Cathy gave him a little wave and headed into the lobby. Robin backed into the foyer and prayed she did not turn around.

An eternity later, two black-clad figures hurried down the opposite staircase.

‘What’d she say?’ one of them whispered. His voice seemed strangely familiar, though Robin was too distracted to try to place it then.

‘Just being friendly.’ Robin pushed the door open, and the three of them hurried out into the cool night. ‘Are you all right?’

But there was no answer. They’d already taken off, leaving him alone in the dark and the rain.

A more cautious personality would have quit Hermes then, would not have risked his entire future on such razor-thin possibilities. But Robin did go back to do it again. He assisted in a fifth theft, and then a sixth. Michaelmas term ended, the winter holidays sped by, and Hilary term began. His heartbeat no longer pounded in his ears when he approached the tower at midnight. The minutes between entrance and exit no longer felt like purgatory. It all started to feel easy, this simple act of opening a door twice; so easy that by the seventh theft, he had convinced himself he was not doing anything dangerous at all.

‘You’re very efficient,’ said Griffin. ‘They like working with you, you know. You stick to the instructions and don’t embellish.’

A week into Hilary term, Griffin had finally deigned to meet Robin again in person. Once more they strode briskly around Oxford, this time following the Thames down south towards Kennington. The meeting felt like a midterm progress report with a harsh and rarely available supervisor, and Robin found himself basking in the praise, trying and failing not to come off as a giddy kid brother.

‘So I’m doing a good job?’

‘You’re doing very well. I’m quite pleased.’

‘So you’ll tell me more about Hermes now?’ Robin asked. ‘Or at least tell me where the bars are going? What you’re doing with them?’

Griffin chuckled. ‘Patience.’

They walked in silence for a stretch. There had been a storm just that morning. The Isis flowed fast and loud under a misty, darkening sky. It was the kind of evening when the world seemed drained of colour, a painting in progress, a sketch really, existing in greys and shadows only.

‘I have another question, then,’ said Robin. ‘And I know you won’t tell me much about Hermes now. But at least tell me how this all ends up.’

‘How what ends up?’

‘I mean – my situation. This current arrangement feels fine – as long as I’m not caught, I mean – but it seems, I don’t know, rather unsustainable.’

‘Of course it’s unsustainable,’ said Griffin. ‘You’ll study hard and graduate, and then they’ll ask you to do all kinds of unsavoury things for the Empire. Or they’ll catch you, as you said. It all comes to a head eventually, like it did for us.’

‘Does everyone at Hermes leave Babel?’

‘I know very few who have stayed.’

Robin was not sure how to feel about this. He often lulled himself into the fantasy of the post-Babel life – a cushy fellowship, if he wanted it; a guarantee of more fully funded years of study in those gorgeous libraries, living in comfortable college housing and tutoring rich undergraduates in Latin if he wanted extra pocket money; or an exciting career travelling overseas with the book buyers and simultaneous interpreters. In the Zhuangzi, which he’d just translated with Professor Chakravarti, the phrase tǎntú[31] literally meant ‘a flat road’, metaphorically, ‘a tranquil life’. This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises.

The only obstacle, of course, was his conscience.

‘You’ll remain at Babel as long as you’re able,’ said Griffin. ‘I mean, you ought to – heaven knows, we need more people on the inside. But it gets harder and harder, you see. You’ll find you can’t reconcile your sense of ethics with what they ask you to do. What happens when they direct you to military research? When they send you to the frontier in New Zealand, or the Cape Colony?’

‘You can’t just avoid those assignments?’

Griffin laughed. ‘Military contracts compose over half of the work orders. They’re a necessary part of the tenure application. And they pay well too – most of the senior faculty got rich fighting Napoleon. How do you think dear old Dad’s able to maintain three houses? It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’

‘So then what?’ Robin asked. ‘How do I leave?’

‘Simple. You fake your death, and then you go underground.’

‘Is that what you did?’

‘About five years ago, yes. You will too, eventually. And then you’ll become a shadow on the campus you once had the run of, and pray that some other first year will find it in their conscience to grant you access to your old libraries.’ Griffin shot him a sideways look. ‘You’re not happy with this answer, are you?’

Robin hesitated. He wasn’t quite sure how to verbalize his discomfort. Yes, there was a certain appeal to abandoning the Oxford life for Hermes. He wanted to do what Griffin did; he wanted access to Hermes’s inner workings, wanted to see where the stolen bars went and what was done with them. He wanted to see the hidden world.

But if he went, he knew, he could never come back.

‘It just seems so hard to be cut off,’ he said. ‘From everything.’

‘Do you know how the Romans fattened up their dormice?’ Griffin asked.

Robin sighed. ‘Griffin.’

‘Your tutors had you read Varro, didn’t they? He describes a glirarium in the Res Rustica.[32] It’s quite an elegant contraption. You make a jar, only it’s perforated with holes so the dormice can breathe, and the surfaces are polished so smooth that escape is impossible. You put food in the hollows, and you make sure there are some ledges and walkways so the dormice don’t get too bored. Most importantly, you keep it dark, so the dormice always think it’s time to hibernate. All they do is sleep and fatten themselves up.’

‘All right,’ Robin said impatiently. ‘All right. I get the picture.’

‘I know it’s difficult,’ said Griffin. ‘It’s hard to give up the trappings of your station. You still love your stipend and scholar’s gowns and wine parties, I’m sure—’

‘It’s not the wine parties,’ Robin insisted. ‘I don’t – I mean, I don’t go to wine parties. And it’s not about the stipend, or the stupid gowns. It’s just that – I don’t know, it’s such a leap.’

How could he explain it? Babel represented more than material comforts. Babel was the reason he belonged in England, why he was not begging on the streets of Canton. Babel was the only place where his talents mattered. Babel was security. And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Griffin. ‘No one’s asking you to leave Oxford. It’s not prudent, strategically speaking. See, I’m free, and I’m happy on the outside, but I also can’t get into the tower. We’re trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the levers of power. We need their silver. We need their tools. And, loath as we are to admit it, we benefit from their research.’

He gave Robin a shove. It was meant as a fraternal gesture, but neither of them was very practised at those, and it came off as more threatening than perhaps Griffin intended. ‘You do your reading and you stay on the inside. Don’t you worry about the contradiction. Your guilt is assuaged, for now. Enjoy your glirarium, little dormouse.’

Griffin left him at the corner of Woodstock. Robin watched his narrow frame disappear into the streets, his coat flapping around him like the wings of a giant bird, and wondered at how he could both admire and resent someone so much at the same time.

In Classical Chinese, the characters 二心 referred to disloyal or traitorous intentions; literally, they translated as ‘two hearts’. And Robin found himself in the impossible position of loving that which he betrayed, twice.

He did adore Oxford, and his life at Oxford. It was very nice to be among the Babblers, who were in many ways the most privileged group of students there. If they flaunted their Babel affiliation, they were allowed in any of the college libraries, including the absurdly gorgeous Codrington, which didn’t actually hold any reference materials they needed, but which they haunted regardless because its high walls and marble floors made them feel so very grand. All their living expenses were taken care of. Unlike the other servitors, they never had to serve food in hall or clean tutors’ rooms. Their room, board, and tuition were paid directly by Babel, so they never even saw the bill – on top of that, they received their stipend of twenty shillings a month, and were also given access to a discretionary fund they could use to purchase whatever course materials they liked. If they could make even the flimsiest case that a gold-capped fountain pen would aid their studies, then Babel paid for it.

The significance of this never crossed Robin’s mind until one night he stumbled upon Bill Jameson in the common room, scratching numbers onto a sheet of scrap paper with a wretched look on his face.

‘This month’s battels,’ he explained to Robin. ‘I’ve overspent what they sent me from home – I keep coming up short.’

The numbers on the paper astonished Robin; he had never imagined Oxford tuition could be so expensive.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a few things I can pawn to make up the difference until next month. Or I’ll pass on a few meals until then.’ Jameson glanced up. He looked desperately uncomfortable. ‘I say, and I do hate to ask, but do you think—’

‘Of course,’ Robin said hastily. ‘How much do you need?’

‘I wouldn’t, but the costs this term – they’re charging us to dissect corpses for Anatomy, I really—’

‘Don’t mention it.’ Robin reached into his pocket, pulled out his purse, and began counting out coins. He felt awfully pretentious as he did this – he’d just retrieved his stipend from the bursar that morning, and he hoped Jameson did not think he always walked around with such a stuffed purse. ‘Would that cover meals, at least?’

‘You’re an angel, Swift. I’ll pay you back first thing next month.’ Jameson sighed and shook his head. ‘Babel. They take care of you, don’t they?’

They did. Not only was Babel very rich, it was also respected. Theirs was by far the most prestigious faculty at Oxford. It was Babel that new undergraduates bragged about when showing their visiting relatives around campus. It was a Babel student who invariably won Oxford’s yearly Chancellor’s Prize, given to the best composition of Latin verse, as well as the Kennicott Hebrew Scholarship. It was Babel undergraduates who were invited to special receptions[33] with the politicians, aristocrats, and the unimaginably wealthy who made up the lobby clientele. Once it was rumoured that Princess Victoria herself would be in attendance at the faculty’s annual garden party; this turned out to be false, but she did give them a new marble fountain which was installed on the green a week later, and which Professor Playfair enchanted to shoot high, glistening arcs of water at all hours of the day.

By the middle of Hilary term, like every Babel cohort before them, Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty had absorbed the insufferable superiority of scholars who knew they had the run of campus. They took much amusement in how visiting scholars, who either condescended to or ignored them in hall, started fawning and shaking their hands when they revealed they studied translation. They dropped mention of how they had access to the Senior Common Room, which was both very nice and inaccessible to other undergraduates, though in truth they rarely spent much time there, as it was difficult to have a plain conversation when an ancient, wrinkled don sat snoring in the corner.

Victoire and Letty, who now understood that the presence of women at Oxford was more of an open secret than an outright taboo, began slowly growing out their hair. One day Letty even appeared in hall for dinner wearing a skirt instead of trousers. The Univ boys whispered and pointed, but the staff said nothing, and she was served her three courses and wine without incident.

But there were also significant ways in which they did not belong. No one would serve Ramy at any of their favourite pubs if he was the first to arrive. Letty and Victoire could not take books out of the library without a male student present to vouch for them. Victoire was assumed by shopkeepers to be Letty or Robin’s maid. Porters regularly asked all four of them if they could please not step on the green for it was off limits, while the other boys trampled over the so-called delicate grass all around them.

What’s more, it took them all several months to learn to speak like Oxfordians. Oxford English was different from London English, and was developed largely by the undergraduate tendency to corrupt and abbreviate just about everything. Magdalene was pronounced maudlin; by the same token, St Aldate’s had become St Old’s. The Magna Vacatio became the Long Vacation became the Long. New College became New; St Edmund’s became Teddy. It took months before Robin was used to uttering ‘Univ’ when he meant ‘University College’. A spread was a party with a sizable number of guests; a pidge was short for pigeonhole, which in turn meant one of the wooden cubbies where their post was sorted.

Fluency also entailed a whole host of social rules and unspoken conventions that Robin feared he might never fully grasp. None of them could quite understand the particular etiquette of calling cards, for instance, or how it was that one wormed oneself into the social ecosystem of the college in the first place, or how the many distinct but overlapping tiers of said ecosystem worked.[34] They were always hearing rumours of wild parties, nights at the pub spinning out of control, secret society meetings, and teas where so-and-so had been devastatingly rude to his tutor or where so-and-so had insulted someone else’s sister, but they never witnessed these events in person.

‘How is it we don’t get invited to wine parties?’ Ramy asked. ‘We’re delightful.’

‘You don’t drink wine,’ Victoire pointed out.

‘Well, I’d like to appreciate the ambience—’

‘It’s because you don’t throw any wine parties yourself,’ said Letty. ‘It’s a give-and-take economy. Have either of you ever delivered a calling card?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a calling card,’ said Robin. ‘Is there an art to it?’

‘Oh, they’re easy enough,’ said Ramy. ‘To Pendennis, Esq., Infernal beast, I will give you lashings of booze tonight. Confound you, your enemy, Mirza. No?’

‘Very civil.’ Letty snorted. ‘Small wonder you aren’t college royalty.’

They were decidedly not college royalty. Not even the white Babblers in the years above them were college royalty, for Babel kept them all too busy with coursework to enjoy a social life. That label could only describe a second year at Univ named Elton Pendennis and his friends. They were all gentlemen-commoners, which meant they’d paid higher fees to the university to avoid entrance examinations and to enjoy the privileges of fellows of the college. They sat at high table in hall, they lodged in apartments far nicer than the Magpie Lane dormitories, and they played snooker in the Senior Common Room whenever they liked. They enjoyed hunting, tennis, and billiards at the weekends and headed to London by coach every month for dinner parties and balls. They never did their shopping on High Street; all the newest fashions and cigars and accessories were brought straight from London to their quarters by salesmen who did not even bother quoting prices.

Letty, who’d grown up around boys like Pendennis, made him and his friends the target of a running stream of vituperation. ‘Rich boys studying on their father’s money. I bet they’ve never cracked open a textbook in their lives. I don’t know why Elton thinks he’s so handsome. Those lips are girlish; he shouldn’t pout so. Those double-breasted purple jackets look ridiculous. And I don’t know why he keeps telling everyone that he has an understanding with Clara Lilly. I know Clara and she’s as good as engaged to the Woolcotts’ oldest boy . . .’

Still, Robin could not help but envy those boys – those born into this world, who uttered its codes as native speakers. When he saw Elton Pendennis and his crowd strolling and laughing across the green, he couldn’t help but imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like to be a part of that circle. He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for its material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life. And he would no longer be the foreigner, second-guessing his pronunciation at every turn, but a native whose belonging could not possibly be questioned or revoked.

It was a great shock when one night Robin found a card made of embossed stationery waiting in his pidge. It read:

Robin Swift—

Would appreciate the pleasure of your company for drinks next Friday – seven o’clock if you like to be there at the start or any reasonable time thereafter we are not fussy.

It was signed, in a very impressive calligraphy that took Robin a moment to decipher, Elton Pendennis.

‘I think you’re making a rather big deal of this,’ said Ramy when Robin showed them the card. ‘Don’t tell me you’ll actually go.’

‘I don’t want to be rude,’ Robin said weakly.

‘Who cares if Pendennis thinks you’re rude? He didn’t invite you for your impeccable manners, he just wants to be friends with someone at Babel.’

‘Thank you, Ramy.’

Ramy brushed this off. ‘The question is, why you? I’m infinitely more charming.’

‘You’re not genteel enough,’ Victoire said. ‘Robin is.’

‘I don’t understand what anyone means by genteel,’ said Ramy. ‘People always throw it around in reference to the high- and well-born. But what’s it actually mean? Does it just mean that you’re very wealthy?’

‘I mean it in the context of manners,’ said Victoire.

‘Very funny,’ said Ramy. ‘But it’s not manners that’s the issue, I think. It’s that Robin passes as white and we don’t.’

Robin could not believe they were being so rude about this. ‘Is it impossible they might just want my company?’

‘Not impossible, just unlikely. You’re horrible with people you don’t know.’

‘I am not.’

‘You are too. You always clam up and retreat into the corner like they’re about to shoot you.’ Ramy folded his arms and cocked his head. ‘What do you want to dine with them for?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just a wine party.’

‘A wine party, and then what?’ Ramy persisted. ‘You think they’ll make you one of the lads? Are you hoping they’ll take you to the Bullingdon Club?’

The club on Bullingdon Green was an exclusive eating and sporting establishment where young men could while away the afternoon hunting or playing cricket. Membership was assigned on mysterious grounds that seemed to strongly correlate with wealth and influence. For all of Babel’s prestige, none of the Babel students Robin knew had any expectations they might ever be invited.

‘Perhaps,’ said Robin, just to be contrary. ‘It’d be nice to have a look inside.’

‘You’re excited,’ Ramy accused. ‘You hope they love you.’

‘It’s all right to admit you’re jealous.’

‘Don’t come crying when they pour wine all down your shirt and call you names.’

Robin grinned. ‘You won’t defend my honour?’

Ramy swatted his shoulder. ‘Steal an ashtray for me; I’ll pawn it to pay off Jameson’s battels.’

For some reason it was Letty who most ardently opposed Robin’s accepting Pendennis’s invitation. When they left the coffee shop for the library, long after the conversation had drifted elsewhere, she tugged at his elbow until they fell back several paces behind Ramy and Victoire.

‘Those boys are no good,’ she said. ‘They’re lushes, they’re indolent, they’re bad influences.’

Robin laughed. ‘It’s only a wine party, Letty.’

‘So why do you want to go?’ she pressed. ‘You hardly even drink.’

He could not understand why she was making such a big deal of this. ‘I’m just curious, that’s all. It’s probably going to be awful.’

‘So don’t show up,’ she insisted. ‘Just throw the card away.’

‘Well no, that’s rude. And I really haven’t anything on that night—’

‘You could spend it with us,’ she said. ‘Ramy wants to cook something.’

‘Ramy’s always cooking something, and it always tastes awful.’

‘Oh, then are you hoping they’ll bring you into the ranks?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Swift and Pendennis, bosom friends, is that what you want?’

He felt a flare of irritation. ‘Are you really that terrified I’ll make some other friends? Trust me, Letitia, nothing could beat your company.’

‘I see.’ To his shock, her voice broke. Her eyes, he noticed, had turned very red. Was she about to cry? What was wrong with her? ‘So that’s how it is.’

‘It’s only a wine party,’ he said, frustrated. ‘What’s the matter, Letty?’

‘Never mind,’ she said, and quickened her pace. ‘Have drinks with whoever you like.’

‘I will,’ he snapped, but she’d already left him far behind.

At ten to seven the following Friday, Robin put on his one nice jacket, pulled a bottle of port he’d bought at Taylor’s from under his bed, and walked to the flats on Merton Street. He had no trouble finding Elton Pendennis’s rooms. Even before he’d made his way down the street, he heard loud voices and somewhat arrhythmic piano music floating out of the windows.

He had to knock several times before someone heard him. The door swung open, revealing a tow-haired boy whose name Robin vaguely remembered as St Cloud.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking Robin up and down through lidded eyes. He seemed quite drunk. ‘You came.’

‘It seemed polite,’ Robin said. ‘As I was invited?’ He hated how his voice crawled up into a question.

St Cloud blinked at him, then turned and gestured vaguely inside. ‘Well, come on.’

Indoors, three other boys were seated on lounge chairs in the sitting room, which was so thick with cigar smoke that Robin coughed upon entering.

The boys were all crowded around Elton Pendennis like leaves around a bloom. Up close, the reports of his good looks seemed not to be exaggerated one bit. He was one of the handsomest men Robin had ever encountered, a Byronic hero incarnate. His hooded eyes were framed by thick, dark lashes; his plump lips would have looked girlish, as Letty had accused, if they weren’t set off by such a strong, square jaw.

‘It’s not the company, it’s the ennui,’ he was saying. ‘London’s fun for a season, but then you start seeing all the same faces again year after year, and the girls don’t ever get any prettier, just older. Once you’ve been to one ball you might have been to them all. You know, one of my father’s friends once promised his closest acquaintances that he could liven up their gatherings. He prepared an elaborate dinner party, then told his servants to go out and extend an invitation to all the beggars and homeless sops they came across. When his friends arrived, they saw those motley stragglers, punch-drunk and dancing on tables – it was hilarious, I wish I’d been invited myself.’

The joke ended here; the audience laughed on cue. Pendennis, his monologue complete, looked up. ‘Oh, hello. Robin Swift, isn’t it?’

By now Robin’s tentative optimism that this would be a good time had evaporated. He felt drained. ‘That’s me.’

‘Elton Pendennis,’ said Pendennis, extending a hand for Robin to shake. ‘We’re very happy you could make it.’

He pointed around the room with his cigar, wafting smoke about as he made introductions. ‘That’s Vincy Woolcombe.’ A red-headed boy sitting next to Pendennis gave Robin a friendly wave. ‘Milton St Cloud, who’s been providing our musical entertainment.’ The tow-haired, freckled St Cloud, who’d taken his seat in front of the piano, nodded lazily, then resumed plunking out a tuneless sequence. ‘And Colin Thornhill – you know him.’

‘We’re neighbours on Magpie Lane,’ Colin said eagerly. ‘Robin’s in room seven, and I’m number three—’

‘So you’ve said,’ Pendennis said. ‘Many times, in fact.’

Colin faltered. Robin wished Ramy were there to see; he’d never met someone capable of eviscerating Colin with a single glance.

‘Thirsty?’ Pendennis asked. Assembled on the table was such a rich collection of liquor it made Robin dizzy to look at it. ‘Help yourself to anything you want. We can never agree on the same drink. Port and sherry’s being decanted over there – oh, I see you’ve brought something, just put it on the table.’ Pendennis did not even look at the bottle. ‘Here’s absinthe, there’s the rum – oh, there’s only a bit of gin left, but feel free to finish the bottle, it isn’t very good. And we’ve ordered a dessert from Sadler’s, so please help yourself, otherwise it’ll go bad sitting out like that.’

‘Just some wine,’ Robin said. ‘If you have it.’

His cohort rarely drank together, out of deference to Ramy, and he had yet to acquire the detailed knowledge of types and makes of alcohol and what one’s choice of drink said about one’s character. But Professor Lovell always drank wine at dinner, so wine seemed safe.

‘Of course. There’s a claret, or port and Madeira if you want something stronger. Cigar?’

‘Oh – no, that’s all right, but Madeira’s good, thanks.’ Robin retreated to the one open seat, bearing a very full glass.

‘So you’re a Babbler,’ said Pendennis, leaning back against the chair.

Robin sipped his wine, trying to match Pendennis’s listless affect. How did one make such a relaxed position look so elegant? ‘That’s what they call us.’

‘What’s it you do? Chinese?’

‘Mandarin’s my speciality,’ said Robin. ‘Though I’m also studying comparisons to Japanese and, eventually, Sanskrit—’

‘So you are a Chinaman, then?’ Pendennis pressed. ‘We weren’t sure – I think you look English, but Colin swore you were an Oriental.’

‘I was born in Canton,’ Robin said patiently. ‘Though I’d say I’m English as well—’

‘I know China,’ Woolcombe interjected. ‘Kubla Khan.’

There was a short pause.

‘Yes,’ Robin said, wondering if that utterance was supposed to mean anything.

‘The Coleridge poem,’ Woolcombe clarified. ‘A very Oriental work of literature. Yet somehow, very Romantic as well.’

‘How interesting,’ Robin said, trying his best to be polite. ‘I’ll have to read it.’

Silence descended again. Robin felt some pressure to sustain the conversation, so he tried turning the question around. ‘So what – I mean, what are you all going to do? With your degrees, I mean.’

They laughed. Pendennis rested his chin on his hand. ‘Do,’ he drawled, ‘is such a proletarian word. I prefer the life of the mind.’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Woolcombe. ‘He’s going to live off his estate and subject all his guests to grand philosophical observations until he dies. I’ll be a clergyman, Colin a solicitor. Milton’s going to be a doctor, if he can find it in him to go to lectures.’

‘So you’re not training for any profession here?’ Robin asked Pendennis.

‘I write,’ Pendennis said with very deliberate indifference, the way people who are very conceited throw out morsels of information they hope become objects of fascination. ‘I write poetry. I haven’t produced much so far—’

‘Show him,’ Colin cried, right on cue. ‘Do show him. Robin, it’s ever so profound, wait until you hear it—’

‘All right.’ Pendennis leaned forward, still feigning reluctance, and reached for a stack of papers that Robin realized had been set out for display on the coffee table this entire time. ‘Now, this one is a reply to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”,[35] which is as you know an ode to the unforgiving ravaging of time against all great empires and their legacies. Only I’ve argued that, in the modern era, legacies can be built to last and indeed there are great men of the sort at Oxford capable of such a monumental task.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve opened with the same line as Shelley – I met a traveller from an antique land . . .’

Robin leaned back and drained the rest of his Madeira. Several seconds passed before he realized that the poem had ended, and his appraisal was required.

‘We have translators working on poetry at Babel,’ he said blandly, for lack of anything better to say.

‘Of course that’s not the same,’ Pendennis said. ‘Translating poetry is for those who haven’t the creative fire themselves. They can only seek residual fame cribbing off the work of others.’

Robin scoffed. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Pendennis. ‘You’re not a poet.’

‘Actually—’ Robin fidgeted with the stem of his glass for a moment, then decided to keep talking. ‘I think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. That’s why Shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible.[36] So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’

By the end of this spiel Pendennis and his friends were staring at him, slack-jawed and bemused, as if they weren’t sure what to make of him.

‘Dancing in shackles,’ Woolcombe said after a pause. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘But I’m not a poet,’ Robin said, a bit more viciously than he’d intended. ‘So really what do I know?’

His anxiety had dissipated entirely. He no longer felt concerned about how he presented, about whether his jacket was properly buttoned or he’d left crumbs on the side of his mouth. He didn’t want Pendennis’s approval. He didn’t care for any of these boys’ approval at all.

The truth of this encounter hit him with such clarity that he nearly laughed out loud. They were not appraising him for membership. They were trying to impress him – and by impressing him, to display their own superiority, to prove that to be a Babbler was not as good as being one of Elton Pendennis’s friends.

But Robin was not impressed. Was this the pinnacle of Oxford society? This? He felt a profuse pity for them – these boys who considered themselves aesthetes, who thought their lives were as rarefied as the examined life could be. But they would never engrave a word in a silver bar and feel the weight of its meaning reverberate in their fingers. They would never change the fabric of the world by simply wishing it.

‘Is that what they teach you at Babel, then?’ Woolcombe looked slightly awed. No one, it seemed, ever talked back to Elton Pendennis.

‘That and then some,’ Robin said. He felt a heady rush every time he spoke. These boys were nothing; he could decimate them with a word if he so desired. He could jump up on the couch and hurl his wine against the curtains without consequence, because he simply did not care. This rush of heady confidence was wholly foreign to him, but it felt very good. ‘Of course, the real point of Babel is silver-working. All that stuff about poetry is just the underlying theory.’

He was talking off the top of his head here. He had only a very vague idea of the underlying theory behind silver-working, but whatever he’d just said sounded good and played off even better.

‘Have you done silver-working?’ St Cloud pressed. Pendennis shot him an irritated look, but St Cloud persisted. ‘Is it difficult?’

‘I’m only still learning the fundamentals,’ Robin said. ‘We have two years of coursework, then one year of apprenticeship on one of the floors, and then I’ll be engraving bars on my own.’

‘Can you show us?’ Pendennis asked. ‘Could I do it?’

‘It wouldn’t work for you.’

‘Why not?’ Pendennis asked. ‘I know Latin and Greek.’

‘You don’t know them well enough,’ said Robin. ‘You’ve got to live and breathe a language, not just muddle through a text now and then. Do you dream in languages other than English?’

‘Do you?’ Pendennis shot back.

‘Well, of course,’ said Robin. ‘After all, I’m a Chinaman.’

The room lapsed once again into uncertain silence. Robin decided to put them out of their misery. ‘Thank you for the invitation,’ he said, standing up. ‘But I ought to head to the library.’

‘Of course,’ said Pendennis. ‘I’m sure they keep you very busy.’

No one said anything as Robin retrieved his coat. Pendennis watched him lazily through lidded eyes, slowly sipping his Madeira. Colin was blinking very rapidly; his mouth opened once or twice, but nothing came out. Milton made a desultory gesture at getting up to walk him to the door, but Robin waved him back down.

‘You can find your way out?’ Pendennis asked.

‘I’m sure I’m fine,’ Robin called over his shoulder as he left. ‘This place isn’t that large.’

The next morning, he recounted everything to his cohort to uproarious laughter.

‘Recite his poem again to me,’ Victoire begged. ‘Please.’

‘I don’t remember it all,’ said Robin. ‘But let me think – wait, yes, there was another line, the blood of a nation ran in his noble cheeks—’

‘No – oh, God—’

‘And the spirit of Waterloo in his widow’s peak—’

‘I don’t know what you’re all talking about,’ said Ramy. ‘The man’s a poetic genius.’

Only Letty did not laugh. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time,’ she said frostily.

‘You were right,’ Robin said, trying to be generous. ‘They’re fools, all right? I should never have abandoned your side, dear, sweet, sober Letty. You are always right about everything.’

Letty did not respond. She picked up her books, dusted off her trousers, and stormed out of the Buttery. Victoire stood halfway up as if about to chase after her, then sighed, shook her head, and sat down.

‘Let her go,’ Ramy said. ‘Let’s not spoil a good afternoon.’

‘Is she like this always?’ Robin asked. ‘I can’t see how you can stand living with her.’

‘You rile her up,’ Victoire said.

‘Don’t defend her—’

‘You do,’ said Victoire. ‘You both do, don’t pretend otherwise; you like making her snap.’

‘Only because she’s so up her own backside all the time,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘Is she an entirely different person with you, then, or have you merely adapted?’

Victoire glanced back and forth between them. She seemed to be trying to decide something. Then she asked, ‘Did you know she had a brother?’

‘What, some nabob in Calcutta?’ Ramy asked.

‘He’s dead,’ said Victoire. ‘He died a year ago.’

‘Oh.’ Ramy blinked. ‘Pity.’

‘His name was Lincoln. Lincoln and Letty Price. They were so close when they were children that all their family’s friends called them the twins. He came to Oxford some years before her, but he hadn’t half the mind for books as she does, and every holiday he and their father would fight viciously over how he was squandering his education. He was much more like Pendennis than like any of us, if you know what I mean. One night he went out drinking. The police came to Letty’s house the next morning, told them they’d found Lincoln’s body under a cart. He’d fallen asleep by the road, and the driver hadn’t noticed him under the wheels until hours later. He must have died sometime before dawn.’

Ramy and Robin were quiet; neither could think of anything to say. They felt rather like chastised schoolboys, as if Victoire were their stern governess.

‘She came up to Oxford a few months later,’ said Victoire. ‘Did you know Babel has a general entrance exam for applicants who don’t come specially recommended? She took it and passed. It was the only faculty at Oxford that would take women. She’d always wanted to come to Babel – she’d studied for it her whole life – but her father kept refusing to let her go to school. It wasn’t until Lincoln died that her father let her come and take his place. Bad to have a daughter at Oxford, but worse to have no children at Oxford at all. Isn’t that terrible?’

‘I didn’t know,’ Robin said, ashamed.

‘I don’t think you two quite understand how hard it is to be a woman here,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re liberal on paper, certainly. But they think so very little of us. Our landlady roots through our things when we’re out as if she’s searching for evidence that we’ve taken lovers. Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.’

‘I suppose that means we’re to excuse her constantly walking around like she’s got a rod up her bum,’ Ramy muttered.

Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘She’s unbearable sometimes, yes. But she’s not trying to be cruel. She’s scared she isn’t supposed to be here. She’s scared everyone wishes she were her brother, and she’s scared she’ll be sent home if she steps even slightly out of line. Above all, she’s scared that either of you might go down Lincoln’s path. Go easy on her, you two. You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Her behaviour,’ said Ramy, ‘is dictated by self-absorption.’

‘Be that as it may, I have to live with her.’ Victoire’s face tightened; she looked very annoyed with the both of them. ‘So do pardon me if I try to keep the peace.’

Letty’s sulks never lasted long, and she soon expressed her tacit forgiveness. When they filed into Professor Playfair’s office the next day, she returned Robin’s tentative smile with her own. Victoire nodded when he glanced her way. They were all on the same page, it seemed; Letty knew that Robin and Ramy knew, she knew they were sorry, and she herself was sorry and more than a bit embarrassed for being so dramatic. There was nothing else to be said.

Meanwhile, there were more exciting debates to be had. In Professor Playfair’s class that term, they were hung up on the idea of fidelity.

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ He looked around the classroom. ‘Does anyone here think that is fidelity?’

‘I’ll bite,’ said Ramy. ‘No, I don’t think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isn’t it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?’

Professor Playfair shrugged. ‘Is it not also unfaithful to make Virgil sound like a stuffy foreigner, rather than a man you would happily carry on a conversation with? Or, as Guthrie did, to cast Cicero as a member of the English Parliament? But I confess, these methods are questionable. You take things too far, and you get something like Pope’s translation of the Iliad.’

‘I thought Pope was one of the greatest poets of his time,’ Letty said.

‘Perhaps in his original work,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But he injects the text with so many Britishisms that he makes Homer sound like an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. Surely this does not accompany our image of the Greeks and Trojans at war.’

‘Sounds like typical English arrogance,’ said Ramy.

‘It isn’t only the English that do this,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Recall how Herder attacks the French neoclassicists for making Homer a captive, clad in French clothes, and following French customs, lest he offend. And all the well-known translators in Persia favoured the “spirit” of translation rather than word-for-word accuracy – indeed, they often found it appropriate to change European names into Persian and replace aphorisms in the target languages with Persian verse and proverbs. Was that wrong, do you think? Unfaithful?’

Ramy had no rejoinder.

Professor Playfair ploughed on. ‘There is no right answer, of course. None of the theorists before you have solved it either. This is the ongoing debate of our field. Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter – to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all.

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’

‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’

‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’

‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.

‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

He closed this profound statement as he always did, by looking at each of them in turn. And as Robin’s eyes met Professor Playfair’s, he felt a deep, vinegary squirm of guilt in his gut.

Chapter Nine

Babel students did not take qualifying exams until the end of their third year, so Trinity flew by with no more and no less stress than the previous two terms. Somewhere in this flurry of papers, readings, and doomed late-night attempts to perfect Ramy’s potato curry, their first year came to an end.

It was customary for rising second years to go abroad during the summer for language immersion. Ramy spent June and July in Madrid learning Spanish and studying the Umayyad archives. Letty went to Frankfurt, where she apparently read nothing but incomprehensible German philosophy, and Victoire to Strasbourg, from which she returned with insufferable opinions on food and fine dining.[37] Robin had hoped he might have the chance to visit Japan that summer, but he was sent instead to the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca to maintain his Mandarin. The college, which was run by Protestant missionaries, enforced an exhausting routine of prayers, readings in the classics, and courses in medicine, moral philosophy, and logic. Never did he get the chance to wander out of the compound onto Heeren Street, where the Chinese residents lived; instead, those weeks were an unbroken stream of sun, sand, and endless Bible study meetings among white Protestants.

He was very glad when summer ended. They all returned to Oxford sun-darkened and at least a stone heavier each from eating better than they had all term. Still, none of them would have extended their breaks if they could have done. They’d missed each other, they’d missed Oxford with its rain and dreadful food, and they’d missed the academic rigour of Babel. Their minds, enriched with new sounds and words, were like sleek muscles waiting to be stretched.

They were ready to make magic.

This year, they were finally allowed access to the silver-working department. They would not be allowed to make their own engravings until year four, but this term they would begin a preparatory theory course called Etymology – taught, Robin learned with some trepidation, by Professor Lovell.

On the first day of term, they went up to the eighth floor for a special introductory seminar with Professor Playfair.

‘Welcome back.’ Normally he lectured in a plain suit, but today he’d donned a black master’s gown with tassels that swished dramatically around his ankles. ‘The last time you were allowed on this floor, you saw the extent of the magic we create here. Today, we’ll dismantle its mysteries. Have a seat.’

They settled into chairs at the nearest workstations. Letty moved aside a stack of books on hers so she could see better, but Professor Playfair barked suddenly, ‘Don’t touch that.’

Letty flinched. ‘Pardon?’

‘That’s Evie’s desk,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Can’t you see the plaque?’

There was, indeed, a small bronze plaque affixed to the front of the desk. They craned their necks to read it. Desk Belonging to Eveline Brooke, it read. Do not touch.

Letty gathered her things, stood up, and took the seat next to Ramy. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, cheeks scarlet.

They sat in silence for a moment, not sure what to do. They’d never seen Professor Playfair so upset. But just as abruptly, his features rearranged themselves back into his regular warmth and, with a slight hop, he began to lecture as if nothing had happened.

‘The core principle underlying silver-working is untranslatability. When we say a word or phrase is untranslatable, we mean that it lacks a precise equivalent in another language. Even if its meaning can be partially captured in several words or sentences, something is still lost – something that falls into semantic gaps which are, of course, created by cultural differences in lived experience. Take the Chinese concept dao, which we translate sometimes as “the way”, “the path”, or “the way things ought to be”. Yet none of those truly encapsulates the meaning of dao, a little word that requires an entire philosophical tome to explain. Are you with me so far?’

They nodded. This was nothing more than the thesis Professor Playfair had hammered into their heads all of last term – that all translation involved some degree of warp and distortion. Finally, it appeared, they were going to do something with this distortion.

‘No translation can perfectly carry over the meaning of the original. But what is meaning? Does meaning refer to something that supersedes the words we use to describe our world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked. Humboldt,[38] for instance, argues that words are connected to the concepts they describe by something invisible, intangible – a mystical realm of meaning and ideas, emanating from a pure mental energy which only takes form when we ascribe it an imperfect signifier.’

Professor Playfair tapped the desk in front of him, where a number of silver bars, both blank and engraved, had been arranged in a neat row. ‘That pure realm of meaning – whatever it is, wherever it exists – is the core of our craft. The basic principles of silver-working are very simple. You inscribe a word or phrase in one language on one side, and a corresponding word or phrase in a different language on the other. Because translation can never be perfect, the necessary distortions – the meanings lost or warped in the journey – are caught, and then manifested by the silver. And that, dear students, is as close to magic as anything within the realm of natural science.’ He appraised them. ‘Are you still with me?’

They looked more unsure now.

‘I think, Professor,’ said Victoire. ‘If you gave us an example . . .’

‘Of course.’ Professor Playfair picked up the bar on the far right. ‘We’ve sold quite a few copies of this bar to fishermen. The Greek kárabos has a number of different meanings including “boat”, “crab”, or “beetle”. Where do you think the associations come from?’

‘Function?’ Ramy ventured. ‘Were the boats used for catching crabs?’

‘Good try, but no.’

‘The shape,’ Robin guessed. As he spoke it made more sense. ‘Think of a galley with rows of oars. They’d look like little scuttling legs, wouldn’t they? Wait – scuttle, sculler . . .’

‘You’re getting carried away, Mr Swift. But you’re on the right path. Focus on kárabos for now. From kárabos we get caravel, which is a quick and lightweight ship. Both words mean “ship”, but only kárabos retains the sea-creature associations in the original Greek. Are you following?’

They nodded.

He tapped the ends of the bar, where the words kárabos and caravel were written on opposite sides. ‘Affix this to a fishing ship, and you’ll find it yields a better load than any of its sister crafts. These bars were quite popular in the last century, until overuse meant fishing yields dropped down to what they were before. The bars can warp reality to some extent, but they can’t materialize new fish. You’d need a better word for that. Is this all starting to make sense?’

They nodded again.

‘Now, this is one of our most widely replicated bars. You’ll find these in doctors’ bags throughout England.’ He lifted the second bar to the right. ‘Triacle and treacle.’

Robin reeled back, startled. It was the bar, or a copy of the bar, that Professor Lovell had used to save him in Canton. The first enchanted silver he’d ever touched.

‘It is most often used to create a sugary home remedy that acts as an antidote to most types of poison. An ingenious discovery by a student named Evie Brooke – yes, that Evie – who realized the word treacle was first recorded in the seventeenth century in relation to the heavy use of sugar to disguise the bad taste of medicine. She then traced that back to the Old French triacle, meaning “antidote” or “cure from snakebite”, then the Latin theriaca, and finally to the Greek theriake, both meaning “antidote”.’

‘But the match-pair is only between English and French,’ said Victoire. ‘How—’

‘Daisy-chaining,’ said Professor Playfair. He turned the bar around to show them the Latin and Greek engraved along the sides. ‘It’s a technique that invokes older etymologies as guides, shepherding meaning across miles and centuries. You might also think of it as extra stakes for a tent. It keeps the whole thing stable and helps us identify with accuracy the distortion we’re trying to capture. But that’s quite an advanced technique – don’t worry about that for now.’

He lifted the third bar to the right. ‘Here’s something I came up with quite recently on commission for the Duke of Wellington.’ He uttered this with evident pride. ‘The Greek word idiótes can mean a fool, as our idiot implies. But it also carries the definition of one who is private, unengaged with worldly affairs – his idiocy is derived not from lack of natural faculties, but from ignorance and lack of education. When we translate idiótes to idiot, it has the effect of removing knowledge. This bar, then, can make you forget, quite abruptly, things you thought you’d learned. Very nice when you’re trying to get enemy spies to forget what they’ve seen.’[39]

Professor Playfair put the bar down. ‘So there it is. It’s all quite easy once you’ve grasped the basic principle. We capture what is lost in translation – for there is always something lost in translation – and the bar manifests it into being. Simple enough?’

‘But that’s absurdly powerful,’ said Letty. ‘You could do anything with those bars. You could be God—’

‘Not quite, Miss Price. We are restrained by the natural evolution of languages. Even words that diverge in meaning still have quite a close relationship with each other. This limits the magnitude of change the bars can effect. For example, you can’t use them to bring back the dead, because we haven’t found a good match-pair in a language where life and death are not in opposition to each other. Besides that, there’s one other rather severe limitation to the bars – one that keeps every peasant in England from running around wielding them like talismans. Can anyone guess what it is?’

Victoire raised her hand. ‘You need a fluent speaker.’

‘Quite right,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Words have no meaning unless there is someone present who can understand them. And it can’t be a shallow level of understanding – you can’t simply tell a farmer what triacle means in French and expect that the bar will work. You need to be able to think in a language – to live and breathe it, not just recognize it as a smattering of letters on a page. This is also why invented languages[40] will never work, and why ancient languages like Old English have lost their effect. Old English would be a silver-worker’s dream – we’ve got such extensive dictionaries and we can trace the etymology quite clearly, so the bars would be wonderfully exact. But nobody thinks in Old English. Nobody lives and breathes in Old English. It’s partly for this reason that the Classics education at Oxford is so rigorous. Fluency in Latin and Greek are still mandatory for many degrees, though the reformers have been agitating for years for us to drop those requirements. But if we ever did so, half the silver bars in Oxford would stop working.’

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Ramy. ‘We’re already fluent.’

‘That’s why you’re here,’ Professor Playfair agreed. ‘Psammetichus’s boys. Wonderful, no, to hold such power by virtue of your foreign birth? I’m quite good with new languages, yet it would take me years to invoke Urdu the way you can without hesitation.’

‘How do the bars work if a fluent speaker must be present?’ Victoire asked. ‘Shouldn’t they lose their effect as soon as the translator leaves the room?’

‘Very good question.’ Professor Playfair held up the first and second bars. Placed side by side, the second bar was clearly slightly longer than the first. ‘Now you’ve raised the issue of endurance. Several things affect the endurance of a bar’s effect. First is the concentration and amount of silver. Both these bars are over ninety per cent silver – the rest is a copper alloy, which is used often in coins – but the triacle bar is about twenty per cent larger, which means it’ll last a few months longer, depending on frequency and intensity of use.’

He lowered the bars. ‘Many of the cheaper bars you see around London don’t last quite as long. Very few of them are actually silver all the way through. More often, they’re just a thin sheen of silver coating over wood or some other cheap metal. They run out of charge in a matter of weeks, after which they need to be touched up, as we put it.’

‘For a fee?’ Robin asked.

Professor Playfair nodded, smiling. ‘Something has to pay for your stipends.’

‘So that’s all it takes to maintain a bar?’ asked Letty. ‘Just having a translator speak the words in the match-pair?’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Sometimes the engravings have to be reinscribed, or the bars have to be refitted—’

‘How much do you charge for those services, though?’ Letty pressed. ‘A dozen shillings, I’ve heard? Is it really worth so much to perform a little touch-up?’

Professor Playfair’s grin widened. He looked rather like a boy who’d been caught sticking his thumb in a pie. ‘It pays well to perform what the general public thinks of as magic, doesn’t it?’

‘Then the expense is entirely invented?’ Robin asked.

This came out more sharply than he’d intended. But he was thinking, then, of the choleric plague that had swept through London; of how Mrs Piper explained the poor simply could not be helped, for silver-work was so terribly costly.

‘Oh, yes.’ Professor Playfair seemed to find this all very funny. ‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else. Now, one last thing before we conclude.’ He plucked up one gleaming blank bar from the far end of the table. ‘I must issue a warning. There is one match-pair that you must never, ever attempt. Can anyone guess what that is?’

‘Good and evil,’ said Letty.

‘Good guess, but no.’

‘The names of God,’ said Ramy.

‘We trust you not to be that stupid. No, this one’s trickier.’

No one else had the answer.

‘It’s translation,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Simply, the words for translation itself.’

As he spoke, he engraved a word quickly on one side of the bar, and then showed them what he’d written: Translate.

‘The verb translate has slightly different connotations in each language. The English, Spanish, and French words – translate, traducir, and traduire – come from the Latin translat, which means “to carry across”. But we get something different once we move past Romance languages.’ He began inscribing a new set of letters on the other side. ‘The Chinese fānyì, for example, connotes turning or flipping something over, while the second character yì comes with a connotation of change and exchange. In Arabic, tarjama can refer both to biography and translation. In Sanskrit, the word for translation is anuvad, which also means “to say or repeat after and again”. The difference here is temporal, rather than the spatial metaphor of Latin. In Igbo, the two words for translation – tapia and kowa – both involve narration, deconstruction, and reconstruction, a breaking into pieces that makes possible a change in form. And so on. The differences and their implications are infinite. As such, there are no languages in which translation means exactly the same thing.’

He showed them what he’d written on the other side. Italian – tradurre. He put it on the table.

‘Translate,’ he said. ‘Tradurre.’

The moment he lifted his hand from the bar, it began to shake.

Amazed, they watched as the bar trembled with greater and greater violence. It was awful to witness. The bar seemed to have come alive, as if possessed by some spirit desperately trying to break free, or at least to split itself apart. It made no sound other than a fierce rattling against the table, but Robin heard in his mind a tortured, accompanying scream.

‘The translation match-pair creates a paradox,’ Professor Playfair said calmly as the bar started shaking so hard that it leapt inches off the table in its throes. ‘It attempts to create a purer translation, something that will align to the metaphors associated with each word, but this is of course impossible, because no perfect translations are possible.’

Cracks formed in the bar, thin veins that branched, split, and widened.

‘The manifestation has nowhere to go except the bar itself. So it creates an ongoing cycle until, at last, the bar breaks down. And . . . this happens.’

The bar leapt high into the air and shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces that scattered across the tables, the chairs, the floor. Robin’s cohort backed away, flinching. Professor Playfair did not bat an eye. ‘Do not try it. Not even out of curiosity. This silver,’ he kicked at one of the fallen shards, ‘cannot be reused. Even if it’s melted down and reforged, any bars made with even an ounce of it will be impotent. Even worse, the effect is contagious. You activate the bar when it’s on a pile of silver, and it spreads to everything it’s in contact with. Easy way to waste a couple dozen pounds if you’re not careful.’ He placed the engraving pen back on the worktable. ‘Is this understood?’

They nodded.

‘Good. Never forget this. The ultimate viability of translation is a fascinating philosophical question – it is, after all, what lies at the heart of the story of Babel. But such theoretical questions are best left for the classroom. Not for experiments that might bring down the building.’

‘Anthony was right,’ said Victoire. ‘Why would anyone bother with the Literature Department when there’s silver-working?’

They sat around their regular table at the Buttery, feeling rather dizzy with power. They’d been repeating the same sentiments about silver-working since class had been let out, but it didn’t matter; it all felt so novel, so incredible. The whole world had seemed different when they stepped out of the tower. They’d entered the wizard’s house, had watched him mix his potions and cast his spells, and now nothing would satisfy them until they’d tried it themselves.

‘Did I hear my name?’ Anthony slid into the seat across Robin. He peered around at their faces, then smiled knowingly. ‘Oh, I remember this look. Did Playfair give you his demonstration today?’

‘Is that what you do all day?’ Victoire asked him excitedly. ‘Tinker with match-pairs?’

‘Close enough,’ said Anthony. ‘It involves a lot more thumbing through etymological dictionaries than tinkering per se, but once you’ve seized upon something that might work, things get really fun. Right now I’m playing with a pair I think might be useful in bakeries. Flour and flower.’

‘Aren’t those just entirely different words?’ asked Letty.

‘You would think,’ said Anthony. ‘But if you go back to the Anglo-French original of the thirteenth century, you’ll find they were originally the same word – flower simply referred to the finest part of grain meal. Over time, flower and flour diverged to represent different objects. But if this bar works right, then I should be able to install it in milling machines to refine flour with more efficiency.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not sure it will work. But I expect a lifetime of free scones from Vaults if it does.’

‘Do you get royalties?’ asked Victoire. ‘Every time they make a copy of your bars, I mean?’

‘Oh, no. I get a modest sum, but all proceeding profits go to the tower. They do add my name to the ledger of match-pairs, though. I’ve got six in there so far. And there are only about twelve hundred active match-pairs currently in use throughout the Empire, so that’s about the highest academic laurel you can claim. Better than publishing a paper anywhere else.’

‘Hold on,’ said Ramy. ‘Isn’t twelve hundred quite low? I mean, match-pairs have been in use since the Roman Empire, so how—’

‘How is it that we haven’t covered the country in silver expressing every match-pair possible?’

‘Right,’ said Ramy. ‘Or at least, come up with more than twelve hundred.’

‘Well, think about it,’ said Anthony. ‘The problem should be obvious. Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force. Most of the silver bars that power London are translations from Latin, French, and German. But those bars are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents – as words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon – the semantic warp loses its potency.’

‘Professor Lovell told me something similar,’ said Robin, remembering. ‘He’s convinced that Romance languages will yield fewer returns as time goes on.’

‘He’s right,’ said Anthony. ‘So much has been translated from other European languages to English and vice versa in this century. We seem unable to kick our addiction to the Germans and their philosophers, or to the Italians and their poets. So, Romance Languages is really the most threatened branch of the faculty, as much as they’d like to pretend they own the building. The Classics are getting less promising as well. Latin and Greek will hang on for a bit, since fluency in either is still the purview of the elites, but Latin, at least, is getting more colloquial than you’d think. Somewhere on the eighth floor there’s a postdoc working on a revival of Manx and Cornish, but no one thinks that’s going to succeed. Same with Gaelic, but don’t tell Cathy. That’s why you three are so valuable.’ Anthony pointed at them all in turn except for Letty. ‘You know languages they haven’t milked to exhaustion yet.’

‘What about me?’ Letty said indignantly.

‘Well, you’re all right for a bit, but only because Britain’s developed its sense of national identity in opposition to the French. The French are superstitious heathens; we are Protestants. The French wear wooden shoes, so we wear leather. We’ll resist French incursion on our language yet. But it’s really the colonies and the semi-colonies – Robin and China, Ramy and India; boys, you’re uncharted territory. You’re the stuff that everyone’s fighting over.’

‘You say it like it’s a resource,’ said Ramy.

‘Well, certainly. Language is a resource just like gold and silver. People have fought and died over those Grammaticas.’

‘But that’s absurd,’ said Letty. ‘Language is just words, just thoughts – you can’t constrain the use of a language.’

‘Can’t you?’ asked Anthony. ‘Do you know the official punishment in China for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner is death?’

Letty turned to Robin. ‘Is that true?’

‘I think it is,’ said Robin. ‘Professor Chakravarti told me the same thing. The Qing government are – they’re scared. They’re scared of the outside.’

‘You see?’ asked Anthony. ‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

‘Words tell stories.’ This was how Professor Lovell opened their first class that afternoon, held in a spare, windowless room on the tower’s fifth floor. ‘Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact. Take the word knave. Where do you think it comes from?’

‘Playing cards, right? You’ve got your king, queen . . .’ Letty started, then broke off when she realized the argument was circular. ‘Oh, never mind.’

Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘The Old English cnafa refers to a boy servant, or young male servant. We confirm this with its German cognate Knabe, which is an old term for boy. So knaves were originally young boys who attended to knights. But when the institution of knighthood crumbled at the end of the sixteenth century, and when lords realized they could hire cheaper and better professional armies, hundreds of knaves found themselves unemployed. So they did what any young men down on their luck would do – they fell in with highwaymen and robbers and became the lowlife scoundrels that we label as knaves now. So the history of the word does not describe just a change in language, but a change in an entire social order.’

Professor Lovell was not a passionate lecturer, nor a natural performer. He looked ill at ease before an audience; his movements were stilted and abrupt, and he spoke in a dry, sombre, straightforward manner. Still, every word out of his mouth was perfectly timed, well considered, and fascinating.

In the days before this lecture, Robin had dreaded taking a class with his guardian. But it turned out not to be awkward or embarrassing. Professor Lovell treated him just like he had in front of company back in Hampstead – distant, formal, his eyes flitting always over Robin’s face without landing, like the space where he existed could not be seen.

‘We get the word etymology from the Greek étymon,’ continued Professor Lovell. ‘The true sense of a word, from étumos, the “true or actual”. So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’

Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’[41]

‘No, give me something bigger.’

‘Táifēng?’[42]

‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’

‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’

‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’

‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’

‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics. When we invoke words in silver, we call to mind that changing history.’

Letty raised her hand. ‘I have a question about method.’

‘Go on.’

‘Historical research is well and fine,’ said Letty. ‘All you have to do is look at artefacts, documents, and the like. But how do you research the history of words? How do you determine how far they’ve travelled?’

Professor Lovell looked very pleased by this question. ‘Reading,’ he said. ‘There is no other way around it. You compile all the sources you can get your hands on, and then you sit down to solve puzzles. You look for patterns and irregularities. We know, for instance, that the final Latin m was not pronounced in classical times, because inscriptions at Pompeii are misspelled in a way that leaves the m out. This is how we pin down sound changes. Once we do that, we can predict how words should have evolved, and if they don’t match our predictions, then perhaps our hypothesis about linked origins is wrong. Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack. But our particular needles, I’d say, are quite worth the search.’

That year, using English as an example, they began the task of studying how languages grew, changed, morphed, multiplied, diverged, and converged. They studied sound changes; why the English knee had a silent k that was pronounced in the German counterpart; why the stop consonants of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit had such a regular correspondence with consonants in Germanic languages. They read Bopp, Grimm, and Rask in translation; they read the Etymologiae of Isidorus. They studied semantic shifts, syntactical change, dialectical divergence, and borrowing, as well as the reconstructive methods one might use to piece together the relationships between languages that at first glance seemed to have nothing to do with each other. They dug through languages like they were mines, searching for valuable veins of common heritage and distorted meaning.

It changed the way they spoke. Constantly they trailed off in the middle of sentences. They could not utter even common phrases and aphorisms without pausing to wonder where those words came from. Such interrogations infiltrated all their conversations, became the default way they made sense of each other and everything else.[43] They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’. But not all English words had their roots in such far-flung or noble origins. The curious thing about etymology, they soon learned, was that anything could influence a language, from the consumption habits of the rich and worldly to the so-called vulgar utterances of the poor and wretched. The lowly cants, the supposed secret languages of thieves, vagabonds, and foreigners, had contributed such common words such as bilk, booty, and bauble.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

In addition to Etymology, they each took on an extra language that year. The point was not to attain fluency in this language, but to, through the process of its acquisition, deepen their understanding of their focus languages. Letty and Ramy began studying Proto-Indo-European with Professor De Vreese. Victoire proposed a number of West African languages she hoped to learn to the advisory board, but was rejected on the grounds that Babel possessed insufficient resources for proper instruction in any of them. She ended up studying Spanish – Spanish contact was relevant to the Haitian-Dominican border, Professor Playfair argued – but was none too happy about it.

Robin took Sanskrit with Professor Chakravarti, who began their first lesson by scolding Robin for having no knowledge of the language to begin with. ‘They should teach Sanskrit to China scholars from the beginning. Sanskrit came to China by way of Buddhist texts, and this caused a veritable explosion of linguistic innovation, as Buddhism introduced dozens of concepts that Chinese had no easy word for. Nun, or bhiksunī in Sanskrit, became ni.[44] Nirvana became nièpán.[45] Core Chinese concepts like hell, consciousness, and calamity come from Sanskrit. You can’t begin to understand Chinese today without also understanding Buddhism, which means understanding Sanskrit. It’s like trying to understand multiplication before you know how to draw numbers.’

Robin thought it was a bit unfair to accuse him of learning out of order a language he’d spoken from birth, but he played along. ‘Where do we start, then?’

‘The alphabet,’ Professor Chakravarti said cheerfully. ‘Back to basic building blocks. Take out your pen and trace these letters until you’ve developed a muscle memory for them – I expect it’ll take you about half an hour. Go on.’

Latin, translation theory, etymology, focus languages, and a new research language – it was an absurdly heavy class load, especially when each professor assigned coursework as if none of the other courses existed. The faculty was utterly unsympathetic. ‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.’

Still, they found their moments of joy. Oxford had now begun to feel like a home of sorts, and they carved their own pockets into it, spaces where they were not just tolerated but in which they thrived. They’d learned which coffee houses would serve them without fuss, and which ones would either pretend Ramy did not exist or complain he was too dirty to sit on their chairs. They learned which pubs they could frequent after dark without harassment. They sat in the audience of the United Debating Society and gave themselves stitches trying to contain their laughter as boys like Colin Thornhill and Elton Pendennis shouted about justice, liberty, and equality until they were red in their faces.

Robin took up rowing at Anthony’s insistence. ‘It’s no good for you to stay cooped up in the library all the time,’ he told him. ‘One needs to stretch one’s muscles for the brain to work properly. Get the blood flowing. Try it, it’ll be good for you.’

As it happened, he adored it. He found great pleasure in the rhythmic straining motion of pulling a single oar against the water again and again. His arms grew stronger; his legs, somehow, felt longer. Gradually he lost his hunched-over reediness and acquired a filled-in look, which gave him deep satisfaction every morning when he glanced at the mirror. He started looking forward to chilly mornings on the Isis, when the rest of the town hadn’t woken up yet, when the only sound he could hear for miles around was the birds chirping and the pleasant splash of blades sinking into the water.

The girls tried, but failed, to sneak their way into the boat club. They weren’t nearly tall enough to row, and coxing involved too much shouting for them to pretend they were men. But weeks later, Robin began hearing rumours of two vicious additions to the Univ fencing team, though Victoire and Letty at first claimed innocence upon interrogation.

‘It’s the aggression that’s the attraction,’ Victoire finally confessed. ‘It’s so funny to watch. These boys always come out so strong at the front, and they lose all sight of strategy.’

Letty agreed. ‘Then it’s a simple matter of keeping your head and pricking them where they’re not guarded. That’s all it takes.’

In the winter, the Isis froze over and they went skating, which none of them save Letty had ever done before. They laced their boots on as tight as they could go – ‘Tighter,’ said Letty, ‘they can’t wobble, else you’ll break your ankles’ – and staggered onto the ice, clutching each other for balance as they teetered forth, though usually this only meant that they all fell when one did. Then Ramy realized if he leaned forward and bent his knees, he could drive himself faster and faster, and by the third day he was skating circles around the rest, even Letty, who pretended to be upset when he skidded in her path but who couldn’t stop laughing regardless.

There was a solid, enduring quality to their friendship now. They were no longer dazzled and frightened first years, clinging to each other for stability. Instead they were weary veterans united by their trials, hardened soldiers who could lean against each other for anything. Meticulous Letty, despite her grumbling, would always mark up a translation, no matter how late at night or early in the morning. Victoire was like a vault; she would listen to any amount of complaining and petty griping without letting slip to the subjects thereof. And Robin could knock on Ramy’s door at any time, day or night, if he needed a cup of tea, or something to laugh about, or someone to cry with.

When the new cohort – no girls, and four baby-faced boys – had appeared at Babel that autumn, they’d given them scarcely any attention. They had, without consciously intending to, become just like the upperclassmen they had so envied during their first term. What they’d perceived as snobbery and haughtiness, it turned out, was only exhaustion. Older students had no intention of bullying newer ones. They simply didn’t have the time.

They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

And Robin, despite everything, hoped the day Griffin prophesied would never come, that he could live hanging in this balance forever. For he had never been happier than he was now: stretched thin, too preoccupied with the next thing before him to pay any attention to how it all fitted together.

In late Michaelmas a French chemist named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre came to Babel with a curious object in tow. It was a heliographic camera obscura, he announced, and could be capable of replicating still images using exposed copper plates and light-sensitive compounds, although he couldn’t quite get the mechanics right. Could the Babblers take a look and see if they could improve it somehow?

The problem of Daguerre’s camera became the talk of the tower. The faculty made it a competition – any student cleared for silver-work who could solve Daguerre’s problem was entitled to have their name on his patent, and a percentage of the riches that were sure to follow. For two weeks, the eighth floor frothed with silent frenzy as fourth years and graduate fellows flipped through etymological dictionaries, trying to find a set of words that would get at the right nexus of meaning involving light, colour, image, and imitation.

It was Anthony Ribben who finally cracked it. As per contractual terms with Daguerre, the actual patented match-pair was kept a secret, but rumour was that Anthony had done something with the Latin imago, which in addition to meaning ‘a likeness’ or ‘imitation’ also implied a ghost or phantom. Other rumours held that Anthony had found some way to dissolve the silver bar to create fumes from heated mercury. Whatever it was, Anthony could not say, but he was paid handsomely for his efforts.

The camera worked. Magically, the exact likeness of a captured subject could be replicated on a sheet of paper in marvellously little time. Daguerre’s device – the daguerreotype, they called it – became a local sensation. Everyone wanted their picture taken. Daguerre and the Babel faculty put on a three-day exhibition in the tower lobby, and eager members of the public formed lines that wrapped around the street.

Robin was nervous about a Sanskrit translation due the next day, but Letty insisted they all go in for a portrait. ‘Don’t you want a memento of us?’ she asked. ‘Preserved at this moment in time?’

Robin shrugged. ‘Not really.’

‘Well, I do,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I want to remember exactly how we were now, in this year, in 1837. I never want to forget.’

They assembled themselves before the camera. Letty and Victoire sat down in chairs, hands folded stiffly in their laps. Robin and Ramy stood behind them, uncertain what to do with their hands. Should they place them on the girls’ shoulders? On the chairs?

‘Arms by your sides,’ said the photographer. ‘Hold still as best you can. No – first, cluster a bit closer – there you go.’

Robin smiled, realized he couldn’t keep his mouth stretched wide for that long, and promptly dropped it.

The next day, they retrieved their finished portrait from a clerk in the lobby.

‘Please,’ said Victoire. ‘That looks nothing like us at all.’

But Letty was delighted; she insisted they go shopping for a frame. ‘I’ll hang it over my mantel, what do you think?’

‘I’d rather you throw that away,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s unnerving.’

‘It is not,’ said Letty. She seemed bewitched as she observed the print, as if she’d seen actual magic. ‘It’s us. Frozen in time, captured in a moment we’ll never get back as long as we live. It’s wonderful.’

Robin, too, thought the photograph looked strange, though he did not say so aloud. All of their expressions were artificial, masks of faint discomfort. The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.

Violets cast into crucibles, indeed.

Chapter Ten

Near the end of Michaelmas term that year, Griffin seemed to be around more than usual. Robin had been starting to wonder where he’d gone; since he’d got back from Malacca, his assignments had dropped from twice a month to once to none. But in December, Robin began to receive notes instructing him to meet Griffin outside the Twisted Root every few days, where they commenced their usual routine of walking frantically round the city. Usually these were preludes to planned thefts. But occasionally Griffin seemed to have no agenda in mind, and instead wanted only to chat. Robin eagerly awaited these talks; they were the only times when his brother seemed less mysterious, more human, more flesh and bone. But Griffin never answered the questions Robin really wanted to discuss, which were what Hermes did with the materials he helped steal, and how the revolution, if there was one, was proceeding. ‘I still don’t trust you,’ he would say. ‘You’re still too new.’

I don’t trust you either, Robin thought but didn’t say. Instead, he probed at things in a roundabout way. ‘How long has Hermes been around?’

Griffin shot him a droll look. ‘I know what you’re doing.’

‘I just want to know if it’s a modern invention, or, or—’

‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea. Decades at least, perhaps longer, but I’ve never found out. Why don’t you ask what you really want to know?’

‘Because you won’t tell me.’

‘Try me.’

‘Fine. Then if it’s been around for longer, I can’t understand . . . ’

‘You can’t see why we haven’t won already. Is that it?’

‘No. I just don’t see what difference it makes,’ said Robin. ‘Babel is – Babel. And you’re just—’

‘A small cluster of exiled scholars chipping away at the behemoth?’ Griffin supplied. ‘Say what you mean, brother, don’t dither.’

‘I was going to say “massively outnumbered idealists”, but yes. I mean – please, Griffin, it’s just hard to keep faith when it’s unclear what effect there is to anything I do.’

Griffin slowed his pace. He was silent for a few seconds, considering, and then he said, ‘I’m going to paint you a picture. Where does silver come from?’

‘Griffin, honestly—’

‘Indulge me.’

‘I’ve got class in ten minutes.’

‘And it’s not a simple answer. Craft won’t throw you out for being late just once. Where does silver come from?’

‘I don’t know. Mines?’

Griffin sighed heavily. ‘Don’t they teach you anything?’

‘Griffin—’

‘Just listen. Silver’s been around forever. The Athenians were mining it in Attica, and the Romans, as you know, used silver to expand their empire once they realized what it could do. But silver didn’t become international currency, didn’t facilitate a trade network spanning continents, until much later. There simply wasn’t enough of it. Then in the sixteenth century, the Hapsburgs – the first truly global empire – stumbled upon massive silver deposits in the Andes. The Spaniards brought it out of the mountains, courtesy of indigenous miners you can be certain weren’t paid fairly for their labour,[46] and minted it into their little pieces of eight, which brought riches flowing into Seville and Madrid.

‘Silver made them rich – rich enough to buy printed cotton cloth from India, which they used to pay for bound slaves from Africa, who they put to work on plantations in their colonies. So the Spanish become richer and richer, and everywhere they go they leave death, slavery, and impoverishment in their wake. You see the patterns so far, surely?’

Griffin, when lecturing, bore a peculiar resemblance to Professor Lovell. Both made very sharp gestures with their hands, as if punctuating their lengthy diatribes with hand movements instead of full stops, and both spoke in a very precise, syncopated manner. They also shared a fondness for Socratic questioning. ‘Jump forward two hundred years, and what do you have?’

Robin sighed, but played along. ‘All the silver, and all the power, flows from the New World to Europe.’

‘Right,’ said Griffin. ‘Silver accrues where it’s already in use. The Spanish held the lead for a long time, while the Dutch, British, and French were nipping at their heels. Jump ahead another century, and Spain’s a shadow of what it once was; the Napoleonic wars have eroded France’s power, and now glorious Britannia is on top. Largest silver reserves in Europe. Best translation institute in the world by far. The best navy on the seas, cemented after Trafalgar, meaning this island is well on its way to ruling the world, isn’t it? But something funny’s been happening over the last century. Something that’s been giving Parliament and all the British trading companies quite a headache. Can you guess what it is?’

‘Don’t tell me we’re running out of silver.’

Griffin grinned. ‘They’re running out of silver. Can you guess where it’s all flowing now?’

This Robin knew the answer to, only because he’d heard Professor Lovell and his friends complaining about it for years during those sitting room nights in Hampstead. ‘China.’

‘China. This country is gorging itself on imports from the Orient. They can’t get enough of China’s porcelain, lacquered cabinets, and silks. And tea. Heavens. Do you know how much tea gets exported from China to England every year? At least thirty million pounds’ worth. The British love tea so much that Parliament used to insist that the East India Company always keep a year’s worth of supply in stock in case of shortages. We spend millions and millions on tea from China every year, and we pay for it in silver.

‘But China has no reciprocal appetite for British goods. When the Qianlong Emperor received a display of British manufactured items from Lord Macartney, do you know what his response was? Strange and costly objects do not interest me. The Chinese don’t need anything we’re selling; they can produce everything they want on their own. So silver keeps flowing to China, and there’s nothing the British can do about it because they can’t alter supply and demand. One day it won’t matter how much translation talent we have, because the silver reserves will simply not exist to put it to use. The British Empire will crumble as a consequence of its own greed. Meanwhile, silver will accrue in new centres of power – places that have heretofore had their resources stolen and exploited. They’ll have the raw materials. All they’ll need then are silver-workers, and the talent will go where the work is; it always does. So it’s all as simple as running out the Empire. The cycles of history will do the rest, and you’ve only got to help us speed it along.’

‘But that’s . . . ’ Robin trailed off, struggling to find the words to phrase his objection. ‘That’s so abstract, so simple, it can’t possibly – I mean, certainly you can’t predict history like this with such broad strokes—’

‘There’s quite a lot you can predict.’ Griffin shot Robin a sideways look. ‘But that’s the problem with a Babel education, isn’t it? They teach you languages and translation, but never history, never science, never international politics. They don’t tell you about the armies that back dialects.’

‘But what does it all look like?’ Robin persisted. ‘What you’re describing, I mean – how is this going to come about? A global war? A slow economic decline until the world looks entirely different?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Griffin. ‘No one knows precisely what the future looks like. Whether the levers of power move to China, or to the Americas, or whether Britain’s going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to its place – that’s impossible to foretell.’

‘Then how do you know that what you’re doing has any effect?’

‘I can’t predict how every encounter will shake out,’ Griffin clarified. ‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’

‘It’s such an uneven fight, though,’ Robin said helplessly. ‘You on one side, the whole of the Empire on the other.’

‘Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,’ said Griffin. ‘But it’s not. Take this current moment. We are just at the tail end of a great crisis in the Atlantic, after the monarchic empires have fallen one after the other. Britain and France lost in America, and then they went to war against each other to nobody’s benefit. Now we’re watching a new consolidation of power, that’s true – Britain got Bengal, it got Dutch Java and the Cape Colony – and if it gets what it wants in China, if it can reverse this trade imbalance, it’s going to be unstoppable.

‘But nothing’s written in stone – or even silver, as it were. So much rests on these contingencies, and it’s at these tipping points where we can push and pull. Where individual choices, where even the smallest of resistance armies make a difference. Take Barbados, for example. Take Jamaica. We sent bars there to the revolts—’

‘Those slave revolts were crushed,’ said Robin.

‘But slavery’s been abolished, hasn’t it?’ said Griffin. ‘At least in British territories. No – I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

‘You really believe that,’ said Robin, amazed. Griffin’s faith astounded him. For Robin, such abstract reasoning was a reason to divest from the world, to retreat into the safety of dead languages and books. For Griffin, it was a rallying call.

‘I have to,’ said Griffin. ‘Otherwise, you’re right. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.’

After that conversation, Griffin seemed to have decided Robin wasn’t about to betray the Hermes Society, for Robin’s assignments vastly increased in number. Not all of his missions involved theft. More often Griffin made requests for materials – etymological handbooks, Grammatica pages, orthography charts – which were easily acquired, copied out, and returned without drawing attention. Still, he had to be clever with when and how he took the books out, as he’d attract suspicion if he kept sneaking away materials unrelated to his focus areas. One time Ilse, the upperclassman from Japan, demanded to know what he was doing with the Old German Grammatica, and he had to stammer out a story about pulling the title by accident in the course of trying to trace a Chinese word back to Hittite origins. No matter that he was at the entirely wrong section of the library. Ilse seemed ready to believe he was simply that dim.

By and large, Griffin’s requests were painless. It was all less romantic than Robin had imagined – and, perhaps, hoped for. There were no thrilling escapades or coded conversations spoken on bridges over running water. It was all so mundane. The great achievement of the Hermes Society, Robin learned, was how effectively it rendered itself invisible, how completely it concealed information even from its members. If one day Griffin disappeared, then Robin would be hard-pressed to prove to anyone the Hermes Society ever existed except as a figment of his imagination. He often felt that he wasn’t a part of a secret society at all, but rather of a large, boring bureaucracy that functioned with exquisite coordination.

Even the thefts became routine. Babel’s professors seemed wholly unaware that anything was being stolen at all. The Hermes Society took silver only in amounts small enough to mask with some accounting trickery, for the virtue of a humanities faculty, Griffin explained, was that everyone was hopeless with numbers.

‘Playfair would let entire crates of silver disappear if no one checked him,’ he told Robin. ‘Do you think he keeps tidy books? The man can barely add figures in two digits.’

Some days Griffin did not mention Hermes at all, but instead spent the hour it took to reach Port Meadow and back inquiring about Robin’s life at Oxford – his rowing exploits, his favourite bookshops, his thoughts on the food in hall and in the Buttery.

Robin answered cautiously. He kept waiting for the ball to drop, for Griffin to spin this conversation into an argument, for his own preference for plain scones to become the proof of his infatuation with the bourgeoisie. But Griffin only kept asking, and gradually it dawned on Robin that perhaps Griffin just missed being a student.

‘I do love the campus at Christmastime,’ said Griffin one night. ‘It’s the season when Oxford leans most into the magic of itself.’

The sun had set. The air had gone from pleasantly chilly to bone-cuttingly cold, but the city was bright with Christmas candles, and a light trickle of snow floated down around them. It was lovely. Robin slowed his pace, wanting to savour the scene, but Griffin, he noticed, was shivering madly.

‘Griffin, don’t . . . ’ Robin hesitated; he didn’t know how to ask politely. ‘Is that the only coat you have?’

Griffin recoiled like a dog rising on its hackles. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just – I’ve got a stipend, if you wanted to buy something warmer—’

‘Don’t patronize me.’ Robin regretted instantly that he’d ever brought it up. Griffin was too proud. He could take no charity; he could not even take sympathy. ‘I don’t need your money.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Robin, wounded.

They walked for another block in silence. Then Griffin asked, in an obvious attempt at an olive branch, ‘What’s on for Christmas?’

‘First there’ll be dinner in hall.’

‘So endless Latin prayers, rubber goose, and a Christmas pudding that’s indistinguishable from pig slop. What’s really on?’

Robin grinned. ‘Mrs Piper has some pies waiting for me in Jericho.’

‘Steak and kidney?’

‘Chicken and leek. My favourite. And a lemon tart for Letty, and a chocolate pecan dessert pie for Ramy and Victoire—’

‘Bless your Mrs Piper,’ Griffin said. ‘The professor had some frigid crone named Mrs Peterhouse in my time. Couldn’t cook to save her life, no, but always remembered to say something about half-breeds whenever I was in earshot. He didn’t like that either, though; I suppose that’s why he let her go.’

They turned left onto Cornmarket. They were very near the tower now, and Griffin seemed fidgety; Robin suspected they would soon part ways.

‘Before I forget.’ Griffin reached into his coat, pulled out a wrapped parcel, and tossed it at Robin. ‘I got you something.’

Surprised, Robin pulled at the string. ‘A tool?’

‘Just a present. Merry Christmas.’

Robin tore away the paper, which revealed a lovely, freshly printed volume.

‘You said you liked Dickens,’ said Griffin. ‘They’d just bound the serialization of his latest – you might have already read it, but I thought you’d like it all in one piece.’

He’d bought Robin the three-volume set of Oliver Twist. For a moment Robin could only stammer – he hadn’t known they were exchanging gifts, he hadn’t bought anything for Griffin – but Griffin waved this off. ‘That’s all right, I’m older than you, don’t embarrass me.’

Only later, after Griffin had disappeared down Broad Street, coat flapping around his ankles, would Robin realize this selection had been Griffin’s idea of a joke.

Come back with me, he almost said when they parted. Come to hall. Come back and have Christmas dinner.

But that was impossible. Robin’s life was split into two, and Griffin existed in the shadow world, hidden from sight. Robin could never bring him back to Magpie Lane. Could never introduce him to his friends. Could never, in daylight, call him brother.

‘Well.’ Griffin cleared his throat. ‘Next time, then.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Don’t know yet.’ He was already walking away, snow filling in his footsteps. ‘Watch your window.’

On the first day of Hilary term, the main entrance to Babel was blocked off by four armed policemen. They appeared to be engaged with someone or something inside, though whatever it was, Robin could not see over the crowd of shivering scholars.

‘What’s happened?’ Ramy asked the girls.

‘They’re saying it was a break-in,’ said Victoire. ‘Someone wanted to pilfer some silver, I suppose.’

‘So what, the police were here at precisely the right time?’ asked Robin.

‘He set off some alarm when he tried to get through the door,’ said Letty. ‘And the police, I think, came quickly.’

A fifth and sixth policeman emerged from the building, dragging the man Robin assumed was the thief between them. He was middle-aged, dark-haired, bearded, and dressed in very grimy clothes. Not Hermes, then, Robin thought with some relief. The thief’s face was contorted in pain, and his moans floated over the crowd as the police pulled him down the steps towards a waiting cab. They left a streak of blood on the cobblestones behind them.

‘He’s got about five bullets in him.’ Anthony Ribben appeared beside them. He looked like he might vomit. ‘Nice to see the wards are working, I suppose.’

Robin balked. ‘Wards did that?’

‘The tower’s protected by the most sophisticated security system in the country,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s not just the Grammaticas that are guarded. There’s about half a million pounds’ worth of silver in this building, and only spindly academics around to defend it. Of course the doors are warded.’

Robin’s heart was beating very quickly; he could hear it in his eardrums. ‘By what?’

‘They never tell us the match-pairs; they’re very private about it. Playfair updates them every few months, which is about as often as someone attempts a theft. I must say, I like this set much better – the last set tore gaping wounds in the trespasser’s limbs using ancient knives rumoured to be from Alexandria. It got blood all over the inside carpet; you can still see the brown spots if you look carefully. We spent weeks guessing which words Playfair used, but no one’s been able to crack it.’

Victoire’s eyes followed the departing cab. ‘What do you think will happen to him?’

‘Oh, he’ll probably be on the first ship to Australia,’ said Anthony. ‘Provided he doesn’t bleed out on the way to the police station.’

‘Routine pickup,’ said Griffin. ‘In and out – you won’t even see we’re there. The timing’s a bit tricky, though, so be on call all night.’ He nudged Robin’s shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

Robin blinked and glanced up. ‘Hm?’

‘You look spooked.’

‘I just . . . ’ Robin deliberated for a moment, then blurted, ‘You know about the wards, right?’

‘What?’

‘We saw a man break in this morning. And the wards, they triggered some sort of gun, and it shot him full of bullets—’

‘Well, of course.’ Griffin looked puzzled. ‘Don’t tell me that’s news to you. Babel’s got ridiculous wards – didn’t they rub that into your faces during the first week?’

‘They’ve updated them, though. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, they can tell when a thief’s walking through now—’

‘The bars aren’t that sophisticated,’ Griffin said dismissively. ‘They’re designed to discriminate between students, their guests, and strangers to the Institute. What do you think would happen if the traps sprang on a translator who needed to take some bars home overnight? Or someone bringing his wife to the faculty without first clearing it with Playfair? You’re completely safe.’

‘But how do you know?’ Robin sounded more petulant than he’d intended. He cleared his throat, tried to deepen his voice without being obvious about it. ‘You didn’t see what I saw, you don’t know what the new match-pairs are—’

‘You’re in no danger. Here – take this, if you’re worried.’ Griffin rummaged in his pocket, then tossed Robin a bar. Wúxíng, it read. Invisible. It was the same bar he’d used the first night they met.

‘For a quick getaway,’ said Griffin. ‘If things really do go wrong. And you might need to use it on your comrades regardless – it’s hard to get a chest that size out of the city unseen.’

Robin slid the bar into his inner pocket. ‘You could be less flippant about all this, you know.’

Griffin’s lip curled. ‘What, now is when you’re scared?’

‘It’s just . . . ’ Robin considered for a moment, shook his head, then decided to say it. ‘It just feels like – I mean, I’m the one who’s always at risk, while you’re just—’

‘Just what?’ Griffin asked sharply.

He’d strayed into dangerous territory. He knew, from the way Griffin’s eyes flashed, he’d wandered too close to where it hurt. A month ago, when their relationship was more precarious, he might have changed the subject. But he couldn’t hold his silence now. He felt irritated and belittled just then, and with that came a hot desire to hurt.

‘Why aren’t you coming on this one?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t you use the bar yourself?’

Griffin blinked slowly. Then he said, in a tone so level it must have been forced, ‘I can’t. You know I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t dream in Chinese.’ His expression did not change, nor did his tone, but the condescending fury seeped through his words nonetheless. Watching him speak then was uncanny. He looked so like their father. ‘I’m your failed predecessor, you see. Dear old Papa took me out of the country too early. I’ve got a natural ear for tones, but that’s it. My fluency is largely artificial. I don’t have memories in Chinese. I don’t dream in it. I’ve got the recall, I’ve got the language skills, but I can’t reliably make the bars work. Half the time they do nothing at all.’ His throat pulsed. ‘Our father got it right with you. He left you to ferment until you were literate. But he brought me here before I’d formed enough connections, enough memories. What’s more, he was the only person I ever spoke Mandarin with, when my Cantonese was far better to begin with. And that’s lost now. I don’t think in it, and I certainly don’t dream in it.’

Robin thought of the thieves in the alley, of Griffin’s desperate whispers as he tried to make them disappear. What would he do if he’d lost his own Chinese? The very idea filled him with horror.

‘You get it,’ Griffin said, watching him. ‘You know how it feels for your native tongue to slip away. You caught it in time. I didn’t.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Robin. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Griffin said drily. ‘You didn’t ruin my life.’

Robin could see Oxford now through Griffin’s eyes – an institution that never valued him, that had only ever ostracized and belittled him. He imagined Griffin coming up through Babel, trying desperately to win Professor Lovell’s approval, but never able to get the silver to work consistently. How awful it would have felt to reach for flimsy Chinese from a barely remembered life, knowing full well that it was the only thing that gave him value here.

Small wonder Griffin was furious. Small wonder he hated Babel with such vehemence. Griffin had been robbed of everything – a mother tongue, a motherland, a family.

‘So I need you, darling brother.’ Griffin reached out, ruffled his hair. His touch was so forceful it hurt. ‘You’re the real thing. You’re indispensable.’

Robin knew better than to respond.

‘Keep an eye on your window.’ There was no warmth in Griffin’s eyes. ‘Things are moving fast. And this one’s important.’

Robin swallowed his objections and nodded. ‘Right.’

One week later, Robin came back from dinner with Professor Lovell to find the scrap of paper he’d been dreading wedged under his window.

Tonight, it read. Eleven.

It was already 10.45. Robin hastily threw on the coat he’d just hung up, grabbed the wúxíng bar out of his drawer, and dashed back out into the rain.

He checked the back of the note for other details as he walked, but Griffin had included no further instructions. This wasn’t necessarily a problem – Robin assumed this meant he should simply let whatever accomplices showed up in and out of the tower – but the hour was surprisingly early, and he realized belatedly that he hadn’t brought anything with him – no books, no satchel, not even an umbrella – that would justify a late-night trip to the tower.

But he couldn’t fail to show at all. As the bells struck eleven, he dashed across the green and yanked the door open. This was nothing he hadn’t done a dozen times before – open sesame, close sesame, and stay out of the way. As long as Robin’s blood was stored in those stone walls, the wards shouldn’t sound.

Two Hermes operatives followed him through and disappeared up the stairs. Robin hung around the foyer as usual, keeping an eye out for nocturnal scholars, counting down the seconds until it was time to leave. At five past eleven, the Hermes operatives hurried downstairs. One of them carried a set of engraving tools, the other a chest of silver bars.

‘Well done,’ whispered one. ‘Let’s go.’

Robin nodded and opened the door to let them out. The moment they stepped foot over the barrier, an awful cacophony split the air – a screaming, a howling, the grinding of metal gears in some invisible mechanism. It was a threat and a warning, the hybrid of ancient horror and the modern capacity for spilling blood. Behind them, the panels in the door shifted, revealing a dark cavity within.

Without another word, the Hermes operatives dashed towards the green.

Robin hesitated, trying to decide whether to follow. He might get away – the trap was loud, but seemed slow-acting. He glanced down and saw both his feet were planted squarely on the university’s coat of arms. Suppose the ward was only triggered if he stepped off?

One way to find out. He took a deep breath, then dashed down the stairs. He heard a bang, then felt a searing pain in his left arm. He couldn’t tell where he’d been hit. The pain seemed to come from everywhere, less a singular wound and more a burning agony that spread through his entire arm. It was on fire, it was exploding, the whole limb was going to fall off. He kept running. Bullets fired into the air behind him. He ducked and jumped at random; he’d read somewhere this was how to dodge gunshots, but had no idea if it was true. He heard more bangs, but felt no corresponding explosions of pain. He made it down the length of the green and turned left onto Broad Street, out of sight and out of range.

Then the pain and fear caught up with him. His knees shook. He took two more steps and collapsed against the wall, fighting the urge to vomit. His head swam. He couldn’t outrun the police if they came. Not like this, not with blood dripping down his arm and black creeping at the edges of his vision. Focus. He fumbled for the bar in his pocket. His left hand was slippery, dark with blood; the very sight set off another wave of vertigo.

‘Wúxíng,’ he whispered frantically, trying to concentrate, to imagine the world in Chinese. He was nothing. He was formless. ‘Invisible.’

It didn’t work. He couldn’t make it work; he couldn’t switch modes to Chinese when all he could think about was the awful pain.

‘Hey there! You – stop!’

It was Professor Playfair. Robin flinched, prepared for the worst, but the professor’s face creased into a warm, concerned smile. ‘Oh, hello, Swift. Didn’t realize that was you. Are you quite all right? There’s a ruckus on at the building.’

‘Professor, I . . . ’ Robin hadn’t the faintest clue what to say, so he decided it was best just to babble. ‘I don’t – I was near it, but I don’t know if . . . ’

‘Did you see anyone?’ asked Professor Playfair. ‘The wards are meant to shoot the intruder, you know, but the gears seem to have stuck after last time. Might have still hit him, though – did you see anyone with a limp, anyone who looked like they were in pain?’

‘No, I didn’t – I was almost to the green when the alarms went off, but I hadn’t turned the corner.’ Was Professor Playfair nodding in sympathy? Robin hardly dared believe his luck. ‘Is it – was there a thief?’

‘Perhaps not. Don’t you worry.’ Professor Playfair reached out and patted him on the shoulder. The impact sent another horrible wave of pain through his whole upper body, and Robin clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. ‘The wards get finicky sometimes – perhaps it’s time to replace them. Pity, I liked this version. Are you all right?’

Robin nodded and blinked, trying his hardest to keep his voice level. ‘Just scared, I suppose – I mean, after what we saw last week . . . ’

‘Ah, right. Awful, wasn’t it? Nice to know that my little idea worked, though. They wouldn’t even let me test it out on dogs beforehand. Good thing it wasn’t you it malfunctioned on.’ Professor Playfair barked out a laugh. ‘Might have pumped you full of lead.’

‘Right,’ Robin said weakly. ‘So . . . so glad.’

‘You’re fine. Have a whisky with hot water, that’ll help with the shock.’

‘Yes, I think . . . I think that sounds nice.’ Robin turned to go.

‘Didn’t you say you were on your way in?’ Professor Playfair asked.

Robin had this lie ready. ‘I was feeling anxious, so I thought I’d get a head start on a paper for Professor Lovell. But I’m a bit shaken up, and I don’t think I’ll do any good work if I start now, so I think I’d rather just head to bed.’

‘Of course.’ Professor Playfair patted his shoulder again. It felt more forceful this time; Robin’s eyes bulged. ‘Richard would say you’re being lazy, but I quite understand. You’re still only in your second year, you can afford to be lazy. Go home and sleep.’

Professor Playfair gave him a last cheerful nod and strolled off towards the tower, where the alarms were still wailing. Robin took a deep breath and hobbled away, striving with all his might not to collapse on the street.

Somehow he made it back to Magpie Lane. The bleeding still had not stopped, but after wiping his arm with a wet towel, he saw to his relief that the bullet had not lodged in his arm. It had only grazed a notch into the flesh above his elbow, about a third of an inch deep. The wound looked reassuringly small when he wiped the blood away. He didn’t know how to dress it properly – he imagined it might involve a needle and thread – but it would be foolish to go and seek the college nurse at this hour.

He gritted his teeth against the pain, trying to remember what useful advice he’d picked up from adventure novels. Alcohol – he needed to disinfect the wound. He rummaged around his shelves until he found a half-empty bottle of brandy, a Christmas gift from Victoire. He dribbled it over his arm, hissing from the sting, then swallowed down several mouthfuls for good measure. Next he found a clean shirt, which he ripped up to make bandages. These he wrapped tightly around his arm using his teeth – he’d read that pressure helped stanch the bleeding. He didn’t know what else he ought to do. Should he simply wait, now, for the wound to close up on its own?

His head swam. Was he dizzy from blood loss, or was that only the brandy at work?

Find Ramy, he thought. Find Ramy, he’ll help.

No. Calling on Ramy would implicate him. Robin would die before he jeopardized Ramy.

He sat against the wall, head tilted towards the roof, and took several deep breaths. He just had to get through this night. It took several shirts – he’d have to go to the tailor, make up some story about a laundry disaster – but eventually, the bleeding was stemmed. At last, exhausted, he slumped over and fell asleep.

The next day, after wincing through three hours of class, Robin went to the medical library and rooted through the stacks until he found a physician’s handbook on field wounds. Then he went to Cornmarket, bought a needle and thread, and hurried home to suture his arm back together.

He lit a candle, sterilized the needle over the flame, and after many fumbled tries, managed to thread it. Then he sat down and held the sharp point above his raw, wounded flesh.

He couldn’t do it. He kept bringing the needle close to the wound and then, anticipating the pain, pulling it away. He reached for the brandy and took three massive gulps. He waited several minutes until the alcohol had settled nicely in his stomach and his extremities had begun tingling pleasantly. This was where he needed to be – dull enough not to mind the pain, alert enough to sew himself together. He tried again. It was easier this time, though he still had to stop to jam a wadded cloth in his mouth to keep from yelling. At last he made the final stitch. His forehead dripped with sweat; tears flowed freely down his cheeks. Somehow, he found the strength to snip the thread, tie the sutures off with his teeth, and toss the bloody needle into the sink. Then he collapsed back on his bed and, curling onto his side, finished the rest of the bottle.

Griffin was not in touch that night.

Robin knew it was foolish to expect he would be. Griffin, upon learning what had happened, would likely have gone underground, and for good reason. Robin wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t hear from Griffin for an entire term. Still, he felt an overwhelming, black wave of resentment.

He’d told Griffin this would happen. He’d warned him, he’d told him exactly what he’d seen. This had been utterly avoidable.

He wanted their next meeting to happen sooner just so he could yell at him, say he’d told him so, that Griffin should have listened. That if Griffin weren’t so arrogant, perhaps his little brother wouldn’t have a line of messy stitches up his arm. But the appointment didn’t come. Griffin left no notes in his window the next night, or the night after. He seemed to have disappeared without a trace from Oxford, leaving Robin with no way of contacting him or Hermes at all.

He couldn’t talk to Griffin. Couldn’t confide in Victoire, Letty, or Ramy. He had only himself for company that night, crying miserably over the empty bottle while his arm throbbed. And for the first time since he’d arrived at Oxford, Robin felt truly alone.

Chapter Eleven

Robin saw none of Griffin for the rest of Hilary Term, or Trinity. In truth, he hardly noticed; his second-year coursework only got more difficult as the weeks went on, and he barely had time to dwell on his resentment.

Summer came, though it was not a summer at all but rather an accelerated term, and his days were occupied with frantically cramming Sanskrit vocabulary for an assessment the week before next Michaelmas began. Then they were third-year students, a status that entailed all the exhaustion of Babel with none of its novelties. Oxford lost its charm that September; the golden sunsets and bright blue skies replaced by an endless chill and fog. It rained an inordinate amount, and the storm winds felt uniquely vicious compared to previous years. Their umbrellas kept breaking. Their socks were always wet. Rowing that term was cancelled.[47]

That was just as well. None of them had time for sports anymore. The third year at Babel was traditionally known as the Siberian winter, and the reason became obvious when they were issued their courses lists. They were all continuing in their tertiary languages and in Latin, which was rumoured to become devilishly difficult when Tacitus entered the picture. They were also continuing in Translation Theory with Professor Playfair and Etymology with Professor Lovell, though the workload for each course had now doubled, as they were expected to produce a five-page paper for each class every week.

Most importantly, they were all assigned supervisors with whom they would pursue an independent research project. This counted as their proto-dissertation – their first piece of work that would, if completed successfully, be preserved on Babel’s shelves as a true piece of scholarly contribution.

Ramy and Victoire were both immediately unhappy with their supervisors. Ramy had been invited by Professor Joseph Harding to contribute to an editorial round of the Persian Grammatica, which was nominally a great honour.[48] But Ramy couldn’t see the romance in such a project.

‘Initially I proposed a translation of Ibn Khaldun’s manuscripts,’ he told them. ‘The ones Silvestre de Sacy’s got hold of. But Harding objected that the French Orientalists were already working on that, and that it was unlikely I could get Paris to lend them to me for the term. So then I asked if I might just translate Omar ibn Said’s Arabic essays into English, given that they’ve just been sitting around for a near decade in our collections, but Harding said that was unnecessary because abolition had already passed into law in England, can you believe it?[49] As if America doesn’t exist? At last Harding said if I wanted to do something authoritative, then I could edit the citations in the Persian Grammatica, so he’s got me reading Schlegel now. Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. And you know what? Schlegel wasn’t even in India when he wrote that. He wrote it all from Paris. How do you write a definitive text on the “language and wisdom” of India from Paris?’[50]

Yet Ramy’s indignation seemed trivial compared to what Victoire was dealing with. She was working with Professor Hugo Leblanc, with whom she’d studied French for two years with no trouble, but who now became a source of ceaseless frustration.

‘It’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I want to work on Kreyòl, which he’s not wholly opposed to despite thinking it’s a degenerate language, but all he wants to know about is Vodou.’

‘That pagan religion?’ Letty asked.

Victoire shot her a scathing look. ‘The religion, yes. He keeps asking about Vodou spells and poems, which he can’t access, of course, because they’re in Kreyòl.’

Letty looked confused. ‘But isn’t that just the same thing as French?’

‘Not even remotely,’ said Victoire. ‘French is the lexifier, yes, but Kreyòl is its own language, with its own grammatical rules. French and Kreyòl are not mutually intelligible. You could have studied French for a decade, but a Kreyòl poem might still be impossible to decipher without a dictionary. Leblanc doesn’t have a dictionary – there is no dictionary, not yet – so I’m the next best thing.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’ asked Ramy. ‘Seems like you’ve got a pretty good project, there.’

Victoire looked uncomfortable. ‘Because the texts he wants translated are – I don’t know, they’re special texts. Texts that mean something.’

‘Texts so special that they shouldn’t even be translated?’ Letty asked.

‘They’re heritage,’ insisted Victoire. ‘They’re sacred beliefs—’

‘Not your beliefs, surely—’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Victoire. ‘I haven’t – I mean, I don’t know. But they’re not meant to be shared. Would you be content to sit hour after hour with a white man as he asks you the story behind every metaphor, every god’s name, so he can pilfer through your people’s beliefs for a match-pair that might make a silver bar glow?’

Letty looked unconvinced. ‘But it’s not real, is it?’

‘Of course it’s real.’

‘Oh, please, Victoire.’

‘It’s real in a sense you can never know.’ Victoire was growing agitated. ‘In a sense that only someone from Haiti could have access to. But not in the sense that Leblanc is imagining.’

Letty sighed. ‘So why don’t you tell him just that?’

‘You don’t think I’ve tried?’ Victoire snapped. ‘Have you ever tried to convince a Babel professor not to pursue something?’

‘Well anyhow,’ said Letty, annoyed and defensive now and therefore vicious, ‘what would you know about Vodou? Didn’t you grow up in France?’

This was the worst reply she could have made. Victoire clamped her mouth shut and looked away. The conversation died. An awkward silence descended, which neither Victoire nor Letty made any attempt to break. Robin and Ramy exchanged a glance, clueless, foolish. Something had gone terribly wrong, a taboo had been breached, but they were all too afraid to probe at precisely what.

Robin and Letty were passably happy with their projects, plodding and time-consuming as they were. Robin was working with Professor Chakravarti to complete a list of Sanskrit loanwords to Chinese, and Letty was working with Professor Leblanc to wade through French scientific papers for possibly useful and untranslatable metaphors in the realm of mathematics and engineering. They learned to avoid discussing the details around Ramy and Victoire. They all used platitudes with each other; Robin and Letty were always ‘making good progress’ while Ramy and Victoire were ‘struggling on as usual’.

Privately, Letty was not so generous. The subject of Professor Leblanc had become a sticking point between her and Victoire, who was hurt and astounded by Letty’s lack of sympathy, while Letty thought Victoire was being too sensitive about it all.

‘She’s brought this on herself,’ she complained to Robin. ‘She could make this so much easier if she’d just do the research – I mean, no one’s done a third-year project in Haitian Creole, there’s barely even a Grammatica. She could be the very first!’

There was no debating with Letty when she was in these moods – it was obvious she only wanted an audience to vent to – but Robin tried anyway. ‘Suppose it means more to her than you realize.’

‘But it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t! She’s not the slightest bit religious; I mean, she’s civilized—’

He whistled. ‘That’s a loaded word, Letty.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.’

Halfway into Michaelmas, Letty and Victoire were hardly talking to each other. They always came to class several minutes apart, and Robin wondered if it took skill to space out their departures so that they never crossed paths on the long walk down.

The girls were not the only ones suffering fractures. The atmosphere of those days was oppressive. Something had seemed to break between them all – no, break was perhaps too strong a word, for they still clung to each other with the force of people who had no one else. But their bond had twisted in a decidedly hurtful direction. They still spent nearly all their waking moments together, but they dreaded each other’s company. Everything was an unintended slight or deliberate offence – if Robin complained about Sanskrit, it was insensitive to the fact that Professor Harding kept insisting Sanskrit was one of Ramy’s languages when it wasn’t; if Ramy was pleased he and Professor Harding had finally agreed on a research direction, it was a callous remark to Victoire, who had got nowhere with Professor Leblanc. They used to find solace in their solidarity, but now they saw each other only as reminders of their own misery.

The worst, from Robin’s perspective, was that something had changed suddenly and mysteriously between Letty and Ramy. Their interactions were as heated as ever – Ramy never ceased to make fun, and Letty never ceased to flare up in response. But now Letty’s rejoinders had acquired an oddly victimized tone. She snapped at the smallest, often intangible slights. Ramy in return had got more cruel and more snide in a way that was hard to describe. Robin didn’t know what to do about this, nor did he have the faintest clue what it was all about, other than that it gave him strange pangs in his chest whenever he watched these exchanges happen.

‘She’s just being Letty,’ said Ramy when pressed about it. ‘She wants attention, and she thinks throwing a tantrum is the way to get it.’

‘Did you do something to upset her?’ Robin asked.

‘Other than generally exist? I don’t think so.’ Ramy seemed bored by the subject. ‘Suppose we get on with this translation? Everything’s all right, Birdie, I promise.’

But things were decidedly not all right. Things were in fact very weird. Ramy and Letty seemed unable to stand each other, and at the same time, they gravitated around each other; they could not speak normally without fiercely opposing each other in a way that made them the protagonists of the conversation. If Ramy wanted coffee, Letty wanted tea; if Ramy thought that a painting on the wall was pretty, then Letty suddenly had twelve reasons why it exemplified the worst of the Royal Academy’s adherence to artistic conventionalism.

Robin found it unbearable. One night, during a fitful burst of sleep, he had a sudden and violent fantasy of pushing Letty into the Cherwell. When he awoke he searched himself for any hint of guilt, but could find none; the thought of Letty drenched and sputtering brought just as much vicious satisfaction in the sober light of day.

There was at least the distraction of their third-year apprenticeships, for which they would each assist a faculty member in their silver-working duties throughout the term. ‘Theory comes from the Greek theōria, meaning a sight or spectacle, whose root also gives us the word theatre.’ So Professor Playfair expounded before he sent them off with their respective supervisors. ‘But it is not enough to merely watch the operations. You must get your hands dirty. You must understand how the metal sings.’

In practice this meant a lot of unpaid donkey work. To Robin’s disappointment, the apprentices spent very little time on the eighth floor, where all the exciting research happened. Instead, three times a week, he accompanied Professor Chakravarti on trips around Oxford, helping with silver-work installation and upkeep. He learned how to polish silver until it shone (oxidation and tarnishing greatly dampened the match-pair effect), how to choose between different sizes of engraving styluses to painstakingly restore an inscription to its original clarity, and how to deftly slide the bars in and out of their specially welded fixtures. It was too bad that Griffin had gone underground, he thought, for his apprenticeship gave him almost unrestricted access to the tower’s tools and raw materials. He wouldn’t have had to let thieves in at midnight. Amidst whole drawers of engraving equipment and absent-minded professors who wouldn’t have noticed a thing, he could have plucked whatever he liked from the tower at will.

‘How often do you have to do this?’ he asked.

‘Oh, it never ends,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘It’s how we make all our money, you see. The bars fetch a high price, but it’s the upkeep that’s the real grift. The workload is a bit harder on myself and Richard, though, since there are so few Sinologists.’

That afternoon they were doing a house call on an estate in Wolvercote, where a silver-work installation in the back garden had ceased to function despite a twelve-month warranty. They’d had some trouble getting through the front gate – the housekeeper seemed unconvinced they were Babel scholars, and rather suspicious that they were here to rob the place – but after supplying various proofs of identification, including the recitations of many Latin graces, they were at last invited in.

‘Happens about twice a month,’ Professor Chakravarti told Robin, though he looked quite put off. ‘You get used to it. They don’t give Richard half the trouble.’[51]

The housekeeper led them through the estate to a very lush, pretty garden with a burbling, serpentine stream and several large rocks arranged at random. It was designed in the Chinese style, they were informed, which had become very popular in that era after William Chambers’s Oriental landscaping designs were shown for the first time in Kew Gardens. Robin could not recall ever seeing anything like this in Canton, but he nodded along appreciatively until the housekeeper had gone.

‘Well, the problem here’s obvious.’ Professor Chakravarti pushed some shrubbery aside to reveal the fence corner where the silver-work was installed. ‘They’ve been pushing a cart back and forth over the bar. It’s rubbed the engraving half off. That’s their own fault – this won’t qualify under the warranty.’

He let Robin extract it from its fixture, then turned the bar around to show him the inscription. On one side: garden; on the other, the character 齋, which could mean a landscape garden, but more generally evoked a place for private withdrawal, to retreat from the world, with connotations of ritual purification, cleansing, alms-giving, and Daoist acts of repentance.

‘The idea is to make their gardens nicer and quieter than the hubbub of Oxford allows. Keeps out the riffraff. The effect is quite subtle, if we’re being honest; we didn’t do all that much testing, but there’s really no limit to what the wealthy will throw money at.’ Professor Chakravarti whittled at the bar as he spoke. ‘Hm. We’ll see if that’ll do the trick.’

He let Robin reinstall the bar, then bent down to check his work. Satisfied, he stood and brushed his hands on his trousers. ‘Would you like to activate it?’

‘I just – what, say the words?’ Robin had seen the professors do the same many times, though he couldn’t imagine it was all that easy. Then again, he recalled, the wúxíng bar had worked for him on the first try.

‘Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them. Does that make sense?’

‘I – I think so, sir.’ Robin frowned at the bar. ‘That’s really all it takes?’

‘Oh, no, I’m being careless. There are some good mental heuristics you’ll learn during your fourth year, and some theory seminars you’ll have to sit through, but when it comes down to it, it’s about the feeling.’ Professor Chakravarti seemed rather bored; Robin got the impression he was still very irritated by this household and wanted to be away as quickly as possible. ‘Go on.’

‘Well – all right.’ Robin placed his hand on the bar. ‘Zhāi. Garden.’

He felt a slight thrum beneath his fingertips. The garden did seem quieter then, more serene, though he couldn’t tell if this was his doing or his imagination. ‘Have we done it?’

‘Well, we’d better hope so.’ Professor Chakravarti slung his tool bag over his shoulder. He was not concerned enough to check. ‘Come on, let’s go and get paid.’

‘Do you always need to speak the match-pair to make it work?’ Robin asked as they walked back to campus. ‘It seems untenable – that is, there are so many bars, and so few translators.’

‘Well, that depends on a number of things,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘To begin with, the nature of the impact. With some bars, you want a temporary manifestation. Suppose you need a short and extreme physical effect – a lot of military bars work this way. Then they need to be activated each time upon use, and they’re designed so that the effects don’t last long. But other bars have an enduring effect – like the wards in the tower, for example, or the bars installed in ships and carriages.’

‘What makes them last longer?’

‘The number of carats, to start with. Finer silver endures, and the higher the percentage of other alloys, the shorter the time of effect. But there are also subtle differences in the way they’re smelted and engraved; you’ll learn soon enough.’ Professor Chakravarti shot him a smile. ‘You’re eager to get started, aren’t you?’

‘It’s just very exciting, sir.’

‘That’ll wear off,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Walk around town muttering the same words over and over again, and soon you start feeling like a parrot instead of a magician.’

One afternoon, they arrived at the Ashmolean Museum to fix a silver bar that no number of incantations would activate. The English side read verify, and the Chinese side used the character 參, meaning ‘to validate’. It could also mean ‘to juxtapose’, ‘to arrange side by side’, and ‘to compare things’. The Ashmolean staff had been using this to compare fraudulent artifacts against the real ones, but recently it had failed several test runs, which the staff wisely conducted before appraising new acquisitions.

They carefully inspected the bar under a hand-held microscope, but neither the Chinese nor the English calligraphy showed any sign of erosion. Even after Professor Chakravarti went over the whole thing with his smallest engraving stylus, it still failed to activate.

He sighed. ‘Wrap that up and put it in my bag, won’t you?’

Robin obeyed. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Its resonance link has stopped working. It happens sometimes, especially with some of the older match-pairs.’

‘What’s a resonance link?’

‘Off to the tower,’ said Professor Chakravarti, already walking away. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’

Back at Babel, Professor Chakravarti led Robin up to the southern wing of the eighth floor, past the worktables. Robin had never been in this area before. All of his visits to the eighth floor had been restricted to the workshop, which occupied most of what the eye saw past the thick fire door. But another set of doors blocked off the southern wing, bolted shut with three sets of locks, which Professor Chakravarti now opened with a jangling ring of keys.

‘I’m really not supposed to show you just yet.’ Professor Chakravarti winked at him. ‘Privileged information and all that. But there’s no other way to explain.’

He undid the final lock. They stepped through.

It was like entering a fun house exhibit, or the inside of a giant piano. Massive silver rods of varying heights and lengths stood upright all across the floor. Some were waist high; others towered above him, stretching from the floor to the ceiling, with just enough room between them for one to step nimbly through without touching any. They reminded Robin rather of church organs; he had a strange impulse to take a mallet and strike them all at once.

‘Resonance is a way of cutting costs,’ Professor Chakravarti explained. ‘We need to save the higher-carat silver for bars with endurance needs – the bars that go into the Navy, that protect merchant ships, and the like. So we use silver with a higher percentage of alloys for the bars that operate on English land, since we can keep them fuelled with resonance.’

Robin peered around, amazed. ‘But how does it all work?’

‘It’s easiest to think of Babel as the centre, and all the resonance-dependent bars in England as the periphery. The periphery draws on the centre for power.’ Professor Chakravarti gestured around him. Each rod, Robin noticed, appeared to be vibrating at a very high frequency, but though it felt as if the tower should be ringing with discordant notes, the air was still and silent. ‘These rods, engraved with commonly used match-pairs, sustain linked bars throughout the country. The manifesting power comes from the rod, you see, which means that the bars outside don’t require such constant reactivation.’

‘Like British outposts in the colonies,’ said Robin. ‘Calling upon home for soldiers and supplies.’

‘A convenient metaphor, yes.’

‘So do these resonate with every bar in England?’ Robin saw in his mind an invisible network of meaning stretching over the country, keeping the silver-work alive. It was quite terrifying to consider. ‘I’d have thought there would be more of them.’

‘Not quite. There are much smaller resonance centres across the country – there’s one in Edinburgh, for example, and one in Cambridge. The effect does weaken with distance. But the lion’s share is in Oxford – it spreads the Translation Institute too far out to maintain multiple centres, as you need trained translators for the upkeep.’

Robin bent to examine one of the closest rods. In addition to the match-pair, written in large calligraphy at the top, he saw a series of letters and symbols that he could make no sense of. ‘How’s the link forged, then?’

‘It’s a complicated process.’ Professor Chakravarti led Robin to a slender rod near the south-side window. He knelt down, retrieved the Ashmolean bar from his bag, and held it up against the rod. Robin noticed then a number of etchings in the side of the rod that corresponded with similar etchings in the bar. ‘They’ve got to be smelted from the same material. And then there’s a good deal of etymological symbol work – you’ll learn all of that in your fourth year, if you specialize in silver-working. We actually use an invented alphabet, based on a manuscript first discovered by an alchemist from Prague in the seventeenth century.[52] It’s so that no one outside Babel can replicate our process. For now, you can think of all this adjustment as deepening the bond of connection.’

‘But I thought fake languages didn’t work to activate the bars,’ said Robin.

‘They don’t to manifest meaning,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘As a linking mechanism, however, they work quite well. We could do with basic numbers, but Playfair likes his mysteries. Keeps things proprietary.’

Robin stood awhile in silence, watching as Professor Chakravarti adjusted the etchings on the Ashmolean bar with a fine stylus, examined them with a lens, and then made corresponding adjustments to the resonance rod. The whole process took about fifteen minutes. At last, Professor Chakravarti wrapped the Ashmolean bar back up in velvet, returned it to his bag, and stood up. ‘That should do the trick. We’ll head back to the museum tomorrow.’

Robin had been reading the rods, noticing what a large percentage of them appeared to use Chinese match-pairs. ‘You and Professor Lovell have to maintain all of these?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘There’s no one else who can do it. Your graduation will make three.’

‘They need us,’ Robin marvelled. It was strange to think the functioning of an entire empire depended on just a handful of people.

‘They need us so terribly,’ agreed Professor Chakravarti. ‘And it’s good, in our situation, to be needed.’

They stood together at the window. Looking out over Oxford, Robin had the impression that the whole city was like a finely tuned music box, relying wholly on its silver gears to keep running; and that if the silver ever ran out, if these resonance rods ever collapsed, then the whole of Oxford would stop abruptly in its tracks. The bell towers would go mute, the cabs would halt on the roads, and the townsfolk would freeze in motion on the street, limbs lifted in midair, mouths open in midspeech.

But he couldn’t imagine that it would ever run out. London, and Babel, were getting richer every day, for the same ships fuelled by long-enduring silver-work brought back chests and chests of silver in return. There wasn’t a market on earth that could resist British incursion, not even the Far East. The only thing that would disrupt the inflow of silver was the collapse of the entire global economy, and since that was ridiculous, the Silver City, and the delights of Oxford, seemed eternal.

One day in mid-January, they showed up at the tower to find all the upperclassmen and graduate fellows wearing black under their gowns.

‘It’s for Anthony Ribben,’ explained Professor Playfair when they filed into his seminar. He himself was wearing a shirt of lilac blue.

‘What about Anthony?’ Letty asked.

‘I see.’ Professor Playfair’s face tightened. ‘They haven’t told you.’

‘Told us what?’

‘Anthony went missing during a research expedition to Barbados last summer,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘He disappeared the night before his ship was due to return to Bristol, and we haven’t heard from him since. We’re presuming he’s dead. His colleagues on the eighth floor are quite upset; I believe they’ll be wearing black for the rest of the week. A few of the other cohorts and fellows have joined in, if you care to participate.’

He said this with such casual unconcern that they might have been discussing whether they wanted to go punting that afternoon. Robin gaped at him. ‘But isn’t he – aren’t you – I mean, doesn’t he have family? Have they been told?’

Professor Playfair scribbled an outline for that day’s lecture on the chalkboard as he answered. ‘Anthony has no family except his guardian. Mr Falwell’s been notified by post, and I hear he’s quite upset.’

‘My God,’ said Letty. ‘That’s terrible.’

She said this with a solicitous glance at Victoire, who among them had known Anthony the best. But Victoire looked surprisingly unfazed; she didn’t seem shocked or upset so much as vaguely uncomfortable. Indeed, she looked as if she hoped they might change topics as quickly as possible. Professor Playfair was more than happy to oblige.

‘Well, on to business,’ he said. ‘We left off last Friday on the innovations of the German Romantics . . .’

Babel did not mourn Anthony. The faculty did not so much as hold a memorial service. The next time Robin went up to the silver-working floor, a wheat-haired graduate fellow he didn’t know had taken over Anthony’s workstation.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Letty said. ‘Can you believe – I mean, a Babel graduate, and they just act like he was never here?’

Her distress belied a deeper terror, a terror which Robin felt as well, which was that Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke.

No one said that out loud. It came too close to breaking the spell.

Of them all, Robin had assumed Victoire would be most devastated. She and Anthony had grown quite close over the years; they were two of only a handful of Black scholars in the tower, and they were both born in the West Indies. Occasionally he’d seen them talking, heads bent together, as they walked from the tower to the Buttery.

But he never once saw her cry that winter. He wanted to comfort her, but he did not know how, especially as it seemed impossible to broach the topic with her. Whenever Anthony was brought up, she flinched, blinked rapidly, and then tried very hard to change the subject.

‘Did you know Anthony was a slave?’ Letty asked one night in hall. Unlike Victoire, she was determined to raise the issue at every opportunity; indeed, she was obsessed with Anthony’s death in a way that felt uncomfortably, performatively righteous. ‘Or would have been. His master didn’t want him freed when abolition took effect, so he was going to take him to America, and he only got to stay at Oxford because Babel paid for his freedom. Paid. Can you believe it?’

Robin glanced to Victoire, but her face had not changed one bit.

‘Letty,’ she said very calmly, ‘I am trying to eat.’

Chapter Twelve

They were well into Hilary term before Griffin resurfaced. So many months had passed by then that Robin had stopped checking his window with his usual rigour, and he would have missed the note if he had not spotted a magpie trying in vain to retrieve it from under the pane.

The note instructed Robin to show up at the Twisted Root at half past two the next day, but Griffin was nearly an hour late. When he did arrive, Robin was astounded by his haggard appearance. The sheer act of walking through the pub seemed to exhaust him; by the time he sat down, he was breathing as hard as if he’d just run the length of Parks. He’d clearly not had a change of clothes in days; his smell wafted, attracting glares. He moved with a slight limp, and Robin glimpsed bandages under his shirt every time he raised his arm.

Robin was not sure what to do with this. He’d had a rant prepared for this meeting, but the words died at the sight of his brother’s obvious misery. Instead, he sat silently as Griffin ordered shepherd’s pie and two glasses of ale.

‘Term going all right?’ Griffin asked.

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin. ‘I’m, uh, working on an independent project now.’

‘With whom?’

Robin scratched at his shirt collar. He felt stupid bringing it up at all. ‘Chakravarti.’

‘That’s nice.’ The ale arrived. Griffin drained his glass, set it down, and winced. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘The rest of my cohort’s not too happy with their assignments, though.’

‘Of course they aren’t.’ Griffin snorted. ‘Babel’s never going to let you do the research you ought to be doing. Only the research that fills the coffers.’

A long silence passed. Robin felt vaguely guilty, though he had no good reason to be; still, a worm of discomfort ate further into his gut with every passing second. Food came. The plate was steaming hot, but Griffin wolfed his down like a man starved. And he just might have been, too; when he bent over his place, his collarbones protruded in a way that hurt to look at.

‘Say . . .’ Robin cleared his throat, unsure how to ask. ‘Griffin, is everything—’

‘Sorry.’ Griffin put his fork down. ‘I’m just – I only got back to Oxford last night, and I’m exhausted.’

Robin sighed. ‘Sure.’

‘Anyhow, here’s a list of texts I need from the library.’ Griffin reached into his front pocket and pulled out a crumpled note. ‘You might have some trouble finding the Arabic volumes – I’ve transliterated the titles for you, which will get you to the right shelf, but then you’ll have to identify them on your own. But they’re in the Bodleian, not the tower, so you won’t have to worry about someone wondering what you’re up to.’

Robin took the note. ‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Really?’ Robin couldn’t suppress it anymore. He expected callousness from Griffin, but not this blank pretence of ignorance. His sympathy evaporated, along with his patience; now the resentment, which he’d kept simmering for a year, rushed to the fore. ‘You’re sure?’

Griffin cast him a wary look. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’re not going to talk about last time?’ Robin demanded.

‘Last time?’

‘When the alarm went off. We sprang a trap, we sprang a gun—’

‘You were fine.’

‘I was shot,’ Robin hissed. ‘What happened? Someone messed up, and I know it wasn’t me, because I was right where I was supposed to be, meaning you were wrong about the alarms—’

‘These things happen.’ Griffin shrugged. ‘The good thing is that no one got caught—’

‘I was shot in the arm.’

‘So I heard.’ Griffin peered over the table, as if he could see Robin’s wound through his shirt sleeve. ‘You seem quite all right, though.’

‘I had to stitch myself together—’

‘Well done, you. Smarter than going to the college nurse. You didn’t, did you?’

‘What is wrong with you?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ said Griffin.

‘Keep my—’

‘I don’t see why we’re labouring the point. I made a mistake, you got away, it won’t happen again. We’re going to stop sending people in with you. Instead you’ll drop off the contraband outside on your own—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Robin hissed once more. ‘You let me get hurt. Then you left me out in the cold.’

‘Please don’t be so dramatic.’ Griffin sighed. ‘Accidents happen. And you’re fine.’ He paused, considering, and then said more quietly, ‘Look, if this will make you feel better, there’s a safe house on St Aldate’s we use when we need to hide out for a bit. There’s a basement door by the church – it looks rusted shut, but you’ve only got to look for where the bar’s installed and say the words. It leads to a tunnel end that got overlooked when they did the renovations—’

Robin shook his arm at Griffin. ‘A safe house doesn’t fix this.’

‘We’ll be better next time,’ Griffin insisted. ‘That was a slip-up, that was my fault, we’re adjusting for it. So calm down before someone overhears.’ He settled back in his chair. ‘Now. I’ve been out of town for months, so I need to hear what’s been going on at the tower, and I’d like you to be efficient about it, please.’

Robin could have hit him then. He would have, if it would not have attracted stares, if Griffin were not so clearly already in pain.

He was getting nothing out of his brother, he knew. Griffin, like Professor Lovell, could be astonishingly single-minded; if something did not suit them, they simply failed to acknowledge it, and indeed any attempt to procure acknowledgment would only end in more frustration. He had the fleeting impulse simply to stand up and walk away, if only to see Griffin’s expression. But that would grant no lasting satisfaction. If he turned back around, Griffin would mock him; if he kept walking out, he would only have severed his own ties to Hermes. So he did what he did best, with father and brother both – he swallowed his frustrations and resigned himself to letting Griffin set the terms of the conversation.

‘Not much,’ he said after a calming breath. ‘The professors haven’t been travelling abroad recently, and I don’t think the wards have changed since last time either. Oh – something terrible happened. A graduate fellow – Anthony Ribben—’

‘Sure, I know Anthony,’ Griffin said, then cleared his throat. ‘Knew, I mean. Same cohort.’

‘So you’ve heard?’ Robin asked.

‘Heard what?’

‘That he’s dead.’

‘What? No.’ Griffin’s voice was oddly flat. ‘No, I just meant – I knew him before I left. He’s dead?’

‘Lost at sea sailing back from the West Indies, apparently,’ said Robin.

‘Terrible,’ Griffin said blandly. ‘Just awful.’

‘That’s all?’ Robin asked.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘He was your classmate!’

‘I hate to tell you, but these incidents aren’t uncommon. Voyages are dangerous. Someone goes missing every few years.’

‘But it’s just . . . it feels wrong. That they won’t even give him a memorial. They’re just carrying on like it never happened. It’s . . .’ Robin trailed off. Suddenly he wanted to cry. He felt foolish for bringing this up. He didn’t know what he had wanted – some kind of validation, perhaps, that Anthony’s life had mattered and that he could not be so easily forgotten. But Griffin, he should have known, was the worst person from whom to seek comfort.

Griffin was silent for a long time. He stared out of the window, brows furrowed in concentration as if he were pondering something. He didn’t seem to be listening to Robin at all. Then he cocked his head, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. ‘You know, that’s not a surprise. The way Babel treats its students, particularly those they recruit from abroad. You’re an asset to them, but that’s all you are. A translation machine. And once you fail them, you’re out.’

‘But he didn’t fail, he died.’

‘Same thing.’ Griffin stood up and grabbed his coat. ‘Anyhow. I want those texts within the week; I’ll leave you instructions on where to drop them.’

‘We’re done?’ Robin asked, startled. He felt a fresh wave of disappointment. He didn’t know what he wanted from Griffin, or indeed if Griffin was capable of giving it, but still he’d hoped for more than this.

‘I’ve places to be,’ Griffin said without turning round. He was already on his way out. ‘Watch your window.’

It was, by every measure, a very bad year.

Something had poisoned Oxford, had sucked out everything about the university that gave Robin joy. The nights felt colder, the rains heavier. The tower no longer felt like a paradise but a prison. Coursework was torture. He and his friends took no pleasure in their studies; they felt neither the thrilling discovery of their first year nor the satisfaction of actually working with silver that might one day come with their fourth.

The older cohorts assured them that this always happened, that the third-year slump was normal and inevitable. But that year seemed a markedly bad year in several other respects. For one, the number of assaults on the tower rose alarmingly. Before, Babel could expect two to three attempted break-ins per year, all of which were the subject of great spectacle as the students crowded around the doors to see what cruel effect Playfair’s wards had wrought that time. But by February of that year, the attempted thefts started happening nearly every week, and the students began to grow sick of the sight of policemen dragging maimed perpetrators down the cobblestones.

They weren’t only targeted by thieves. The base of the tower was constantly being defiled, usually with urine, broken bottles, and spilt booze. Twice they discovered graffiti painted overnight in large, crooked scarlet letters. TONGUES OF SATAN read the one on the back wall; DEVIL’S SILVER read the one beneath the first-floor window.

Another morning, Robin and his cohort arrived to find dozens of townsmen assembled on the green, shouting viciously at the scholars going in and out of the front door. They approached cautiously. The crowd was a bit frightening, but not so dense that they couldn’t weave their way through. Perhaps it said something that they were willing to risk a mob rather than miss class, but it really looked like they might get by without harassment until a large man stepped in front of Victoire and began snarling something in a rough and incomprehensible northern accent.

‘I don’t know you,’ Victoire gasped. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘Christ!’ Ramy lurched forward like he’d been shot. Victoire yelped. Robin’s heart stopped. But it was only an egg, he saw; it was aimed at Victoire, and Ramy had lurched because he’d stepped forward to protect her. Victoire flinched back, arms shielding her face; Ramy put an arm around her shoulder and ushered her up the front steps.

‘What is wrong with you?’ Letty screamed.

The man who’d thrown the egg shouted something unintelligible in return. Hastily Robin clenched Letty’s hand and dragged her through the door behind Ramy and Victoire.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

Victoire was trembling so hard she could barely speak. ‘Fine, I’m fine – oh, Ramy, let me, I’ve got a handkerchief . . .’

‘Don’t worry.’ Ramy shrugged off his jacket. ‘It’s a lost cause, I’ll buy a new one.’

Inside the lobby, students and clients alike were clustered at the wall, watching the crowd through the windows. Robin’s first instinct was to wonder if this was the work of Hermes. But it couldn’t be – Griffin’s thefts were so meticulously planned; they belied a far more sophisticated apparatus than this furious mob.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Robin asked Cathy O’Nell.

‘They’re mill workers, I think,’ said Cathy. ‘I heard Babel’s just signed a contract with mill owners north of here and that’s put all these people out of work.’

‘All these people?’ Ramy asked. ‘With just some silver bars?’

‘Oh, they’ve laid off several hundred workers,’ said Vimal, who’d overheard. ‘Supposedly it’s a brilliant match-pair, something Professor Playfair came up with, and it’s netted us enough to fund renovations for the entire east wing of the lobby. Which doesn’t surprise me, if it can do the work of all those men combined.’

‘But it’s quite sad, isn’t it?’ mused Cathy. ‘I wonder what they’ll do now.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Robin.

Cathy gestured to the window. ‘Well, how are they going to provide for their families?’

It shamed Robin that he hadn’t even considered this.

Upstairs in their Etymology class, Professor Lovell expressed a decidedly more cruel opinion. ‘Don’t worry about them. Just the usual riffraff. Drunkards, malcontents from up north, lowlifes with no better way to express their opinions than shouting about them on the street. I’d prefer they wrote a letter, of course, but I doubt half of them can read.’

‘Is it true they’re out of work?’ asked Victoire.

‘Well, of course. The sort of labour they do is redundant now. It should have been made redundant long ago; there’s simply no reason that weaving, spinning, carding, or roving hasn’t all been mechanized already. This is simply human progress.’

‘They seem rather cross about it,’ Ramy observed.

‘Oh, they’re furious for sure,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You can imagine why. What has silver-working done for this country over the past decade? Increased agricultural and industrial productivity to an unimaginable extent. It’s made factories so efficient they can run with a quarter of their workers. Take the textile industry – Kay’s flying shuttle, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s loom were all made possible with silver-working. Silver-working has catapulted Britain ahead of every other nation, and put thousands of labourers out of work in the process. So instead of using their wits to learn a skill that might actually be useful, they’ve decided to whine about it on our front steps. Those protests outside aren’t anything new, you know. There’s a sickness in this country.’ Professor Lovell spoke now with a sudden, nasty vehemence. ‘It started with the Luddites – some idiot workers in Nottingham who thought they’d rather smash machinery than adapt to progress – and it’s spread across England since. There are people all over the country who’d rather see us dead. It’s not just Babel that gets attacked like this; no, we don’t even see the worst of it, since our security’s better than most. Up north, those men are pulling off arson, they’re stoning building owners, they’re throwing acid on factory managers. They can’t seem to stop smashing looms in Lancashire. No, this isn’t the first time our faculty have received death threats, it’s only the first time they’ve dared to come as far south as Oxford.’

‘Do you get death threats?’ Letty asked, alarmed.

‘Of course. I get more and more every year.’

‘But doesn’t it bother you?’

Professor Lovell scoffed. ‘Never. I look at those men, and I think of the vast differences between us. I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They are where they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward with the future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’

‘Is it going to be like this all year?’ Victoire asked in a small voice. ‘Out on the green, I mean.’

‘Not for long,’ Professor Lovell assured her. ‘No, they’ll have cleared off by this evening. Those men have no persistence. They’ll be gone by sunset once they get hungry, or once they wander off in search of a drink. And if they don’t, the wards and the police will move them on.’

But Professor Lovell was wrong. This wasn’t the work of an isolated handful of discontents, nor did they simply dissipate overnight. The police did clear the crowd away that morning, but they returned in smaller numbers; several times a week, a dozen or so men showed up to harass scholars on their way into the tower. One morning, the entire building had to be evacuated when a package making a ticking noise was delivered to Professor Playfair’s office. It turned out to be a clock connected to an explosive. Fortunately, rain had soaked through the package, eroding the fuse.

‘But what happens when it doesn’t rain?’ Ramy asked.

No one had a good answer to that.

Security at the tower doubled overnight. The post was now received and sorted by newly hired clerks at a processing centre halfway across Oxford. A rotating team of policemen guarded the tower entrance at all hours. Professor Playfair installed a new set of silver bars over the front door, though as usual he refused to reveal what match-pairs he’d inscribed them with, or what they would do when triggered.

These protests were not the symptoms of a minor disturbance. Something was happening throughout England, a set of changes the consequences of which they were only beginning to fathom. Oxford, which consistently ran about a century behind the rest of England’s major cities, could only pretend to be immune to change for so long. The vicissitudes of the world outside had now become impossible to ignore. This was about more than mill workers. Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade. The full impact of a so-called silver industrial revolution, a term coined by Peter Gaskell just six years before, was just beginning to be felt across the country. Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens. Rural agriculture was in decline; men, women, and children moved en masse to urban centres to work in factories, where they laboured unimaginably long hours and lost limbs and lives in frightful accidents. The New Poor Law of 1834, which had been designed to reduce the costs of poverty relief more than anything else, was fundamentally cruel and punitive in design; it withheld financial aid unless applicants moved into a workhouse, and those workhouses were designed to be so miserable no one would want to live in them. Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized. Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.

These currents were unsustainable. The gears of history were turning fast in England. The world was getting smaller, more mechanized, and more unequal, and it was as yet unclear where things would end up, or what that would mean for Babel, or for the Empire itself.

Robin and his cohort, though, did what scholars always did, which was to bend their heads over their books and focus solely on their research. The protestors eventually dispersed after troops sent in from London dragged the ringleaders off to Newgate. The scholars stopped holding their breath every time they ascended the steps to the tower. They learned to put up with the swarming police presence, along with the fact that now it took twice as long for new books and correspondence to arrive. They stopped reading the editorials in the Oxford Chronicle, which was a newly minted proreform, pro-Radical publication that seemed intent on destroying their reputation.

Still, they couldn’t quite ignore the headlines, hawked from every street corner on their way to the tower:

BABEL A THREAT TO THE NATIONAL ECONOMY?

FOREIGN BARS SEND DOZENS TO THE WORKHOUSE

SAY NO TO SILVER!

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

One stormy night, on his way to dinner at Professor Lovell’s home, Robin glimpsed a family sitting at the corner of Woodstock Road holding out tin mugs for alms. Beggars were a common sight in Oxford’s outskirts, but entire families were rare. The two small children gave him little waves as he approached, and the sight of their pale, rain-streaked faces made him feel guilty enough to stop and fish several pennies out of his pocket.

‘Thank you,’ murmured the father. ‘God bless you.’

The man’s beard had grown out, and his clothes had got a good deal tattier, but Robin still recognized him – he was, without question, one of the men who had screamed obscenities at him on his way into the tower several weeks ago. He met Robin’s eyes. It wasn’t clear if he recognized Robin as well; he opened his mouth to say something, but Robin quickened his pace, and whatever the man might have called after him was soon drowned out by the wind and the rain.

He didn’t mention the family to Mrs Piper or Professor Lovell. He didn’t want to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all. He’d seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his next meal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. For all his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he had not once gone to sleep hungry.

That night he ate his dinner, smiled at Mrs Piper’s compliments, and shared a bottle of wine with Professor Lovell. He walked a different route back to the college. The next month, he forgot to take the same detour on his way up, but it didn’t matter – by then, the little family was already gone.

Looming exams made a bad year awful. Babel scholars underwent two rounds of exams – one at the end of their third year, and another during their fourth. These were staggered throughout the calendar; the fourth years sat their exams in the middle of Hilary term, while the third years had until Trinity term. The effect was that starting after the winter holidays, the mood in the tower was utterly changed. The libraries and study rooms were packed during all hours by nervous fourth years who flinched whenever someone breathed and looked ready to murder whenever someone dared to so much as whisper.

Traditionally, Babel publicly announced the fourth years’ marks at the end of the examination period. At noon on Friday of that week, a bell rang three times throughout the tower. Everyone stood and hurried downstairs to the lobby, where that afternoon’s clients were being ushered out the door. Professor Playfair stood on a table at the centre of the room. He was dressed in an ornate gown with purple edges, holding aloft the kind of curling scroll that Robin had only ever seen in medieval illuminations. Once the tower had been cleared of everyone not affiliated with the faculty, he cleared his throat and intoned, ‘The following degree candidates have passed their qualifying exams with distinction. Matthew Houndslow—’

Someone in the back corner let out a loud shriek.

‘Adam Moorhead.’

A student near the front sat plumb down on the floor in the middle of the lobby, both hands clasped over his mouth.

‘This is inhumane,’ Ramy whispered.

‘Most cruel and unusual,’ Robin agreed. But he couldn’t take his eye off the proceedings. He wasn’t up for examination yet, but it was so much closer now, and his heart was pounding hard with vicarious terror. As horrific as this was, it was also still exciting, this public declaration of who had proven themselves brilliant and who hadn’t.

Only Matthew and Adam had won distinction. Professor Playfair announced a merit (James Fairfield) and a pass (Luke McCaffrey), then said in a very sombre voice, ‘The following candidate failed their qualifying exams, and will not be asked to return to the Royal Institute of Translation for a postgraduate fellowship, nor will they be awarded a degree. Philip Wright.’

Wright was the French and German specialist who had sat beside Robin at the faculty dinner during his first year. Over the years, he had grown thin and haggard-looking. He was one of the students who constantly lurked around at the library looking as if he hadn’t bathed or shaved in days, staring at the stack of papers before him with a mixture of panic and bewilderment.

‘You’ve been offered every lenience,’ Professor Playfair said. ‘You’ve been granted more accommodations than was good for you, I think. Now it’s time to acknowledge this is the end of your time here, Mr Wright.’

Wright made as if to approach Professor Playfair, but two graduate fellows seized him by the arms and pulled him back. He began to beg, babbling about how his exam response had been misinterpreted, how he could clarify everything if only he got another chance. Professor Playfair stood placidly with his hands held behind his back, pretending not to listen.

‘What happened?’ Robin asked Vimal.

‘Gave a folk etymology instead of a real one.’ Vimal shook his head dramatically. ‘Tried to link canards to canaries, you see, except canaries aren’t related to canard ducks – they’re from the Canary Islands, which are named after dogs—’

The rest of his explanation eluded Robin.

Professor Playfair pulled a glass vial out of his inner pocket – the vial, Robin assumed, that contained Wright’s blood. He placed it on the table and stomped down. Glass shards and brown flecks scattered across the floor. Wright began howling. It wasn’t clear what the breaking of the vial had actually done to him – all four limbs seemed intact, as far as Robin could tell, and there was no fresh blood – but Wright collapsed to the floor, clutching his midriff as if he’d been impaled.

‘Horrific,’ said Letty, awed.

‘Positively medieval,’ Victoire agreed.

They had never witnessed a failure before. They could not tear their eyes away.

It took a third graduate fellow to pull Wright to his feet, drag him to the front door, and fling him unceremoniously down the steps. Everyone else watched, mouths hanging open. Such a grotesque ceremony seemed unbefitting of a modern academic institution. Yet this was utterly appropriate. Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.[53]

The door slammed shut. Professor Playfair dusted off his gown, hopped down from the table, and turned around to face the rest of them.

‘Well, that’s taken care of.’ He beamed. ‘Happy exams. Congratulations all.’

Two days later Griffin asked Robin to meet him at a tavern in Iffley, nearly an hour’s walk from the college. It was a dim, noisy place. It took Robin a moment to find his brother, who was sitting slouched near the back. Whatever he’d been up to since their last meeting, he apparently hadn’t been eating; he had two steaming shepherd’s pies before him and was wolfing one down with no fear of scalding his tongue.

‘What is this place?’ Robin asked.

‘I get supper here sometimes,’ said Griffin. ‘The food’s awful but there’s a lot of it, and importantly, nobody from the university ever comes out here. It’s too close to the – what did Playfair call them? The locals.’

He looked worse than he’d been all term – visibly exhausted, hollow-cheeked, and whittled down to a sharp, lean core. He gave off the air of a shipwreck survivor, of someone who’d travelled long distances and barely made it out alive – though of course he wouldn’t tell Robin where he’d been. His black coat, hanging off the chair behind him, reeked.

‘Are you all right?’ Robin pointed to Griffin’s left arm. It was wrapped in bandages, but whatever wound lay beneath was clearly still open, because the dark stain over his forearm had spread visibly since Robin had sat down.

‘Oh.’ Griffin glanced at his arm. ‘That’s nothing, it’s just taking forever to close up.’

‘So it’s something.’

‘Bah.’

‘It looks bad.’ Robin chuckled, and what came next sounded more bitter than he’d intended. ‘You should suture it. Brandy helps.’

‘Ha. No, we’ve got someone. I’ll have it looked at later.’ Griffin pulled his sleeve over the bandages. ‘Anyhow. I need you ready next week. It’s very touch-and-go, so I don’t yet have a good idea of the time or day, but it’s a big one – they’re expecting a massive shipment of silver in from Magniac & Smith, and we’d love to get a crate during the unloading. It’ll take a large distraction, of course. I might need to store some explosives in your room for quick access—’

Robin recoiled. ‘Explosives?’

‘I forgot you scare easily.’ Griffin waved a hand. ‘It’s all right, I’ll show you how to set them off before the day, and if you plan it well enough then no one will get hurt—’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘No, that’s it, I’m done – this is absurd, I’m not doing this.’

Griffin arched a brow. ‘Where’s all this coming from?’

‘I’ve just seen someone expelled—’

‘Oh.’ Griffin laughed. ‘Who was it this year?’

‘Wright,’ said Robin. ‘They crushed a vial of his blood. They threw him out of the tower, locked him out, cut him off from everything and everyone—’

‘But that won’t happen to you; you’re too brilliant. Or am I keeping you from your revision?’

‘Opening doors is one thing,’ said Robin. ‘Setting explosives is quite another.’

‘It’ll be fine, just trust me—’

‘But I don’t,’ Robin blurted. His heart beat very quickly, but it was too late now to hold his silence. He had to say it all at once; he couldn’t keep biting down on his words forever. ‘I don’t trust you. You’re getting messy.’

Griffin’s brows shot up. ‘Messy?’

‘You don’t show up for weeks, and when you do you’re late half the time; your instructions are all scratched out and revised so many times that it takes skill, really, to decipher what they say. Babel’s security has nearly tripled, but you don’t seem interested in working out how to deal with it. And you still haven’t explained what happened last time, or what your new workaround for the wards is. I was shot in the arm and you don’t seem to care—’

‘I said I’m sorry about that,’ Griffin said wearily. ‘Won’t happen again.’

‘But why should I believe you?’

‘Because this one’s important.’ Griffin leaned forward. ‘This could change everything, could shift the balance—’

‘Tell me how, then. Tell me more. This doesn’t work when you always keep me in the dark.’

‘Look, I told you about St Aldate’s, didn’t I?’ Griffin looked frustrated. ‘You know I can’t say more. You’re still too new, you don’t understand the risks—’

‘The risks? I’m the one taking risks, I’m putting my entire future on the line—’

‘Funny,’ said Griffin. ‘And here I thought the Hermes Society was your future.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, it’s quite clear.’ Griffin’s lip curled. He looked very much like their father just then. ‘You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It’s shackling you. You’ve identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can’t be one of them?’

‘Stop deflecting,’ said Robin. ‘You always deflect. When I say my future, I don’t mean a cushy post. I mean survival. So tell me why this matters. Why now? Why this one?’

‘Robin—’

‘You are asking me to put my life on the line for the invisible,’ Robin snapped. ‘And I’m just asking you to give me a reason.’

Griffin was silent for a moment. He glanced round the room, tapping his fingers against the table, and then said in a very low voice, ‘Afghanistan.’

‘What’s going on in Afghanistan?’

‘Don’t you read the news? The British are going to pull Afghanistan into their sphere of influence. But there are plans in motion to make sure that doesn’t happen – and that I really can’t tell you about, brother—’

But Robin was laughing. ‘Afghanistan? Really?’

‘Is this funny?’ asked Griffin.

‘You’re all talk,’ Robin said, amazed. Something in his mind shattered then – the illusion that he ought to admire Griffin, that Hermes mattered at all. ‘It makes you feel important, doesn’t it? Acting like you’ve got some leverage over the world? I’ve seen the men who really pull the levers, and they’re nothing like you. They don’t have to scramble for power. They don’t organize silly midnight heists and put their kid brothers in jeopardy in some wild attempt to obtain it. They’ve already got it.’

Griffin’s eyes narrowed. ‘What does that mean?’

‘What do you do?’ Robin demanded. ‘Really, Griffin, what on earth have you ever done? The Empire’s still standing. Babel’s still there. The sun rises, and Britain’s still got her claws everywhere in the world, and silver keeps flowing in without end. None of this matters.’

‘Tell me you don’t really think that.’

‘No, I just—’ Robin felt a sharp twinge of guilt. He’d spoken too harshly perhaps, but his point, he thought, was fair. ‘I just can’t see what any of this achieves. And you’re asking me to give up so much in return. I want to help you, Griffin. But I also want to survive.’

Griffin did not respond for a long while. Robin sat watching him, growing increasingly uncomfortable as he calmly finished the last of his shepherd’s pie. Then he set down his fork and meticulously wiped his mouth with a napkin.

‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘I’m not out for good,’ Robin said hastily. ‘I just – I mean, just until this year is over, or until things have blown over—’

‘That’s not how this works,’ said Griffin. ‘You’re in or you’re not. Afghanistan isn’t waiting.’

Robin drew in a shaky breath. ‘Then I’m out.’

‘Very well.’ Griffin dropped his napkin and stood up. ‘Only keep your mouth shut, will you? Otherwise I’ll have to come and tie up loose ends, and I don’t like to be messy.’

‘I won’t tell a soul. You have my word—’

‘I don’t really care about your word,’ said Griffin. ‘But I do know where you sleep.’

There was nothing Robin could say to that. He knew Griffin was not bluffing, but also that if Griffin really did not trust him, he would not make it back to the college alive. They watched each other for a long time, unspeaking.

At last, Griffin shook his head and said, ‘You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.’ He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin’s shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. ‘But realize this, brother. You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.’