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

Chapter Thirteen

Griffin made good on his word. He never left another note for Robin. At first, Robin was sure Griffin would merely take some time to sulk before pestering him again for smaller, more routine errands. But a week became a month, which became a term. He’d expected Griffin to be a bit more vindictive – to leave a recriminating farewell letter, at least. For the first few days after their falling-out, he flinched every time a stranger glanced his way on the street, convinced that the Hermes Society had decided it best to tie up this loose end.

But Griffin had cut him out entirely.

He tried not to let his conscience bother him. Hermes was not going anywhere. There would always be battles to fight. They would all be there waiting when Robin was ready to rejoin them, he was sure. And he could do nothing for Hermes if he did not remain firmly ensconced within Babel’s ecosystem. Griffin had said it himself – they needed people on the inside. Wasn’t that reason enough to stay right where he was?

Meanwhile, there were third-year exams. End-of-year exams were quite a matter of ceremony at Oxford. Up until the last years of the previous century, viva voce exams – oral questioning ordeals made public for crowds of spectators to witness – had been the norm, although by the early 1830s the regular BA degree required only five written examinations and one viva voce exam, on the grounds that oral responses were too difficult to assess objectively and were unnecessarily cruel besides. By 1836, spectators were no longer allowed at the vivas either, and the townspeople lost a great source of annual entertainment.

Instead, Robin’s cohort was told to expect a three-hour essay exam in each of their research languages; a three-hour essay exam in Etymology; a viva voce exam in Translation Theory, and a silver-working test. They could not stay on at Babel if they failed any of their language or theory exams, and if they failed the silver-working test, they could not, in the future, work on the eighth floor.[54]

The viva voce would be done in front of a panel of three professors led by Professor Playfair, who was a notoriously tough examiner, and who was rumoured to make at least two students dissolve into tears every year. ‘Balderdash,’ he would drawl slowly, ‘is a word which used to refer to the cursed concoction created by bartenders when they’d nearly run out of every drink at the end of the night. Ale, wine, cider, milk – they’d dump it all in and hope their patrons wouldn’t mind, since after all the goal was simply to get drunk. But this is Oxford University, not the Turf Tavern after midnight, and we are in need of something slightly more illuminating than getting sloshed. Would you like to try again?’

Time, which had felt infinite during their first and second years, now ran quickly down the hourglass. No longer could they put off their readings to have a lark on the river under the assumption there was always the opportunity later to catch up. Exams were in five weeks, then four, then three. When Trinity term drew to an end, the last day of class should have culminated in a golden afternoon, in desserts and elderflower cordial and punting on the Cherwell. But the moment the bells rang at four, they packed up their books and walked straight from Professor Craft’s classroom to one of the study rooms on the fifth floor, where they would wall themselves in, every day for the next thirteen days, to pore over dictionaries and translated passages and vocabulary lists until their temples throbbed.

Acting from generosity, or perhaps sadism, the Babel faculty made available a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These bars were engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and its Latin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with the connotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars was to induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.

Ramy hated and refused to use them. ‘It doesn’t tell you where you went wrong,’ he complained. ‘It just makes you want to vomit for no reason you can discern.’

‘Well, you could do with more caution,’ Letty grumbled, returning his marked-up composition. ‘You’ve made at least twelve errors on this page, and your sentences are far too long—’

‘They’re not too long; they’re Ciceronian.’

‘You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian—’

Ramy waved a hand dismissively. ‘That’s fine, Letty, I cranked that one out in ten minutes.’

‘But it’s not about speed. It’s about precision—’

‘The more I get done, the larger range I’ve acquired for the possible paper questions,’ said Ramy. ‘And that’s what we’ve really got to prepare for. I don’t want to go blank when the paper’s in front of me.’

This was a valid worry. Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years. During the fourth-year exams last year, one examinee was rumoured to have become so paranoid that he declared not only that he could not finish the exam but that he was lying about being fluent in French at all. (He was in fact a native speaker.) They all thought they were immune to this particular folly until one day, a week before exams, Letty suddenly broke down crying and declared she knew not a word of German, not a single word, that she was a fraud and her entire career at Babel had been based on pretence. None of them understood this rant until much later, for she had indeed delivered it in German.

Failure of memory was only the first symptom to come. Never had Robin’s anxiety over his marks made him so physically ill. First came a persistent, throbbing headache, and then the constant urge to throw up every time he stood or moved. Waves of tremors kept coming over him with no warning; often his hand shook so hard that he had difficulty gripping his pen. Once, during a practice paper, he found his vision blacking out; he couldn’t think, couldn’t remember a single word, couldn’t even see. It took him nearly ten minutes to recover. He couldn’t make himself eat. He was somehow both exhausted all the time and unable to sleep from a surplus of nervous energy.

Then, like all good Oxford upperclassmen, he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect. Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on what basic salutations meant. When the porter asked him if he’d had a good one, he stood still and mute for a good thirty seconds, unable to process what was meant by ‘good’, or indeed, ‘one’.

‘Oh, same,’ Ramy said cheerfully when Robin brought this up. ‘It’s awful. I can’t have basic conversations anymore – I keep on wondering what the words really mean.’

‘I’m walking into walls,’ said Victoire. ‘The world keeps disappearing around me, and all I can perceive are vocabulary lists.’

‘It’s tea leaves for me,’ said Letty. ‘They keep looking like glyphs, and I really did find myself trying to gloss one the other day – I’d even started copying it out on paper and everything.’

It relieved Robin to hear he wasn’t the only one seeing things, because the visions worried him the most. He’d begun to hallucinate entire persons. Once when hunting through the bookshelves at Thornton’s for a poetry anthology on their Latin reading list, Robin glimpsed what he thought was a familiar profile by the door. He walked closer. His eyes had not betrayed him – Anthony Ribben was paying for a paper-wrapped parcel, hale and healthy as could be.

‘Anthony—’ Robin blurted.

Anthony glanced up. He saw Robin. His eyes widened. Robin started forward, confused yet elated, but Anthony hastily pushed several coins at the bookseller and darted out of the shop. By the time Robin made his way out onto Magdalene Street, Anthony had disappeared from sight. Robin stared around for several seconds, then returned to the bookshop, wondering if it was possible he’d mistaken a stranger for Anthony. But there were not many young Black men in Oxford. Which meant either he’d been lied to about Anthony’s death – that indeed, all of Babel’s faculty had done it as some elaborate hoax – or he’d imagined the whole thing. In his current state, he found the latter far more likely.

The exam they all dreaded most was the silver-working test. During the last week of Trinity term, they’d been informed they’d have to devise a unique match-pair and engrave it in front of a proctor. In their fourth year, once they had finished their apprenticeships, they would learn proper techniques of match-pair design, engraving, and experimentation for magnitude and duration of effect, as well as the intricacies of resonance links and spoken manifestation. But for now, armed with just the basic principles of how match-pairs worked, they had only to achieve any effect at all. It did not need to be perfect; indeed, first tries never were. But they had to do something. They had to prove they possessed the undefinable stuff, the inimitable instinct for meaning, that made a translator a silver-worker.

Help from postgraduates here was technically forbidden, but sweet, kind Cathy O’Nell surreptitiously slipped Robin a faded yellow pamphlet on the basics of match-pair research one afternoon when she caught him looking dazed and scared in the library.

‘It’s just in the open stacks,’ she said sympathetically. ‘We’ve all used it; have a read through and you’ll be fine.’

The pamphlet was rather dated – it was written in 1798, and employed many archaic spellings – but did contain a number of brief, easily digestible tips. The first was to stay away from religion. This one they already knew from dozens of horror stories. It was theology that had got Oxford interested in Oriental languages in the first place – the only reason Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac had initially become subjects of academic study was the translation of religious texts. But the Holy Word, it turned out, was both unpredictable and unforgiving on silver. There was a desk in the north wing of the eighth floor that no one dared approach because it still occasionally emitted smoke from an unseen source. There, it was rumoured, some foolish graduate fellow had attempted to translate on silver the name of God.

More helpful was the second lesson in the pamphlet, which was to focus their research by looking for cognates. Cognates – words in different languages that shared a common ancestor and often similar meanings as well[55] – were often the best clues for fruitful match-pairs, since they were on such close branches of the etymological tree. But the difficulty with cognates was that often their meanings were so close that there was little distortion in translation, and thus little effect that the bars could manifest. There was, after all, no significant difference between the word chocolate in English and in Spanish. Moreover, in looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends – words which seemed like cognates but had utterly different origins and meanings. The English have did not come from the Latin habere (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin capere (‘to seek’). And the Italian cognato did not mean ‘cognate’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’.

False friends were especially tricky when their meanings appeared related as well. The Persian word farang, which was used to refer to Europeans, appeared to be a cognate of the English foreign. But farang actually arose from a reference to the Franks, and morphed to encompass Western Europeans. The English foreign, on the other hand, originated from the Latin fores, meaning ‘doors’. Linking farang and foreign, then, produced nothing.[56]

The third lesson in the pamphlet introduced a technique called daisy-chaining. This they vaguely recalled from Professor Playfair’s demonstration. If the words in their binary match-pair had evolved too far apart in meaning for a translation to be plausible, one could try adding a third or even fourth language as an intermediary. If all these words were engraved in chronological order of evolution, this could guide the distortion of meaning more precisely in the way they intended. Another related technique was the identification of a second etymon: another source that may have interfered in the evolution of meaning. The French fermer (‘to close, to lock’) was for instance quite obviously based on the Latin firmāre (‘to make hard, to strengthen’) but had also been influenced by the Latin ferrum, meaning ‘iron’. Fermer, firmāre, and ferrum could then, hypothetically, create an unbreakable lock.

All these techniques sounded good in theory. They were much harder to replicate. The difficult part, after all, was coming up with a suitable match-pair in the first place. For inspiration, they took out a copy of the Current Ledger – the comprehensive list of match-pairs in use across the Empire in that year – and skimmed through it for ideas.

‘Look,’ said Letty, pointing at a line on the first page. ‘I’ve figured out how they make those driverless trams run.’

‘Which trams?’ asked Ramy.

‘Haven’t you seen them running around in London?’ said Letty. ‘They move of their own accord, but there’s no one driving them.’

‘I always thought there was some internal mechanism,’ said Robin. ‘Like an engine, surely—’

‘That’s true of the larger ones,’ said Letty. ‘But the smaller cargo trams aren’t that big. Haven’t you noticed they seem to pull themselves?’ She jabbed excitedly at the page. ‘There are bars in the track. Track is related to trecken, from Middle Dutch, which means to pull – especially when you go through the French intermediary. And now you have two words that mean what we think of as a track, but only one of them involves a moving force. The result is the tracks pull the carts forward themselves. That’s brilliant.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Ramy. ‘We’ve only got to revolutionize transportation infrastructure during our exams, and we’ll be set.’

They could have spent hours alone reading the ledger, which was full of endlessly interesting and astonishingly brilliant innovations. Many, Robin discovered, had been devised by Professor Lovell. One particularly ingenious pair was the translation from the Chinese character gǔ (古) meaning ‘old or aged’, and the English ‘old’. The Chinese gǔ carried a connotation of durability and strength; indeed, the same character 古 was present in the character gù (固), which meant ‘hard, strong, or solid’. Linking the concepts of durability and antiquity helped prevent machinery from decaying over time; in fact, the longer it was in use, the more reliable it became.

‘Who’s Eveline Brooke?’ Ramy asked, flipping through the most recent entries near the back.

‘Eveline Brooke?’ Robin repeated. ‘Why does that sound familiar?’

‘Whoever she is, she’s a genius.’ Ramy pointed at a page. ‘Look, she’s got over twelve match-pairs in 1833 alone. Most of the graduate fellows haven’t got more than five.’

‘Hold on,’ said Letty. ‘Do you mean Evie?’

Ramy frowned. ‘Evie?’

‘The desk,’ Letty said. ‘Remember? That time Playfair snapped at me for sitting in the wrong chair? He said it was Evie’s chair.’

‘Suppose she’s very particular,’ Victoire said. ‘And she doesn’t like when people mess with her things.’

‘But no one’s moved any of her things since that morning,’ said Letty. ‘I’ve noticed. It’s been months. And those books and pens are right where she left them. So either she’s particular about her things to a frightening degree, or she hasn’t been back at that desk at all.’

As they flipped through the ledger, another theory became more evident. Evie had been wildly prolific between the years 1833 and 1834, but by 1835, her research had dropped completely off the record. Not a single innovation in the past five years. They’d never met an Evie Brooke at any of the departmental parties or dinners; she’d given no lectures, no seminars. Whoever Eveline Brooke was, as brilliant as she’d been, she was clearly no longer at Babel.

‘Hold on,’ said Victoire. ‘Suppose she graduated in 1833. That would have put her in the same class as Sterling Jones. And Anthony.’

And Griffin, Robin realized, though he did not say this out loud.

‘Perhaps she was also lost at sea,’ said Letty.

‘A cursed class, then, that,’ observed Ramy.

The room suddenly felt very cold.

‘Suppose we get back to revising,’ Victoire suggested. No one disagreed.

In the late hours of the night, when they’d been staring at their books for so long that they could no longer think straight, they made a game of conceiving implausible match-pairs that might help them pass.

Robin won one night with jīxīn. ‘In Canton, mothers would send their sons off to the imperial exams with a breakfast of chicken hearts,’ he explained. ‘Because chicken hearts – jīxīn – sounds similar to jìxing, which means memory.’[57]

‘What would that do?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Scatter bloody chicken bits all over your paper?’

‘Or make your heart the size of a chicken’s,’ said Victoire. ‘Imagine, one moment you’ve got a normal-size heart and the next it’s smaller than a thimble, and it can’t pump all the blood you need to survive, so you collapse—’

‘Christ, Victoire,’ said Robin. ‘That’s morbid.’

‘No, this is easy,’ said Letty. ‘It’s a metaphor of sacrifice – the key is the trade. The chicken’s blood – the chicken’s heart – is what supports your memory. So you’ve only got to slaughter a chicken to the gods and you’ll pass.’

They stared at each other. It was very late, and none of them had got enough sleep. They were all presently suffering the peculiar madness of the very scared and very determined, the madness that made academia feel as dangerous as the battlefield.

If Letty had suggested they plunder a henhouse right then, none of them would have hesitated to follow.

The fated week came. They were as prepared as they could be. They’d been promised a fair exam as long as they did their work, and they had done their work. They were frightened, of course, but warily confident. These exams, after all, were precisely what they had been trained to do for the last two and a half years; no more and no less.

Professor Chakravarti’s paper was easiest of all. Robin had to translate, unseen, a five-hundred-character-long passage in Classical Chinese that Professor Chakravarti had composed. It was a charming parable about a virtuous man who loses one goat in a mulberry field but finds another. Robin realized after the exam that he’d mistranslated yànshǐ, which meant ‘romantic history’, as the tamer ‘colourful history’,[58] which missed the tone of the passage somewhat, but hoped the ambiguities between ‘sexual’ and ‘colourful’ in English would be enough to fudge things over.

Professor Craft had written a devilishly difficult paper prompt about the fluid roles of the interpretes in the writings of Cicero. They were not simply interpreters, but played a number of roles such as brokers, mediators, and occasionally bribers. Robin’s cohort were instructed to elaborate, then, on the use of language in this context. Robin scribbled an eight-page essay on how the term interpretes was, for Cicero, ultimately value neutral in comparison to Herodotus’s hermeneus, one of whom was killed by Themistocles for using Greek on behalf of the Persians. He concluded with some comments on linguistic propriety and loyalty. He was truly unsure how he’d performed when he walked out of the examination room – his mind had resorted to the funny trick of ceasing to understand what he’d argued as soon as he dotted the last sentence, but the inky lines had looked robust, and he knew he’d at least sounded good.

Professor Lovell’s paper involved two prompts. The first was a challenge to translate three pages of a children’s nonsense alphabet rhyme (‘A is for the apricot, which was eaten by a Bear’) into a language of their choosing. Robin spent fifteen minutes trying to match Chinese characters ordered by their romanizations before giving up and going the easy route, which was just to do it all in Latin. The second page contained an Ancient Egyptian fable told through hieroglyphs and its accompanying English translation with the instructions to identify as best they could, with no prior knowledge of the source language, the difficulties in conveying it into the target language. Here, Robin’s facility with the pictorial nature of Chinese characters helped greatly; he came up with something about ideographic power and subtle visual implications and managed to get it all down before time ran out.

The viva voce was not as bad as it could have been. Professor Playfair was as harsh as promised, but still an incorrigible showman, and Robin’s anxiety dissipated as he realized how much of Playfair’s loud condescension and indignation was for theatrics. ‘Schlegel wrote in 1803 that the time was not so far away that German would be the speaking voice of the civilized world,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Discuss.’ Robin had fortunately read this piece by Schlegel in translation, and he knew Schlegel was referring to the unique and complex flexibility of German, which Robin proceeded to argue was an underestimation of other Occidental languages such as English (which Schlegel accused in that same piece of ‘monosyllabic brevity’) and French. This sentiment was also – Robin recalled hastily as his time ran out – the grasping argument of a German aware that the Germanic empire could offer no resistance to the increasingly dominant French, and who sought refuge instead in cultural and intellectual hegemony. This answer was neither particularly brilliant nor original, but it was correct, and Professor Playfair followed up on only a handful of technicalities before dismissing Robin from the room.

Their silver-working test was scheduled for the last day. They were instructed to report to the eighth floor in thirty-minute increments – Letty first at noon, then Robin, then Ramy, then Victoire at half past one.

At half past noon, Robin walked up all seven flights of the tower and stood waiting outside the windowless room at the back of the southern wing. His mouth was very dry. It was a sunny afternoon in May, but he couldn’t stop the shivering in his knees.

It was simple, he told himself. Just two words – he needed only to write down two simple words, and then it would be over. No cause for panic.

But fear, was, of course, not rational. His imagination ran wild with the thousand and one things that could go wrong. He could drop the bar on the floor, he could suffer a lapse of memory the moment he walked through the door, or he could forget a brush stroke or spell the English word wrong despite practising both a hundred times. Or it could fail to work. It could simply fail to work, and he would never get a position on the eighth floor. It could all be over that quickly.

The door swung open. Letty emerged, pale-faced and shaking. Robin wanted to ask her how it had gone, but she brushed past him and hurried down the stairs.

‘Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti poked his head out the door. ‘Come on in.’

Robin took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The room had been cleared of chairs, books, and shelves – anything valuable or breakable. Only one desk remained, in the corner, and that was bare save for a single blank silver bar and an engraving stylus.

‘Well, Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti clasped his hands behind his back. ‘What do you have for me?’

Robin’s teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak. He hadn’t known how debilitatingly scared he would be. The written exams had involved their fair share of shakes and retching, but when it came down to it, when his pen hit parchment, it felt routine. It had been nothing more and nothing less than the accumulation of everything he’d practised for the past three years. This was something else entirely. He had no idea what to expect.

‘It’s all right, Robin,’ Professor Chakravarti said gently. ‘It’ll work. You’ve just got to focus. It’s nothing you won’t do a hundred times in your career.’

Robin took a deep breath and exhaled. ‘It’s something very basic. It’s – theoretically, metaphorically, I mean, it’s a bit messy, and I don’t think it’ll work—’

‘Well, why don’t you walk me through the theory first and then we’ll see.’

‘Míngbai,’ Robin blurted. ‘Mandarin. It means – so it means, “to understand”, right? But the characters are loaded with imagery. Míng – bright, a light, clear. And bai – white, like the colour. So it doesn’t just mean to understand, or to realize – it has the visual component of making clear, to shine a light on.’ He paused to clear his throat. He was not quite so nervous anymore – the match-pair he’d prepared did sound better when he spoke it out loud. In fact, it seemed halfway plausible. ‘So – now this is the part I’m not very sure about, because I don’t know what the light will be associated with. But it should be a way of making things clear, of revealing things, I think.’

Professor Chakravarti gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Well, why don’t we see what it does?’

Robin took the bar in trembling hands and positioned the tip of the stylus against the smooth, blank surface. It took an unexpected amount of force to make the stylus etch out a clear line. This was, somehow, calming – it made him focus on keeping the pressure steady instead of the thousand other things he could do wrong.

He finished writing.

‘Míngbai,’ he said, holding up the bar so that Professor Chakravarti could see. 明白. Then he flipped it over. ‘Understand.’

Something pulsed in the silver – something alive, something forceful and bold; a gale of wind, a crashing wave; and in that fraction of a second Robin felt the source of its power, that sublime, unnameable place where meaning was created, that place which words approximated but could not, could never pin down; the place which could only be invoked, imperfectly, but even so would make its presence felt. A bright, warm sphere of light shone out of the bar and grew until it enveloped them both. Robin had not specified what sort of understanding this light would signify; he had not planned that far; yet in that moment he knew perfectly and, from the look on Professor Chakravarti’s face, his supervisor did too.

He dropped the bar. It stopped glowing. It lay inert on the desk between them, a perfectly ordinary hunk of metal.

‘Very good,’ was all Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Will you retrieve Mr Mirza?’

Letty was waiting for him outside the tower. She’d calmed significantly; the colour had returned to her cheeks, and her eyes were no longer wide with panic. She must have just dashed to the bakery up the street, for she held a crumpled paper bag in her hands.

‘Lemon biscuit?’ she asked as he approached.

He realized he was starving. ‘Yes please, thanks.’

She passed him the bag. ‘How’d it go?’

‘All right. It wasn’t the precise effect I wanted, but it was something.’ Robin hesitated, biscuit halfway to his mouth, not wanting to celebrate nor elaborate in case she’d failed.

But she beamed at him. ‘Same. I just wanted something to happen, and then it did, and oh, Robin, it was so wonderful—’

‘Like rewriting the world,’ he said.

‘Like drawing with the hand of God,’ she said. ‘Like nothing I’d ever felt before.’

They grinned at each other. Robin savoured the taste of the biscuit melting in his mouth – he saw why these were Letty’s favourite; they were so buttery that they dissolved instantly, and the lemony sweetness spread across his tongue like honey. They’d done it. Everything was okay; the world could keep moving; nothing else mattered, because they’d done it.

The bells rang for one o’clock, and the doors opened again. Ramy strode out, grinning widely.

‘It worked for you too, eh?’ He helped himself to a biscuit.

‘How do you know?’ asked Robin.

‘Because Letty’s eating,’ he said, chewing. ‘If either of you’d failed, she’d be pummelling these biscuits to crumbs.’

Victoire took the longest. It was nearly an hour before she emerged from the building, scowling and flustered. Immediately Ramy was at her side, one arm slung around her shoulder. ‘What happened? Are you all right?’

‘I gave them a Kreyòl-French match-pair,’ Victoire said. ‘And it worked, worked like a charm, only Professor Leblanc said they couldn’t put it in the Current Ledger because he didn’t see how a Kreyòl match-pair would be useful to anyone who doesn’t speak Kreyòl. And then I said it’d be of great use to people in Haiti, and then he laughed.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Letty rubbed her shoulder. ‘Did they let you try a different one?’

She’d asked the wrong question. Robin saw a flash of irritation in Victoire’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. She sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, the French-English one didn’t work quite so well, and I was a bit too shaken so I think my handwriting was off, but it did have some effect.’

Letty made a sympathetic noise. ‘I’m sure you’ll pass.’

Victoire reached for a biscuit. ‘Oh, I passed.’

‘How do you know?’

Victoire shot her a puzzled look. ‘I asked. Professor Leblanc said I’d passed. He said we’d all passed. What, none of you knew?’

They stared at her for a moment in surprise, and then they burst out into laughter.

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of uncomplicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief.

Chapter Fourteen

And then they were free. Not for long – they had the summer off, and then they would repeat all the miseries they’d just endured, with twice the agony, during their fourth-year exams. But September felt so far away. It was only May, and the whole summer lay before them. It felt now as if they had all the time in the world to do nothing but be happy, if they could just remember how.

Every three years University College held a commemoration ball. These balls were the pinnacle of Oxford social life; they were a chance for colleges to show off their lovely grounds and prodigious wine cellars, for the richer colleges to flaunt their endowments, and for the poorer colleges to try to claw their way up the ladder of prestige. Balls let colleges fling all their excess wealth that they didn’t, for some reason, allocate to students in need at a grand occasion for their wealthy alumni, the financial justification being that wealth attracted wealth, and there was no better way to solicit donations for hall renovations than showing the old boys a good time. And what a very good time it was. Colleges competed each year to break records for sheer indulgence and spectacle. The wine flowed all night, the music never stopped, and those who danced into the early hours could expect breakfast brought round on silver trays when the sun came up.

Letty insisted they all purchase tickets. ‘It’s exactly what we need. We deserve some indulgence after that nightmare. You’ll come with me to London, Victoire, we’ll go to be fitted for gowns—’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Victoire.

‘Why? We have the money. And you’d look dazzling in emerald, or perhaps a white silk—’

‘Those tailors are not going to dress me,’ said Victoire. ‘And the only way they’ll let me into the shop is if I pretend to be your maid.’

Letty was shaken, but only for a moment. Robin saw her hastily rearrange her features into a forced smile. Letty was relieved to be back in Victoire’s good graces, he knew, and she’d do anything to stay there. ‘That’s all right, you can make do with one of mine. You’re a bit taller, but I can let out the hem. And I’ve got so much jewellery to lend you – I can write back to Brighton and see if they’ll send me some of Mama’s old things. She had all these lovely pins – I’d love to see what I can do with your hair—’

‘I don’t think you understand,’ Victoire said, quietly but firmly. ‘I really don’t want—’

‘Please, darling, it’ll be no fun without you. I’ll buy your ticket.’

‘Oh,’ said Victoire, ‘please, I don’t want to owe you—’

‘You can buy ours,’ said Ramy.

Letty rolled her eyes at him. ‘Buy your own.’

‘Dunno, Letty. Three pounds? That’s quite pricey.’

‘Work one of the silver shifts,’ Letty said. ‘They’re only for an hour.’

‘Birdie doesn’t like crowded spaces,’ said Ramy.

‘I don’t,’ Robin said gamely. ‘Get too nervous. Can’t breathe.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Letty scoffed. ‘Balls are wonderful. You’ve never seen anything like it. Lincoln brought me as his date to one at Balliol – oh, the whole place was transformed. I saw stage acts that you can’t even see in London. And they’re only once every three years; we won’t be undergraduates next time. I’d give anything to feel that way again.’

They cast each other helpless looks. The dead brother settled the conversation. Letty knew it, and was not afraid to invoke him.

So Robin and Ramy signed up to work the ball. University College had devised a labour-for-entry scheme for students too poor to afford the ticket price, and Babel students were particularly lucky here, for instead of catering drinks or taking coats, they could work what were called ‘silver shifts’. This did not take much work other than periodically checking that the bars commissioned to enhance the decorations, lights, and music hadn’t been removed or slipped out of their temporary installations, but the colleges did not seem to know this, and Babel had no good reason to inform them.

On the day of the ball, Robin and Ramy shoved their frock coats and waistcoats into canvas bags and walked past the ticket lines curling around the corner to the kitchen entrance at the back of the college.

University College had outdone itself. It exhausted the eye; there was too much to take in at once – oysters on enormous pyramids of ice; long tables bearing all kinds of sweet cakes, biscuits, and tarts; champagne flutes going round on precariously balanced plates; and floating fairy lights that pulsed through an array of colours. Stages had been erected overnight in every quad of the college, upon which a variety of harpists, players, and pianists performed. An opera singer, it was rumoured, had been brought in from Italy to perform in hall; every now and then, Robin thought he could hear her higher notes piercing through the din. Acrobats cavorted on the green, twisting up and down long silken sheets and spinning silver rings around their wrists and ankles. They were dressed in vaguely foreign garb. Robin scrutinized their faces, wondering where they were from. It was the oddest thing: their eyes and lips were made up in an exaggeratedly Oriental fashion, yet beneath the paint they seemed as if they could have been plucked off the streets of London.

‘So much for Anglican principles,’ Ramy said. ‘This is a proper bacchanalia.’

‘You think they’ll run out of oysters?’ Robin asked. He’d never tried them before; they apparently upset Professor Lovell’s stomach, so Mrs Piper never bought them. The gloopy meat and shiny shells looked both disgusting and very enticing. ‘I just want to know how they taste.’

‘I’ll go and grab one for you,’ said Ramy. ‘Those lights are about to slip, by the way, you should – there you go.’

Ramy disappeared into the crowd. Robin sat atop his ladder and pretended to work. Privately, he was grateful for the job. It was humiliating to wear servant’s blacks while his fellow students danced around him, yes, but it was at least a gentler way to ease into the frenzy of the night. He liked being hidden safely in the corner with something to do with his hands; this way the ball was not quite so overwhelming. And he truly liked discovering what ingenious silver match-pairs Babel had provided for the ball. One, certainly devised by Professor Lovell, paired the Chinese four-word idiom 百卉千葩 with the English translation ‘a hundred plants and thousand flowers’. The connotation of the Chinese original, which invoked rich, dazzling, and myriad colours, made the roses redder, the blooming violets larger and more vibrant.

‘No oysters,’ said Ramy. ‘But I brought you some of these truffle things, I don’t know what they are exactly but people kept snagging them off plates.’ He passed a chocolate truffle up the ladder and popped the other one in his mouth. ‘Oh – ugh. Never mind. Don’t eat that.’

‘I wonder what it is?’ Robin held the truffle up to his eyes. ‘Is this pale mushy part supposed to be cheese?’

‘I shudder to think what else it could be,’ said Ramy.

‘You know,’ said Robin, ‘there’s a Chinese character, xiǎn,[59] which can mean “rare, fresh, and tasty”. But it can also mean “meagre and scanty”.’

Ramy spat the truffle into a napkin. ‘Your point?’

‘Sometimes rare and expensive things are worse.’

‘Don’t tell the English that, it’ll shatter their entire sense of taste.’ Ramy glanced out over the crowd. ‘Oh, look who’s arrived.’

Letty pushed her way through the throng towards them, tugging Victoire along behind her.

‘You’re – goodness.’ Robin hurried down the ladder. ‘You’re incredible.’

He meant it. Victoire and Letty were unrecognizable. He’d grown so used to seeing them in shirts and trousers that he forgot sometimes they were women at all. Tonight, he recalled, they were creatures of a different dimension. Letty wore a dress of a pale, floaty blue material that matched her eyes. Her sleeves were quite enormous – she looked as if she could have concealed an entire leg of mutton up there – but that appeared to be the fashion of the year, for colourful, billowing sleeves filled the college grounds. Letty was in fact quite pretty, Robin realized; he’d only never noticed it before – under the soft fairy lights, her arched eyebrows and her sharply angled jaw did not look cold and austere, but regal and elegant.

‘How’d you get your hair like that?’ Ramy demanded.

Pale, bouncy ringlets framed Letty’s face, defying gravity. ‘Why, curl papers.’

‘You mean witchcraft,’ said Ramy. ‘That’s not natural.’

Letty snorted. ‘You need to meet more women.’

‘Where at, Oxford lecture halls?’

She laughed.

It was Victoire, however, who’d truly been transformed. She glowed against the deep emerald fabric of her gown. Her sleeves, too, ballooned outwards, but on her they seemed rather adorable, like a protective ring of clouds. Her hair was twisted into an elegant knot at the top of her head, fastened with two coral pins, and a string of the same coral beads shone like constellations around her neck. She was lovely. She knew it, too; as she took in Robin’s expression a smile bloomed over her face.

‘I’ve done a good job, haven’t I?’ Letty surveyed Victoire with pride. ‘And to think she didn’t want to come.’

‘She looks like starlight,’ said Robin.

Victoire blushed.

‘Hello, there.’ Colin Thornhill strode up to them. He seemed quite drunk; there was a dazed, unfocused look in his eyes. ‘I see even Babblers have deigned to come.’

‘Hello, Colin,’ Robin said warily.

‘Good party, isn’t it? The opera girl was a little pitchy, but perhaps it was only the acoustics in the chapel – it’s really not a proper performance venue, you need a bigger space so the sound doesn’t get lost.’ Without looking at her, Colin held his wineglass out in front of Victoire’s face. ‘Get rid of this and get me a burgundy, will you?’

Victoire blinked at him, astonished. ‘Get your own.’

‘What, aren’t you working this thing?’

‘She’s a student,’ Ramy snapped. ‘You’ve met her before.’

‘Have I?’ Colin really was very drunk; he kept swaying on his feet, and his pale cheeks had turned a deep ruddy colour. The glass hung so precariously from his fingertips that Robin was afraid it would shatter. ‘Well. They all look the same to me.’

‘The waiters are in black, and they’ve got trays,’ Victoire said patiently. Robin was amazed at her restraint; he would have slapped the glass from Colin’s hand. ‘Though I think you might try some water.’

Colin narrowed his eyes at Victoire, as if trying to see her in better detail. Robin tensed, but Colin only laughed, murmured something under his breath that sounded like the words ‘She looks like a Tregear,’[60] and walked off.

‘Ass,’ Ramy muttered.

‘Do I look like I’m serving staff?’ Victoire asked anxiously. ‘And what’s a Tregear?’

‘Never mind,’ Robin said quickly. ‘Just – ignore Colin, he’s an idiot.’

‘And you look ethereal,’ Letty assured her. ‘We’ve all just got to relax, everyone – here.’ She extended her arm to Ramy. ‘Your shift’s done now, isn’t it? Dance with me.’

He laughed. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Come on.’ She seized his hands and tugged him towards the dancing crowd. ‘This waltz isn’t hard, I’ll teach you the steps—’

‘No, really, stop.’ Ramy extricated his hands from hers.

Letty crossed her arms. ‘Well, it’s no fun just sitting here.’

‘We’re sitting here because we’re already barely tolerated, and because as long as we don’t move too quickly or speak too loudly, we can blend into the background or at least pretend to be serving staff. That’s how this works, Letty. A brown man at an Oxford ball is a fun curiosity as long as he keeps to himself and manages not to offend anyone, but if I dance with you, then someone’s going to hit me, or worse.’

She huffed. ‘Don’t be dramatic.’

‘I’m only being prudent, dear.’

One of the Sharp brothers drifted by just then and extended his hand to Letty. It seemed a rather rude and perfunctory gesture, but Letty took it without comment and left, tossing Ramy a nasty look over her shoulder as she sauntered off.

‘Good for her,’ Ramy muttered. ‘And good riddance.’

Robin turned to Victoire. ‘You’re feeling all right?’

‘I don’t know.’ She looked very nervous. ‘I feel – I don’t know, exposed. Put on display. I told Letty they’d think I was staff—’

‘Don’t mind Colin,’ said Robin. ‘He’s a prat.’

She looked unconvinced. ‘Aren’t they all like Colin, though?’

‘Hello, there.’ A red-haired boy in a purple waistcoat swooped upon them. It was Vincy Woolcombe – the least awful of Pendennis’s friends, Robin recalled. Robin opened his mouth to greet him, but Woolcombe’s eyes slid over him completely; he was solely focused on Victoire. ‘You’re in our college, aren’t you?’

Victoire glanced around for a moment before realizing Woolcombe was indeed addressing her. ‘Yes, I—’

‘You’re Victoire?’ he asked. ‘Victoire Desgraves?’

‘Yes,’ she said, standing up a bit straighter. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘Well, there are only two of you in your year,’ said Woolcombe. ‘Woman translators. You must be brilliant to be at Babel. Of course we know your names.’

Victoire’s mouth was slightly open, but she said nothing; she seemed unable to determine whether Woolcombe was about to make fun of her or not.

‘J’ai entendu dire que tu venais de Paris.’ Woolcombe dipped his head in a slight bow. ‘Les parisiennes sont les plus belles.’

Victoire smiled, surprised. ‘Ton français est assez bon.’

Robin watched this exchange, impressed. Perhaps Woolcombe was not so terrible after all – perhaps he was only a prat in association with Pendennis. He, too, wondered briefly if Woolcombe was having fun at Victoire’s expense, but there were no leering friends in sight; no one was glancing surreptitiously over their shoulders and pretending not to laugh.

‘Summers in Marseilles,’ said Woolcombe. ‘My mother is of French extraction; she insisted I learn. Would you say it’s passable?’

‘You exaggerate the vowels a bit,’ Victoire said earnestly, ‘but otherwise, not bad.’

Woolcombe, to his credit, did not seem offended at this correction. ‘I’m glad to hear it. Would you like to dance?’

Victoire lifted her hand, hesitated, then glanced at Robin and Ramy as if asking their thoughts.

‘Go,’ Ramy said. ‘Enjoy.’

She took Woolcombe’s hand, and he spun her away.

That left Robin alone with Ramy. Their shifts were ended; the bells had rung for eleven several minutes ago. They both pulled on their dress coats – identical black garments they’d purchased at the last moment from Ede & Ravenscroft – but continued lingering in safety by the back wall. Robin had made a perfunctory attempt to enter the fray, but quickly retreated in horror – everyone he was vaguely familiar with stood in tight conversational clusters and either ignored him completely as he approached, which made him feel oafish and awkward, or asked him about working at Babel, since that was apparently all they knew about him. Except whenever this happened, he was assaulted with a dozen questions on every side, all having to do with China and the Orient and silver-working. Once he’d escaped back to the cool quiet by the wall, he was so frightened and exhausted that he couldn’t bear doing it again.

Ramy, ever loyal, stayed at his side. They watched the proceedings in silence for a bit. Robin snatched a glass of claret from a passing waiter and downed it faster than he should have, just to dull his fear of the noise and the crowd.

At last, Ramy asked, ‘Well, are you going to ask anyone to dance?’

‘I don’t know how,’ said Robin. He peered out at the throng, but all the girls in their bright balloon sleeves looked one and the same to him.

‘To dance? Or to ask?’

‘Well – both. But certainly the latter. It seems you need to know them socially before it’s appropriate.’

‘Oh, you’re handsome enough,’ said Ramy. ‘And you’re a Babbler. I’m sure one of them would say yes.’

Robin’s mind was spinning with claret, or else he wouldn’t have managed what he said next. ‘Why won’t you dance with Letty?’

‘I’m not looking to start a row.’

‘No, really.’

‘Please, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘You know how it is.’

‘She wants you,’ Robin said. He’d only just realized this, and now that he said it out loud, it seemed so obvious that he felt stupid for not seeing it earlier. ‘Very badly. So why—’

‘Don’t you know why?’

Their eyes met. Robin felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The space between them felt very charged, like the moment between lightning and thunder, and Robin had no idea what was going on or what would happen next, only that it all felt very strange and terrifying, like teetering over the edge of a windy, roaring cliff.

Abruptly Ramy stood. ‘There’s trouble over there.’

Across the quad, Letty and Victoire stood backs against the wall, surrounded on all sides by a pack of leering boys. Pendennis and Woolcombe were among them. Victoire was hugging her arms across her chest, Letty saying something very quickly that they couldn’t make out.

‘Better have a look,’ said Ramy.

‘Right.’ Robin followed him through the crowd.

‘It’s not funny,’ Letty was snarling. Her cheeks were blotchy with rage. She held both her fists up like a boxer might; they trembled as she spoke. ‘We’re not showgirls, you can’t just—’

‘But we’re so curious,’ said Pendennis, drawling and drunk. ‘Are they really different colours? We’d like to see – you’re wearing such low-cuts, it tantalizes the imagination—’

He reached an arm towards her shoulder. Letty drew her hand back and smacked him full across the face. Pendennis recoiled. His face was transformed, beastly with fury. He took a step towards Letty, and for a moment it seemed as if he really might hit her back. Letty flinched away.

Robin rushed up between them. ‘Leave,’ he told Victoire and Letty. They darted towards Ramy, who took their hands and pulled them towards the back gate.

Pendennis turned on Robin.

Robin had no idea what would happen next. Pendennis was taller, a bit heavier, and likely stronger, but he was swaying on his feet, his gaze unfocused. If this became a fight, it would be a clumsy, undignified one. No one would be seriously hurt. He might even land Pendennis on the ground and skirt away before Pendennis got his wits about him. But the college had strict rules against brawling, there were quite a lot of witnesses, and Robin did not want to know how he would fare against Pendennis’s word before a disciplinary board.

‘We can fight,’ Robin breathed. ‘If that’s what you want. But you’re holding a glass of Madeira, and do you really want to spend the night with red all down your front?’

Pendennis’s eyes dipped to his wineglass, then back up to Robin.

‘Chink,’ he said in a very ugly voice. ‘You’re just a dressed-up Chinkee, you know that, Swift?’

Robin’s fists tightened. ‘And are you going to let a Chinkee ruin your ball?’

Pendennis sneered, but it was clear the danger had passed. As long as Robin swallowed his pride, as long as he told himself it was only words Pendennis had hurled his way, words that meant nothing at all, he could simply turn and follow Ramy, Victoire, and Letty out of the college unscathed.

Outside, the cool night breeze was welcome relief against their reddened, overheated faces.

‘What happened?’ Robin asked. ‘What were they saying?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Victoire said. She was shivering violently; Robin pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

‘It’s not nothing,’ snapped Letty. ‘That bastard Thornhill started going on about the different colours of our – our – you know, for biological reasons, and then Pendennis decided we ought to show them—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Victoire. ‘Let’s just walk.’

‘I’ll kill him,’ Robin swore. ‘I’m going back in. I’m going to kill him—

‘Please don’t.’ Victoire seized his arm. ‘Don’t make this worse, please.’

‘This is your fault,’ Ramy told Letty.

‘Mine? How—’

‘None of us wanted to come. Victoire told you it’d end badly, and still you forced us out here—’

‘Forced?’ Letty gave a sharp laugh. ‘You seemed to be having a nice enough time, with your chocolates and truffles—’

‘Yes, until Pendennis and his lot tried to violate our Victoire—’

‘They had a go at me too, you know.’ This was a bizarre line of argument, and Robin was not sure why Letty made it at all, but she said it with vehemence. Her voice went up by several octaves. ‘It wasn’t just because she’s—’

‘Stop!’ Victoire shouted. Tears streamed down her face. ‘Stop it, it’s no one’s fault, we just – I should have known better. We shouldn’t have come.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Letty said in a very small voice. ‘Victoire, love, I didn’t . . .’

‘It’s fine.’ Victoire shook her head. ‘There’s no reason why you’d – never mind.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘Let’s just be out of here, can we, please? I want to go home.’

‘Home?’ Ramy stopped walking. ‘What do you mean, home? It’s a night for celebration.’

‘Are you mad? I’m going to bed.’ Victoire picked at the skirt of her gown, muddied now, at the bottom. ‘And I’m getting out of this, I’m getting rid of these stupid sleeves—’

‘No, you’re not.’ Ramy gave her a gentle tug towards High Street. ‘You got dressed up for a ball. You deserve a ball. So let’s have one.’

Ramy’s plan, he revealed, was for them to spend the night on Babel’s roof – just the four of them, a basket of sweets (the kitchens were very easy to steal from if you looked like staff), and the telescope under a clear night sky.[61] But when they turned the corner on the green, they saw lights and moving silhouettes through the windows of the first floor. Someone was in there.

‘Wait—’ Letty began, but Ramy jumped lightly up the steps and pushed the door open.

Fairy lights bobbed all around the lobby, which was crowded with students and graduate fellows. Robin recognized Cathy O’Nell, Vimal Srinivasan, and Ilse Dejima among them. Some danced, some chatted with wineglasses in hands, and some stood with heads bent over worktables dragged down from the eighth floor, watching intently as a graduate fellow etched an engraving into a silver bar. Something went poof, and the room filled with the scent of roses. Everyone cheered.

Finally someone noticed them. ‘Third years!’ Vimal cried, waving them in. ‘What took you so long?’

‘We were at the college,’ said Ramy. ‘We didn’t know there was a private party.’

‘You should have invited them,’ said a dark-haired German girl whose name Robin thought might be Minna. She danced in place as she spoke, and her head kept bobbing heavily to the left. ‘So cruel of you, to let them go to that horror show.’

‘One does not appreciate heaven until one has known hell,’ said Vimal. ‘Revelations. Or Mark. Or something like that.’

‘That’s not in the Bible,’ said Minna.

‘Well,’ Vimal said dismissively, ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘That was cruel of you,’ said Letty.

‘Make haste,’ Vimal called over his shoulder. ‘Give the girl some wine.’

Glasses were handed round; port was poured. Soon Robin was very pleasantly drunk, head buzzing, limbs floating. He leaned against the shelves, slightly out of breath from waltzing with Victoire, and basked in the marvellousness of it all. Vimal was now on the table, dancing a vigorous jig with Minna. On the opposite table, Matthew Houndslow, winner of that year’s most prestigious postgraduate fellowship, was inscribing a silver bar with a match-pair that caused bright spheres of pink and purple light to bob around the room.

‘Ibasho,’ said Ilse Dejima.

Robin turned to her. She’d never spoken to him before; he wasn’t sure if she’d meant to address him. But there was no one else around. ‘Pardon?’

‘Ibasho,’ she repeated, swaying. Her arms floated in front of her, either dancing or conducting the music, he couldn’t tell which. For that matter, he couldn’t tell where the music was coming from at all. ‘It doesn’t translate well into English. It means “whereabouts”. A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves.’

She wrote out the kanji characters for him in the air – 居场所 – and he recognized their Chinese equivalents. The character for a residence. The characters for a place.

In the months to come, whenever he thought back on this night, he could only grasp a handful of clear memories – after three glasses of port, it all turned into a pleasant haze. Vaguely he remembered dancing to some frantic Celtic tune on tables pushed together, then playing some kind of language game that mostly involved a lot of shouting and rapid rhyming, and laughing so hard his sides hurt. He remembered Ramy sitting with Victoire in a corner, doing silly impersonations of the professors until her tears were dry, and then until they were both crying from laughter. ‘I despise women,’ intoned Ramy in Professor Craft’s severe monotone. ‘They’re flighty, easily distracted, and in general unsuited for the sort of rigorous study that an academic life demands.’

He remembered English phrases rising unbidden to his mind as he watched the revels; phrases from songs and poems that he wasn’t quite sure on the meaning of, but which looked and sounded right – and perhaps that was just what poetry was? Meaning through sound? Through spelling? He couldn’t remember whether he merely thought it, or if he asked it out loud to everyone he came across, but he found himself consumed with the question ‘What is the light fantastic?’[62]

And he remembered sitting on the stairs deep into the night with Letty, who wept furiously into his shoulder. ‘I wish he would see me,’ she kept repeating through her hiccups. ‘Why won’t he see me?’ And though Robin could think of any number of reasons – because Ramy was a brown man in England and Letty the daughter of an admiral; because Ramy did not want to be shot in the street; or because Ramy simply did not love her like she loved him, and she’d badly mistaken his general kindness and ostentatious verve for special attention, because Letty was the kind of girl who was used to, and had come to always expect, special attention – he knew better than to tell her the truth. What Letty wanted then was not honest counsel, but someone to comfort and love her and give her, if not the attention she craved, then some facsimile of it. So he let her sob against him, soaking the front of his shirt in tears, and rubbed circles in her back as he murmured mindlessly that he didn’t understand – was Ramy a fool? What wasn’t to love about her? She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous – indeed, he intoned, she ought to feel lucky she hadn’t been turned into a mayfly already. This made Letty giggle, which stopped her crying somewhat, and that was good; that meant he’d done his job.

He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. And perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccuping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold stained-glass windows.

They were all very drunk by the time the party broke up – except for Ramy, who was drunk anyway on exhaustion and laughter – which was the only reason it seemed a good idea to wander through the cemetery behind St Giles, taking the long way round north, to where the girls lived. Ramy murmured a quiet du’a, and they traipsed through the gate. At first it seemed a great adventure as they stumbled against each other, laughing, as they picked their way around the tombstones. But then the air seemed to change very quickly. The warmth of the streetlamps dimmed; the tombstone shadows stretched long, shifting, as if belying some presence that did not want them there. Robin felt a sudden, chilling dread. It was not illegal to walk through the cemetery, but suddenly it seemed a horrific violation to trespass these grounds in their state.

Ramy had felt it too. ‘Let’s hurry.’

Robin nodded. They began weaving faster among the tombstones. ‘Shouldn’t be out here after Maghrib,’ Ramy muttered. ‘Should have listened to my mother—’

‘Hold on,’ said Victoire. ‘Letty’s still – Letty?’

They turned around. Letty had fallen behind several rows back. She stood before a tombstone.

‘Look.’ She pointed, her eyes wide. ‘It’s her.’

‘Her who?’ asked Ramy.

But Letty only stood there, staring.

They doubled back to join her before the weathered stone. Eveline Brooke, it read. Dearly beloved daughter, scholar. 1813–1834.

‘Eveline,’ said Robin. ‘Is that—’

‘Evie,’ said Letty. ‘The girl with the desk. The girl with all the match-pairs on the ledger. She’s dead. All this time. She’s been dead for five years.’

Suddenly the night air felt icy. The lingering warmth of port had evaporated with their laughter; now they were sober, cold, and very scared. Victoire pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘What do you think happened to her?’

‘Probably just something mundane.’ Ramy made a valiant effort to dispel the gloom. ‘Probably she fell sick, or had an accident, or overexhausted herself. Could be she went skating without a scarf. Could be she got so wrapped up in her research she forgot to eat.’

But Robin suspected Evie Brooke’s death was about more than some mundane bout of illness. Anthony’s disappearance had left hardly a trace on the faculty. Professor Playfair seemed by now to have forgotten he’d ever existed; he’d not uttered a word about Anthony since the day he’d announced his death. Yet he’d kept Evie’s work desk undisturbed for five years and counting.

Eveline Brooke had been someone special. And something awful had happened here.

‘Suppose we go home,’ Victoire whispered after a while.

They must have been in the graveyard for quite some time. The dark sky was slowly giving way to pale light, the chill condensing into morning dew. The ball was over. The last night of term had ended, had given way to endless summer. Wordlessly, they took each other’s hands and walked home.

Chapter Fifteen

Robin received his exam marks in his pidge the next morning (Merit in Translation Theory and Latin, Distinction in Etymology, Chinese, and Sanskrit), along with the following note printed on thick, creamy paper: The board of undergraduate studies at the Royal Institute of Translation is pleased to inform you that you have been invited to continue your tenure as undergraduate scholar for the following year.

Only when he had the papers in hand did it all seem real. He’d passed; they’d all passed. For at least another year, they had a home. They had room and board paid for, a steady allowance, and access to all of Oxford’s intellectual riches. They would not be forced to leave Babel. They could breathe easy again.

Oxford in June was hot, sticky, golden, and beautiful. They had no pressing summer assignments – they could do further research on their independent projects if they liked, though generally, the weeks between the end of Trinity and the start of next Michaelmas were tacitly acknowledged as a reward, and brief respite, that incoming fourth years deserved.

Those were the happiest days of their lives. They had picnics of ripe, bursting grapes; fresh rolls; and Camembert cheese on the hills of South Park. They went punting up and down the Cherwell – Robin and Ramy got passably good at it, but the girls could not seem to manage the art of pushing them straight ahead instead of sideways into the bank. They walked the seven miles north to Woodstock to tour Blenheim Palace, but did not go in, as the sightseeing fee was exorbitant. A visiting acting troupe from London put on some excerpts of Shakespeare at the Sheldonian; they were undeniably awful, and the heckling from badly behaved undergraduates probably made them worse, but quality was not the point.

Near the end of June, all anyone could talk about was the coronation of Queen Victoria. Many of the students and fellows still on campus took coaches to Didcot for the train to London the day before, but those who remained in Oxford were treated to a dazzling lighting-up show. There were rumours of a grand dinner to be put on for Oxford’s poor and homeless, but the city authorities argued that the richness of roast beef and plum pudding would put the poor in such a state of excitement that they would lose their ability to properly enjoy the illumination.[63] So the poor went hungry that night, but at least the lights were lovely. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire strolled with Letty down High Street with mugs of cold cider in hand, trying to conjure up the same sense of patriotism visible in everyone else.

Near the end of summer they took a weekend trip to London, where they drank in the vitality and variety that Oxford, suspended centuries in the past, so lacked. They went to Drury Lane and saw a show – the acting wasn’t very good, but the garish make-up and the ingenue’s pitchy warbling kept them fascinated for the full three-hour run time. They browsed the stalls at New Cut for plump strawberries, copper trinkets, and sachets of supposedly exotic teas; tossed pennies to dancing monkeys and organ-grinders; dodged beckoning prostitutes; perused street stands of counterfeit silver bars with amusement;[64] had dinner at an ‘Authentick Indian’ curry house that disappointed Ramy but satisfied the rest of them; and slept overnight in a single crowded townhouse room on Doughty Street. Robin and Ramy lay on the floor swaddled in coats while the girls huddled on the narrow bed, all of them giggling and whispering until long past midnight.

The next day they took a walking tour of the city that ended by the Port of London, where they strolled down to the docks and marvelled at the massive ships, their great white sails, and the complex interlacing of their masts and rigging. They tried identifying the flags and company logos of the departing vessels, speculating on where they might be coming from or going. Greece? Canada? Sweden? Portugal?

‘A year from now we’ll be getting on one of these,’ said Letty. ‘Where do you think it’ll be sailing to?’

Every graduating cohort at Babel went on a grand, fully compensated international voyage at the conclusion of fourth-year exams. These voyages usually corresponded with some Babel business – graduates had served as live interpreters at the court of Nicholas I, hunted for cuneiform tablets in the ruins of Mesopotamia, and once, accidentally, caused a near diplomatic breakdown in Paris – but they were primarily a chance for the graduates to simply see the world, and to soak in the foreign linguistic environments they had been sequestered from during their years of study. Languages had to be lived to be understood, and Oxford was, after all, the opposite of real life.

Ramy was convinced their class would be sent to either China or India. ‘There’s simply so much happening. The East India Company’s lost its monopoly in Canton, which means they’ll need translators for all kinds of business reorientations. I’d give my left arm for it to be Calcutta. You’ll love it – we’ll go and stay with my family for a bit; I’ve written to them all about you, they even know Letty can’t take her tea too hot. Or perhaps we’ll go to Canton – wouldn’t that be lovely, Birdie? When’s the last time you were home?’

Robin wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Canton. He’d considered it a few times, but couldn’t summon any feelings of excitement, only a confused, vaguely guilty dread. Nothing awaited him there; no friends, no family, just a city he only half remembered. Rather, he was afraid of how he might react if he did go home; if he stepped back into the world of a forgotten childhood. What if, upon return, he couldn’t bring himself to leave?

Worse, what if he felt nothing at all?

‘More likely we’ll be sent somewhere like Mauritius,’ he said. ‘Let the girls make use of their French.’

‘You think Mauritian Creole is anything like Haitian Creole?’ Letty asked Victoire.

‘I’m not sure they’ll be mutually intelligible,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re both French-based, of course, but Kreyòl takes grammar cues from the Fon language, while Mauritian Creole . . . hm. I don’t know. There’s no Grammatica, so I’ve nothing to consult.’

‘Perhaps you’ll write one,’ said Letty.

Victoire cast her a small smile. ‘Perhaps.’

The happiest development of that summer was that Victoire and Letty had gone back to being friends. In fact, all the strange, ill-defined awfulness of their third year had evaporated with the news that they’d passed their exams. Letty no longer grated on Robin’s nerves, and Ramy no longer made Letty scowl every time he opened his mouth.

To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willing to blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up to their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer and to remember again what it was like to love one another.

For these, truly, were the last of the golden days. That summer felt all the more precious because they all knew it couldn’t last, that such delights were only so because of the endless, exhausting nights that had earned them. Soon year four would start, then graduating exams, and then work. None of them knew what life might look like after that, but surely they could not remain a cohort forever. Surely, eventually, they had to leave the city of dreaming spires; had to take up their respective posts and repay all that Babel had given them. But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

In January of 1838, the inventor Samuel Morse had given a demonstration in Morristown, New Jersey, showing off a device that could transmit messages over long distances using electrical impulses to convey a series of dots and dashes. Sceptical, the United States Congress declined to grant him funding to build a line connecting the capitol in Washington, DC, with other cities, and would drag their feet in doing so for another five years. But scholars at the Royal Institute of Translation, as soon as they heard that Morse’s device worked, went overseas and cajoled Morse into making a months-long visit to Oxford, where the silver-working department was amazed that this device required no match-pairs to work, but instead ran on pure electricity. By July 1839, Babel hosted the first working telegraph line in England, which was connected to the British Foreign Office in London.[65]

Morse’s original code transmitted only numerals, under the assumption that the receiver could look up the corresponding words in a guidebook. This was fine for conversations that involved a limited vocabulary – train signals, weather reports, and certain kinds of military communications. But soon after Morse’s arrival, Professors De Vreese and Playfair developed an alphanumeric code that allowed exchange of messages of any kind.[66] This expanded the telegraph’s possible uses to the commercial, personal, and beyond. Word spread quickly that Babel had means of communicating instantaneously with London from Oxford. Soon clients – largely businessmen, government officials, and the occasional clergyman – were crammed in the lobby and lined up around the block clutching messages they needed sent. Professor Lovell, exasperated by the clamour, wanted to set the defensive wards on crowd. But calmer, more financially attuned heads prevailed. Professor Playfair, seeing great potential for profit, ordered that the northwest wing of the lobby, which was formerly used for storage, be converted into a telegraph office.

The next obstacle was staffing the office with operators. Students were the obvious source of free labour, and so every Babel undergraduate and graduate fellow was required to learn Morse code. This took only a matter of days, since Morse code was the rare language that did in fact have a perfect one-to-one correlation between language symbols, provided one was communicating in English. When September bled into October and Michaelmas term began that autumn, all students on campus were assigned to work at least one three-hour shift a week. And so, at nine o’clock every Sunday night, Robin dragged himself to the little lobby office and sat by the telegraph machine with a stack of course readings, waiting for the needle to buzz into life.

The advantage of the late shift was that the tower received very little correspondence during those hours, since everyone in the London office would have already gone home. All Robin had to do was stay awake from nine to midnight, in case any urgent missives arrived. Otherwise, he was free to do as he liked, and he usually spent these hours reading or revising his compositions for the next morning’s class.

Occasionally he glanced out of the window, squinting across the quad to relieve the strain of the dim light on his eyes. The green was usually empty. High Street, so busy during the day, was eerie late at night; when the sun had gone down, when all the light came from pale streetlamps or from candles inside windows, it looked like another, parallel Oxford, an Oxford of the faerie realm. On cloudless nights especially, Oxford was transformed, its streets clear, its stones silent, its spires and turrets promising riddles and adventures and a world of abstraction in which one could get lost forever.

On one such night, Robin glanced up from his translation of Sima Qian’s histories and saw two black-clad figures striding briskly towards the tower. His stomach dropped.

Only when they reached the front steps, when the lights from inside the tower shone against their faces, did he realize it was Ramy and Victoire.

Robin sat frozen at his desk, unsure what to do. They were here on Hermes business. They had to be. Nothing else explained the attire; the furtive glances; the late night trip to the tower when Robin knew they had no business being there, because he’d seen them finish their papers for Professor Craft’s seminar on the floor of Ramy’s room just several hours before.

Had Griffin recruited them? Certainly, that was it, Robin thought ruefully. He’d given up on Robin, so he’d gone for the others in his cohort instead.

Of course he wouldn’t report them – that was not in question. But should he help them? No, perhaps not – the tower was not wholly empty; there were researchers still on the eighth floor, and if he startled Ramy and Victoire, he might attract unwanted attention. The only choice seemed to be to do nothing. If he pretended never to notice, and if they succeeded in whatever it was they wanted, then the fragile equilibrium of their lives at Babel would not be disturbed. Then they could maintain the thin veneer of deniability Robin had lived with for years. Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.

Ramy and Victoire slipped through the door and up the stairs. Robin trained his eyes on his translation, trying not to strain his ear for any hint of what they might be doing. Ten minutes later, he heard descending footsteps. They’d got what they’d come for. Soon they’d be back out the door. Then the moment would pass, and the calm would resume, and Robin could consign this to the back of his mind with all the other unpleasant truths he hadn’t the will to untangle—

A shrieking, inhuman wail pierced the tower. He heard a great crash, then a bout of cursing. He jumped up and dashed out of the lobby.

Ramy and Victoire were trapped just outside the front door, ensnared in a web of glistening silvery string that doubled and multiplied before his eyes, new strands lashing around their wrists, waists, ankles, and throats with every passing second. A smattering of items lay scattered at their feet – six silver bars, two old books, one engraving stylus. Items Babel scholars regularly took home at the end of the day.

Except, it appeared, Professor Playfair had successfully changed the wards. He’d achieved even more than Robin had feared – he’d altered them to detect not only which people and things were passing through, but whether their purposes were legitimate.

‘Birdie,’ gasped Ramy. Silver webs tightened around his neck; his eyes bulged. ‘Help—’

‘Hold still.’ Robin yanked at the strands. They were sticky but pliable, breakable; impossible to escape alone but not without help. He freed Ramy’s neck and hands first, then together they pulled Victoire out of the web, though Robin’s legs became entangled in the process. The web, it seemed, gave only if it could take. But its vicious lashing had ceased; whatever match-pair triggered the alarm seemed to have calmed. Ramy pulled his ankles free and stepped back. For a moment they all regarded each other under the moonlight, baffled.

‘You too?’ Victoire finally asked.

‘Looks like it,’ said Robin. ‘Did Griffin send you?’

‘Griffin?’ Victoire looked bewildered. ‘No, Anthony—’

‘Anthony Ribben?’

‘Of course,’ said Ramy. ‘Who else?’

‘But he’s dead—’

‘This can wait,’ Victoire interrupted. ‘Listen, the sirens—’

‘Damn it,’ said Ramy. ‘Robin, lean this way—’

‘There’s no time,’ said Robin. He couldn’t move his legs. The strings had ceased multiplying – perhaps because Robin was not the thief – but the web was now impossibly dense, stretching across the entire front entrance, and if Ramy came any closer, he feared, they’d both be trapped. ‘Leave me.’

They both began to protest. He shook his head. ‘It has to be me. I haven’t conspired, I have no idea what’s going on—’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Ramy demanded. ‘We’re—’

‘It’s not obvious, so don’t tell me,’ Robin hissed. The siren’s wailing was endless; soon the police would be at the green. ‘Say nothing. I know nothing, and when they question me, that’s what I’ll say. Just hurry and go, please, I’ll think of something.’

‘You’re sure—’ Victoire began.

‘Go,’ Robin insisted.

Ramy opened his mouth, closed it, then bent down to scoop up the stolen materials. Victoire followed suit. They left just two bars behind – clever, Robin thought, for that was some evidence that Robin had been working alone, that he had no accomplices who’d disappeared with all the contraband. Then they dashed down the steps, across the green and into the alley.

‘Who’s there?’ someone shouted. Robin saw lamps bobbing at the other end of the quadrangle. He twisted his head and squinted towards Broad Street, trying and failing to glimpse any trace of his friends. They’d got away, it had worked, the police were coming only for the tower. Only for him.

He took a shaky breath, then turned to face the light.

Angry shouts, bright lamps in his face, firm hands on his arms. Robin hardly processed what happened over the next several minutes; he was aware only of his vague, incoherent rambles, a cacophony of policemen yelling different orders and questions in his ear. He tried piecing together an excuse, some story about seeing thieves caught in the webbing, and how they’d snagged him when he went to stop them, but that was incoherent upon utterance, and the police only laughed. Eventually they prised him free of the web and led him back into the tower to a small, windowless room in the lobby, empty save for a single chair. The door had a small grate at eye level covered by a sliding flap; it resembled a jail cell more than a reading room. He wondered if he was not the first Hermes operative to be detained here. He wondered if the faint brown splotch in the corner might be dried blood.

‘You’ll stay here,’ said the constable in charge as he cuffed Robin’s hands behind his back. ‘Till the professor arrives.’

They locked the door and left. They had not said which professor, or when they would return. Not knowing was torture. Robin sat and waited, knees jangling, arms shuddering miserably from waves and waves of nauseating adrenaline.

He was finished. There was, surely, no coming back from this. It was so difficult to be expelled from Babel, which invested so much in its hard-sought talent that previous Babel undergraduates had been pardoned for almost every kind of offence save for murder.[67] But surely thievery and treason were grounds for expulsion. And then what? A cell in the city gaol? In Newgate? Would they hang him? Or would he simply be put on a ship and sent back to where he had come from, where he had no friends, no family, and no prospects?

An image rose in his mind, one he had locked away for nearly a decade now – a hot, airless room, the smell of sick, his mother lying stiff beside him, her drawn cheeks turning blue before his eyes. The last ten years – Hampstead, Oxford, Babel – had all been a miraculous enchantment, but he had broken the rules – had broken the spell – and soon the glamour would fall away and he would be back among the poor, the sick, the dying, the dead.

The door creaked open.

‘Robin.’

It was Professor Lovell. Robin searched his eyes for a shred of something – kindness, disappointment, or anger – anything that might prophesy what he should expect. But his father’s expression, as ever before, was only a blank, inscrutable mask. ‘Good morning.’

‘Have a seat.’ The first thing Professor Lovell had done was unlock Robin’s cuffs. Then he’d led him up the stairs to his office on the seventh floor, where now they sat facing each other as casually as if convening for a weekly tutorial.

‘You’re very lucky the police contacted me first. Imagine if they’d found Jerome instead. You’d be missing your legs right now.’ Professor Lovell leaned forward, hands clasped over his desk. ‘How long have you been pilfering resources for the Hermes Society?’

Robin blanched. He had not expected Professor Lovell to be so direct. This question was very dangerous. Professor Lovell evidently knew about Hermes. But how much did he know? How much could Robin lie about? Perhaps he was bluffing, and perhaps Robin could fumble his way out of this if he minced his words in just the right way.

‘Tell the truth,’ Professor Lovell said in a hard, flat voice. ‘That’s the only thing that will save you now.’

‘Three months,’ Robin breathed. Three months felt less damning than three years, but long enough to sound plausible. ‘Only – only since the summer.’

‘I see.’ There was no ire in Professor Lovell’s voice. The calm made him terrifyingly unreadable. Robin would have preferred that he screamed.

‘Sir, I—’

‘Quiet,’ Professor Lovell said.

Robin clamped his mouth shut. It didn’t matter. He didn’t know what he would have said. There was no explaining himself out of this mess, no possible exoneration. He could only face up to the stark evidence of his betrayal and await the consequences. But if he could keep Ramy and Victoire’s names out of this, if he could convince Professor Lovell that he’d acted alone, that would be enough.

‘To think,’ Professor Lovell said after a long while, ‘that you would have turned out so abominably ungrateful.’

He leaned back, shook his head. ‘I have done more for you than you could ever imagine. You were a dock boy in Canton. Your mother was an outcast. Even if your father had been Chinese,’ Professor Lovell’s throat pulsed then, and this was as much of an admission as he would ever make, Robin knew, ‘your station would have been the same. You would have scraped along for pennies your entire life. You never would have seen the shores of England. You never would have read Horace, Homer, or Thucydides – you never would have opened a book, for that matter. You would have lived and died in squalor and ignorance, never imagining the world of opportunities that I have afforded you. I lifted you from destitution. I gifted you the world.’

‘Sir, I didn’t—’

‘How dare you? How dare you spit in the face of all you were given?’

‘Sir—’

‘Do you know how privileged you’ve been by this university?’ Professor Lovell’s voice remained unchanged in volume, but each syllable grew longer, first drawled and then spat out as if he were biting the words off at the ends. ‘Do you know how much most households pay to send their sons to Oxford? You enjoy rooms and lodging at no cost. You’re blessed with a monthly allowance. You have access to the largest stores of knowledge in the world. Did you think your situation was common?’

A hundred arguments swam through Robin’s head – that he had not requested these privileges of Oxford, had not chosen to be spirited out of Canton at all, that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to. That he had not wished for this fate until it was thrust upon him, decided for him. That he didn’t know what life he would have chosen – this one, or a life in which he’d grown up in Canton, among people who looked and spoke like him.

But what did it matter? Professor Lovell would hardly sympathize. All that mattered was that Robin was guilty.

‘Was it fun for you?’ Professor Lovell’s lip curled. ‘Did you get a thrill out of it? Oh, you must have. I imagine you considered yourself the hero of one of your little stories – a regular Dick Turpin, didn’t you? You always did love your penny dreadfuls. A weary student by day, and a dashing thief by night? Was it romantic, Robin Swift?’

‘No.’ Robin squared his shoulders and tried, at least, not to sound so pathetically scared. If he was going to be punished, he might as well own his principles. ‘No, I was doing the right thing.’

‘Oh? And what is the right thing?’

‘I know you don’t care. But I did it, and I’m not sorry, and you can do whatever you like—’

‘No, Robin. Tell me what you were fighting for.’ Professor Lovell leaned back, steepled his fingers together, and nodded. As if this were an examination. As if he were really listening. ‘Go, on, convince me. Try to recruit me. Do your very best.’

‘The way Babel hoards materials isn’t just,’ said Robin.

‘Oh! It’s not just!’

‘It’s not right,’ Robin continued angrily. ‘It’s selfish. All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.’

He knew these arguments well. He was parroting what Griffin had told him, truths he had come to internalize. Yet in the face of Professor Lovell’s stony silence, it all seemed so silly. His voice sounded frail and tinny, desperately unsure of itself.

‘And if you are indeed so disgusted by the ways Babel enriches itself,’ continued Professor Lovell, ‘how is it that you seemed delighted, always, to take its money?’

Robin flinched. ‘I didn’t – I didn’t ask—’ But this was incoherent upon utterance. He trailed off, cheeks burning.

‘You drink the champagne, Robin. You take your allowance. You live in your furnished room on Magpie Lane, you parade down the streets in your robes and tailored clothes, all paid for by the school, and yet you say all this money comes from blood. This does not bother you?’

And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.

Professor Lovell’s lip curled again. ‘Not so bothered by empire, now, are you?’

‘It’s not just,’ Robin repeated. ‘It’s not fair—’

‘Fair,’ mimicked Professor Lovell. ‘Suppose you invented the spinning wheel. Are you suddenly obligated to share your profits with everyone who still spins by hand?’

‘But that’s not the same—’

‘And are we obligated to distribute silver bars all around the world to backward countries who have had every opportunity to construct their own centres of translation? It takes no great investment to study foreign languages. Why must it be Britain’s problem if other nations fail to take advantage of what they have?’

Robin opened his mouth to reply, but could think of nothing to say. Why was it so difficult to find the words? There was something wrong with this argument, but once again, he could not figure out what. Free trade, open borders, equal access to the same knowledge – it all sounded so fine in theory. But if the playing field really was so even, why had all the profits accumulated in Britain? Were the British really so much more clever and industrious? Had they simply played the game, fair and square, and won?

‘Who recruited you?’ Professor Lovell inquired. ‘They must not have done a very good job.’

Robin did not respond.

‘Was it Griffin Harley?’

Robin flinched, and that was confession enough.

‘Of course. Griffin.’ Professor Lovell spat the name like a curse. He watched Robin for a long moment, scrutinizing his face as if he could find the ghost of his elder son in the younger. Then he asked, in a strangely soft tone, ‘Do you know what happened to Eveline Brooke?’

‘No,’ Robin said, even as he thought yes; he did know, not the particulars of the story but its general outline. He had nearly put it all together by now, though he’d held off sliding in the final piece, because he did not want to know, and did not want it to be true.

‘She was brilliant,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The best student we’ve ever had. The pride and joy of the university. Did you know it was Griffin who murdered her?’

Robin recoiled. ‘No, that’s not—’

‘He never told you? I’m surprised, to be honest. I would have expected him to gloat.’ Professor Lovell’s eyes were very dark. ‘Then let me enlighten you. Five years ago, Evie – poor, innocent Evie – was working on the eighth floor after midnight. She’d kept her lamp on, but she hadn’t realized the rest of the lights were off. That’s how Evie was. When she was caught up in her work, she lost track of what was going on around her. Nothing existed for her but the research.

‘Griffin Harley entered the tower at about two in the morning. He didn’t see Evie – she was working in the back corner behind the workstations. He thought he was alone. And Griffin proceeded to do what Griffin does best – pilfer and steal, root through precious manuscripts to smuggle them to God knows where. He was nearly at the door when he realized Evie had seen him.’

Professor Lovell fell silent. Robin was confused by this pause, until he saw, to his astonishment, that his eyes were red and wet at the corners. Professor Lovell, who’d never shown the slightest ounce of feeling in all the years Robin had known him, was crying.

‘She never did anything.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘She didn’t raise the alarm. She didn’t scream. She never had the chance. Eveline Brooke was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Griffin was so afraid she might turn him in that he killed her anyway. I found her the next morning.’

He reached out and tapped the worn silver bar lying at the corner of his desk. Robin had seen it many times before, but Professor Lovell had always kept it turned away, half-hidden behind a picture frame, and he’d never been bold enough to ask. Professor Lovell flipped it over. ‘Do you know what this match-pair does?’

Robin glanced down. The front side read 爆. His gut twisted. He was too afraid to look at the back.

‘Bào,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The radical for fire. And beside it, the radical for violence, cruelty, and turbulence; the same radical which on its own can mean untamed, savage brutality; the same radical used in the words for thunder and cruelty.[68] And he translated it against burst, the tamest English translation possible, so tame that it hardly translates as such at all – so that all of that force, that destruction, was trapped in the silver. It exploded against her chest. Sprang her ribs apart like an open birdcage. And then he left her there, lying among the shelves, books still in hand. When I saw her, her blood had pooled across half the floor. Stained every page red.’ He slid the bar across the table. ‘Hold it.’

Robin flinched. ‘Sir?’

‘Pick it up,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘Feel the weight of it.’

Robin reached out and closed his fingers around the bar. It was terribly cold to the touch, colder than any other silver he’d encountered, and inordinately heavy. Yes, he could believe that this bar had murdered someone. It seemed to hum with trapped, furious potential, a lit grenade, waiting to go off.

He knew it was pointless to ask, but he had to regardless. ‘How do you know it was Griffin?’

‘We’ve had no other students in Chinese in the past ten years,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Do you suppose I did it? Or Professor Chakravarti?’

Was he lying? It was possible – this story was so grotesque, Robin nearly didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe that Griffin could be capable of something like murder.

But wasn’t he? Griffin, who spoke of Babel faculty as if they were enemy combatants, who sent his own brother repeatedly into the fray without care for the consequences, who was so convinced of the Manichaean justice of the war he fought that he could see little else. Wouldn’t Griffin have murdered a defenceless girl, if it meant keeping Hermes secure?

‘I’m sorry,’ Robin whispered. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘This is who you’ve thrown your lot in with,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘A liar and a killer. Do you imagine you’re aiding some movement of global liberation, Robin? Don’t be naive. You’re aiding Griffin’s delusions of grandeur. And for what?’ He nodded to Robin’s shoulder. ‘A bullet in your arm?’

‘How did you—’

‘Professor Playfair observed you might have hurt your arm rowing. I am not quite so easily deceived.’ Professor Lovell clasped his hands over the desk and leaned back. ‘So. The choice ought to be very obvious, I think. Babel, or Hermes.’

Robin frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘Babel, or Hermes? It’s quite simple. You may decide.’

Robin felt like a broken instrument, capable of uttering only one sound. ‘Sir, I don’t . . .’

‘Did you think you would be expelled?’

‘Well – yes, wouldn’t—’

‘It’s not quite so easy to leave Babel, I’m afraid. You’ve strayed down the wrong path, but I believe it was as a result of vicious influences – influences crueller and wilier than you could have been expected to handle. You’re naive, yes. And a disappointment. But you’re not finished. This does not need to end with gaol or prison.’ Professor Lovell tapped his fingers against the desk. ‘But it would be very helpful if you could give us something useful.’

‘Useful?’

‘Information, Robin. Help us find them. Help us root them out.’

‘But I don’t know anything about them,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t even know any of their names, except Griffin’s.’

‘Really.’

‘It’s true, it’s how they operate – they’re so decentralized, they don’t tell new associates anything. In case—’ Robin swallowed. ‘In case something like this happens.’

‘How unfortunate. You’re quite sure?’

‘Yes, I really don’t—’

‘Say what you mean, Robin. Don’t dither.’

Robin flinched. Those were precisely the same words Griffin had used; he remembered. And Griffin had said it exactly the same way Professor Lovell did now, cold and imperious, as if he’d already won the argument, as if any response Robin made was bound to be nonsense.

And Robin could imagine Griffin’s smirk just now; knew exactly what he would say – of course you’ll choose your creature comforts, you coddled little scholar. But what right did Griffin have to judge his choices? Staying at Babel, at Oxford, wasn’t indulgence; it was survival. It was his only ticket into this country, the one thing between him and the streets.

He felt a sudden flare of hatred towards Griffin. Robin had asked for none of this, and now his future – and Ramy’s and Victoire’s futures – hung in the balance. And where was Griffin? Where was he when Robin had been shot? Vanished. He’d used them to do his bidding, then abandoned them when things went sour. At least if Griffin went to prison, he deserved it.

‘If it’s loyalty that’s keeping you quiet, then there’s nothing else to be done,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘But I think we can work together still. I think you’re not quite ready to leave Babel. Don’t you?’

Robin took a deep breath.

What was he giving up, really? The Hermes Society had abandoned him, had ignored his warnings and endangered his two dearest friends. He owed them nothing.

In the days and weeks that followed he would try to persuade himself that this was a moment of strategic concession, not of betrayal. That he was not giving up much of importance – Griffin himself had said they had multiple safe houses, hadn’t he? – and that this way Ramy and Victoire were protected, he was not expelled, and all the lines of communication existed still for some future cooperation with Hermes. But he’d never quite talk himself out of the nasty truth – that this was not about Hermes, nor about Ramy or Victoire, but about self-preservation.

‘St Aldate’s,’ he said. ‘The back entrance to the church. There’s a door near the basement that looks rusted shut, but Griffin has a key. They use it as a safe room.’

Professor Lovell scribbled this down. ‘How often does he go there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s in there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robin said again. ‘I never went myself. Truly, he told me very little. I’m sorry.’

Professor Lovell cast him a long, cool look, then appeared to relent.

‘I know you’re better than this.’ He leaned forward over his desk. ‘You are unlike Griffin in every way possible. You’re humble, you’re bright, and you work hard. You are less corrupted by your heritage than he was. If I’d only just met you, I’d be hard pressed to guess you were a Chinaman at all. You have prodigious talent, and talent deserves a second chance. But careful, boy.’ He gestured to the door. ‘There won’t be a third.’

Robin stood up, then glanced down at his hand. He noticed he’d been clutching the bar that had killed Evie Brooke this whole time. It felt simultaneously very hot and very cold, and he had the strange fear that if he touched it for a moment longer, it might erode a hole through his palm. He held it out. ‘Here, sir—’

‘Keep it,’ said Professor Lovell.

‘Sir?’

‘I have been staring at that bar every day for the past five years, wondering where I went wrong with Griffin. If I had raised him differently, or seen him earlier for what he was, if Evie would still – but never mind.’ Professor Lovell’s voice hardened. ‘Now it weighs on your conscience. Keep it, Robin Swift. Carry it in your front pocket. Pull it out whenever you begin to doubt, and let it remind you which side are the villains.’

He motioned for Robin to leave the office. Robin stumbled down the stairs, the silver clutched tight in his fingers, dazed and quite sure he’d pushed his entire world off course. Only he hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d done the right thing, what right and wrong meant at all, or how the pieces might now fall.

Interlude Ramy

Ramiz Rafi Mirza had always been a clever boy. He had a prodigious memory, the gift of the gab. He soaked up languages like a sponge, and he had an uncanny ear for rhythm and sound. He did not merely repeat the phrases he absorbed; he uttered them in such precise imitation of the original speaker, investing his words with all their intended emotion, it was like he momentarily became them. In another life, he would have been destined for the stage. He had that ineffable skill, of making simple words sing.

Ramy was brilliant, and he had ample opportunity to show off. The Mirza family had navigated the vicissitudes of that era with great fortune. Although they were among the Muslim families who had lost land and holdings after the Permanent Settlement, the Mirzas had found steady, if not very lucrative, employment in the household of one Mr Horace Hayman Wilson, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. Sir Horace had a keen interest in Indian languages and literatures, and he took great delight in conversing with Ramy’s father, who had been well educated in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.

So Ramy grew up among the elite English families of Calcutta’s white town, among porticoed and colonnaded houses built in European styles and shops catering exclusively to a European clientele. Wilson took an early interest in his education, and while other boys his age were still playing in the streets, Ramy was auditing classes at the Mohammedan College of Calcutta, where he learned arithmetic, theology, and philosophy. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu he studied with his father. Latin and Greek he learned from tutors hired by Wilson. English he absorbed from the world around him.

In the Wilson household, they called him the little professor. Blessed Ramy, dazzling Ramy. He had no idea what the purpose was of anything he studied, only that it delighted the adults so when he mastered it all. Often, he performed tricks for the guests Sir Horace had over to his sitting room. They would show him a series of playing cards, and he’d repeat with perfect accuracy the suit and number of the cards in the order in which they’d appeared. They would read out whole passages or poems in Spanish or Italian and he, not understanding a word of what was said, would recite it back, intonations and all.

He once took pride in this. He liked hearing the guests’ shouts of wonder, liked the way they ruffled his hair and pressed sweets into his palm before they bade him scamper off to the kitchens. He had no understanding of class then, or of race. He thought it was all a game. He did not see his father watching from around the corner, eyebrows knitted with worry. He did not know that impressing a white man could be as dangerous as provoking one.

One afternoon when he was twelve years old, Wilson’s guests summoned him during a heated debate.

‘Ramy.’ The man who waved him over was Mr Trevelyan, a frequent visitor, a man with prodigious sideburns and a dry, wolflike smile. ‘Come here.’

‘Oh, leave him be,’ said Sir Horace.

‘I’m proving a point.’ Mr Trevelyan beckoned with one hand. ‘Ramy, if you please.’

Sir Horace did not tell Ramy not to, so Ramy hurried to Mr Trevelyan’s side and stood straight, hands clasped behind his back like a little soldier. He’d learned that English guests adored this stance; they found it precious. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Count to ten in English,’ said Mr Trevelyan.

Ramy obliged. Mr Trevelyan knew perfectly well he could do this; the performance was for the other gentlemen present.

‘Now in Latin,’ said Mr Trevelyan, and when Ramy had accomplished that, ‘Now in Greek.’

Ramy complied. Gratified chuckles around the room. Ramy decided to test his luck. ‘Little numbers are for little children,’ he said in perfect English. ‘If you’d like to converse about algebra, pick a language and we’ll do that too.’

Charmed chuckles. Ramy grinned, rocking back and forth on his feet, waiting for the inevitable press of candy or coin.

Mr Trevelyan turned back to the other guests. ‘Consider this boy and his father. Both of similar ability, both of a similar background and education. The father begins with even more of an advantage, I would say, as his father, I’m told, belonged to a wealthier merchant class. But so fortunes rise and fall. Despite his natural talents, Mr Mirza here can attain no better than a posting as a domestic servant. Don’t you agree, Mr Mirza?’

Ramy saw the most peculiar expression then on his father’s face. He looked as if he were holding something in, as if he’d swallowed a very bitter seed but was unable to spit it out.

Suddenly this game did not seem such fun. He felt nervous now for showing off, but couldn’t quite put his finger on why.

‘Come now, Mr Mirza,’ said Mr Trevelyan. ‘You can’t claim that you wanted to be a footman.’

Mr Mirza gave a nervous chuckle. ‘It’s a great honour to serve Sir Horace Wilson.’

‘Oh, come off it – no need to be polite, we all know how he farts.’

Ramy stared at his father; the man he still thought was as tall as a mountain, the man who had taught him all his scripts: Roman, Arabic, and Nastaliq. The man who taught him salah. The man who taught him the meaning of respect. His hafiz.

Mr Mirza nodded and smiled. ‘Yes. That’s right, Mr Trevelyan, sir. Of course, I’d rather be in your position.’

‘Well, there you go,’ said Mr Trevelyan. ‘You see, Horace, these people have ambitions. They have the intellect, and the desire to self-govern, as so they should.[69] And it’s your educational policies that are keeping them down. India simply has no languages for statecraft. Your poems and epics are all very interesting, to be sure, but on the matters of administration—’

The room exploded again into clamorous debate. Ramy was forgotten. He glanced at Wilson, still hoping for his reward, but his father cast him a sharp look and shook his head.

Ramy was a clever boy. He knew to make himself scarce.

Two years later, in 1833, Sir Horace Wilson left Calcutta to take on the position of the first Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University.[70] Mr and Mrs Mirza knew better than to protest when Wilson proposed to bring their son with him to England, and Ramy did not begrudge his parents for not fighting to keep him at their side. (He knew, by then, how dangerous it was to defy a white man.)

‘My staff will raise him up in Yorkshire,’ Wilson explained. ‘I will visit him when I can take leave from the university. Then, when he’s grown, I’ll have him enrolled at University College. Charles Trevelyan might be right, and English might be the path forward for the natives, but there’s value yet in Indian languages where scholars are concerned. English is good enough for those chaps in civil administration, but we need our real geniuses studying Persian and Arabic, don’t we? Someone’s got to keep the ancient traditions alive.’

Ramy’s family bid him farewell at the docks. He hadn’t packed much; he would outgrow any clothes he brought in half a year.

His mother clasped the sides of his face and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Make sure to write. Once a month – no, once a week – and make sure to pray—’

‘Yes, Amma.’

His sisters clung to his jacket. ‘Will you send presents?’ they asked. ‘Will you meet the King?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And no, I don’t care to.’

His father stood a little way back, observing his wife and children, blinking hard as if trying to commit everything to memory. At last, when the boarding call sounded, he hugged his son to his chest and whispered, ‘Allah hafiz.[71] Write to your mother.’

‘Yes, Abbu.’

‘Forget not who you are, Ramiz.’

‘Yes, Abbu.’

Ramy was fourteen then, and old enough to understand the meaning of pride. Ramy intended to do more than remember. For he understood now why his father had smiled that day in the sitting room – not out of weakness or submission, and not out of fear of reprisal. He’d been playing a part. He’d been showing Ramy how it was done.

Lie, Ramiz. This was the lesson, the most important lesson he’d ever been taught. Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart.

And what an act Ramy put on. He had no trouble navigating English high society – Calcutta had its fair share of English taverns, music halls, and theatres, and what he saw in Yorkshire was no more than an expansion of the elite microcosm he’d grown up in. He thickened and thinned his accent depending on his audience. He learned all the fanciful notions the English held about his people, elaborated on them like an expert playwright, and spat them back out. He knew when to play a lascar, a houseboy, a prince. He learned when to flatter and when to engage in self-deprecation. He could have written a thesis on white pride, on white curiosity. He knew how to make himself an object of fascination while neutralizing himself as a threat. He fine-tuned the greatest of all tricks, which was to swindle an Englishman into looking at him with respect.

He grew so good at this that he almost began to lose himself in the artifice. A dangerous trap indeed, for a player to believe his own stories, to be blinded by the applause. He could envision himself as a postgraduate fellow, dripping with distinctions and awards. A richly paid solicitor on Legal. A highly acclaimed spontaneous interpreter, sailing back and forth between London and Calcutta, bringing riches and gifts for his family every time he returned.

And this scared him sometimes, how easily he danced around Oxford, how attainable this imagined future seemed. Outside, he dazzled. Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor. And he was just starting to despair, to wonder if all he would ever accomplish was to become a lackey of empire as Wilson had intended, for the avenues of anticolonial resistance seemed so few, and so hopeless.

Until his third year, when Anthony Ribben appeared back from the dead and asked, ‘Will you join us?’

And Ramy, without hesitating, looked him in the eyes and said, ‘Yes.’

Chapter Sixteen

Morning came. Robin rose, washed, and dressed for class. He met Ramy outside the house. Neither said a word; they walked in silence to the tower door, which, despite Robin’s sudden fear, opened to let them in. They were late; Professor Craft was already lecturing when they took their seats. Letty shot them an irritated glare. Victoire gave Robin a nod, her face inscrutable. Professor Craft continued as if she hadn’t seen them; this was how she always dealt with tardiness. They pulled out their pens and began taking down notes on Tacitus and his thorny ablative absolutes.

The room seemed at once both mundane and heartbreakingly beautiful: the morning light streaming through stained-glass windows, casting colourful patterns on the polished wooden desks; the clean scratch of chalk against the blackboard; and the sweet, woody smell of old books. A dream; this was an impossible dream, this fragile, lovely world in which, for the price of his convictions, he had been allowed to remain.

That afternoon they received notices in their pidges to prepare to depart for Canton by way of London by the eleventh of October – the day after next. They would spend three weeks in China – two in Canton, and one in Macau – and then stop in Mauritius for ten days on the way home.

Your destinations are temperate, but the sea voyage can be chilly, read the notice. Bring a thick coat.

‘Isn’t this a bit early?’ asked Letty. ‘I thought we weren’t going until after our exams.’

‘It explains here.’ Ramy tapped the bottom of the page. ‘Special circumstances in Canton – they’re short on Chinese translators and want Babblers to fill in the gap, so they’ve pushed our voyage up ahead.’

‘Well, that’s exciting!’ Letty beamed. ‘It’ll be our first chance to go out in the world and do something.’

Robin, Ramy, and Victoire exchanged glances with one another. They all shared the same suspicion – that this sudden departure was somehow linked to Friday night. But they couldn’t know what that meant for Ramy’s and Victoire’s presumed innocence, or what this voyage held in store for them all.

The final day before they left was torture. The only one among them who felt any excitement was Letty, who took it upon herself to march into their rooms that night and make sure their trunks were properly packed. ‘You don’t realize how cold it gets at sea in the mornings,’ she said, folding Ramy’s shirts into a neat pile on his bed. ‘You’ll need more than just a linen shirt, Ramy, you’ll want two layers at least.’

‘Please, Letitia.’ Ramy swatted her hand away before she could get at his socks. ‘We’ve all been at sea before.’

‘Well, I’ve travelled regularly,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘I ought to know. And we should keep a little bag of remedies – sleeping tinctures, ginger – I’m not sure there’s time to run to a shop, we might have to do so in London—’

‘It’s a long time on a little ship,’ snapped Ramy. ‘It’s not the Crusades.’

Letty turned stiffly to sort through Robin’s trunk. Victoire cast Robin and Ramy a helpless look. They couldn’t speak freely in Letty’s presence, so they could only sit simmering in anxiety. The same unanswered questions bedevilled them all. What was happening? Had they been forgiven, or was the axe still waiting to drop? Would they naively board the ship to Canton, only to be abandoned on the other side?

Most importantly – how was it possible they’d been recruited separately to the Hermes Society without knowledge of the others? Ramy and Victoire at least had some excuse – they were new to Hermes; they might have been too frightened by the society’s demands for silence to say anything to Robin yet. But Robin had known about Hermes for three years now, and he’d never spoken of it once, not even to Ramy. He’d done a marvellous job hiding his greatest secret from friends who, he’d proclaimed, owned his heart.

This, Robin suspected, had greatly rattled Ramy. After they’d walked the girls north to their lodgings that night, Robin tried to broach the subject, but Ramy shook his head. ‘Not now, Birdie.’

Robin’s heart ached. ‘But I only wanted to explain—’

‘Then I think we ought to wait for Victoire,’ Ramy said curtly. ‘Don’t you?’

They headed to London the next afternoon with Professor Lovell, who was to be their supervisor throughout the voyage. The trip was, thankfully, much shorter than the ten-hour stagecoach ride that had brought Robin to Oxford three years ago. The railway line between Oxford and Paddington Station had finally been completed over the previous summer, its opening commemorated with the installation of silver bars under the platform of the newly constructed Oxford Station,[72] and so the journey took them only an hour and a half, during which Robin managed not to meet Professor Lovell’s eyes once.

Their ship did not depart until tomorrow; they would lodge overnight at an inn on New Bond Street. Letty insisted they go out and explore London for a bit, so they ended up going to see the sitting room show of someone who called herself Princess Caraboo. Princess Caraboo was notorious among Babel students. Once a humble cobbler’s daughter, she had persuaded several people into believing she was exotic royalty from the island of Javasu. But it was now nearly a decade since Princess Caraboo had been unmasked as Mary Willcocks of North Devon, and her show – which consisted of a strange hopping dance, several very emphatic utterances in a made-up tongue, and prayers to a god she called Allah-Tallah (here Ramy wrinkled his nose), came off as more pathetic than funny. The display put a bad taste in their mouths; they left early and returned to the inn, tired and laconic.

The next morning, they boarded an East India Company clipper named the Merope heading straight for Canton. These ships were built for speed, for they had to ferry perishable goods back and forth as quickly as possible, and were thus fitted out with state-of-the-art silver bars to hasten their voyage. Robin vaguely remembered that his first journey from Canton to London, ten years ago, had taken close to four months. These clippers could make that journey a mere six weeks.

‘Excited?’ Letty asked him as the Merope made its way out from the Port of London over the Thames towards open water.

Robin wasn’t sure. He’d felt funny ever since they’d boarded, though he couldn’t quite give a name to his discomfort. It didn’t seem real that he was headed back. Ten years ago he’d been thrilled as he sailed towards London, head spinning with dreams of the world on the other side of the ocean. This time, he thought he knew what to expect. That scared him. He imagined his homecoming with a dreadful anticipation; the fear of not knowing one’s own mother in a crowd. Would he recognize what he saw? Would he remember it at all? At the same time, the prospect of seeing Canton again seemed so sudden and unbelievable; he found himself with the strange conviction that by the time they reached it, it would have disappeared clean off the globe.

Still more frightening was the possibility that once he arrived, he’d be made to stay; that Lovell had lied and this whole trip was contrived to get him out of England; that he would be exiled from Oxford, and all that he knew, forever.

Meanwhile, there were six weeks at sea to suffer through. These proved torturous from the start. Ramy and Victoire were like dead men walking, pale-faced and jumpy, flinching at the slightest noises, and unable to engage in the simplest small talk without assuming expressions of utter terror. Neither of them had been punished by the university. Neither of them had even been called in for questioning. But surely, Robin thought, Professor Lovell at least suspected their involvement. The guilt was written all over their faces. How much, then, did Babel know? How much did Hermes know? And what had happened to Griffin’s safe room?

Robin wanted nothing more than to discuss things with Ramy and Victoire, but they never had the opportunity. Letty was always there. Even at night, when they retreated into their separate cabins, there was no chance that Victoire could sneak away to join the boys without Letty growing suspicious. They had no choice but to pretend everything was normal, but they were dreadful at this. They were all clammy, fidgety, and irritable. None of them could drum up enthusiasm for what ought to have been the most exciting chapter of their careers. And they couldn’t make conversation about anything else; none of their old jokes or inconsequential debates came easily to mind, and whenever they did, they sounded heavy and forced. Letty – pushy, chatty, and oblivious – was grating on them all, and though they tried to conceal their irritation, for it wasn’t her fault, they couldn’t help snapping at her when she asked their thoughts on Cantonese cuisine for the dozenth time.

Finally she caught wind that something was going on. Three nights in, after Professor Lovell had departed the mess, she slammed down her fork at dinner and demanded, ‘What is wrong with everyone?’

Ramy gave her a wooden stare. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t pretend,’ Letty snapped. ‘You’re all acting bizarre. You won’t touch your food, you’re mangling your lessons – I don’t think you’ve even touched your phrasebook, Ramy, which is funny because you’ve been saying for months that you bet you could imitate a better Chinese accent than Robin—’

‘We’re seasick,’ Victoire blurted. ‘All right? Not all of us grew up summering up and down the Mediterranean like you.’

‘And I suppose you were seasick in London, too?’ Letty asked archly.

‘No, just tired of your voice,’ Ramy said viciously.

Letty reeled.

Robin pushed his chair back and stood. ‘I need air.’

Victoire called after him, but he pretended not to hear. He felt guilty abandoning her and Ramy to Letty, for fleeing the catastrophic fallout, but he couldn’t bear to be at that table for another moment. He felt very hot and agitated, as if a thousand ants were crawling around under his clothes. If he didn’t get away, walk around, move, then he was sure he would explode.

Outside, it was cold and quickly turning dark. The deck was empty except for Professor Lovell, who was having a smoke by the prow. Robin almost turned back around when he saw him – they had not uttered a word to each other except for pleasantries since the morning after he’d been caught – but Professor Lovell had already seen him. He lowered his pipe and beckoned Robin to join him. Heart pounding, Robin approached.

‘I remember the last time you made this voyage.’ Professor Lovell nodded at the black, rolling waves. ‘You were so small.’

Robin didn’t know how to respond, so he merely stared at him, waiting for him to continue. To his great surprise, Professor Lovell reached out then and placed a hand on Robin’s shoulder. But the touch felt awkward, forced; the angles off, the pressure too heavy. They stood, strained and baffled, like two actors before a daguerreotype, holding their positions just until the light flashed.

‘I believe in fresh starts,’ said Professor Lovell. He seemed to have rehearsed these words; they came out as stilted and awkward as his touch. ‘What I mean to say, Robin, is that you’re very talented. We’d be sorry to lose you.’

‘Thank you,’ was all Robin said, for he still had no idea where this was going.

Professor Lovell cleared his throat, then waved his pipe around a bit before he spoke, as if coaxing his own words out of his chest. ‘Anyhow, what I really wish to say is – which I perhaps ought to have said before – I can understand if you were feeling . . . disappointed by me.’

Robin blinked. ‘Sir?’

‘I should have been more sympathetic to your situation.’ Professor Lovell glanced back out at the ocean. He seemed to have trouble looking Robin in the eye and speaking at the same time. ‘Growing up outside your country, leaving everything you knew behind, adapting to a new environment where I’m sure you received – well, less than the amount of care and affection you likely needed . . . Those were all things that affected Griffin as well, and I can’t say I’ve handled things better the second time. You are responsible for your own poor decisions, but I confess I do in part blame myself.’

He cleared his throat again. ‘I’d like for us to start anew. A clean slate for you, a renewed commitment on my part to be a better guardian. We’ll pretend the past few days never happened. We’ll put the Hermes Society, and Griffin, behind us. We’ll think only of the future, and all the glorious and brilliant things you will achieve at Babel. Is that fair?’

Robin was momentarily struck dumb. To be honest, this was not a very large concession. Professor Lovell had only apologized for being, occasionally, somewhat distant. He hadn’t apologized for refusing to claim Robin as a son. He hadn’t apologized for letting his mother die.

Still, he’d made a greater acknowledgment of Robin’s feelings than he’d ever done, and for the first time since they’d boarded the Merope, Robin felt that he could breathe.

‘Yes, sir,’ Robin murmured, for there was nothing else to say.

‘Very good, then.’ Professor Lovell patted him on the shoulder, a gesture so awkward that Robin cringed, and headed past him for the stairs. ‘Good night.’

Robin turned back to the waves. He took another breath and closed his eyes, trying to imagine how he might feel if he really could erase the past week. He’d be exhilarated, wouldn’t he? He’d be gazing over the horizon, hurtling into the future he’d been training for. And what an exciting future – a successful Canton trip, a gruelling fourth year, and then graduation into a post at the Foreign Office or a fellowship in the tower. Repeat voyages to Canton, Macau, and Peking. A long and glorious career translating on behalf of the Crown. There were so very few qualified Sinologists in England. He could be so many firsts. He could chart so much territory.

Shouldn’t he want it? Shouldn’t that thrill him?

He could still have it. That was what Professor Lovell had been trying to tell him – that history was malleable, that all that mattered were decisions of the present. That they could bury Griffin and the Hermes Society into the recesses of the untouched past – he wouldn’t even need to betray them, simply ignore them – just like they’d buried everything else they’d agreed was better left unmentioned.

Robin opened his eyes, stared out over the rolling waves until he lost focus, until he was staring at nothing at all, and tried to convince himself that if he was not happy, he was at least content.

It was a week into the voyage before Robin, Ramy, and Victoire had a private moment to themselves. Halfway through their morning stroll, Letty went back below deck, claiming an upset stomach. Victoire offered half-heartedly to go with her, but Letty waved her off – she was still annoyed with them all, and clearly wanted to be alone.

‘All right.’ Victoire stepped closer to Robin and Ramy as soon as Letty had gone, closing off the gap made by her absence so that the three of them stood tight, an impenetrable silo against the wind. ‘What in God’s name—’

They all started talking at once.

‘Why didn’t—’

‘Do you think Lovell—’

‘When did you first—’

They fell silent. Victoire tried again. ‘So who recruited you?’ she asked Robin. ‘It wouldn’t have been Anthony, he would have told us.’

‘But isn’t Anthony—’

‘No, he’s very much alive,’ said Ramy. ‘Faked his death abroad. But answer the question, Birdie.’

‘Griffin,’ Robin said, still reeling from this revelation. ‘I told you. Griffin Lovell.’

‘Who’s that?’ Victoire asked, at the same time that Ramy said, ‘Lovell?’

‘A former Babel student. I think he’s also – I mean, he said he’s my half-brother. He looks just like me, we think Lovell – I mean, our father—’ Robin was tripping over his words. The Chinese character 布 meant both ‘cloth’ and ‘to relate, to tell’. The truth was embroidered on a cloth tapestry, spread out to display its contents. But Robin, coming clean to his friends at last, had no idea where to start. The image he displayed was a jumbled and confused one, warped no matter how he told it by its complexity. ‘He left Babel several years ago, and then went underground right around Evie Brooke’s – I mean, ah, I think he killed Evie Brooke.’

‘Good heavens,’ Victoire said. ‘Really? Why?’

‘Because she caught him on Hermes business,’ said Robin. ‘I didn’t know until Professor Lovell told me.’

‘And you believe him?’ asked Ramy.

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Yes, I think Griffin would – Griffin is absolutely the kind of person who would have . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Listen, the important thing is that Lovell thinks I was acting alone. Has he talked to either one of you?’

‘Not me,’ said Victoire.

‘Nor I,’ said Ramy. ‘No one’s approached us at all.’

‘That’s good!’ Robin exclaimed. ‘Isn’t it?’

There was an awkward silence. Ramy and Victoire did not look half as relieved as Robin expected.

‘That’s good?’ Ramy said finally. ‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Robin.

‘What do you think I mean?’ demanded Ramy. ‘Don’t avoid the subject. How long were you with Hermes?’

There was nothing to do but be honest. ‘Since I started here. Since the very first week.’

‘Are you joking?’

Victoire touched his arm. ‘Ramy, don’t—’

‘Don’t tell me that doesn’t infuriate you,’ Ramy snapped at her. ‘That’s three years. Three years he never told us what he was up to.’

‘Hold on,’ said Robin. ‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Very good, Birdie, you noticed.’

‘I don’t understand – Ramy, what did I do wrong?’

Victoire sighed and glanced out over the water. Ramy gave him a hard glare, and then burst out, ‘Why didn’t you just ask me?’

Robin was stunned by his vehemence. ‘Are you serious?’

‘You’d known Griffin for years,’ said Ramy. ‘Years. And you never thought to tell us about it? You never thought we might like to join up as well?’

Robin could not believe how unfair this was. ‘But you never told me—’

‘I wanted to,’ said Ramy.

‘We were going to,’ said Victoire. ‘We begged Anthony, we almost let it slip so many times – he kept telling us not to, but we decided we would break it to you ourselves, we were going to do it that Sunday—’

‘But you didn’t even ask Griffin, did you?’ Ramy demanded. ‘Three years. Lord, Birdie.’

‘I was trying to protect you,’ Robin said helplessly.

Ramy scoffed. ‘From what? Precisely the community we wanted?’

‘I didn’t want to put you at risk—’

‘Why didn’t you let me decide that for myself?’

‘Because I knew you’d say yes,’ Robin said. ‘Because you’d join up with them on the spot and abdicate everything at Babel, everything you’ve worked for—’

‘Everything I’ve worked for is this!’ Ramy exclaimed. ‘What, you think I came to Babel because I want to be a translator for the Queen? Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like Hermes since I got here—’

‘But that’s just it,’ said Robin. ‘That’s precisely why it was too risky for you—’

‘And it’s not for you?’

‘No,’ Robin said, suddenly angry. ‘It wasn’t.’

He didn’t have to say why. Robin, whose father was on the faculty, who could pass for white under the right lighting, at the right angles, was shielded in a way Ramy and Victoire were not. If Ramy or Victoire had faced the police that night, they wouldn’t have been on this ship, they would have been behind bars, or worse.

Ramy’s throat pulsed. ‘Damn it, Robin.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t easy,’ Victoire said, trying valiantly to broker a peace. ‘They’re so strict with their secrecy, you remember—’

‘Yes, but we know each other.’ Ramy shot Robin a glare. ‘Or at least I thought we did.’

‘Hermes is messy,’ Robin insisted. ‘They’ve ignored my warnings, they hang their members out to dry, and it wouldn’t have done you any good to be sent down your first year—’

‘I would have been careful,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘I’m not like you, I’m not scared of my own shadow—’

‘But you’re not careful,’ Robin said, exasperated. So they were trading insults now. So they were being frank now. ‘You were caught, weren’t you? You’re impulsive, you don’t think – the moment anyone insults your pride you lash out—’

‘Then what about Victoire?’

‘Victoire’s . . .’ Robin trailed off. He had no defence. He hadn’t told Victoire about Hermes because he’d assumed she had too much to lose, but there was no good way to say this out loud, or to justify its logic.

She knew what he meant. She would not meet his pleading look.

‘Thank God for Anthony,’ was all she said.

‘I’ve just one more question,’ Ramy said abruptly. He was really, truly furious, Robin realized. This was not merely a burst of Ramy-esque passion. This was something they perhaps could not come back from. ‘What did you say to make it go away? What’d you give up?’

Robin couldn’t lie to Ramy’s face. He wanted to; he was so afraid of the truth, and of the way Ramy would look at him when he heard it, but this he could not hide. It would rip him apart. ‘He wanted information.’

‘And so?’

‘So I gave him information.’

Victoire touched a hand to her mouth. ‘Everything?’

‘Just what I knew,’ Robin said. ‘Which wasn’t much, Griffin made sure of it – I never even knew what he did with the books I took out for him. All I told Lovell about was one safe room at St Aldate’s.’

It didn’t help. She still looked at him as if he’d kicked a puppy.

‘Are you mad?’ Ramy asked.

‘It didn’t matter,’ Robin insisted. ‘Griffin’s never there, he told me himself – and I bet they haven’t even caught him, he’s so incredibly paranoid; I bet he’s already out of the country by now.’

Ramy shook his head in amazement. ‘But you still betrayed them.’

This was profoundly unfair, Robin thought. He’d saved them – he’d done the only thing he could think of to minimize the damage – which was more than Hermes had ever done for him. Why was he now under siege? ‘I was only trying to save you—’

Ramy was unmoved. ‘You were saving yourself.’

‘Look,’ Robin snapped. ‘I don’t have a family. I have a contract, a guardian, and a house in Canton full of dead relatives that for all I know could still be rotting in their beds. That’s what I’m sailing home to. You have Calcutta. Without Babel, I have nothing.’

Ramy crossed his arms and set his jaw.

Victoire cast Robin a sympathetic look, but said nothing in his defence.

‘I’m not a traitor,’ Robin pleaded. ‘I’m just trying to survive.’

‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’

The rest of the voyage was decidedly miserable. Ramy, it seemed, had said all he wanted to say. He and Robin passed all the hours they spent in their shared cabin in desperately uncomfortable silence. Mealtimes weren’t much better. Victoire was polite but distant; there was little she could say in Letty’s presence, and she didn’t make much effort to seek Robin out otherwise. And Letty was still angry with all of them, which made small talk nigh impossible.

Things would have been better if they had had a single other soul for company, but they were the only passengers on a trade ship where the sailors seemed interested in anything but befriending Oxford scholars, whom they considered an unwanted and ill-timed burden. Robin spent most of his days either alone above deck or alone in his cabin. Under any other circumstances, the voyage would have been a fascinating chance to examine the unique linguistics of nautical environments, which blended the necessary multilingualism brought about by foreign crews and foreign destinations with the highly technical vocabulary of seacraft. What was a banian day? What was marling? Was the anchor attached to the better end, or the bitter end? Normally he would have delighted in finding out. But he was busy sulking, still both baffled and resentful at how he’d lost his friends in the process of trying to save them.

Letty, poor thing, was the most confused of all. The rest of them at least understood the cause for the hostilities. Letty hadn’t a clue what was going on. She was the only innocent here, unfairly caught in the crossfire. All she knew was that things were wrong and sour, and she was driving herself up the wall trying to figure out what the reason was. Someone else might have grown withdrawn and sullen, resentful at being shut out by their closest friends. But Letty was as pigheaded as ever, determined to resolve problems through brute force. When none of them would give her a concrete answer to the question ‘What’s happened?’ she decided to try conquering them one by one, to pry out their secrets through oversolicitous kindness.

But this had the opposite of her intended effect. Ramy began leaving the room every time she came in. Victoire, who as Letty’s roommate could not escape her, started showing up at breakfast looking haggard and exasperated. When Letty asked her for the salt, Victoire snapped so viciously at her to get it herself that Letty reeled back, wounded.

Undaunted, she began broaching startlingly personal topics every time she was alone with one of them, like a dentist prodding teeth to see where it hurt most, to find what needed fixing.

‘It can’t be easy,’ she said to Robin one day. ‘You and him.’

Robin, who thought at first she was talking about Ramy, stiffened. ‘I don’t – how do you mean?’

‘It’s just so obvious,’ she said. ‘I mean, you look so much like him. Everyone can see it, it’s not like anyone suspects otherwise.’

She meant Professor Lovell, Robin realized. Not Ramy. He was so relieved that he found himself engaging in the conversation. ‘It’s a strange arrangement,’ he admitted. ‘Only I’ve grown so used to it that I’ve stopped wondering why it isn’t otherwise.’

‘Why won’t he publicly acknowledge you?’ she asked. ‘Is it because of his family, do you think? The wife?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I’m really not bothered. I wouldn’t know what to do if he did declare himself my father, to be honest. I’m not sure I want to be a Lovell.’

‘But doesn’t it kill you?’

‘Why would it?’

‘Well, my father—’ she started, then broke off and coughed primly. ‘I mean. You all know. My father won’t speak to me, hasn’t looked me in the eyes and spoken to me after Lincoln, and . . . I just wanted to say, I know a bit what it’s like. That’s all.’

‘I’m sorry, Letty.’ He patted her hand and immediately felt guilty for doing it; it seemed so fake.

But she took the gesture at face value. She, too, must have been starved for familiar contact, for some indication that her friends still liked her. ‘And I just wanted to say, I’m here for you.’ She took his hand in hers. ‘I hope this isn’t too forward, but it’s just that I’ve noticed, he’s not treating you the same, not the way he used to. He won’t look you in the eyes, and he won’t speak to you directly. And I don’t know what happened, but it’s not right, and it’s very unfair what he’s done to you. And I want you to know that if you want to talk, Birdie, I’m here.’

She never called him Birdie. That’s Ramy’s word, Robin almost uttered, before realizing that would be the absolute worst thing to say. He tried to remind himself to be kind. She was, after all, only attempting her version of comfort. Letty was bull-headed and overbearing, but she did care.

‘Thank you.’ He gave her fingers a squeeze, hoping that if he did not elaborate, then this might force the end of the conversation. ‘I appreciate that.’

At least there was work to distract. Babel’s practice of sending entire cohorts, all of whom specialized in different languages, on the same graduation voyages was a testament to the reach and connectedness of the British trading companies. The colonial trade had its claws in dozens of countries across the world, and its labour, consumers, and producers spoke scores of tongues. During the voyage, Ramy was often asked to translate for the Urdu- and Bengali-speaking lascars; never mind that his Bengali was now rudimentary at best. Letty and Victoire were put to work looking over shipping manifests for their next leg to Mauritius, and translating stolen correspondences from French missionaries and French trading companies out of China – the Napoleonic Wars had ended, but the competition for empire had not.

Every afternoon, Professor Lovell tutored Ramy, Letty, and Victoire in Mandarin from two to five. No one expected they would be fluent by the time they docked in Canton, but the point was to force-feed them enough vocabulary that they would understand basic salutations, directions, and common nouns. There was also, Professor Lovell argued, a great pedagogical benefit to learning a wholly new language in a very short amount of time; it forced the mind to stretch and build rapid connections, to contrast unfamiliar language structures with what one already knew.

‘Chinese is awful,’ Victoire complained to Robin one night after class. ‘There are no conjugations, no tenses, no declensions – how do you ever know the meaning of a sentence? And don’t get me started on tones. I simply can’t hear them. Perhaps I’m just not very musical, but I really can’t tell the difference. I’m starting to think they’re a hoax.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Robin assured her. He was mostly glad she was talking to him at all. After three weeks Ramy had finally deigned to exchange basic civilities, but Victoire – though she still held him at arm’s length – had forgiven him enough to speak to him like a friend. ‘They don’t speak Mandarin in Canton anyway. You’d need Cantonese to actually get around.’

‘And Lovell doesn’t speak it?’

‘No,’ Robin said. ‘No, that’s why he needs me.’

In the evenings, Professor Lovell primed them for the purpose of their mission in Canton. They were going to help negotiate on behalf of several private trading companies, foremost among them Jardine, Matheson & Company. This would be more difficult than it sounded, for trade relations with the Qing court had been marked by mutual misunderstanding and suspicion since the end of the past century. The Chinese, wary of foreign influences, preferred to keep the British contained with other foreign traders at Canton and Macau. But British merchants wanted free trade – open ports, market access past the islands, and the lifting of restrictions on particular imports such as opium.

The three previous attempts by the British to negotiate broader trading rights had ended in abject failure. In 1793, the Macartney embassy became a global punchline when Lord George Macartney refused to kowtow to the Qianlong Emperor and came away with nothing. The Amherst embassy of 1816 went very much the same way when Lord William Amherst similarly refused to kowtow to the Jiaqing Emperor and was subsequently refused admission to Peking at all. There was also, of course, the disastrous Napier affair of 1834, which climaxed in a pointless exchange of cannon fire and Lord William Napier’s ignoble death of fever in Macau.

Theirs would be the fourth such delegation. ‘It’ll be different this time,’ vowed Professor Lovell, ‘because at last they’ve called on Babel translators to lead the talks. No more fiascoes of cultural miscommunication.’

‘Had they not consulted you before?’ Letty asked. ‘That’s quite amazing.’

‘You’d be surprised how often traders think they shouldn’t need our help,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘They tend to assume everyone should naturally just learn to speak and behave like the English. They’ve done a fairly good job at provoking local animosity with that attitude, if the Canton papers aren’t exaggerating. Expect some less-than-friendly natives.’

They all had a good idea of the kind of tension they would see in China. They’d read more and more coverage of Canton in London’s newspapers of late, which mostly reported the kinds of ignominies British merchants were suffering at the hands of brutal local barbarians. Chinese forces, according to The Times, were intimidating merchants, attempting to expel them from their homes and factories, and publishing insulting things about them in their own press.

Professor Lovell opined strongly that, though the traders could have been more delicate, such heightened tensions were fundamentally the fault of the Chinese.

‘The problem is that the Chinese have convinced themselves that they’re the most superior nation in the world,’ he said. ‘They insist on using the word yi to describe Europeans in their official memos, though we’ve asked them time and time again to use something more respectful, as yi is a designation for barbarians. And they take this attitude into all trade and legal negotiations. They recognize no laws except their own, and they don’t regard foreign trade as an opportunity, but as a pesky incursion to be dealt with.’

‘You’d be in favour of violence, then?’ Letty asked.

‘It might be the best thing for them,’ said Professor Lovell with surprising vehemence. ‘It’d do well to teach them a lesson. China is a nation of semi-barbarous people in the grips of backward Manchu rulers, and it would do them good to be forcibly opened to commercial enterprise and progress. No, I wouldn’t oppose a bit of a shake-up. Sometimes a crying child must be spanked.’

Here Ramy glanced sideways at Robin, who looked away. What more was there to say?

Six weeks at last came to an end. Professor Lovell informed them at dinner one night that they could expect to dock at Canton by noon the next day. Prior to disembarking, Victoire and Letty were requested to bind their chests and to clip their hair, which they’d grown long during their years as upperclassmen, above their ears.

‘The Chinese are strict about barring foreign women in Canton,’ explained Professor Lovell. ‘They don’t like it when traders bring their families in; it makes it seem like they’re here to stay.’

‘Surely they don’t actually enforce that,’ protested Letty. ‘What about the wives? And the maidservants?’

‘The expats here hire local servants, and they keep their wives in Macau. They’re quite serious about enforcing these laws. The last time a British man tried to bring his wife to Canton – William Baynes, I believe it was – the local authorities threatened to send in soldiers to remove her.[73] Anyhow, it’s for your own benefit. The Chinese treat women very badly. They have no conception of chivalry. They hold their women in low esteem and, in some cases, don’t even permit them to leave the house. You’ll be better off if they think you’re young men. You’ll learn that Chinese society remains quite backwards and unjust.’

‘I wonder what that’s like,’ Victoire said drily, accepting the cap.

The next morning they spent the sunrise hour above deck, milling about the prow, occasionally leaning over the railing as if those inches of difference would help them spot what navigational science claimed they were fast approaching. The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette of buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world.

For the first time in a decade, Robin found himself gazing at the shores of his motherland.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ramy asked him quietly.

This was the first time they’d spoken directly to each other in weeks. It was not a truce – Ramy still refused to look him in the eyes. But it was an opening, a grudging acknowledgment that despite everything, Ramy still cared, and for that Robin was grateful.

‘I’m thinking about the Chinese character for dawn,’ he said truthfully. He couldn’t let himself dwell on the larger magnitude of it all. His thoughts threatened to spiral to places he feared he could not control unless he brought them down to the familiar distraction of language. ‘Dàn. It looks like this.’ He drew the character in the air: 旦. ‘Up top is the radical for the sun – rì.’ He drew 日. ‘And under that, a line. And I’m just thinking about how it’s beautiful because it’s so simple. It’s the most direct use of pictography, see. Because dawn is just the sun coming up over the horizon.’

Chapter Seventeen

A year ago, after overhearing Colin and the Sharp brothers loudly discussing it in the common room, Robin had gone alone to London over a weekend to see the celebrated Afong Moy. Advertised as the ‘Chinese Lady’, Afong Moy had been brought out of China by a pair of American traders who’d initially hoped to use an Oriental lady to showcase goods acquired overseas, but who quickly realized they could instead make a fortune exhibiting her person across the eastern seaboard. This was her first tour to England.

Robin had read somewhere that she was also from Canton. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped for other than a glimpse of, perhaps a moment of connection with, someone who shared his motherland. His ticket granted him admission to a garish stage room advertised as a ‘Chinese Saloon’, decorated with randomly placed ceramics, shoddy imitations of Chinese paintings, and a suffocating quantity of gold and red damask illuminated by cheap paper lanterns. The Chinese Lady herself was seated on a chair at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk buttoned shirt, and her feet, bound conspicuously in linen, were propped up on a small cushion before her. She looked very small. The pamphlet he’d been handed at the ticket booth claimed she was somewhere in her twenties, but she could have easily been as young as twelve.

The room was loud and packed with an audience of mostly men. They hushed when, slowly, she reached down to unbind her feet.

The story of her feet was also explained in the pamphlet. Like many young Chinese women, Afong Moy’s feet had been broken and bound when she was young to restrict their growth and to leave them curved in an unnatural arch that gave her a tottering, unstable gait. As she walked across the stage, the men around Robin pushed forward, trying to get a closer look. But Robin could not understand the appeal. The sight of her feet seemed neither erotic nor fascinating, but rather a great invasion of intimacy. Standing there, watching her, he felt as embarrassed as if she’d just pulled down her trousers before him.

Afong May returned to her chair. Her eyes locked suddenly on Robin’s; she seemed to have scanned the room and found kinship in his face. Cheeks flushing, he averted his eyes. When she started to sing – a lilting, haunting melody that he did not recognize and could not understand – he pushed his way through the crowd and left the room.

Apart from Griffin, he had not seen any Chinese people since.

As they sailed inland, he noticed that Letty kept looking at his face, then at the dockworkers’ faces, as if comparing them. Perhaps she was trying to determine precisely how Chinese he looked, or to see if he was experiencing some great emotional catharsis. But nothing stirred in his chest. Standing on the deck, minutes from stepping foot in his motherland after a lifetime away, all Robin felt was empty.

They made anchor and disembarked at Whampoa, where they boarded smaller boats to continue up Canton’s riverfront. Here, the city became a wash of noise, of the ongoing rumbling and humming of gongs, firecrackers, and shouting boatmen moving their craft up and down the river. It was unbearably loud. Robin did not remember such a din from his childhood; either Canton had grown much busier, or his ears had grown unaccustomed to its sounds.

They stepped ashore at Jackass Point, where they were met by Mr Baylis, their liaison with Jardine, Matheson & Co. Mr Baylis was a short, well-dressed man with dark, clever eyes who spoke with astonishing animation. ‘You couldn’t have arrived at a better time,’ he said, pumping Professor Lovell’s hand, then Robin’s, and then Ramy’s. The girls he ignored. ‘It’s a disaster here – the Chinese are getting bolder and bolder by the day. They’ve broken up the distribution rings – they bombed one of the fast crabs to bits in the harbour just the other day, thank God no one was on board – and the crackdowns will make trade impossible if this keeps up.’

‘What about the European smuggling boats?’ asked Professor Lovell as they walked.

‘That was a workaround, but only for a bit. Then the Viceroy started sending his people door to door on house searches. The whole city’s terrified. You’ll scare a man off just by mentioning the name of the drug. It’s all the fault of that new Imperial Commissioner the Emperor has sent down. Lin Zexu. You’ll meet him soon; he’s the one we’ll have to deal with.’ Mr Baylis spoke so quickly as they walked that Robin was astonished he never ran out of breath. ‘So he comes in and demands the immediate surrender of all opium brought to China. This was last March. Of course we said no, so he suspended trade and told us we’re not to leave the Factories until we’re ready to play by the rules. Can you imagine? He put us under siege.’

‘A siege?’ Professor Lovell repeated, looking mildly concerned.

‘Oh, well, it really wasn’t so bad. The Chinese staff went home, which was a trial – I had to do my own washing, and that was a disaster – but otherwise we generally kept our spirits high. Really the only harms were overfeeding and lack of exercise.’ Mr Baylis gave a short, nasty laugh. ‘Happily that’s over with, and now we can stroll around outside as we wish, no harm done. But there must be penalties, Richard. They’ve got to learn they can’t get away with this. Ah – here we are, ladies and gents, here is your home from home.’

Past the southwestern suburbs they came upon a row of thirteen buildings in a line, all visibly Western in design, replete with recessed verandahs, neoclassical ornaments, and European flags. These looked so jarring against the rest of Canton that it seemed as if some giant had dug up a neat strip of France or England and dropped it wholesale onto the city’s edge. These were the Factories, explained Mr Baylis, named not because they were centres of production, but because they were the residences of the factors – the agents of trade. Merchants, missionaries, government officials, and soldiers lived here during trading season.

‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ said Mr Baylis. ‘Quite like a handful of diamonds on top of a heap of old rubbish.’

They were to stay at the New English Factory. Mr Baylis led them quickly through the ground-floor warehouse, past the social room and dining room to the visiting chambers on the upper floors. There were also, he pointed out, a well-stocked library, several rooftop terraces, and even a garden facing the riverside.

‘Now, they’re very strict about keeping foreigners within the foreign enclave, so don’t go exploring by yourselves,’ Mr Baylis warned. ‘Stay within the Factories. There’s a corner in the Imperial Factory – that’s number three – where Markwick & Lane sell all sorts of European goods you might need, though they haven’t got many books apart from nautical charts. Those flower boats are strictly off limits, do you hear me? Our merchant friends can arrange for some women of a more discreet temperament to visit in the evenings if you need some company – no?’

Ramy’s ears had gone bright red. ‘We’ll be fine, sir.’

Mr Baylis chuckled. ‘Suit yourself. You’ll be staying just down this hall.’

Robin and Ramy’s room was quite gloomy. The walls, which must have originally been painted dark green, were now nearly black. The girls’ room was as dark, and considerably smaller; there was barely space to walk between the single bed and the wall. It also had no windows. Robin could not see how they were possibly expected to live there for two weeks.

‘Technically this is a storage unit, but we couldn’t have you too close to the gentlemen.’ Mr Baylis at least made an effort to sound apologetic. ‘You understand.’

‘Of course,’ Letty said, pushing her trunk into the room. ‘Thank you for your accommodations.’

After putting down their things, they congregated in the dining room, which was furnished with one very large table capable of seating at least twenty-five. Over the middle of the table was suspended an immense fan made of a cloth sail stretched over a wooden frame, which was kept in constant motion by a coolie servant who pulled and slackened it without pause throughout the dinner service. Robin found it quite distracting – he felt an odd pang of guilt every time he met the servant’s eyes – but the other residents of the factory seemed to find the coolie invisible.

Dinner that night was one of the most ghastly and uncomfortable affairs Robin had ever endured. The men at the table included both Jardine & Matheson employees and a number of representatives from other shipping companies – Magniac & Co., J. Scott & Co., and others whose names Robin promptly forgot. They were all white men who seemed cut from precisely the same cloth as Mr Baylis – superficially charming and talkative men who, despite their clean-cut attire, seemed to exude an air of intangible dirtiness. Apart from businessmen there was Reverend Karl Gützlaff, a German-born missionary who apparently did more interpreting for the shipping companies than conversion of Chinese souls. Reverend Gützlaff proudly informed them that he was also a member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China,[74] and was currently writing a series of articles for a Chinese-language magazine to teach the Chinese about the difficult Western concept of free trade.

‘We’re delighted to have you working with us,’ said Mr Baylis to Robin as the first course – a bland gingery soup – was served. ‘It’s so hard to find good Chinese translators that can string together a full sentence in English. The Western-trained ones are much better. You’ll be interpreting for me during my audience with the Commissioner on Thursday.’

‘I am?’ Robin was startled. ‘Why me?’ This was a fair question, he thought; he’d never interpreted professionally before, and it seemed odd to choose him for an audience with the greatest authority in Canton. ‘Why not Reverend Gützlaff? Or Professor Lovell?’

‘Because we are Caucasian men,’ Professor Lovell said wryly. ‘And therefore, barbarians.’

‘And they won’t speak to barbarians, of course,’ said Mr Baylis.

‘Karl looks rather Chinese, though,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Aren’t they still convinced you’re at least part Oriental?’

‘Only when I introduce myself as Ai Han Zhe,’[75] said Reverend Gützlaff. ‘Though I think Commissioner Lin will not be too enamoured with the title.’

The company men all chuckled, though Robin couldn’t see what was so funny. A certain smugness underwrote this entire exchange, an air of brotherly fraternity, of shared access to some long-running joke the rest of them didn’t understand. It reminded Robin of Professor Lovell’s gatherings in Hampstead, as he’d never been able to tell what the joke was back then either, or what the men had to be so satisfied about.

No one was drinking much of their soup. Servants cleared their bowls away and replaced them with both the main course and dessert at once. The main course was potatoes with some sort of grey, sauce-covered lump – either beef or pork, Robin couldn’t tell. Dessert was even more mysterious, a violently orange thing that looked a bit like a sponge.

‘What’s this?’ Ramy asked, prodding his dessert.

Victoire sliced off a piece with her fork and examined it. ‘It’s sticky toffee pudding, I think.’

‘It’s orange,’ said Robin.

‘It’s burnt.’ Letty licked her thumb. ‘And it’s made with carrots, I think?’

The other guests were chuckling again.

‘The kitchen staff are all Chinks,’ explained Mr Baylis. ‘They’ve never been to England. We keep describing the foods we’d like, and of course they have no idea how it tastes or how to make it, but it’s still funny to see them try. Afternoon tea is better. They understand the point of sweet treats, and we’ve got our own English cows here to supply the milk.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Robin. ‘Why don’t you just have them cook Cantonese dishes?’

‘Because English cuisine reminds one of home,’ said Reverend Gützlaff. ‘One appreciates such creature comforts on faraway journeys.’

‘But it tastes like rubbish,’ said Ramy.

‘And nothing could be more English,’ said Reverend Gützlaff, cutting vigorously into his grey meat.

‘Anyhow,’ said Mr Baylis, ‘the Commissioner is going to be devilishly difficult to work with. Rumours are he’s very strict, extremely uptight. He thinks Canton is a cesspool of corruption, and that all Western traders are nefarious villains intent on swindling his government.’

‘Astute one, that,’ said Reverend Gützlaff, to more self-satisfied chuckles.

‘I do prefer when they underestimate us,’ Mr Baylis agreed. ‘Now, Robin Swift, the issue at hand is the opium bond, which would make all foreign ships assume responsibility before Chinese law for any opium they may smuggle in. It used to be that this ban existed on paper only. We’d dock our ships at – how shall we call them? – outer anchorages, like Lintin and Camsingmoon and such, where we’d distribute cargo for resale with local partners. But that’s all changed under Commissioner Lin. His arrival, as I’ve told you, was quite the shake-up. Captain Elliot – good man, but he’s a coward where it matters – defused the situation by letting them confiscate all the opium we had in our possession.’ Here Mr Baylis clutched his chest as if physically pained. ‘Over twenty thousand chests. Do you know how much that’s worth? Nearly two and a half million pounds. That’s unjust seizure of British property, I tell you. Surely that’s grounds for war. Captain Elliot thinks he saved us from starvation and violence, but he’s only shown the Chinese that they can walk all over us.’ Mr Baylis pointed his fork at Robin. ‘So that’s what we’ll need you for. Richard’s caught you up on what we want in this round of negotiations, yes?’

‘I’ve read through the proposal drafts,’ Robin said. ‘But I’m a bit confused on the priorities . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it seems the ultimatum on opium is a bit extreme,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t see why you couldn’t break it into some more piecemeal deals. I mean, certainly you could still negotiate on all the other exports—’

‘There are no other exports,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘None that matter.’

‘It just seems that the Chinese have a rather good point,’ Robin said helplessly. ‘Given it’s such a harmful drug.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Mr Baylis smiled a wide, practised smile. ‘Smoking opium is the safest and most gentleman-like speculation I am aware of.’

This was such an obvious lie that Robin blinked at him, astounded. ‘The Chinese memorandums call it one of the greatest vices ever to plague their country.’

‘Oh, opium’s not as harmful as all that,’ said Reverend Gützlaff. ‘Indeed, it’s prescribed as laudanum in Britain all the time. Little old ladies regularly use it to go to sleep. It’s no more a vice than tobacco or brandy. I often recommend it to members of my congregation.’

‘But isn’t pipe opium a great deal stronger?’ Ramy cut in. ‘It really doesn’t seem like sleep aids are the issue here.’

‘That’s missing the point,’ said Mr Baylis with a touch of impatience. ‘The point is free trade between nations. We’re all liberals, aren’t we? There should be no restrictions between those who have goods and those who want to purchase them. That’s justice.’

‘A curious defence,’ said Ramy, ‘to justify a vice with virtue.’

Mr Baylis scoffed. ‘Oh, the Qing Emperor doesn’t care about vices. He’s stingy about his silver, that’s all. But trade only works when there’s give and take, and currently we’re sitting at a deficit. There’s nothing we have that those Chinamen want, apparently, except opium. They can’t get enough of the stuff. They’ll pay anything for it. And if I had my way, every man, woman, and child in this country would be puffing opium smoke until they couldn’t think straight.’

He concluded by slamming his hand against the table. The noise was perhaps louder than he intended; it cracked like a gunshot. Victoire and Letty flinched back. Ramy looked too amazed to reply.

‘But that’s cruel,’ said Robin. ‘That’s – that’s terribly cruel.’

‘It’s their free choice, isn’t it?’ Mr Baylis said. ‘You can’t fault business. Chinamen are simply filthy, lazy, and easily addicted. And you certainly can’t blame England for the foibles of an inferior race. Not where there’s money to be made.’

‘Mr Baylis.’ Robin’s fingers tingled with a strange and urgent energy; he didn’t know whether he wanted to bolt or to hit the man. ‘Mr Baylis, I’m a Chinaman.’

Mr Baylis, for once, fell silent. His eyes roved over Robin’s face, as if trying to detect the truth of this statement in his features. Then, to Robin’s great surprise, he burst out laughing.

‘No, you’re not.’ He leaned back and clasped his hands over his chest, still guffawing. ‘Good Lord. That’s hilarious. No, you’re not.’

Professor Lovell said nothing.

Translation work began promptly the next day. Good linguists were always in heavy demand at Canton, and were pulled in a dozen different directions whenever they did show up. Western traders did not like using the government-licensed native Chinese linguists because their language skills were so often subpar.

‘Forget English,’ complained Mr Baylis to Professor Lovell, ‘half of them aren’t even fluent in Mandarin. And you can’t trust them to represent your interests besides. You can always tell when they’re not giving you the truth – I once had a man lie to my face about the customs rates when the Arabic numerals were right there.’

The trading companies occasionally employed Westerners fluent in Chinese, but they were hard to find. Officially, teaching Chinese to a foreigner was a crime punishable by death. Now, as China’s borders were slightly more porous, this law was impossible to enforce, but it did mean skilled translators were often missionaries like Reverend Gützlaff with little spare time. The upshot was that people like Robin and Professor Lovell were worth their weight in gold. Ramy, Letty, and Victoire, poor things, would be shuttled from factory to factory all day doing silver-work maintenance, but Robin and Professor Lovell’s itineraries were crammed with meetings starting from eight in the morning.

Promptly after breakfast, Robin accompanied Mr Baylis to the harbour to go over shipping manifests with Chinese customs officials. The customs office had supplied their own translator, a reedy, bespectacled man named Meng who uttered each English word with slow, timid deliberateness, as if terrified of mispronouncing anything.

‘We will now go over the inventory,’ he told Robin. His deferential, upwards-trailing tone made it sound as if he were asking a question; Robin could not tell if he was asking him for permission or not.

‘Er – yes.’ He cleared his throat, then enunciated in his best Mandarin, ‘Proceed.’

Meng began reading off the inventory list, glancing up after every item so that Mr Baylis could confirm in which boxes those goods had been stored. ‘One hundred twenty-five pounds copper. Seventy-eight pounds ginseng crude. Twenty-four boxes be . . . beetle—’

‘Betel nuts,’ corrected Mr Baylis.

‘Betel?’

‘You know, betel,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘Or areca nuts, if you will. For chewing.’ He pointed to his jaw and mimed the act. ‘No?’

Meng, still baffled, looked to Robin for help. Robin swiftly translated into Chinese, and Meng nodded. ‘Beetle nuts.’

‘Oh, enough of this,’ snapped Mr Baylis. ‘Let Robin do it – you can translate the whole list, can’t you, Robin? It would save us a good deal of time. They’re hopeless, I told you, all of them – a whole country, and not a single competent English speaker among them.’

Meng seemed to understand this perfectly. He cast Robin a scathing look, and Robin bent his head over the manifest to avoid his eye.

It went on like this all morning: Mr Baylis met with a procession of Chinese agents, all of whom he treated with incredible rudeness, and then looked to Robin as if expecting him to translate not only his words but his utter contempt for his interlocutors.

By the time they adjourned for lunch, Robin had developed a painful, throbbing headache. He could not take another moment of Mr Baylis’s company. Even supper, which was served back in the English Factory, was no respite; Mr Baylis spent the whole time recounting silly claims the customs officials had made, and kept casting his stories in a way that made Robin sound like he’d verbally slapped the Chinese at every turn. Ramy, Victoire, and Letty looked very confused. Robin scarcely spoke. He scarfed down his food – this time a more tolerable, if flavourless, dish of beef over rice – and then announced that he was heading back out.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Mr Baylis.

‘I want to go and see the city.’ Robin’s irritation made him bold. ‘We’re done for the day, aren’t we?’

‘Foreigners aren’t allowed in the city,’ said Mr Baylis.

‘I’m not a foreigner. I was born here.’

Mr Baylis had no rejoinder. Robin took his silence as assent. He snatched up his coat and strode towards the door.

Ramy hurried after him. ‘Suppose I come with you?’

Please, Robin almost said, but hesitated. ‘I’m not sure if you can.’

Robin saw Victoire and Letty glancing their way. Letty made as if to rise, but Victoire put an arm on her shoulder.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Ramy, pulling on his coat. ‘I’ll be with you.’

They walked out the front door and down the length of the Thirteen Factories. When they crossed from the foreign enclave into the Cantonese suburbs, no one stopped them; no one seized them by the arm and insisted they return to where they belonged. Even Ramy’s face attracted no peculiar comment; Indian lascars were a common sight in Canton, and they attracted less attention than white foreigners. It was, strangely, a complete reversal of their situation in England.

Robin led them through the streets of downtown Canton at random. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Childhood haunts? Familiar landmarks? He had no destination in mind; no place he thought would bring catharsis. All he felt was a deep urgency, a need to walk over as much territory as he could before the sun went down.

‘Does it feel like home?’ Ramy asked – lightly, neutrally, as if tiptoeing on eggshells.

‘Not in the least,’ Robin said. He felt so deeply confused. ‘This is – I’m not sure what this is.’

Canton was wildly different from the way he’d left it. The construction on the docks, which had been going on since Robin could remember, had exploded into entire complexes of new buildings – warehouses, company offices, inns, restaurants, and teahouses. But what else had he expected? Canton had always been a shifting, dynamic city, sucking in what the sea delivered and digesting it all into its own peculiar hybridity. How could he ever assume it might remain rooted in the past?

Still, this transformation felt like a betrayal. It felt like the city had closed off any possible path home.

‘Where did you used to live?’ Ramy asked, still in that careful, gentle tone, as if Robin were a basket of emotions threatening to spill.

‘One of the shanty towns.’ Robin looked around. ‘Not too far from here, I think.’

‘Do you want to go?’

Robin thought of that dry, stuffy house; the stink of diarrhoea and decomposing bodies. It was the last place in the world he wanted to visit again. But it seemed even worse not to have a look. ‘I’m not sure I can find it. But we can try.’

Eventually Robin found his way back to his old home – not by following the streets, which had now become wholly unfamiliar, but by walking until the distance between the docks, the river, and the setting sun felt familiar. Yes, this was where home should have been – he remembered the curve of the riverfront, as well as the rickshaw lot on the opposite bank.

‘Is this it?’ asked Ramy. ‘It’s all shops.’

The street didn’t resemble anything he remembered. His family house had disappeared off the face of the planet. He couldn’t even tell where its foundations lay – they could have been beneath the tea shop in front of them, or the company office to its left, or the lavishly ornamented shop near the end of the street with a sign that read, in garish red paint: huā yān guǎn. Flower-smoke shop. An opium den.

Robin strode towards it.

‘Where are you going?’ Ramy hurried behind him. ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s where all the opium goes. They come here to smoke it.’ Robin felt a sudden unbearable curiosity. His gaze darted around the shopfront, trying to memorize every detail of it – the large paper lanterns, the lacquered exterior, the girls in face paint and long skirts beckoning from the shopfront. They beamed at him, extending their arms like dancers as he approached.

‘Hello, mister,’ they cooed in Cantonese. ‘Won’t you come in for some fun?’

‘Good heavens,’ said Ramy. ‘Come away from there.’

‘One moment.’ Robin felt compelled by some fierce, twisted desire to know, the same vicious urge that compelled one to prod at a sore, just to see how badly it could hurt. ‘I just want to have a look around.’

Inside, the smell hit him like a wall. It was cloying, sickly, and sugar-sweet, both repulsive and enticing at once.

‘Welcome, sir.’ A hostess materialized around Robin’s arm. She smiled wide as she took in his expression. ‘Is this your first time?’

‘I don’t—’ Suddenly the words failed Robin. He could understand Cantonese, but he couldn’t speak it.

‘Would you like to try?’ The hostess held out a pipe towards him. It was already lit; the pot glowed with gently burning opium, and a small trickle of smoke unfurled from the tip. ‘Your first on the house, mister.’

‘What’s she saying?’ Ramy asked. ‘Birdie, don’t touch that.’

‘Look how much fun they’re having.’ The hostess gestured around the sitting room. ‘Won’t you have a taste?’

The den was filled with men. Robin hadn’t noticed them before, it was so dark, but now he saw that there were at least a dozen opium smokers sprawled over low couches in various states of undress. Some fondled girls perched atop their laps, some listlessly played a gambling game, and some lay alone in a stupor, mouths half-open and eyes half-closed, staring out at nothing.

Your uncle couldn’t stay away from those dens. The sight prompted words he hadn’t recalled in a decade, words in his mother’s voice, words she’d sighed throughout his childhood. We used to be rich, darling. Look at us now.

He thought of his mother reminiscing bitterly about the gardens she used to tend and the dresses she used to wear before his uncle frittered their family fortune away in an opium den like this. He imagined his mother, young and desperate, eager to do anything for the foreign man who promised her coin, who used and abused her and left her with an English maid and a bewildering set of instructions to raise their child, her child, in a language she couldn’t speak herself. Robin was birthed by choices produced from poverty, poverty produced from this.

‘A draught, mister?’

Before he registered what he was doing, the pipe was in his mouth – he was breathing in, the hostess was smiling wider, saying something he didn’t understand, and everything was sweet and dizzy and lovely and awful all at once. He coughed, then sucked in hard again; he had to see how addictive this stuff was, if it really could make one sacrifice all else.

‘Fine.’ Ramy gripped his arm. ‘That’s enough, let’s go.’

They walked briskly back through the city, this time with Ramy in the lead. Robin didn’t speak a word. He couldn’t tell how much those few draughts of opium had affected him, whether he was only imagining his symptoms. Once, out of curiosity, he had thumbed through a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which described the effect of opium as communicating ‘serenity and equipoise’ to all the faculties, of ‘greatly invigorating’ one’s self-possession, and of giving ‘an expansion to the heart’. But he felt none of those things. The only words he would use to describe himself now were ‘not quite right’; he felt vaguely nauseated, his head swam, his heart beat too fast, and his body moved far too slowly.

‘You all right?’ Ramy asked after a while.

‘I’m drowning,’ Robin mumbled.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Ramy. ‘You’re only being hysterical. We’ll get back to the Factories, and you’ll drink a nice tall glass of water—’

‘It’s called yánghuò,’[76] said Robin. ‘That’s what she called the opium. Yáng means “foreign”, huò means “goods”. Yánghuò means “foreign goods”. That’s how they refer to everything here. Yáng people. Yáng guilds. Yánghuòre – an obsession with foreign goods, with opium. And that’s me. That’s coming from me. I’m yáng.’

They paused over a bridge, beneath which fishermen and sampans went back and forth. The din of it, the cacophony of a language he’d spent so much time away from and now had to focus on to decipher, made Robin want to press his hands against his ears, to block out a soundscape that should have but did not feel like home.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘About Hermes.’

Ramy sighed. ‘Birdie, not now.’

‘I should have told you,’ Robin insisted. ‘I should have, and I didn’t, because somehow I still had it all split in my head, and I never put the two pieces together because I just didn’t see . . . I just – I don’t know how I didn’t see.’

Ramy regarded him in silence for a long moment, and then stepped closer so that they were standing side by side, gazing out over the water.

‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘Sir Horace Wilson, my guardian, once took me to one of the opium fields he’d invested in. In West Bengal. I don’t think I ever told you about it. That’s where the bulk of this stuff is grown – in Bengal, Bihar, and Patna. Sir Horace owned a share in one of the plantations. He was so proud; he thought this was the future of the colonial trade. He made me shake hands with his fieldworkers. He told them that someday, I might be their supervisor. This stuff changed everything, he said. This corrected the trade deficit.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

‘It’s sick,’ he whispered. ‘It’s sick, it’s so sick . . .’

‘But it’s just trade,’ said Ramy. ‘Everyone benefits; everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more. Continuous gains – that’s the logic, isn’t it? So why would we ever try to break out? The point is, Birdie, I think I understand why you didn’t see. Almost no one does.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Griffin was right to be angry, thought Robin, but he was wrong to think he could do anything about it. These trade networks were carved in stone. Nothing was pushing this arrangement off its course; there were too many private interests, too much money at stake. They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all.

‘It was so easy to forget,’ he said. ‘The cards it’s built on, I mean – because when you’re at Oxford, in the tower, they’re just words, just ideas. But the world’s so much bigger than I thought—’

‘It’s just as big as we thought,’ Ramy said. ‘It’s just that we forgot the rest of it mattered. We got so good at refusing to see what was right in front of us.’

‘But now I’ve seen it,’ said Robin, ‘or at least understand it a bit better, and it’s tearing me apart, Ramy, and I don’t even understand why. It’s not as if – as if—’

As if what? As if he’d seen anything properly horrible? As if he’d seen the slave plantations in the West Indies at the height of their cruelty, or the starved bodies in India, victims of utterly avoidable famines, or the slaughtered natives of the New World? All he’d seen was one opium den – but that was enough to act as synecdoche for the awful, undeniable rest.

He leaned over the side of the bridge, wondering how it might feel if he just toppled over the edge.

‘Are you going to jump, Birdie?’ Ramy asked.

‘It just doesn’t feel . . .’ Robin took a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t feel like we have the right to be alive.’

Ramy sounded very calm. ‘Do you mean that?’

‘No, I don’t, I just . . .’ Robin squeezed his eyes shut. His thoughts were so jumbled; he had no idea how to convey what he meant, and all he could grasp at were memories, passing references. ‘Did you ever read Gulliver’s Travels? I read it all the time, when I lived here – I read it so often I nearly memorized it. And there’s this chapter where Gulliver winds up on a land ruled by horses, who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, and where the humans are savage, idiot slaves called Yahoos. They’re swapped. And Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them. And that’s how this . . . that’s . . .’ Robin rocked back and forth over the bridge. He felt like no matter how hard he breathed, he could not get enough air. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

‘I do,’ Ramy said gently. ‘But it does no one any good for us to get into histrionics about it. So step down, Birdie, and let’s go and have that glass of water.’

The next morning Robin accompanied Mr Baylis to the downtown government office for their audience with Imperial High Commissioner Lin Zexu.

‘This Lin fellow is smarter than the rest,’ said Mr Baylis as they walked. ‘Nigh incorruptible. In the southeast, they call him Lin Qingtian[77] – clear as the heavens, he’s so impervious to bribes.’

Robin said nothing. He had decided to suffer through the rest of his duties in Canton by doing the bare minimum required of him, and this did not involve egging on Mr Baylis’s racist diatribes.

Mr Baylis did not appear to notice. ‘Now, be on your toes. The Chinese are a devilishly tricky sort – duplicitous by nature, and all that. Always saying one thing when they mean quite the opposite. Careful you don’t let them get the better of you.’

‘I’ll stay sharp,’ Robin said shortly.

By Mr Baylis’s account, one would imagine Commissioner Lin was nine-foot tall, had eyes that could shoot fire and trickster’s horns. In person, the Commissioner was a mild-mannered, gentle-featured man of average height and build. His person was entirely nondescript save for his eyes, which seemed unusually bright and perceptive. He had with him his own interpreter, a young Chinese man who introduced himself as William Botelho, and who, to Robin’s surprise, had studied English in the United States.

‘Welcome, Mr Baylis,’ said Commissioner Lin as William swiftly translated into English. ‘I’m told you have some thoughts you would like to share with me.’

‘The issue, as you know, is the opium trade,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘It is the opinion of Mr Jardine and Mr Matheson that it would benefit both your people and ours if their agents could legally sell opium along the coast in Canton without interference. They’d appreciate an official apology for the inhospitable treatment their trading agents received earlier this year. And it seems only just that the twenty thousand chests of opium that were seized a few months ago are returned to us, or at least monetary compensation equivalent to their market value.’

For the first few moments Commissioner Lin only listened, blinking, as Robin continued to rattle off Mr Baylis’s list of demands. Robin tried not to convey Mr Baylis’s tone, which was loud and patronizing, but to instead deliver them in as flat and emotionless a manner as he could manage. Still, his ears reddened in embarrassment; this did not feel like a dialogue but a lecture, the sort one might give a dim child.

Mr Baylis did not seem baffled by Commissioner Lin’s lack of response; when his words met with silence, he merely continued: ‘Misters Jardine and Matheson would also like to say that the Qing Emperor ought to realize his government’s exclusive trade policies do not benefit the Chinese. Your own people, in fact, resent your trade barriers, which they believe do not represent their interests. They would much rather enjoy free association with foreigners, for that gives them too an opportunity to seek wealth. Free trade is, after all, the secret to national prosperity – and believe me, your people could do with reading some Adam Smith.’

Finally, Commissioner Lin spoke. ‘We know this.’ William Botelho swiftly translated. It was an odd conversation, conveyed through four people, none of whom spoke directly to the person he was listening to. ‘These are the precise terms in the many letters delivered from Misters Jardine and Matheson, no? Have you come to say anything new?’

Robin looked expectantly to Mr Baylis. Mr Baylis faltered briefly. ‘Well – no, but it bears repeating in person—’

Commissioner Lin clasped his hands behind his back, then asked, ‘Mr Baylis, is it not true that in your own country, opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity?’ He paused to let William translate.

‘Well, yes,’ said Mr Baylis, ‘but the question is trade, not Britain’s domestic restrictions—’

‘And,’ continued Commissioner Lin, ‘does not the sanction against your own civilians’ use of opium prove that you know full well how harmful it is to mankind? We should like to ask, has China ever sent forth a noxious article from its soil? Have we ever sold you anything save for that which is beneficial, that which your country has great demand for? Is your argument now that the opium trade is, in fact, good for us?’

‘The debate,’ insisted Mr Baylis, ‘is about economics. I once had an admiral seize my ship and search it for opium. When I explained to him I had none, as I follow the laws set by the Qing Emperor, he professed disappointment. He was hoping to purchase it wholesale and redistribute it himself, you see. Which proves the Chinese have much to profit from this trade as well—’

‘You are still avoiding the question of who smokes the opium,’ said Commissioner Lin.

Mr Baylis gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Robin, tell him—’

‘I will reiterate to you what we wrote to your Queen Victoria,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Those who wish to trade with our celestial empire must obey the laws set down by the Emperor. And the Emperor’s new law, about to be put into force, reads that any foreigners bringing opium into China with designs to sell it will be decapitated, and all property on board the ship will be confiscated.’

‘But you can’t do that,’ Mr Baylis blustered. ‘Those are British citizens you’re talking about. That’s British property.’

‘Not when they choose to be criminals.’ Here William Botelho mirrored Commissioner Lin’s cool disdain with exact precision, down to the slightest arch of his eyebrow. Robin was impressed.

‘Now look here,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘The British don’t fall under your jurisdiction, Commissioner. You haven’t got any real authority.’

‘I am aware that you believe your interests will always supersede our laws,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Yet we stand inside Chinese territory. And so I will remind you, and your masters, that we will enforce our laws as we see fit.’

‘Then you know we’ll have to defend our citizens as we see fit.’

Robin was so amazed Mr Baylis had spoken these words out loud that he forgot to translate. There was an awkward pause. At last, William Botelho murmured Mr Baylis’s meaning in Chinese to Commissioner Lin.

Commissioner Lin was utterly unfazed. ‘Is this a threat, Mr Baylis?’

Mr Baylis opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and then closed it. Irritated as he was, he’d apparently realized that as much as he loved verbally berating the Chinese, he still couldn’t issue a declaration of war without his government’s backing.

All four parties regarded each other in silence.

Then abruptly, Commissioner Lin nodded to Robin. ‘I would like a private conversation with your assistant.’

‘Him? He hasn’t any company authority,’ Robin translated automatically on Mr Baylis’s behalf. ‘He’s just the interpreter.’

‘I mean only for a casual conversation,’ said Commissioner Lin.

‘I – but he’s not permitted to speak on my behalf.’

‘I don’t need him to. In fact, I rather think we’ve said all that needs to be said to each other,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Don’t you?’

Robin allowed himself the simple pleasure of watching Mr Baylis’s shock turn to indignation. He considered translating his stuttered protests, but decided on silence when it became clear none of it was coherent. At last Mr Baylis, for lack of any better option, allowed himself to be escorted out of the room.

‘You too,’ Commissioner Lin told William Botelho, who obeyed without comment.

Then they were alone. Commissioner Lin gazed at him for a long, silent moment. Robin blinked, unable to sustain eye contact; he felt certain he was being searched, and this made him feel both inadequate and desperately uncomfortable.

‘What is your name?’ Commissioner Lin asked quietly.

‘Robin Swift,’ Robin said, then blinked, confused. The Anglophone name seemed incongruous for a conversation held in Chinese. His other name, his first name, had not been used for so long that it hadn’t crossed his mind to say it.

‘I mean—’ But he was too embarrassed to continue.

Commissioner Lin’s gaze was curious, unmoving. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Here, in fact,’ said Robin, grateful for a question he could easily answer. ‘Though I left when I was very young. And I haven’t been back in a long time.’

‘How interesting. Why did you leave?’

‘My mother died of cholera, and a professor at Oxford became my guardian.’

‘You belong to their school, then? The Translation Institute?’

‘I do. It’s the reason why I left for England. I’ve studied my whole life to be a translator.’

‘A very honourable profession,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Many of my countrymen look down on learning barbarian tongues. But I’ve commissioned quite a few translation projects since I assumed power here. You must know the barbarians to control the barbarians, don’t you think?’

Something about the man compelled Robin to speak frankly. ‘That’s rather the same attitude they have about you.’

To his relief, Commissioner Lin laughed. This emboldened Robin. ‘May I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Why do you call them yi? You must know that they hate it.’

‘But all it means is “foreign”,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘They are the ones who insisted on its connotations. They create the insult for themselves.’

‘Then wouldn’t it be easier just to say yáng?’

‘Would you let someone come in and tell you what words in your own language mean? We have words to use when we wish to insult. They should feel lucky guǐ[78] is not more prevalent.’

Robin chuckled. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Now I would like you to be frank with me,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Is there any point to negotiating this subject? If we swallowed our pride, if we bent the knee – would this mediate things whatsoever?’

Robin wanted to say yes. He wished he could claim that yes, of course, there was yet space to negotiate – that Britain and China, both being nations led by rational, enlightened people, could certainly find a middle ground without resorting to hostilities. But he knew this was not true. He knew Baylis, Jardine, and Matheson had no intention of compromising with the Chinese. Compromise required some acknowledgment that the other party deserved equal moral standing. But to the British, he’d learned, the Chinese were like animals.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They want what they want, and they won’t settle for anything less. They don’t respect you, or your government. You are obstacles to be resolved, one way or another.’

‘Disappointing. For all their talk of rights and dignity.’

‘I think those principles only apply to those they find human.’

Commissioner Lin nodded. He seemed to have decided something; his features set with resolve. ‘Then there’s no need to waste words, is there?’

Only when Commissioner Lin turned his back to him did Robin realize he had been dismissed.

Unsure what to do, he gave an awkward, perfunctory bow and left the room. Mr Baylis was waiting in the corridor, looking disgruntled.

‘Anything?’ he demanded as servants escorted them out of the hall.

‘Nothing,’ Robin said. He felt slightly dizzy. The audience had ended so abruptly that he didn’t know what to make of it. He’d been so focused on the mechanics of translation, on conveying Mr Baylis’s precise meanings, word for word, that he’d failed to grasp the shift in the conversation. He sensed something momentous had just occurred, but he wasn’t sure of what, nor his role in it. He kept going over the negotiation in his head, wondering if he’d made some disastrous mistake. But it had all been so civil. They had only reiterated positions well established on paper, had they not? ‘He seemed to have considered the matter settled.’

Mr Baylis hurried immediately to the upstairs offices upon their return to the English Factory, leaving Robin alone in the lobby. He wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He was supposed to have been out interpreting all afternoon, but Mr Baylis had absconded without any parting instructions. He waited in the lobby for a few minutes, then at last made his way to the sitting room, assuming it would be best to stay in a public area in case Mr Baylis decided he still needed him. Ramy, Letty, and Victoire sat at a table playing a game of cards.

Robin took the empty seat beside Ramy. ‘Don’t you have silver to polish?’

‘Finished early.’ Ramy dealt him a hand. ‘Gets a bit boring here when you can’t speak the language, to be honest. We’re thinking we might take a boat trip to see the Fa Ti river gardens later when we’re allowed. How was the meeting with the Commissioner?’

‘Strange,’ said Robin. ‘We didn’t get anywhere. He seemed very interested in me, though.’

‘Because he can’t figure out why a Chinese interpreter is working for the enemy?’

‘I suppose,’ Robin said. He couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding, as if watching a gathering storm, waiting for the skies to split. The mood in the sitting room seemed too light-hearted, too tranquil. ‘How are you all? You think they’ll give you anything more interesting to do?’

‘Not likely.’ Victoire yawned. ‘We’re abandoned children. Mama and Papa are too busy wrecking economies to deal with us.’

‘Good Lord.’ Suddenly Letty stood. Her eyes were fixed, wide and horrified, on the window, where she pointed. ‘Look – what in God’s name—’

A great fire roared on the opposite bank. But the burn, they saw when they rushed to the window, was a controlled burn; it only seemed catastrophic because of the billowing flames and smoke. When Robin squinted, he saw that the flames were contained at their source to a pile of chests loaded on deep-bellied boats that had been pushed out to the shallows. A few seconds later he smelled their contents: a sickly sweet scent carried by wind across the coast through the windows of the English Factory.

Opium. Commissioner Lin was burning the opium.

‘Robin.’ Professor Lovell stormed into the room, followed closely by Mr Baylis. Both looked furious; Professor Lovell’s face in particular was twisted with a rage Robin had never seen on him. ‘What did you do?’

‘I – what?’ Robin looked from Professor Lovell to the window, baffled. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘What did you say?’ Professor Lovell repeated, shaking Robin by the collar. ‘What did you tell him?’

It was the first time Professor Lovell had laid hands on him since that day in the library. Robin didn’t know what Professor Lovell might do now – the look in his eyes was beastly, wholly unrecognizable. Please, Robin thought wildly. Please, hurt me, hit me, because then we’ll know. Then there won’t be any question. But the spell passed as quickly as it came. Professor Lovell let go of Robin, blinking, as if coming back to himself. He took a step back and dusted off the front of his jacket.

Around them Ramy and Victoire stood tense, both crouching as if to spring between them.

‘Excuse me, I simply—’ Professor Lovell cleared his throat. ‘Get your things and meet me outside. All of you. The Hellas is waiting in the bay.’

‘But aren’t we headed to Macau next?’ Letty asked. ‘Our notices said—’

‘The situation’s changed,’ Professor Lovell said curtly. ‘We’ve booked early passage back to England. Go.’

Chapter Eighteen

The Hellas departed Pearl Bay with impressive haste. Within fifteen minutes of their boarding, the ropes were cut, the anchors pulled, and the sails unfurled. They darted out of the harbour, chased by billowing smoke that seemed to engulf the whole of the city.

The crew, who had not been told until boarding that they would be responsible for the room and board of five additional passengers, were curt and annoyed. The Hellas was not a passenger ship, and its quarters were already cramped. Ramy and Robin were told to bunk with the sailors, but the girls were afforded a private cabin, which they shared with the only other civilian on board – a woman named Jemima Smythe, a Christian missionary from America who’d tried to sneak into the mainland but was caught trying to ford the river into Canton’s suburbs.

‘Do you know what all the fuss is?’ She kept asking this as they sat hunched together in the mess. ‘Was it an accident, or did the Chinese do it on purpose? Will it be open war now, do you think?’ The last question she kept repeating excitedly at intervals, despite their exasperated assurances that they did not know. At last she changed the subject to what they’d been doing in Canton, and how they’d passed their days in the English Factory. ‘There are quite a few reverends under that roof, aren’t there? What did you do for your Sunday services?’ She stared inquiringly at Ramy. ‘Do you go to Sunday services?’

‘Of course.’ Ramy did not miss a beat. ‘I go because I’m forced, where I mumble apologies to Allah whenever possible.’

‘He’s joking,’ Letty said quickly before the horrified Miss Smythe could begin trying to convert him. ‘He’s Christian, of course – we all had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles at Oxford matriculation.’[79]

‘I’m very glad for you,’ Miss Smythe said sincerely. ‘Will you be spreading the gospel back home as well?’

‘Home is Oxford,’ Ramy said, blinking innocently. God help us, thought Robin, he’s snapped. ‘Do you mean that Oxford is full of heathens? Good heavens. Has anyone told them?’

At last Miss Smythe grew tired of them and wandered above deck to say her prayers, or whatever it was that missionaries did. Robin, Letty, Ramy, and Victoire huddled around the table, fidgeting like naughty schoolchildren awaiting punishment. Professor Lovell was nowhere to be seen; the moment they’d boarded, he’d gone off to speak to the captain. Still, no one had told them what was going on, or what would happen next.

‘What did you say to the Commissioner?’ Victoire asked quietly.

‘The truth,’ said Robin. ‘All I told him was the truth.’

‘But surely something set him off—’

Professor Lovell appeared at the door. They fell silent.

‘Robin,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a chat.’

He did not wait for Robin’s answer before he turned and headed down the passage. Reluctantly, Robin stood.

Ramy touched his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’ Robin hoped they could not tell how quickly his heart was beating, or how loudly the blood thundered through his ears. He did not want to follow Professor Lovell; he wanted to hide and stall, to sit in the corner of the mess with his head buried in his arms. But this confrontation had been a long time coming. The fragile truce struck on the morning of his arrest was never sustainable. They’d been lying to themselves for too long, he and his father. Things could not remain buried, hidden, and wilfully ignored forever. Sooner or later, things had to come to a head.

‘I’m curious.’ Professor Lovell was sitting behind a desk, paging idly through a dictionary when Robin at last made his way to his cabin. ‘Do you know the value of those chests burned in the harbour?’

Robin stepped inside and closed the door behind him. His knees trembled. He could have been eleven again, caught for reading fiction when he shouldn’t have been, cringing from the impending blow. But he was not a child anymore. He tried his very best to keep his voice from wobbling. ‘Sir, I don’t know what happened with the Commissioner, but it’s not—’

‘Over two million pounds,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You heard Mr Baylis. Two million, much of which William Jardine and James Matheson are now personally responsible for.’

‘He’d made up his mind,’ said Robin. ‘He’d made it up before he even met with us. There was nothing I could say—’

‘Your job was not difficult. Be a mouthpiece for Harold Baylis. Present a friendly face to the Chinese. Smooth things over. I thought we were clear on your priorities here, no? What did you say to Commissioner Lin?’

‘I don’t know what you think I did,’ said Robin, frustrated. ‘But what happened at the docks wasn’t because of me.’

‘Did you suggest he should destroy the opium?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Did you intimate anything else to him about Jardine and Matheson? Did you, perhaps, usurp Harold in any way? You’re sure there was nothing untoward about how you conducted yourself?’

‘I did what I was told,’ Robin insisted. ‘I don’t like Mr Baylis, no, but as far as how I represented the company—’

‘For once, Robin, please try to simply say what you mean,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Be honest. Whatever you’re doing now, it’s embarrassing.’

‘I – all right, then.’ Robin folded his arms. He had nothing to apologize for, nothing more to hide. Ramy and Victoire were safe; he had nothing to lose. No more bowing, no more silence. ‘Fine. Let’s be honest with each other. I don’t agree with what Jardine & Matheson is doing in Canton. It’s wrong, it disgusts me—’

Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s just a market. Don’t be childish.’

‘It’s a sovereign nation.’

‘It is a nation mired in superstition and antiquity, devoid of the rule of law, hopelessly behind the West on every possible register. It is a nation of semi-barbarous, incorrigibly backwards fools—’

‘It’s a nation of people,’ Robin snapped. ‘People you’re poisoning, whose lives you’re ruining. And if the question is whether I’ll keep facilitating that project, then it’s no – I won’t come back to Canton again, not for the traders, and not for anything remotely related to opium. I’ll do research at Babel, I’ll do translations, but I won’t do that. You can’t make me.’

He was breathing very hard when he finished. Professor Lovell’s expression had not changed. He watched Robin for a long moment, eyelids half-closed, tapping his fingers against his desk as if it were a piano.

‘You know what astounds me?’ His voice had grown very soft. ‘How utterly ungrateful one can be.’

This line of argument again. Robin could have kicked something. Always this, the argument from bondage, as if his loyalties were shackled by privilege he had not asked for and did not choose to receive. Did he owe Oxford his life, just because he had drunk champagne within its cloisters? Did he owe Babel his loyalty because he had once believed its lies?

‘This wasn’t for me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask for it. It was all for you, because you wanted a Chinese pupil, because you wanted someone who was fluent—’

‘You resent me, then?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘For giving you a life? For giving you opportunities you couldn’t have dreamed of?’ He sneered. ‘Yes, Robin, I took you from your home. From the squalor and disease and hunger. What do you want? An apology?’

What he wanted, Robin thought, was for Professor Lovell to admit what he’d done. That it was unnatural, this entire arrangement; that children were not stock to be experimented on, judged for their blood, spirited away from their homeland in service of Crown and country. That Robin was more than a talking dictionary, and that his motherland was more than a fat golden goose. But he knew these were acknowledgments that Professor Lovell would never make. The truth between them was not buried because it was painful, but because it was inconvenient, and because Professor Lovell simply refused to address it.

It was so obvious now that he was not, and could never be, a person in his father’s eyes. No, personhood demanded the blood purity of the European man, the racial status that would make him Professor Lovell’s equal. Little Dick and Philippa were persons. Robin Swift was an asset, and assets should be undyingly grateful that they were treated well at all.

There could be no resolution here. But at least Robin would have the truth about something.

‘Who was my mother to you?’ he asked.

This, at least, seemed to rattle the professor, if only for the briefest moment. ‘We are not here to discuss your mother.’

‘You killed her. And you didn’t even bother to bury her.’

‘Don’t be absurd. It was the Asiatic Cholera that killed her—’

‘You were in Macau for two weeks before she died. Mrs Piper told me. You knew the plague was spreading, you know you could have saved her—’

‘Heavens, Robin, she was just some Chink.’

‘But I’m just some Chink, Professor. I’m also her son.’ Robin felt a fierce urge to cry. He forced it down. Hurt never garnered sympathy from his father. But anger, perhaps, might spark fear. ‘Did you think you’d washed that part out of me?’

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

But he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double. Unless he chose.

‘Did you think,’ said Robin, ‘that enough time in England would make me just like you?’

Professor Lovell cocked his head. ‘You know, I once thought that having offspring was a kind of translation of its own. Especially when the parents are of such vastly different stock. One is curious to see what ends up coming through.’ His face underwent the strangest transformation as he spoke. His eyes grew larger and larger until they were frighteningly bulbous; his condescending sneer grew more pronounced, and his lips drew back to reveal teeth. It was meant, perhaps, as a look of exaggerated disgust, but it appeared more to Robin as if a mask of civility had been stripped away. It was the ugliest expression he had ever seen his father wear. ‘I’d hoped to raise you to avoid the failings of your brother. I hoped to instill you with a more civilized sense of ethics. Quo semel est imbuta recens, servabit odorem testa diu,[80] and all that. I hoped I might develop you into a more elevated cask. But for all your education, there is no raising you from that base, original stock, is there?’

‘You’re a monster,’ Robin said, amazed.

‘I haven’t the time for this.’ Professor Lovell flipped the dictionary shut. ‘It’s clear bringing you to Canton was the wrong idea. I had hoped it might remind you how lucky you were, but all it’s done is confuse you.’

‘I’m not confused—’

‘We’ll re-evaluate your position at Babel when we return.’ Professor Lovell gestured towards the door. ‘For now, I think, you ought to take some time to reflect. Imagine spending the rest of your life in Newgate, Robin. You can rail against the evils of commerce all you like, if you do it in a prison cell. Would you prefer that?’

Robin’s hands formed fists. ‘Say her name.’

Professor Lovell’s eyebrow twitched. He gestured again to the door. ‘That will be all.’

‘Say her name, you coward.’

‘Robin.’

This was a warning. This was where his father drew the line. Everything Robin had done until now might still be forgiven, if he only backed down; if he only made his apologies, bent to authority, and returned to naive, ignorant luxury.

But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.

He stepped forward. ‘Father, say her name.’

Professor Lovell pushed his chair back and stood.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

And rage, of course, came from madness.[81]

Afterwards, Robin wondered often if Professor Lovell had seen something in his eyes, a fire he hadn’t known his son possessed, and whether that – his startled realization that his linguistic experiment had developed a will of his own – had prompted Robin in turn to act. He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood.

Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know.

This he knew:

Professor Lovell stood abruptly. His hand went to his pocket. And Robin, either mirroring or provoking him, did the same. He reached for his front pocket, where he kept the bar that had killed Eveline Brooke. He was not imagining what the bar might do – of this he was certain. He spoke the match-pair because they were the only words that came to mind to describe this moment, its immensity. He thought of Professor Lovell’s poker cracking over and over against his ribs as he lay curled on the library floor, too startled and confused to cry out. He thought of Griffin, poor Griffin, spirited to England at a younger age than he’d been; chewed up and thrown away because he didn’t remember enough of his native tongue. He thought of the listless men in the opium den. He thought of his mother.

He was not thinking of how the bar would claw apart his father’s chest. Some part of him must have known, of course, because words only activated the bars if you meant them. If you only uttered the syllables, they had no effect. And when he saw the character in his mind, saw the grooves etched in shining silver, and spoke the word and its translation out loud, he must have thought of what it would do.

Bào: to explode, to burst forth with what could no longer be contained.

But it was not until Professor Lovell fell to the floor, until the heady, salty scent of blood filled the air, that Robin realized what he’d done.

He dropped to his knees. ‘Sir?’

Professor Lovell did not stir.

‘Father?’ He grasped Professor Lovell’s shoulders. Hot, wet blood spilled over his fingers. It would not stop; it was everywhere, an endless fountain gushing out of that ruin of a chest.

‘Diē?’

He did not know what made him say it, the word for father. Perhaps he thought it would stun Professor Lovell, that the shock alone would bring him back to life, that he could yank his father’s soul back to his body by naming the one thing that they had never named. But Professor Lovell was limp, gone, and no matter how hard Robin shook him the blood would not stop pouring.

‘Diē,’ he said again. Then a laugh escaped his throat; hysterical, helpless, because it was so very funny, so apt that the romanization of father contained the same letters for death in English. And Professor Lovell was so clearly, incontrovertibly dead. There was no walking back from this. There could be no more pretending.

‘Robin?’

Someone banged at the door. Dazed, without thinking, Robin stood and unlatched it. Ramy, Letty, and Victoire came tumbling in, a babble of voices – ‘Oh, Robin, are you—’; ‘What’s happening—’; ‘We heard shouting, we thought—’

Then they saw the body and the blood. Letty let out a muffled shriek. Victoire’s hands flew to her mouth. Ramy blinked several times, then uttered, very softly, ‘Oh.’

Letty asked, very faintly, ‘Is he . . . ?’

‘Yes,’ Robin whispered.

The cabin went very silent. Robin’s ears were ringing; he brought his hands to his head, then immediately lowered them, for they were bright scarlet and dripping.

‘What happened . . . ?’ Victoire ventured.

‘We quarrelled.’ Robin could barely get the words out. He was struggling now to breathe. Black pressed in at the edges of his vision. His knees felt very weak, and he wanted badly to sit down, only the floor was drenched in a spreading pool of blood. ‘We quarrelled, and . . .’

‘Don’t look,’ Ramy instructed.

No one obeyed. They all stood frozen in place, gazes locked on Professor Lovell’s still form as Ramy knelt beside him and held two fingers against his neck. A long moment passed. Ramy murmured a prayer under his breath – ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi Raji’un’ – and then moved his hands over Professor Lovell’s eyelids to push them closed.

He exhaled very slowly, pressed his hands against his knees for a moment, then stood up. ‘What now?’