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

Chapter Nineteen

‘Keep him in the cabin,’ Victoire said with amazing composure, though the words that came out of her mouth were quite mad. ‘We’ll just . . . roll him up in those sheets and keep him out of sight until we get back to England—’

‘We can’t keep a body concealed for six weeks,’ Letty shrilled.

‘Why not?’

‘It’ll rot!’

‘Fair that,’ said Ramy. ‘Sailors smell bad, but they don’t smell that bad.’

Robin was stunned that their first instinct was to discuss how to hide the body. It didn’t change the fact that he’d just killed his father, or that he’d possibly implicated all of them in the murder, or that scarlet streaked the walls, the floor, his neck, and his hands. But they were talking as if this were only a matter to be fixed – a thorny translation that could be resolved, if they could only find the right turn of phrase.

‘All right, look – here’s what we’ll do.’ Victoire pushed her palms against her temples and took a deep breath. ‘We’ll get rid of the body somehow. I don’t know how, we’ll figure out a way. Then when we dock—’

‘How do we tell the crew to leave him alone for six weeks?’ Letty demanded.

‘Nine weeks,’ said Victoire.

‘What?’

‘This isn’t one of the fast clippers,’ said Victoire. ‘It’ll take nine weeks.’

Letty pressed her palms against her eyes. ‘For the love of God.’

‘How’s this?’ asked Victoire. ‘We’ll tell them he’s got some contagion. I don’t know, some – some scary disease – Robin, you come up with something exotic and disgusting that will scare them off. Say it’s something he picked up in the slums and they’ll all be too scared to come in.’

There was a brief silence. This was, they all had to admit, rather good logic; or at least, it was not immediately evident this was nonsense.

‘Fine.’ Ramy had begun pacing back and forth across the small stretch of wooden floorboards that weren’t covered with blood. ‘Oh, heavens – Allah forgive us.’ He rubbed at his eyes. ‘Fine, yes, that could work. Suppose we keep this a secret until we’re back in London. What then?’

‘Easy,’ said Victoire. ‘We’ll say he died during the journey. During his sleep, perhaps. Only we can’t have the ship’s doctor coming to do an autopsy, because the risk of contamination is too great. We’ll ask for a coffin, which we’ll stuff a bunch of – I don’t know, books rolled up in clothes – and then we’ll carry it off and get rid of it.’

‘That’s insane,’ said Letty. ‘That’s absolutely insane.’

‘Do you have a better idea?’ Victoire inquired.

Letty was silent for a moment. Robin was absolutely sure she would insist they turn themselves in, but then she threw up her hands and said, ‘We could just tip him overboard in broad daylight, say he accidentally drowned, and then they’ll all have seen him die so we won’t seem suspicious—’

‘Oh, and that’s not suspicious?’ asked Ramy. ‘We’ll just drag this bloody corpse up above deck, pretend it’s walking on its own, and then hurl it into the waves where anyone can see that gaping hole where his heart should be? That’s how we prove our innocence? Have some creativity, Letty, we’ve got to play this right—’

At last Robin found his tongue. ‘No. No, this is mad, I can’t let – You all can’t—’ He kept tripping over his words. He took a deep breath, stilled his tongue. ‘I did this. I’ll tell the captain, I’ll turn myself in, and that’s it.’

Ramy scoffed. ‘Well, that’s out of the question.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Robin. ‘You’ll be implicated if—’

‘We’re all implicated regardless,’ said Victoire. ‘We’re all foreigners returning from a foreign country on a ship with a dead white man.’ This statement excluded Letty, but no one corrected her. ‘There is no world in which you go to prison and the rest of us walk free. You see this, right? Either we protect you, or we damn ourselves.’

‘That’s right,’ Ramy said firmly. ‘And none of us are letting you go to prison, Birdie. We’ll all keep our silence, all right?’

Only Letty hadn’t spoken. Victoire nudged her. ‘Letty?’

Letty had turned so pale she matched the bloodless corpse on the floor. ‘I . . . yes. All right.’

‘You can go, Letty,’ said Robin. ‘You don’t have to hear—’

‘No, I want to be here,’ said Letty. ‘I want to know what happens next. I can’t just let you all . . . No.’ She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then reopened her eyes and announced very slowly, as if she’d just come to the decision, ‘I’m in this. With you. All of you.’

‘Good,’ Ramy said briskly. He wiped his hands on his trousers, then resumed his pacing. ‘Now, here’s what I’m thinking. We aren’t supposed to be on this packet. We were originally scheduled to return on the fourth, remember? No one’s expecting us back before then, which means nobody will be looking for him when we disembark.’

‘Right.’ Victoire nodded, then picked up his train of thought. It was quite frightening, watching the two of them. They grew more confident as they spoke. It was as if they were simply collaborating on a group translation, playing off each other’s brilliance. ‘It’s clear the easiest way to get caught is for someone to glimpse the body. So our first priority, as I said, should be to get rid of it as soon as possible – as soon as it’s dark outside. Then, for the rest of the voyage, we’ll tell everyone he’s ill. No one’s more afraid of foreign diseases than sailors, isn’t that right? The moment we let slip that he’s down with something that they might catch, I guarantee you no one will approach that door for weeks. Which means all we’ve got to worry about is getting him into the water.’

‘Well, and cleaning up all this blood,’ said Ramy.

Madness, Robin thought. This was madness, and he couldn’t understand why no one was laughing, why everyone seemed to be very seriously contemplating the idea of dragging their professor’s body up two flights of stairs and hurling it into the sea. They were all past the point of incredulity. The shock had worn off, and the surreal had become the practical. They were speaking not in terms of ethics, but of logistics, and this made Robin feel as if they’d stepped into an upside-down world where nothing made sense, and no one had a single problem with it but him.

‘Robin?’ Ramy asked.

Robin blinked. They were all looking at him with very concerned expressions. He gathered this was not the first time he’d been addressed. ‘I’m sorry – what?’

‘What do you think?’ Victoire asked gently. ‘We’re going to drop him overboard, all right?’

‘I – well, I suppose that works, I just . . .’ He shook his head. There was a very loud ringing in his ears, and it made it hard for him to collect his thoughts. ‘Sorry, I just . . . aren’t any of you going to ask me why?’

Blank stares all around.

‘It’s just – you’re all signed up to help me conceal a murder?’ Robin couldn’t help all his statements becoming questions. The whole world right then seemed like one great, unanswerable question. ‘And you’re not even going to ask how, or why?’

Ramy and Victoire exchanged a look. But it was Letty who answered first. ‘I think we all understand why.’ Her throat pulsed. He could not decipher the expression on her face – it was something he’d never seen on her before, some strange mixture of pity and resolve. ‘And to be honest, Robin, I think the less we say about it the better.’

Cleaning up the cabin went faster than Robin had feared. Letty secured a mop and bucket from the crew by claiming she’d vomited from seasickness, and the rest of them contributed several articles of clothing to soak up the bloody water.

Then there was the matter of disposal. They decided that shoving Professor Lovell in a trunk was their best chance at getting his body to the upper deck unquestioned. The migration upstairs was a game of bated breaths and progress in inches. Victoire would dart forward every few seconds, check to make sure there was no one in sight, and then motion frantically for Robin and Ramy to drag the trunk up another few steps. Letty kept guard on the top deck, feigning a nighttime stroll for some fresh air.

Somehow they got the trunk to the edge of the railing without attracting suspicion.

‘All right.’ Robin slid the lid off the trunk. Originally they’d considered throwing the whole trunk away, but Victoire had astutely pointed out that wood would float. He was afraid to look down; he wanted, if possible, to do this without looking at his father’s face. ‘Quickly, before anyone sees—’

‘Hold on,’ said Ramy. ‘We have to weight it down, otherwise it’ll bob around.’

Robin had a sudden vision of Professor Lovell’s body floating in the wake of the ship, attracting a crowd of sailors and seagulls. He fought a wave of nausea. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘I was a bit panicked, all right?’

‘But you seemed so calm—’

‘I’m good in emergencies, Birdie, but I’m not God.’

Robin’s eyes darted around the deck, searching for anything that might serve as an anchor – oars, wooden buckets, spare planks – damn it, why was everything on a ship designed to float?

At last he found a pile of rope knotted through with what looked like weights. He prayed it wasn’t needed for anything important and dragged it over to the trunk. Securing the rope around Professor Lovell was a nightmare. His heavy, stiffening limbs did not move easily; the corpse seemed in fact to be actively resisting them. The rope, horrifically, snagged on exposed and jagged ribs. Robin’s hands, sweaty with fear, kept slipping; several agonizing minutes passed before they got the rope snugly around the professor’s arms and legs. Robin wanted to tie a quick knot and be done with it, but Ramy was adamant they take their time; he didn’t want the ropes to disentangle as soon as the body hit the water.

‘All right,’ Ramy whispered at last, yanking at the rope. ‘That should do it.’

They each took an end of the corpse – Robin the shoulders, and Ramy the feet – and hoisted it out of the trunk.

‘One,’ Ramy whispered. ‘Two . . .’

On the third swing, they lifted Professor Lovell’s body over the railing and let go. It seemed an eternity before they heard the splash.

Ramy bent over the railing, scrutinizing the dark waves.

‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘He’s not coming up.’

Robin couldn’t speak. He staggered several steps back and vomited onto the deck.

Now, Ramy instructed, they simply went back to their bunks and acted normal for the rest of the voyage. Simple, in theory. But of all the places to commit a murder, a ship midvoyage had to be one of the worst. A killer on the street could at least drop his weapon and flee the city. But they were stuck for two more months at the scene of the crime, two months during which they had to maintain the fiction that they had not blown a man’s chest apart and dumped his body into the ocean.

They tried to keep up appearances. They took their daily strolls around the deck, they entertained Miss Smythe and her tiresome inquiries, and they appeared for meals in the mess, thrice a day on the clock, trying their best to work up an appetite.

‘He’s just feeling under the weather,’ Ramy answered when the cook asked why he hadn’t seen Professor Lovell for several days. ‘He says he’s not very hungry – some kind of stomach affliction – but we’ll bring him something to eat later.’

‘Did he say what’s precisely the matter?’ The cook was a smiling and gregarious man; Robin couldn’t tell if he was prying or just being friendly.

‘Oh, it’s a whole host of minor symptoms,’ Ramy lied smoothly. ‘He’s complained of a headache, some congestion, but it’s mostly nausea. He gets dizzy if he stands up for too long, so he’s spending most of his days in bed. Sleeping quite a lot. Could be seasickness, although he didn’t have any problems with it on the way over.’

‘Interesting.’ The cook rubbed his beard for a moment, then turned on his heel. ‘You wait right here.’

He strode out of the mess at a fast clip. They stared at the door, stricken. Had he grown suspicious? Was he alerting the captain? Was he checking on Professor Lovell’s cabin to confirm their story?

‘So,’ Ramy muttered, ‘do we run now, or . . . ?’

‘And go where?’ Victoire hissed. ‘We’re in the middle of an ocean!’

‘We could beat him to Lovell’s cabin, perhaps—’

‘But there’s nothing there, there’s nothing we can do—’

‘Shush.’ Letty nodded over her shoulder. The cook was already striding back into the mess, holding a small brown sachet in one hand.

‘Candied ginger.’ He offered it to Robin. ‘Good for upset stomachs. You scholars always forget to bring your own.’

‘Thank you.’ Heart hammering, Robin took the sachet. He tried his best to keep his voice level. ‘I’m sure he’ll be very grateful.’

Luckily, none of the rest of the crew ever questioned Professor Lovell’s whereabouts. The sailors were none too fascinated by the daily dealings of scholars they’d been paid a pittance to transport; they were more than happy to pretend they did not exist at all. Miss Smythe was a different story. She was, likely out of sheer boredom, desperately persistent in making herself useful. She asked incessantly about Professor Lovell’s fever, the sound of his cough, and colour and composition of his stool. ‘I’ve seen my share of tropical diseases,’ she said. ‘Whatever he’s got, I’ve surely seen it in among the locals. Just let me have a look at him, I’ll get him fixed right up.’

Somehow they convinced her that Professor Lovell was both highly contagious and painfully shy. (‘He won’t be alone with an unmarried woman,’ Letty vowed solemnly. ‘He’ll be furious if we let you in there.’) Still, Miss Smythe insisted that they join her in a daily prayer for his health, during which it took Robin all he had not to retch from guilt.

The days were terribly long. Time crawled when every second contained a horrible contingency, the question will we get away? Robin was constantly sick. His nausea was wholly different from the roiling unease of seasickness; it was a vicious mass of guilt gnawing at his stomach and clawing at his throat, a poisonous weight that made it hard to breathe. Trying to relax or to distract himself was no help; it was when he slipped up and lost his guard that the sickness redoubled. Then the buzzing in his ears grew louder and louder and black seeped into the edges of his vision, reducing the world to a blurry pinprick.

Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus. Sometimes the most he could do was to remember to breathe, hard and even. He had to scream a mantra in his mind – it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re all right, they don’t know, they think you’re just a student and they think he’s just sick – but even that mantra threatened to spin out of control; if he relaxed his focus for just one second, it morphed to the truth – you killed him, you blew a hole in his chest and his blood’s all over the books, all over your hands, slick, wet, warm—

He was scared of his subconscious; of letting it wander. He could dwell on nothing. Every thought that passed through his mind spiralled into a chaotic jumble of guilt and horror; always solidified into the same bleak refrain:

I have killed my father.

I have killed my father.

I have killed my father.

He tortured himself with imagining what might happen to them if they were caught. He projected the scenes so vividly they felt like memories – the short and damning trial, the disgusted looks from the jurors; the manacles around their wrists and, if not the gallows, then the long, crowded, miserable journey to a penal colony in Australia.

What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was what a truly fleeting moment the actual killing had been – no more than a split second of impulsive hatred, a single uttered phrase, a single throw. The Analects of Confucius made the claim sìbùjíshé;[82] that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy’s, Letty’s, and Victoire’s should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort. The truth of the murder would have made more sense had he stood over his father’s body with a blunt axe, bringing it down over and over into his skull and chest until blood sprayed across both their faces. Something brutal, something sustained, a true manifestation of monstrous intent.

But that did not describe what had happened at all. It had not been vicious. It had not taken effort. It was all over so fast, he hadn’t even had time to deliberate. He couldn’t remember acting at all. Could you intend a murder if you couldn’t remember wanting it?

But what kind of question was that? What was the blasted point of sorting through whether he’d desired his father’s death or not, when his ruined corpse was incontrovertibly, irreversibly sinking to the bottom of the ocean?

The nights were far worse than the days. At least the days offered the temporary distractions of the outdoors, the rolling ocean and spraying mists. At night, confined to his hammock, there was only the unforgiving dark. Nights meant sweat-drenched sheets, chills, and shakes, and not even the privacy to moan and scream out loud. Robin lay with his knees curled up to his chest, muffling his frantic breathing with both hands. When he managed snatches of sleep, his dreams were fragmented and horrifyingly vivid, revisiting every beat of that final conversation until the devastating finale. But the details kept changing. What were the last words Professor Lovell had said? How had he looked at Robin? Had he really stepped closer? Who had moved first? Was it self-defence, or was it a preemptive strike? Was there a difference? He wrecked his own memory. Awake and asleep, he examined the same moment from a thousand different angles until he truly no longer knew what had happened.

He wanted all thoughts to stop. He wanted to disappear. At night, the black, endless waves seemed like utopia, and he wanted nothing more than to hurl himself over the side, to let the ocean swallow him and his guilt into its obliterating depths. But that would only condemn the others. How would that look, one student drowned and their professor killed? No excuses, however creative, however true, could extricate them from that.

But if death was not an option, perhaps punishment still was. ‘I have to confess,’ he whispered to Ramy one sleepless night. ‘That’s the only way, we have to end it—’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Ramy.

He scrambled madly out of his hammock. ‘I mean it, I’m going to the captain—’

Ramy jumped up and caught him in the passageway. ‘Birdie, get back in there.’

Robin tried to push past Ramy for the stairs. Ramy promptly slapped him across the face. Somehow this calmed him, if only due to shock – the blinding white pain wiped everything from his mind, just for a few seconds, just long enough to still his racing heart.

‘We are all implicated now,’ Ramy hissed. ‘We cleaned that room. We hid the body for you. To protect you. We’ve all lied a dozen times now; we are accessories in this crime, and if you go to the hangman, you doom us all. Do you understand?’

Chastened, he hung his head and nodded.

‘Good,’ said Ramy. ‘Now back to bed.’

The only silver lining to this whole grotesque affair was that he and Ramy were finally reconciled. The act of murder had bridged the gap between them, had blown Ramy’s accusations of complicity and cowardice out of the water. It didn’t matter that it had been an accident, or that Robin would take it back immediately if he could. Ramy no longer had any ideological grounds to resent him, for between them, only one of them had killed a colonizer. They were co-conspirators now, and this brought them closer than they ever had been. Ramy took on the role of comforter and counsellor, witness to his confessions. Robin didn’t know why he thought speaking his thoughts might make anything better, for saying any of it out loud only served to make him more confused, but he was desperately grateful that Ramy was at least there to listen.

‘Do you think I’m evil?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘You’ve been saying that a lot.’

‘You’ve been ridiculous a lot. But you’re not evil.’

‘But I’m a murderer,’ he said, then said it again, because the words were so absurd that the very act of forming the vowels felt bizarre. ‘I took a life. With full deliberation, with full intent – I knew what the bar would do to him and I threw it, and I watched it break his body, and in the moment before I regretted it, I was satisfied with what I had done. It wasn’t an accident. It doesn’t matter how much I wish I could take it back now – I wanted him dead, and I killed him.’ He took a shuddering breath. ‘Am I – what kind of person do you have to be to do that? A villain. A blackhearted wretch. How else does that happen, Ramy? There’s no in-between. There’s no rule under which this is forgivable, is there?’

Ramy sighed. ‘Whoever takes a life – it will be as if they killed all humanity. So says the Qu’ran.’

‘Thanks,’ Robin muttered. ‘That’s comforting.’

‘But the Qu’ran also speaks of Allah’s infinite mercy.’ Ramy was quiet for a moment. ‘And I think . . . well, Professor Lovell was a very bad man, wasn’t he? You acted in self-defence, didn’t you? And the things he did to you, to your brother, to your mothers . . . perhaps he did deserve to die. Perhaps the fact that you killed him first prevented unforetold harm from coming to others. But that’s really not your decision to make. That’s God’s.’

‘Then what do I do?’ Robin asked miserably. ‘What do I do?’

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Ramy. ‘He’s dead, you killed him, and there’s nothing you can do to change that except pray to God for forgiveness.’ He paused, tapping his fingers against his knee. ‘But the question now is how to protect Victoire and Letty. And your turning yourself in doesn’t do that, Birdie. Neither does your torturing yourself about your worth as a human being. Lovell’s dead, and you’re alive, and perhaps that’s what God willed. And that’s as much comfort as I can offer.’

The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.

Ramy’s favourite way of panicking was to voice all his anxieties in extravagant, incredibly specific detail. ‘Someone will go to his cabin,’ he declared. ‘They’ll need to ask him a question – something inane, something about the arrival date or about payment for passage. Only he won’t be there, and they’ll ask us about it, and finally somebody will get suspicious and they’ll search the whole ship, and we’ll pretend we’ve no idea where he’s gone either and they won’t believe us, and then they’ll find the bloodstains—’

‘Please,’ Victoire said. ‘Please, for the love of God, stop.’

‘Then they’ll send us to Newgate,’ Ramy continued, intoning grandly as if narrating an epic poem, ‘and St Sepulchre’s bell will ring twelve times, and a great crowd will gather outside, and the next morning we’ll be hanged, one by one . . .’

The only way to get Ramy to stop was to let him finishing narrating the entire sick fantasy, which he always did, with more and more ludicrous descriptions of their executions every time. They actually brought Robin some relief – it was relaxing, in a way, to imagine the very worst that could happen, since it took the terror out of the unknown. But it only ever set Victoire off. Whenever these conversations occurred, she’d be unable to sleep. Then it would be her turn to lose her head, and she’d nudge them awake at four in the morning, whispering that she felt bad about keeping Letty up, and they would have to sit above deck with her, whispering inane stories about whatever came to mind – birdsong, Beethoven, departmental gossip – until the gentle reprieve of dawn.

Letty’s bad spells were the hardest to deal with. For Letty, alone among them, did not understand why Ramy and Victoire had come so readily to Robin’s defence. She assumed they’d protected Robin because they were friends. The one motive she understood was that she’d seen Professor Lovell seize Robin’s collar in Canton, and abusive fathers was something she and Robin had in common.

But since she saw Professor Lovell’s death as an isolated incident, not the tip of an iceberg, she was constantly trying to fix their situation. ‘There have to be ways to come clean,’ she kept saying. ‘We can say Professor Lovell was hurting Robin, that it was self-defence? That he’d lost his mind from stress, that he began it all, and that Robin was only trying to get away? We’d all testify, it’s all true, they’d have to acquit him – Robin, what do you think?’

‘But that’s not what happened,’ said Robin.

‘But you could say it’s what happened—’

‘It won’t work,’ Ramy insisted. ‘It’s too dangerous, and more, it’s a risk we absolutely don’t need to take.’

How could they tell her she was being delusional? That it was insane to imagine that the British legal system was truly neutral, that they would receive a fair trial, that people who looked like Robin, Ramy, and Victoire might kill a white Oxford professor, throw his body overboard, lie about it for weeks, and then walk away unscathed? That the fact that she clearly believed all this was only evidence of the starkly different worlds they lived in?

But since they couldn’t tell her the truth, Letty was undeterred. ‘I’ve got a new idea,’ she announced after they shot down her self-defence proposal. ‘So, as you all probably know, my father’s quite an important man—’

‘No,’ said Ramy.

‘Just let me finish. My father was rather influential in his time—’

‘Your father’s a retired admiral, put out to pasture—’

‘But he still knows people,’ Letty insisted. ‘He could call in some favours—’

‘What kind of favours?’ demanded Ramy. ‘“Hello, Judge Blathers, here’s the thing – my daughter and her dirty foreign friends have had their professor killed – a man crucial to the Empire, both financially and diplomatically – so when they’re up for trial I’ll need you to just go ahead and proclaim them innocent—”’

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Letty snapped. ‘What I’m saying is, if we tell him what happened and explain it’s an accident—’

‘An accident?’ Ramy repeated. ‘Have you covered up accidents before? Do they just look the other way when rich white girls kill people? Is that how it works, Letty? Besides, aren’t you on the outs with the admiral?’

Letty’s nostrils flared. ‘I’m only trying to help.’

‘We know,’ Robin said quickly, desperate to diffuse the tension. ‘And I’m grateful, truly. But Ramy’s right. I think it’s best that we keep all this quiet.’

Letty, glaring stiffly at the wall, said nothing.

Somehow they made it back to England. Two months passed and one morning they woke up to London on the horizon, shrouded in its familiar gloomy greys.

Feigning Professor Lovell’s illness throughout the journey had turned out to be simpler than even Victoire had expected; it was apparently very easy to convince an entire ship that an Oxford professor had a remarkably weak constitution. Jemima Smythe, for all her efforts, had finally grown tired of her clammed-up company, and made no efforts to draw out their parting. The sailors said hardly as much as a word of farewell when they disembarked. No one paid much attention to four travel-worn students making their way through the Legal Quays, not when there were goods to unload and pay to collect.

‘We sent the professor on ahead to see a physician,’ Letty told the captain when they passed him on the docks. ‘He said – ah, to say thank you for a smooth trip.’

The captain looked slightly puzzled by these words, but shrugged and waved them off.

‘A smooth trip?’ Ramy muttered. ‘A smooth trip?’

‘I couldn’t think of anything else to say!’

‘Be quiet and walk,’ Victoire hissed.

Robin was sure that everything they did screamed Murderers! as they lugged their trunks down the planks. Any moment now, he thought dizzily; one more step, and there it would be – a suspicious look, a flurry of footsteps, a call of ‘Hey there! You, stop!’ Surely they would not let them escape the Hellas so easily.

On shore, just twelve feet away, was England, was asylum, was freedom. Once they reached that shore, once they disappeared into the crowd, they would be free. But that was impossible, surely – the links connecting them to that bloody room could not be so easily severed. Could they?

The boardwalk gave way to solid land. Robin glimpsed over his shoulder. No one had followed them. No one was even looking their way.

They boarded an omnibus to north London, from which they hailed a cab to Hampstead. They’d agreed without much debate that they would first spend the night at Professor Lovell’s Hampstead residence upon arrival – they had got in too late to catch any trains to Oxford, and Robin knew both that Mrs Piper would still be in Jericho and that the spare key to the estate was hidden under the Ming flowerpot in the garden. The next morning they would board a train to Paddington and return to school as planned.

During the voyage it had crossed all their minds that there remained one obvious option – running, dropping everything and fleeing the continent; climbing onto a packet bound for America or Australia, or returning to the countries from which they’d been plucked.

‘We could escape to the New World,’ Ramy proposed. ‘Go to Canada.’

‘You don’t even speak French,’ Letty said.

‘It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?’

‘We’d have to find work,’ Victoire pointed out. ‘We won’t have our stipends anymore; how would we live?’

This was a good point, and one they’d somehow overlooked. Years of receiving a reliable stipend had made them forget that they only ever had enough to live on for several months; outside Oxford, in a place where their lodgings and meals were no longer provided, they would have nothing.

‘Well, how do other people find employment?’ Ramy had asked. ‘I suppose you just go up to a shop and answer an advertisement?’

‘You have to have been an apprentice,’ Letty had said. ‘There’s a training period, I think, though that costs money—’

‘Then how does one find a tradesman to take them on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Letty had said, frustrated. ‘How would I know? I’ve no idea.’

No, there was never any real possibility they would leave the university. Despite everything, despite the very real risk that if they went back to Oxford then they’d be arrested, investigated, and thrown in prison or hanged, they couldn’t conceive of a life not tied to the university. For they had nothing else. They had no skills; they had not the strength nor the temperament for manual labour, and they did not have the connections to find employment. Most importantly, they didn’t know how to live. None of them had the faintest idea how much it would cost to rent rooms, acquire a week’s worth of groceries, or set oneself up in a town that was not the university. Until now, all of that had been taken care of for them. In Hampstead, there had been Mrs Piper, and at Oxford, there were the scouts and bedmakers. Robin, indeed, would have been hard-pressed to explain how exactly one did the laundry.

When it came down to it, they simply could not think of themselves as anything else but students, couldn’t imagine a world where they did not belong to Babel. Babel was all they knew. Babel was home. And though he knew it was stupid, Robin suspected he wasn’t the only one who believed deep down that, despite everything, there was a world where once this trouble ended, once all necessary arrangements had been made and things were swept under the rug, he might still return to his room on Magpie Lane, might wake up to gentle birdsong and warm sunlight streaming through the narrow window, and once again spend his days poring over nothing but dead languages.

Chapter Twenty

It was raining hard when they climbed out of the cab in Hampstead. They found Professor Lovell’s house more by sheer luck than anything else. Robin had thought he’d easily remember the route, but three years away had done more to his memory than he’d realized, and the hammering sheets of rain made every residence look the same: wet, blockish, surrounded by slick, dripping foliage. By the time they finally found the brick-and-white-stucco house, they were sopping wet and trembling.

‘Hold on.’ Victoire pulled Ramy back just as he started for the door. ‘Shouldn’t we go round the back? In case someone sees us?’

‘If they see us then they see us, it’s not a crime to be in Hampstead—’

‘It is if it’s obvious you don’t live here—’

‘Hello there!’

They all turned their heads at once like startled kittens. A woman waved to them from the doorstep of the house across the street. ‘Hello,’ she called again. ‘Are you looking for the professor?’

They glanced at each other, panicked; they had not discussed an answer for this occasion. They had wanted to avoid all association with a man whose absence would soon garner considerable interest. But how else could they justify their presence in Hampstead?

‘We are,’ Robin said quickly, before their silence became suspicious. ‘We’re his students. We’re just back from overseas – he told us to meet him here when we returned, only it’s getting late and no one’s at the door.’

‘He’s probably at the university.’ The woman’s expression was actually quite friendly; she’d only seemed hostile because she’d been shouting over the rain. ‘He’s only here a few weeks of the year. Stay right there.’

She turned and hurried back inside her house. The door slammed shut behind her.

‘Damn it,’ Ramy muttered. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought it’d be better to stick close to the truth—’

‘A bit too close to the truth, don’t you think? What happens if someone questions her?’

‘What do you want to do, then, run?’

But the woman had already popped back outside. She rushed across the street towards them, shielding off the rain with an elbow. She extended her palm to Robin.

‘Here you are.’ She opened her fingers, revealing a key. ‘That’s his spare. He’s so scatterbrained – they asked me to keep one on hand for when he loses his. You poor things.’

‘Thank you,’ Robin said, stunned by their good fortune. Then a memory struck him, and he took a wild guess. ‘You’re Mrs Clemens, aren’t you?’

She beamed. ‘I certainly am!’

‘Right, that’s right – he said to ask you if we couldn’t find the key. Only we couldn’t figure out what house you were in.’

‘A good thing I was watching the rain, then.’ She had a broad, friendly smile; any suspicion, if it ever was there, had disappeared from her face. ‘I like to face the outside when I play my pianoforte. The world informs my music.’

‘Right,’ he said again, too giddy with relief to process this statement. ‘Well, thanks very much.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Call if you need anything.’ She nodded first to Robin, and then to Letty – she seemed not to even see Ramy or Victoire, for which Robin supposed they could only be grateful – and headed back across the street.

‘How on earth did you know?’ Victoire muttered.

‘Mrs Piper wrote about her,’ said Robin as he dragged his trunk up through the front garden. ‘Said a new family’s moved in, and that the wife is a lonely and eccentric type. I think she comes here most afternoons for tea when the professor is here.’

‘Well, thank God you write to your housekeeper,’ said Letty.

‘Truly,’ said Robin, and unlocked the door.

Robin had not been back to the house in Hampstead since he’d left for Oxford, and it seemed greatly changed in his absence. It was a good deal smaller than he’d remembered, or perhaps he’d just grown taller. The staircase was not such an endless spiral, and the high ceilings did not induce such a heavy sense of solitude. It was very dim inside; all the curtains were drawn, and sheets pulled over the furniture to protect it from dust. They groped around in the dark for a bit – Mrs Piper had always lit the lamps and candles, and Robin hadn’t a clue where she kept the matches. At last Victoire found some flint and candlesticks in the parlour, and from there they managed to light the fireplace.

‘Say, Birdie,’ said Ramy. ‘What’s all this . . . stuff?’

He meant the chinoiserie. Robin glanced around. The parlour was filled with painted fans, hanging scrolls, and porcelain vases, sculptures, and teapots. The effect was a garish re-creation of a Canton teahouse juxtaposed upon a base of English furniture. Had these always been there? Robin didn’t know how he had failed to notice as a child. Perhaps, fresh from Canton, he had not found the separation of two worlds so obvious; perhaps it was only now, after a full immersion in the most English of universities, that he’d developed a sharper sense of the foreign and the exotic.

‘I suppose he was a collector,’ said Robin. ‘Oh, I do remember now – he loved telling his guests about his acquisitions, where they’d come from and their particular histories. He was quite proud.’

‘How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’

‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.’

An expedition to the kitchens turned up nothing to eat. Mrs Piper wouldn’t have stocked provisions while she was still at the Oxford house. The Hampstead house had a persistent rat problem, Robin recalled, never resolved because Professor Lovell abhorred cats, and Mrs Piper hated leaving perishables at their mercy. Ramy found a tin of ground coffee and a jar of salt, but no sugar. They made and drank the coffee anyway. It only sharpened their hunger, but at least it kept them alert.

They had just washed and dried their empty mugs – Robin didn’t know why they were cleaning up when the owner of this place would never come home, but it still felt wrong to leave a mess – when they heard a sharp knock at the door. They all jumped. The knocker paused, then rapped again firmly, thrice in succession.

Ramy sprang up and reached for the fire poker.

‘What are you doing?’ Letty hissed.

‘Well, assuming they come in—’

‘Just don’t open the door, we’ll pretend no one’s here—’

‘But all the lights are on, you dolt—’

‘Then look out the window first—’

‘No, then they’ll see us—’

‘Hello?’ The knocker called through the door. ‘Can you hear me?’

They sagged with relief. It was only Mrs Clemens.

‘I’ll get it.’ Robin stood and shot Ramy a glare. ‘Put that away.’

Their kindly neighbour stood sopping wet on the doorstep, carrying a flimsy, ineffective umbrella in one hand and a covered basket in the other. ‘I noticed you hadn’t brought provisions. He always leaves the pantry empty when he’s gone – rat problem.’

‘I . . . I see.’ Mrs Clemens was very chatty. Robin hoped she did not want to come in.

When he said nothing else, she held the basket out towards him. ‘I’ve just asked my girl Fanny to cobble together what we had on hand. There’s some wine, a hard and a soft cheese, this morning’s bread – crusty, I’m afraid – and some olives and sardines. If you want bread fresh baked, you’ll have to try again in the morning, but let me know if you do want to come over so I can have Fanny send for more fresh butter, we’re nearly out.’

‘Thank you,’ Robin said, rather astounded by this generosity. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Of course,’ Mrs Clemens said promptly. ‘Can you tell me when the professor will be back? I need to have a word with him about his hedges.’

Robin blanked. ‘I . . . don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you say you’d come up ahead of him?’

Robin wasn’t sure what to say. He felt vaguely that the less of an oral trail they left, the better – he’d already told the captain that Professor Lovell had gone ahead of them, and they intended to tell the Babel faculty that Professor Lovell was still in Hampstead, so it might be very dangerous should Mrs Clemens present a different account entirely. But who was going to question all three parties? If the police had got that far, wouldn’t the four of them already be detained?

Letty came to his rescue. ‘Could be as soon as Monday,’ she said, nudging him aside. ‘But we heard at the docks that his ship might be delayed – bad weather over the Atlantic, you know – so it could be weeks still.’

‘How inconvenient,’ said Mrs Clemens. ‘Will you be staying as long, then?’

‘Oh, no, we’re heading back to school tomorrow. We’ll leave a note on the dining room table before we go.’

‘Very prudent. Well, good night,’ Mrs Clemens said cheerfully, and went back out into the rain.

They devoured the cheese and olives in seconds. The bread was hard and took some chewing, which slowed them down, but in minutes that was gone as well. Then they eyed the wine bottle with great longing, caught between knowing they should stay on their guard and wanting desperately to be drunk, until Ramy took responsibility and hid it in the pantry.

By then it was half past eleven. At Oxford, all of them would be awake for hours yet, poring over their assignments or laughing in each other’s rooms. But they were all exhausted, and too scared to part ways to separate bedrooms, so they searched the house for all the blankets and pillows they could find and piled them in the sitting room.

They decided to sleep in shifts, with one person always awake to keep watch. None of them really believed that the police might come crashing through the doors – and never mind that there was little they could do about it if that did happen – but it felt good to be at least minimally prudent.

Robin volunteered to go first. At first none of them could keep still, all jittery from coffee and nerves, but soon fatigue got the better of them, and in minutes their murmured anxieties gave way to deep, even breathing. Letty and Victoire were slumped together on the couch, Victoire’s head on Letty’s arm. Ramy slept on the floor beside Robin, body curled around the couch like protective parenthesis. The sight of them all together made Robin’s chest ache.

He waited half an hour, watching their chests rise and fall, before he dared to stand up. He reasoned it was safe to leave his post. If anything happened, he’d hear it across the house – the rain had now eased to a light patter, and the house was otherwise deathly silent. Holding his breath, he tiptoed out of the sitting room and up the stairs to Professor Lovell’s office.

It was just as cramped and messy as he remembered. At Oxford, Professor Lovell kept his office in some semblance of order, but at home he let his things devolve to a state of managed chaos. Loose papers lay strewn across the floor; books were stacked in piles around the shelves, some lying open, some shut around pens crammed inside to mark the pages.

Robin picked his way across the room to Professor Lovell’s desk. He’d never stood behind it; he’d only ever sat across it, hands clasped nervously in his lap. The desk seemed unrecognizable from the other side. A framed painting was propped upright on the right corner – no, not a painting, a daguerreotype. Robin tried not to look closely, but he couldn’t help but glimpse the outline of a dark-haired woman and two children. He turned the frame down.

He flipped through the loose papers on the desk. They were nothing interesting – notes on Tang dynasty poems and oracle bone inscriptions, both research projects Robin had known Professor Lovell was pursuing at Oxford. He tried the drawer on the right. He expected it to be locked, but it slid open with no trouble. Stashed inside were sheafs and sheafs of letters. He pulled them out and held them up to the lamplight one by one, unsure what he was looking for, or even what he expected to see.

He only wanted a picture of the man. He only wanted to know who his father was.

Most of Professor Lovell’s correspondence was with Babel faculty and representatives of the various trading companies – a handful with the East India Company, more from representatives with Magniac & Co., but the lion’s share were from men at Jardine & Matheson. These were quite interesting. He read faster and faster as he made his way through the pile, skimming over opening niceties for critical phrases buried in the middle paragraphs—–

. . . Gützlaff’s blockade might work . . . would only take thirteen warships, though the question is the time and expense . . . Simple show of force . . . Lindsay wants to embarrass them with a diplomatic withdrawal, but surely this endangers the sole customs agents left behind . . . bring them to the edge and they will back down . . . can’t be hard to decimate a fleet run by sailors who don’t even know what steamers are . . .

Robin exhaled slowly and sat back in the chair.

Two things were clear. First, there was no ambiguity what these documents were. A letter from Reverend Gützlaff from four months ago contained a detailed sketch of Canton’s main docks. On the other side was a list of all the known ships in the Chinese navy. These were not hypotheticals of Britain’s China policy. These were war plans. These letters included thorough accounts of the Qing government’s coastal defences, reports detailing the number of junks defending the naval stations, the number and placement of forts on the surrounding islands, and even the precise number of troops stationed at each.

Second, Professor Lovell’s voice emerged as one of the most hawkish among his interlocutors. Initially, Robin had conceived a silly, baseless hope that perhaps this war was not Professor Lovell’s idea, and that perhaps he had been urging them to stop. But Professor Lovell was quite vocal, not only on the many benefits of such a war (including the vast linguistic resources that would then be at his disposal), but about the ease with which the ‘Chinese, languid and lazy, with an army without one iota of bravery or discipline, might be defeated’. His father had not simply been a scholar caught up in trade hostilities. He had helped design them. One unsent missive, written in Professor Lovell’s neat, tiny hand and addressed to Lord Palmerston, read:

The Chinese fleet consists of outdated junks whose cannons are too small to aim effectively. The Chinese have only one ship worthy of combat against our fleet, the merchantman the Cambridge, purchased from the Americans, but they have no sailors that can handle her. Our agents report she sits idle in the bay. We will make short work of her with the Nemesis.

Robin’s heart was beating very quickly. He felt seized by a sudden urge to discover all he could, to determine the full extent of this conspiracy. He read frantically through the stack; when the letters ran out, he pulled another pile of correspondence from the left drawer. It revealed much of the same. The desirability of war was never a question, only its timing, and the difficulty of persuading Parliament to act. But some of these letters dated as far back as 1837. How had Jardine, Matheson, and Lovell known negotiations in Canton would break out in hostilities more than two years ago?

But that was obvious. They’d known because this was their intent all along. They wanted hostilities because they wanted silver, and without some miraculous change in the Qing Emperor’s mind, the only way to get that was to turn their guns on China. They’d planned on war before they had even set sail. They’d never meant to negotiate with Commissioner Lin in good faith. Those talks were merely a pretext for hostilities. Those men had funded Professor Lovell’s trip to Canton as a final expedition before they introduced the bill to Parliament. These men were relying on Professor Lovell to help them win a short, brutal, efficient war.

What would happen when they learned Professor Lovell was never coming back?

‘What’s that?’

Robin glanced up. Ramy stood in the doorway, yawning.

‘You’ve got an hour left before your turn,’ Robin said.

‘Couldn’t sleep. And these shifts are nonsense anyway, no one’s coming for us tonight.’ Ramy joined Robin behind Professor Lovell’s desk. ‘Digging around, are we?’

‘Look.’ Robin tapped the letters. ‘Read these.’

Ramy picked up a letter from the top of the pile, skimmed it, and then sat down across from Robin to take a closer look at the rest. ‘Good heavens.’

‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin. ‘Everyone’s in on it, everyone we met in Canton – look, here are letters from Reverends Morrison and Gützlaff – they’ve been using their covers as missionaries to spy on the Qing military. Gützlaff’s even been bribing informants to tell him particulars of Chinese troop deployment, which influential Chinese traders are against the British, and even which pawnshops would be good places to raid.’

‘Gützlaff?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Really? I didn’t know that German had it in him.’

‘There are also pamphlets to whip up public support for the war – look, here Matheson calls the Chinese “a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy”. And here someone called Goddard writes that deploying warships would be a “tranquil and judicious visit”. Imagine. A tranquil and judicious visit. What a way to describe a violent invasion.’

‘Incredible.’ Ramy’s eyes roved up and down the documents as he flipped through with increasing speed. ‘Makes you wonder why they sent us in the first place.’

‘Because they still needed a pretext,’ said Robin. It was falling into place now. It was all so clear, so ridiculously simple that he wanted to kick himself for not seeing it earlier. ‘Because they still needed something to take to Parliament to prove the only way they were going to get what they wanted was by sheer force. They wanted Baylis to humiliate Lin, not compromise with him. They wanted to bait Lin into declaring hostilities first.’

Ramy snorted. ‘Only they didn’t count on Lin blowing up all that opium in the harbour.’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘But I suppose they’re getting the just cause they wanted anyway.’

‘There you are,’ said Victoire.

They both jumped, startled.

‘Who’s watching the door?’ asked Robin.

‘It’ll be fine, no one’s breaking in at three in the morning. And Letty’s out like a log.’ Victoire crossed the room and peered down at the stack of letters. ‘What are these?’

Ramy gestured for her to sit. ‘You’ll see.’

Victoire, like Ramy, started reading faster and faster when she realized what she was looking at. ‘Oh, goodness.’ She touched her fingers to her lips. ‘So you think – so they never even—’

‘Right,’ said Robin. ‘It was all for show. We weren’t meant to negotiate peace at all.’

She gave the papers a helpless shake. ‘Then what do we do with this?’

‘What do you mean?’ Robin asked.

She shot him a puzzled look. ‘These are war plans.’

‘And we’re students,’ he replied. ‘What can we do?’

There was a long silence.

‘Oh, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘What are we even doing here? What do we think we’re running back to?’

Oxford was the answer. Oxford, which was what they’d all agreed on, because when they’d been trapped on the Hellas, their professor’s corpse sinking into the depths of the ocean behind them, the promise of a return to the normal and familiar was what kept them calm, a shared delusion of stability that kept them from going mad. All their planning had always stopped at their safe arrival in England. But they couldn’t keep skirting the issue, couldn’t keep up the blind and ridiculous faith that if they just got back to Oxford, then everything would be all right.

There was no going back. They all knew it. There was no pretending anymore, no hiding in their supposedly safe corner of the world while unimaginable cruelty and exploitation carried on beyond. There was only the vast, frightening web of the colonial empire, and the demands of justice to resist it.

‘Then what?’ asked Robin. ‘Where do we go?’

‘Well,’ said Victoire, ‘the Hermes Society.’

It seemed so obvious when she said it. Only Hermes might know what to do with this. The Hermes Society, which Robin had betrayed, which might not even be willing to take them back, was the only entity they’d encountered that had ever professed to bother with the problem of colonialism. Here was a way out, a rare and undeserved second chance to make good on wrong choices – if only they could find Hermes before the police found them.

‘We’re agreed, then?’ Victoire glanced back and forth between them. ‘Oxford, then Hermes – and then whatever Hermes needs of us, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Ramy said firmly.

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘No, this is madness. I’ve got to turn myself in, I need to go to the police as soon as I can—’

Ramy scoffed. ‘We’ve been over this, over and over and over. You turn yourself in and what? Forget that Jardine and Matheson are trying to start a war? This is bigger than us now, Birdie. Bigger than you. You’ve got obligations.’

‘But that’s just it,’ Robin insisted. ‘If I turn myself in, that takes the heat off the two of you. It disentangles this opium war from the murder, don’t you see? It frees you up—’

‘Stop it,’ said Victoire. ‘We won’t let you.’

‘Course we won’t,’ said Ramy. ‘Besides, that’s selfish – you don’t get to take the easy way out.’

‘How is that the easy—’

‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’

‘I do not—’

‘That’s why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.’

Robin thought this was supremely unfair. ‘I was only trying to save you that night.’

‘You were trying to let yourself off the hook,’ Ramy said, not unkindly. ‘But all sacrifice does is make you feel better. It doesn’t help the rest of us, so it’s an ultimately meaningless gesture. Now, if you’re finished with grand attempts at martyrdom, I think we should discuss . . .’

He trailed off. Victoire and Ramy followed his gaze to the door, where Letty stood, hands clutched against her chest. None of them knew how long she’d been there. Her face had gone very pale, save for two blotches of colour high on her cheeks.

‘Oh,’ said Ramy. ‘We thought you were asleep.’

Letty’s throat pulsed. She looked about to burst into sobs. ‘What,’ she asked in a tremulous whisper, ‘is the Hermes Society?’

‘But I don’t understand.’

Letty had been repeating this for the last ten minutes at regular intervals. It didn’t matter how they explained it – the necessity of the Hermes Society, and the myriad reasons why such an organization had to exist in the shadows – she kept shaking her head, her eyes blank and uncomprehending. She didn’t seem outraged or upset so much as truly baffled, as if they were trying to convince her that the sky was green. ‘I don’t understand. Weren’t you happy at Babel?’

‘Happy?’ Ramy repeated. ‘I suppose no one’s ever asked you if your skin’s been washed with walnut juice.’

‘Oh, Ramy, do they really?’ Her eyes widened. ‘But I never heard – but your skin is lovely—’

‘Or said you weren’t allowed in a shop, for reasons unclear,’ Ramy continued. ‘Or cut a wide circle around you on the pavement as if you had fleas.’

‘But that’s just Oxfordians being stupid and provincial,’ said Letty, ‘it doesn’t mean—’

‘I know you don’t see it,’ said Ramy. ‘And I don’t expect you to, that’s not your lot in life. But it’s not really about whether we were happy at Babel. It’s about what our conscience demands.’

‘But Babel gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’

‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

‘But the scholarships – I mean, without those scholarships all of you would have been – I don’t understand—’

‘You’ve made that abundantly clear,’ Ramy snapped. ‘You’re a proper little princess, aren’t you? Big estate in Brighton, summers in Toulouse, porcelain china on your shelves and Assam in your teacups? How could you understand? Your people reap the fruits of the Empire. Ours don’t. So shut up, Letty, and just listen to what we’re trying to tell you. It’s not right what they’re doing to our countries.’ His voice grew louder, harder. ‘And it’s not right that I’m trained to use my languages for their benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good.’

Letty took this better than Robin thought she would. She sat in silence for a moment, blinking, her eyes huge. Then her brows furrowed, and she asked, ‘But . . . but if inequality is the issue, then couldn’t you have gone through the university? There are all sorts of aid programmes, missionary groups. There’s philanthropy, you know, why couldn’t we just go to the colonial governments and—’

‘That’s a bit difficult when the whole point of the institution is preserving the Empire,’ said Victoire. ‘Babel doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit itself.’

‘But that’s not true,’ said Letty. ‘They contribute to charity all the time, I know, Professor Leblanc was leading research into London’s waterworks so that the tenement housing wouldn’t be so diseased, and there are humanitarian societies all over the globe—’[83]

‘Did you know that Babel sells bars to slave traders?’ Victoire interrupted.

Letty blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘Capitale,’ Victoire said. ‘The Latin capitale, derived from caput, becomes the Old French chatel, which in English becomes chattel. Livestock and property become wealth. They write that on the bars, daisy-chain it with the word cattle, and then they fix those bars to iron chains so that slaves can’t escape. You know how? It makes them docile. Like animals.’

‘But that’s . . .’ Letty was blinking very rapidly now, as if trying to force a mote of dust from her eye. ‘But, Victoire love, the slave trade was abolished in 1807.’[84]

‘And you think they just stopped?’ Victoire made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. ‘You don’t think we sell bars to America? You think British manufacturers don’t still profit from shackles and irons? You don’t think there are people who still keep slaves in England who simply manage to hide it well?’

‘But Babel scholars wouldn’t—’

‘That’s exactly the kind of thing Babel scholars do,’ Victoire said viciously. ‘I should know. It’s the kind of thing our supervisor was working on. Every time I met with Leblanc he’d change the subject to his precious chattel bars. He said he thought I might have special insight. He even asked once if I would put them on. He said he wanted to make sure it worked on Negroes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Letty, I tried.’ Victoire’s voice broke. There was such pain in her eyes. And it made Robin deeply ashamed, for only now did he see the cruel pattern of their friendship. Robin had always had Ramy. But at the end of the day, when they parted ways, Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.

And where were he and Ramy? Looking away, failing to notice, hoping secretly the girls would simply stop bickering and move on. Occasionally Ramy made jabs at Letty, but only for his own satisfaction. Never had either of them paused to consider how deeply alone Victoire had to have felt, all this time.

‘You didn’t care,’ Victoire continued. ‘Letty, you don’t even care that our landlady doesn’t let me use the indoor bathroom—’

‘What? That’s ridiculous, I would have noticed—’

‘No,’ said Victoire. ‘You didn’t. You never did, Letty, and that’s the point. And we’re asking you now to finally, please, hear what we’re trying to tell you. Please believe us.’

Letty, Robin thought, was close to a breaking point. She was running out of arguments. She had the look of a dog backed into a corner. But her eyes darted around, desperately seeking an escape. She would find any flimsy excuse, accept any convoluted alternative logic before she let go of her illusions.

He knew, because not so long ago, he’d done the same.

‘So there’s a war,’ she said after a pause. ‘You’re absolutely sure there’s going to be a war.’

Robin sighed. ‘Yes, Letty.’

‘And it’s absolutely Babel’s doing.’

‘You can read the letters yourself.’

‘And what’s – what’s the Hermes Society going to do about it?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘But they’re the only ones who can do something about it. We’ll bring them these documents, we’ll tell them all we know—’

‘But why?’ Letty persisted. ‘Why involve them? We should just do this ourselves. We should make pamphlets, we should go to Parliament – there are a thousand options we’ve got other than going through some . . . some secret ring of thieves. This degree of collusion, of corruption – if the public just knew, they wouldn’t possibly be for it, I’m certain. But operating underground, stealing from the university – that only hurts your cause, doesn’t it? Why can’t you simply go public?’

They were silent for a moment, all of them wondering who would tell Letty first.

Victoire shouldered the task. ‘I wonder,’ she said, very slowly, ‘if you’ve ever read any of the abolition literature published before Parliament finally outlawed slavery.’

Letty frowned. ‘I don’t see how . . .’

‘The Quakers presented the first antislavery petition to Parliament in 1783,’ said Victoire. ‘Equiano published his memoir in 1789. Add that to the countless slave stories the abolitionists were telling the British public – stories of the cruellest, most awful tortures you can inflict on a fellow human. Because the mere fact that Black people were denied their freedom was not enough. They needed to see how grotesque it was. And even then, it took them decades to finally outlaw the trade. And that’s slavery. Compared to that, a war in Canton over trade rights is going to look like nothing. It’s not romantic. There are no novelists penning sagas about the effects of opium addiction on Chinese families. If Parliament votes to force Canton’s ports open, it’s going to look like free trade working as it should. So don’t tell me that the British public, if they knew, would do anything at all.’

‘But this is war,’ said Letty. ‘Surely that’s different, surely that’ll provoke outrage—’

‘What you don’t understand,’ said Ramy, ‘is how much people like you will excuse if it just means they can get tea and coffee on their breakfast tables. They don’t care, Letty. They just don’t care.’

Letty was quiet for a long time. She looked pitiful, stricken and frail, as if she’d just been informed of a death in the family. She loosed a long, shaky breath and cast her eyes about each one of them in turn. ‘I see why you never told me.’

‘Oh, Letty.’ Victoire hesitated, then reached out and put her hand on Letty’s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

But she stopped there. It was clear Victoire could not think of anything more reassuring to say. There was nothing more to say at all, except the truth, which was that of course they wouldn’t have trusted her. That for all their history, for all their declarations of eternal friendship, they had no way of knowing which side she would take.

‘Our minds are made up,’ Victoire said gently, but firmly. ‘We’re taking this to Hermes, as soon as we arrive in Oxford. And you don’t have to go with us – we can’t force you to take that risk; we know you’ve suffered so much already. But if you’re not with us, then we ask you at least to keep our secrets.’

‘What do you mean?’ Letty cried. ‘Of course I’m with you. You’re my friends, I’m with you until the end.’

Then she flung her arms around Victoire and began to weep stormily. Victoire stiffened, looking baffled, but after a moment she raised her arms and cautiously hugged Letty back.

‘I’m sorry.’ Letty sniffled between sobs. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry . . .’

Ramy and Robin watched, unsure what to make of this. On someone else it would have been performative, sickening even, but with Letty, they knew it was not a charade. Letty could not cry on command; she could not even fake basic emotions on command. She was too stiff, too transparent; they knew she was unable to act in any way other than how she felt. So it did feel cathartic, seeing her break down like this, knowing that at last she understood how they all felt. It was a relief to see that in her they still had an ally.

Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

Chapter Twenty-One

Their return to Oxford the next morning quickly spiralled into a comedy of errors, much of which could have been avoided if they hadn’t been too exhausted or hungry or irritated with each other to communicate. Their purses were running low, so they spent an hour arguing over whether it was prudent to borrow Mrs Clemens’s carriage to Paddington Station until they gave up and forked over the fare for cabs. But cabs in Hampstead were hard to come by on Sunday mornings, which meant they didn’t reach the station until ten minutes after the Oxford train had departed. The next train was fully booked, and the one after that was delayed by a cow that had wandered onto the tracks, which meant they would not arrive at Oxford until after midnight.

A whole day, wasted.

They whiled away the hours in London, migrating from coffeehouse to coffeehouse so as not to attract suspicion, growing ever more twitchy and paranoid from the absurd amounts of coffee and sweets they bought to justify keeping their tables. Every now and then one of them would bring up Professor Lovell, or Hermes, only to be shushed viciously by the others; they didn’t know who could be listening, and the whole of London felt full of hostile eavesdroppers. It felt bad to be shushed, but no one had the heart for lighter conversation, and so none of them were speaking to each other by the time they dragged their trunks onto the crowded late train.

They passed the ride in resentful silence. They were ten minutes out from Oxford Station when Letty suddenly sat up and began hyperventilating.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God—’

She was attracting looks. Letty grabbed at Ramy’s shoulder in some appeal for comfort, but Ramy, impatient, jerked his arm from her grasp. ‘Letty, shut up.’

That was cruel, but Robin sympathized. Letty was wearing on him as well; she’d spent most of the day in hysterics, and he was sick of it. All of their nerves were shot, he thought nastily, and Letty should just chin up and keep it together like the rest of them.

Astounded, Letty fell silent.

At last, their train creaked into Oxford Station. Yawning and shivering, they lugged their trunks over bumpy cobblestones for the twenty minutes it took to walk back to the college – the girls would come to the porter’s lodge first to call a cab, they’d decided; it was too dark to walk so far up north alone. At last the austere stone face of University College emerged from the dark, and Robin felt a sharp pang of nostalgia at the sight of this magical and tainted place which, despite everything, still felt like home.

‘Hey there!’ It was the head porter, Billings, swinging a lantern before him. He looked them up and down and, upon recognition, cast them a broad smile. ‘Back from the Orient at last, are you?’

Robin wondered how they looked under the lamplight – panicked, ragged, and sweaty in yesterday’s clothes. Their exhaustion must have been obvious, for Billings’s expression changed to one of pity. ‘Oh, you poor dears.’ He turned and waved for them to follow. ‘Come with me.’

Fifteen minutes later they were seated around a table in the hall, huddled over cups of strong black tea while Billings fussed around in the kitchen. They’d protested they didn’t want to put him out of the way, but he’d insisted on cooking them a proper fry-up. Soon he emerged with plates of sizzling eggs, sausages, potatoes, and toast.

‘And something to lift the spirits.’ Billings set four mugs down in front of them. ‘Just some brandy and water. You’re not the first Babblers I’ve seen back from abroad. That’s always done the trick.’

The smell of food reminded them they were ravenous. They fell on the spread like wolves, chewing in frantic silence as Billings sat watching them, amused.

‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me about this exciting voyage, eh? Canton and Mauritius, was it? Did they feed you anything funny? See any local ceremonies?’

They glanced at each other, unsure of what to say. Letty began to cry.

‘Oh, come now.’ Billings nudged the mug of brandy closer to her. ‘It can’t have been that bad.’

Letty shook her head. She bit her lip, but a whining noise burst out. It was not a mere sniffle but a stormy, full-body cry. She clamped her hands over her face and sobbed heartily, shoulders quaking, incoherent words leaking through her fingers.

‘She was homesick,’ Victoire said lamely. ‘She was, ah, quite homesick.’

Billings reached out to pat Letty’s shoulder. ‘All’s well, child. You’re back home, you’re safe.’

He went out to wake the driver. Ten minutes later a cab pulled up to the hall, and the girls were off to their lodgings. Robin and Ramy dragged their trunks down to Magpie Lane and said their goodnights. Robin felt a fleeting anxiety when Ramy disappeared through the door into his room – he had grown used to Ramy’s company during all those nights on the voyage, and he was scared of being on his own for the first time in weeks, with no other voice to soften the dark.

But when he closed his own door behind him, he was surprised by how normal everything felt. His desk, bed, and bookshelves were exactly as he’d left them. Nothing had changed in his absence. The translation of the Shanhaijing he’d been working on for Professor Chakravarti still sat on his desk, half-finished in the middle of a sentence. The scout must have been in recently, because there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight. As he sat down on his lumpy mattress and breathed in the familiar, comforting scent of old books and mildew, Robin felt that if he only lay back and closed his eyes, he could get up in the morning and head to class like nothing had ever happened.

He woke to the sight of Ramy looming above him. ‘Good God.’ He bolted upright, breathing hard. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘You really should start locking your door.’ Ramy handed him a cup. ‘Now that we’re – you know. Tea?’

‘Thanks.’ He took the cup in both hands and sipped. It was their favourite blend of Assam, dark and heady and strong. For just a blissful moment there, sunlight streaming through the window and birds chirping softly outside, all that had transpired in Canton seemed like a terrible dream before cold, twisting memory sank in. He sighed. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The girls are here,’ said Ramy. ‘Time to get up.’

‘Here?’

‘In my sitting room. Come on.’

Robin washed his face and dressed. Across the hall, Victoire and Letty sat perched on Ramy’s sofa as Ramy passed around tea, a burlap sack of scones, and a small pot of clotted cream. ‘I assumed no one felt like going to hall, so that’s breakfast.’

‘These are very good,’ Victoire said, looking surprised. ‘Where—’

‘Vaults, just before they opened. They always have yesterday’s scones out for a fraction of the price.’ Ramy had no knife, so he scraped his scone directly against the cream. ‘Good, right?’

Robin sat down opposite the girls. ‘How’d you two sleep?’

‘All well, considered,’ said Letty. ‘Feels strange to be back.’

‘It’s too comfortable,’ Victoire agreed. ‘It feels like the world should be different now, but it’s . . . not.’

That was how Robin felt too. It seemed wrong to be back among his creature comforts, to sit on Ramy’s sofa and have their favourite tea with scones from their favourite café. Their situation did not feel commensurate to the stakes. The stakes, rather, seemed to demand that the world be on fire.

‘So, listen.’ Ramy took a seat beside Robin. ‘We can’t just wait around. Every passing second is one that we’re not in prison, and so we’ve got to use them. We’ve got to find Hermes. Birdie, how do you contact Griffin?’

‘I can’t,’ said Robin. ‘Griffin was very adamant about that. He knew how to find me, but I didn’t have any ways to reach him. That’s how it always worked.’

‘Anthony was the same,’ Victoire said. ‘Although – he did show us several drop points, places where we left things for him. Suppose we went and left messages there—’

‘How often does he check them, though?’ Letty asked. ‘Will he even check if he’s not expecting anything?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire, frustrated. ‘But it’s our only option.’

‘I do think they’ll be looking out for us,’ said Robin. ‘After what happened that night we were caught – I mean, there are too many loose ends, and now we’re all back I assume they’ll want to be in touch.’

He could tell from their expressions that this was no great reassurance. Hermes was finicky, unpredictable. Hermes might come knocking in the next hour, or they could go silent for six months.

‘How much time do we have, anyway?’ Ramy asked after a pause. ‘I mean, how long before they realize dear old Richard isn’t coming back?’

None of them could know for sure. Term was not due to start for another week, at which point it would be very suspicious that Professor Lovell had not returned to teach. But suppose the other professors had expected them all back earlier?

‘Well, who’s in regular contact with him?’ asked Letty. ‘We’ll have to tell some kind of story to the faculty, of course—’

‘And there’s Mrs Piper,’ said Robin. ‘His housekeeper in Jericho – she’ll be wondering where he is, I’ve got to call on her as well.’

‘Here’s an idea,’ said Victoire. ‘We could go to his office and look through his correspondence, see if there are any appointments he was due to keep – or even forge some replies if that buys us a little time.’

‘To be clear,’ said Letty, ‘you think we ought to break into the office of the man whose murder we covered up and rifle through his things, all while hoping no one catches us?’

‘The time to do it would be now,’ Victoire pointed out. ‘While no one knows we did it.’

‘How do you know they don’t already?’ Letty’s voice rose in pitch. ‘How do you know we won’t be clapped in irons the moment we walk into the tower?’

‘Holy God,’ Robin muttered. Suddenly it seemed absurd that they were having this conversation, that they were even in Oxford at all. ‘Why did we come back?’

‘We should go to Calcutta,’ Ramy declared abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s escape to Liverpool, we can book a passage from there—’

Letty’s nose wrinkled. ‘Why Calcutta?’

‘It’s safe there, I’ve got parents who can shield us, there’s space in the attic—’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life hiding in your parents’ attic!’

‘It would only be temporary—’

‘Everyone calm down.’ Victoire so seldom raised her voice, it hushed them at once. ‘It’s like – like an assignment, you understand? We only need a plan. We only have to break this down into component parts, finish them, and we’ll be fine.’ She lifted two fingers. ‘Now, it seems there are two things we need to do. Task one: get in touch with the Hermes Society. Task two: accumulate as much information as we can so when we do reach Hermes, they’ll be able to do something with it.’

‘You forgot task three,’ Letty said. ‘Don’t get caught.’

‘Well, that goes without saying.’

‘How exposed are we?’ asked Ramy. ‘I mean, if you think about it, we’re even safer here than we were on the ship. Bodies can’t talk, and he’s not going to wash up anywhere. Seems to me that if we all keep quiet, we’re fine, aren’t we?’

‘But they’ll start asking questions,’ said Letty. ‘I mean, obviously, at some point, someone’s going to notice Professor Lovell’s not answering any letters.’

‘So we keep telling them the same thing,’ said Victoire. ‘He’s holed up in his house, he’s grievously ill, which is why he’s not answering letters or taking visitors, and he told us to come back without him. That’s the whole story. Keep it simple, don’t embellish details. If we all give the same account, then no one will get suspicious. And if we come off as nervous, it’s because we’re concerned for our dear professor. Yes?’

No one challenged her. They were all hanging on her every word. The world had stopped spinning out of control; all that mattered was what Victoire said next.

She continued. ‘What I think, though, is that the more sitting around we do – that is, the more cautiously we behave – the more suspicious we look. We can’t hide away and keep out of sight. We’re Babel students. We’re busy. We’re fourth years losing our minds from all the work we’ve been assigned. We don’t have to pretend we’re not mad, because students here are always mad, but we’ve got to pretend we’re mad for the right reasons.’

Somehow, this made complete and utter sense.

Victoire pointed at Robin. ‘You get the housekeeper sorted, then go and get Professor Lovell’s correspondence. Ramy and I will go to Anthony’s drop points and leave as many encrypted messages as we can. Letty, you’ll go about your daily routine and give the impression that everything is perfectly fine. If people ask you about Canton, start spreading the story about the professor’s illness. We’ll all meet back here tonight, and hope to God nothing goes wrong.’ She took a deep breath and looked around, nodding as if trying to convince herself. ‘We’re going to make it through this, all right? We just can’t lose our heads.’

But this, Robin thought, was a foregone conclusion.

One by one they dispersed from Magpie Lane. Robin had hoped that Mrs Piper would not be at home in Jericho, that he could get away with simply leaving a message in the letterbox, but he’d barely knocked before she threw the door open with a wide smile. ‘Robin, dear!’

She hugged him tight. She smelled of warm bread. Robin’s sinuses stung, threatening tears. He broke away and rubbed at his nose, trying to pass it off as a sneeze.

‘You look thin.’ She patted his cheeks. ‘Didn’t they feed you in Canton? Or had you lost your taste for Chinese food?’

‘Canton was fine,’ he said weakly. ‘It’s the voyages where food’s scarce.’

‘Shame on them. You’re only kids, still.’ She stepped back and glanced around. ‘Is the professor back too, then?’

‘He won’t be back for a bit, actually.’ Robin’s voice wobbled. He cleared his throat and tried again. He’d never lied to Mrs Piper before, and it felt much worse than he’d expected. ‘He – well, he fell badly ill on the return voyage.’

‘My word, really?’

‘And he didn’t feel up to the journey back to Oxford, and was worried about transmitting it besides, so he’s quarantining himself in Hampstead for now.’

‘All on his own?’ Mrs Piper looked alarmed. ‘That fool, he should have written. I should head down tonight, Lord knows the man can’t even make himself tea—’

‘Please don’t,’ Robin blurted. ‘Erm – I mean, what he’s got is very contagious. It spreads through the air in particles when he coughs or speaks. We couldn’t even be in the same cabin with him on the ship. He’s trying to see as few people as possible. But he’s being taken care of. We had a doctor in to look at him—’

‘Which one? Smith? Hastings?’

He tried to remember the name of the doctor who’d come to treat him when he caught influenza as a child. ‘Erm – Hastings?’

‘Good,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘I always thought Smith was a quack. I had this terrible fever several years back, and he diagnosed it as simple hysterics. Hysterics! I couldn’t even keep broth down, and he thought I was making it all up.’

Robin took a steadying breath. ‘I’m sure Dr Hastings will take good care of him.’

‘Oh, sure, he’ll be back here demanding his sultana scones by the weekend.’ Mrs Piper smiled broadly. It was clearly fake; it did not quite reach her eyes, but she seemed determined to cheer him up. ‘Well, I can look after you, at least. Can I make you some lunch?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said quickly. ‘I can’t stay, there’s – I’ve got to go and tell the other professors. They don’t know yet, you see.’

‘You won’t even stay for tea?’

He wanted to. He wanted so badly to sit at her table, to listen to her rambling stories and feel, just for a fleeting moment, the warm comfort and safety of his childhood. But he knew he wouldn’t last five minutes, much less the time it would take to pour, steep, and sip a cup of Darjeeling. If he stayed, if he stepped inside that house, he would break down completely.

‘Robin?’ Mrs Piper examined his face, concerned. ‘Dear, you look so upset.’

‘It’s just—’ Tears blurred his eyes; he could not hold them back. His voice cracked. ‘I’m just so scared.’

‘Oh, dear.’ She wrapped her arms around him. Robin hugged her back, shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs. For the first time he realized he might never see her again – indeed, he hadn’t spared a second thought about what might happen to her when it became known Professor Lovell was dead.

‘Mrs Piper, I was wondering . . .’ He untangled himself and took a step back. He felt wretched with guilt. ‘Are you . . . have you got family or something? Some other place to go?’

She looked confused. ‘How do you mean?’

‘If Professor Lovell doesn’t make it,’ he said. ‘I’m just wondering – because if he doesn’t pull through, then you won’t have—’

‘Oh. Dear boy.’ Her eyes grew leaky. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I’ve got a niece and brother in Edinburgh – there’s no love lost there, but they’ll have to take me in if I come knocking. But it won’t come to that. Richard has caught his share of foreign diseases before. He’ll be back here for your monthly dinners in no time, and I’ll treat you both to a whole roasted goose when he is.’ She squeezed his shoulders. ‘You just focus on your studies, won’t you? Do good work, and don’t worry about the rest.’

He was never going to see her again. No matter how things fell out, this at least seemed certain. Robin fixed his eyes on her gentle smile, trying to memorize this moment. ‘I’ll do my best, Mrs Piper. Goodbye.’

He had to compose himself for a moment on the street before he could summon the nerve to walk into the tower.

The faculty offices were on the seventh floor. Robin waited in the stairwell until he was sure the hallway was empty before he darted forth and slid Professor Lovell’s key into the lock. The correspondence in the office was much the same as he’d found in Hampstead: letters to Jardine, Matheson, Gützlaff, and others on war plans for the coming invasion. He shuffled some into a pile and stuffed them into his jacket. He didn’t have the faintest clue what Hermes might do with them, but some proof, he assumed, was better than none.

He’d just locked the door behind him when he heard voices from Professor Playfair’s office. The first belonged to a woman, demanding and loud. ‘He’s missed three consecutive payments, and I haven’t been in touch with him in months—’

‘Richard is a very busy man,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘And he’s still overseas on the annual fourth years’ trip, which I’m sure he told you—’

‘He did not,’ said the woman. ‘You know he’s terrible about such things, we never know where he’s going. He doesn’t write, doesn’t even telegraph, he sends nothing for the children. You know, they’re starting to forget they have a father.’

Heart pounding, Robin crept to the corner of the hallway, remaining just within earshot. The staircase was just a few feet behind him. If the door opened, he could flee to the sixth floor before anyone saw him.

‘That must be, ah, very difficult,’ Professor Playfair said awkwardly. ‘Though I must say this isn’t a subject on which Richard and I converse frequently. You’d be better off taking it up directly with him—’

‘When’s he expected back?’

‘Next week. Though there’s been some trouble in Canton, I’ve heard, so it may be a few days earlier. But I truly don’t know, Mrs Lovell – I’ll send word when we hear anything, but for now we know as little as you do.’

The door opened. Robin tensed to flee, but morbid curiosity kept him bolted in place. He peeked out from around the corner. He wanted to see, to know for certain.

A tall, thin woman with grey-streaked hair stepped into the hallway. With her were two small children. The older one, a girl, looked about ten and had clearly been crying, though she concealed her sobs in one fist while she clenched her mother’s hand in the other. The younger child, a boy, was much smaller – perhaps only five or six. He tottered out into the hallway as Mrs Lovell said her goodbyes to Professor Playfair.

Robin’s breath caught in his throat. He found himself leaning further out into the hallway, unable to look away. The boy looked so much like himself, like Griffin. His eyes were the same light brown, his hair similarly dark, though it curled more than either of theirs.

The boy met his eyes. Then, to Robin’s horror, he opened his mouth and uttered in a high, clear voice, ‘Papa.’

Robin turned and fled.

‘What was that?’ Mrs Lovell’s voice carried over towards the staircase. ‘Dick, what did you say?’

Professor Lovell’s son babbled something in response, but Robin was flying too quickly down the stairs to hear.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ramy. ‘I didn’t know Professor Lovell even had a family.’

‘I told you he had an estate in Yorkshire!’

‘I thought you were making that up,’ said Ramy. ‘I’ve never seen him take a vacation once. He’s just not – not a family man. How’d he stay home long enough to conceive?’

‘The issue is, they exist and they’re worried,’ said Robin. ‘He’s apparently been missing payments to his estate. And now Playfair knows something’s wrong.’

‘Suppose we paid them off?’ asked Victoire. ‘Forged his handwriting and sent the money ourselves, I mean. How much does it take to maintain a household for a month?’

‘If it’s just the three of them?’ Letty thought for a moment. ‘Only about ten pounds.’

Victoire blanched. Ramy sighed and rubbed at his temples. Robin reached to pour himself a glass of brandy.

The mood that night was decidedly glum. Other than the stack of letters Robin had found in Professor Lovell’s office, the day had yielded nothing. The Hermes Society had remained silent. Robin’s window was empty. Victoire and Ramy had been to each of Anthony’s old drop points – a loose brick behind the Christ Church cathedral, a hidden bench in the Botanic Garden, an overturned and rarely used punt on the bank of the Cherwell – but none showed signs of recent visitation. They’d even walked back and forth in front of the Twisted Root for the better part of an hour, hoping Griffin might spot them lurking, but succeeded only in drawing looks from the patrons.

At least nothing disastrous had happened – no breakdowns, no ominous encounters with the Oxford police. Letty had begun hyperventilating again in the Buttery during lunch, or so Robin heard, but Victoire had slapped her on the back and pretended she’d merely choked on a grape. (Letty, Robin thought unkindly, was not helping the general feminist case that women were not nervous, pea-brained hysterics.)

They were safe, perhaps, for now. Yet they could not help feeling like sitting ducks. The clock was running out on them; too many people were growing suspicious, and their luck would not hold forever. But where else could they go? If they ran, then the Hermes Society had no way of finding them. They were trapped by obligation.

‘Oh, hell,’ said Ramy. He was going through the stacks of correspondence he’d retrieved from their pidges, sorting out the meaningless pamphlets from everything important. ‘I forgot.’

‘What?’ asked Letty.

‘The faculty party.’ Ramy waved a thick cream-coloured invitation card at them. ‘The damn faculty party, it’s this Friday.’

‘Well of course we’re not going,’ said Robin.

‘We can’t not go,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s the faculty party.’

Every year just before the start of Hilary, the Royal Institute of Translation put on a garden party in the University College grounds for faculty, students, and graduate fellows. They’d been to three by now. They were long, unremarkable events; like at all Oxford functions, the food was barely passable and the speeches were long. What Robin couldn’t understand was why Ramy was making such a big deal of it.

‘So what?’ asked Victoire.

‘So everyone goes,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s mandatory. They all know we’re back by now – we ran into Professor Craft outside the Rad Cam this morning, and plenty of people saw Letty in the Buttery. We have to keep up appearances.’

Robin could not imagine anything more horrifying than eating hors d’oeuvres in the company of Babel faculty.

‘Are you mad?’ Victoire demanded. ‘Those things are endless; we’ll never make it through.’

‘It’s only a party,’ said Ramy.

‘Three courses? Wine? Speeches? Letty’s barely keeping it together as it is, and you want to plant her by Craft and Playfair and expect her to talk about what a lovely time she had in Canton for over three hours?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Letty said weakly, convincing no one.

‘They’ll start asking questions if we’re not there—’

‘And they won’t ask questions when Letty vomits all over the centrepiece?’

‘She can pretend she has food poisoning,’ said Ramy. ‘We can pretend she’s been sick since this morning, which explains why she’s all pale and clammy, and why she had a fit in the Buttery. But can you really argue that’s more suspicious than all four of us failing to show up at all?’

Robin glanced to Victoire, hoping she had a counter-argument. But she was looking to him, expecting the same.

‘The party buys time,’ Ramy said firmly. ‘If we can just manage not to seem like total lunatics, we buy ourselves a day. Or two. That’s it. More time. That’s the only factor that matters.’

Friday turned out to be an unseasonably hot day. It began with a typical January morning chill, but by midafternoon the sun had burned through the cloud cover and was shining in full force. They’d all overestimated the cold when they got dressed, but once in the courtyard they could not easily remove their wool undershirts, which meant they had no choice but to sweat.

That year’s garden party was the most extravagant Babel had ever put on. The faculty was swimming in coin after a visit by the Russian Archduke Alexander to the university the previous May; the archduke, who had been so impressed by the wit and skill of his spontaneous interpreters at the reception, had made Babel a gift of one thousand pounds for discretionary funding. The professors had put that to lavish, if ill-considered, use. A string quartet played lustily in the middle of the quadrangle, though everyone veered away from them because the noise made conversation impossible. Half a dozen peacocks, reportedly imported from London Zoo, wandered around the green, harassing anyone dressed in bright colours. Three long, tented tables of food and drink occupied the centre of the green. The offerings included finger sandwiches, small pies, a grotesque variety of chocolates, and seven different flavours of ice cream.

Babel scholars milled around holding rapidly warming glasses of wine, making tepid and petty conversation. Like all faculties at Oxford, the Translation Institute was rife with internal rivalries and jealousies over funding and appointments, a problem exacerbated by the fact that each regional specialist thought their language was more rich, more poetic, more literary, and more fertile for silver-working than others. Babel’s departmental prejudices were just as arbitrary as they were confusing. The Romanticists enjoyed most of the literary prestige,[85] though Arabic and Chinese were highly prized mostly by virtue of how foreign and different they were, while languages closer to home like Gaelic and Welsh had almost no respect at all. This made small talk very dangerous; it was very easy to give offence if one displayed either too much or too little enthusiasm about one’s research. Walking around in the midst of it all was Reverend Doctor Frederick Charles Plumptre, Master of the College, and it was understood at some point that each of them would have to shake his hand, pretend that they believed he remembered them when it was obvious he hadn’t a clue what their names were, and suffer a painfully banal conversation about where they were from and what they studied before he let them go.

All this for three unbearable hours, for no one could leave before the banquet was over. The seating charts were made; their absences would be noticed. They had to stay until the sun had set, until all the toasts had been given, and until all the scholars present had had enough of pretending to enjoy socializing for a lifetime.

This is a disaster, Robin thought, glancing around. They would have been better off not showing up. None of them had their wits about them. He watched a graduate fellow ask Victoire a question three times before she finally registered his presence. Letty was standing in the corner, gulping down glass after glass of cold water as sweat dripped down her forehead. Ramy was faring the best, holding court with a gaggle of first years regaling him with questions about his voyage, but as Robin walked past him, he heard Ramy burst out in such an abrupt, hysterical peal of laughter that he nearly flinched back with fright.

Robin felt dizzy as he looked out over the crowded lawn. This was madness, he thought, sheer madness that he should be standing here among the faculty, holding a wineglass, concealing the truth that he’d killed one of their number. He wandered towards the buffet tables and filled a small plate with hors d’oeuvres, just to have something to do, but the thought of putting any of the rapidly spoiling tarts in his mouth was nauseating.

‘Feeling all right?’

He jumped and turned. It was Professors De Vreese and Playfair. They stood on either side of him like prison guards. Robin blinked rapidly, trying to arrange his features into something like a neutral smile. ‘Professors. Sirs.’

‘You’re sweating buckets.’ Professor Playfair scrutinized his face, looking concerned. ‘And you’ve got enormous shadows under your eyes, Swift. Have you been sleeping?’

‘Time lag,’ Robin blurted. ‘We didn’t – erm, we didn’t adjust our sleeping schedules on the return voyage as well as we should have. And besides we’re exhausted with, erm, with preterm reading.’

To his astonishment, Professor Playfair nodded in sympathy. ‘Ah, well. You know what they say. Student from studere, meaning “painstaking, dedicated application”. If you don’t feel like a nail struck constantly by a hammer, you’re doing it wrong.’

‘Indeed,’ said Robin. His strategy, he’d decided, was to come off as so boring that they lost interest and wandered off.

‘Did you have a good trip?’ inquired Professor De Vreese.

‘It was—’ Robin cleared his throat. ‘It was more than we bargained for, we think. We’re all very glad to be back.’

‘Don’t I know it. Those overseas affairs can be exhausting.’ Professor Playfair nodded to the plate in Robin’s hand. ‘Ah, I see you’ve found my inventions. Go on, have a bite.’

Robin, feeling pressured, bit into a tart.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ Professor Playfair watched him as he chewed. ‘Yes, it’s silver-enhanced. A fanciful little match-pair that I came up with on vacation in Rome. Pomodoro is a rather fanciful description for a tomato, you see – it literally means “apple of gold”. Now add the French intermediary, pomme d’amour, and you get a richness that the English doesn’t . . .’

Robin chewed, trying to look appreciative. All he could register was how slimy it was; how the salty juices bursting in his mouth made him think of blood and corpses.

‘You have pretoogjes,’ Professor De Vreese observed.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Pretoogjes.’ Professor De Vreese gestured at his face. ‘Fun eyes. A Dutch word. Twinkling eyes, shifting eyes. We use it to describe children who are up to no good.’

Robin had not the faintest idea what he was supposed to say in response to this. ‘I . . . how interesting.’

‘I think I’ll go and say hello to the Master now,’ said Professor De Vreese as if Robin hadn’t spoken. ‘Welcome back, Swift. Enjoy the party.’

‘So.’ Professor Playfair handed Robin a glass of claret. ‘Do you have any idea when Professor Lovell is back from London?’

‘I don’t know.’ Robin took a sip, doing his best to collect himself before he answered. ‘You’ve probably heard he’s holed up with something he contracted in Canton. He looked in a bad state when we left him, I’m not sure if he’ll even be back for the term.’

‘Interesting,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘It’s quite fortunate it didn’t spread to any of you.’

‘Oh, well – we took precautions when he started feeling out of sorts. Quarantine, face cloths, all of that – you know.’

‘Come now, Mr Swift.’ Professor Playfair’s voice became stern. ‘I know he’s not ill. I’ve sent three messengers to London since you lot have been back, and they’ve all reported the Hampstead house is presently empty.’

‘Really?’ Robin’s ears began to buzz. What was he supposed to do now? Was there any point in trying to maintain the lie? Should he just cut and run? ‘How very odd, that’s – I don’t know why he would . . .’

Professor Playfair took a step closer and bent his head conspiratorially towards Robin’s ear. ‘You know,’ he whispered, ‘our friends at Hermes would like very much to know where he is.’

Robin nearly spat out his claret. His throat caught the wine before he made a mess, but he then swallowed it up the wrong channel. Professor Playfair stood by calmly as he choked and gasped, spilling both his plate and glass in the process.

‘Quite all right, Swift?’

Robin’s eyes watered. ‘What did you—’

‘I’m with Hermes,’ Professor Playfair murmured pleasantly, eyes fixed on the string quartet. ‘Whatever you’re hiding, you’re safe telling me.’

Robin had no idea what to make of this. Certainly he felt no relief. Trust no one – Griffin had all but engraved this lesson in his bones. Professor Playfair could be easily lying – and this would be the simplest trick, too, if his goal was to coax Robin into spilling everything that he knew. Or Professor Playfair could be the ally, the saviour they’d been waiting for. He felt a pang of residual frustration. If only Griffin had ever told him more, if only Griffin hadn’t been so happy to leave him in the dark, cut off from others, and so utterly helpless.

He had no useful information to act on, only a gut instinct that something was badly wrong. ‘Thank the Lord,’ he said, mirroring Professor Playfair’s covert murmur. ‘So you know about Griffin’s Canton plot?’

‘Of course,’ Professor Playfair said, just a bit too eagerly. ‘Did it work?’

Robin paused. He had to play this next part very carefully. He had to reel out just enough to keep Professor Playfair on the line, curious but not quite ready to pounce. And he needed time – at least enough time to gather the others and run.

Professor Playfair slung his arm around Robin’s shoulders, drawing him in close. ‘Why don’t you and I go and have a chat?’

‘Not here.’ Robin’s eyes darted around the quad. Letty and Victoire were both staring at him over their shoulders. He blinked hard, glanced pointedly at the front exit, then back at them. ‘Not in front of the faculty, you never know who’s listening.’

‘Of course,’ said Professor Playfair.

‘The tunnels,’ said Robin, before Professor Playfair could suggest that they leave the party right then. ‘I’m meeting Griffin and the others tonight at the Taylorian tunnels at midnight, why don’t you come? I’ve got . . . I’ve got all those documents they’ve been waiting for.’

It worked. Professor Playfair let go of Robin’s shoulders and stepped away.

‘Very well.’ His eyes shone with glee; he looked one step away from rubbing his hands together like a villain on a stage. ‘Good work, Swift.’

Robin nodded, and only barely managed to keep a straight face until Professor Playfair moved on to chat with Professor Chakravarti across the green.

Then it took everything he had not to break into a run. He scanned the quad for Ramy, who was trapped in a conversation with Reverend Doctor Plumptre. Robin blinked frantically at him. Immediately Ramy spilled his wineglass all over his own front, exclaimed loudly in dismay, made his excuses, and beelined through the garden towards Robin.

‘Playfair knows,’ Robin told him.

‘What?’ Ramy glanced around. ‘Are you sure—’

‘We have to go.’ To his relief, Robin saw that Victoire and Letty were already moving towards the front gate. He wanted to follow, but too many faculty stood between them; he and Ramy would have to go out the back, by the kitchens. ‘Come on.’

‘How—’

‘Later.’ Robin hazarded a glimpse over his shoulder just before they left the garden. His stomach twisted – Playfair was saying something to Professor De Vreese, their heads bent close together. De Vreese glanced up and looked straight into Robin’s eyes. Robin looked away. ‘Just – come on.’

Victoire and Letty rushed towards them the moment they stepped outside.

‘What’s happened?’ Letty breathed. ‘Why—’

‘Not here,’ Robin said. ‘Walk.’

They marched at a hasty pace down Kybald Street, then turned right onto Magpie Lane.

‘Playfair’s onto us,’ said Robin. ‘We’re done.’

‘How do you know?’ Letty asked. ‘What did he say? Did you tell him?’

‘Of course not,’ Robin said. ‘But he pretended he was with Hermes, tried to get me to confess everything—’

‘How do you know he’s not?’

‘Because I lied,’ said Robin. ‘And he fell for it. He hasn’t a clue what Hermes does, he was fishing for information.’

‘Then what are we doing?’ Victoire asked suddenly. ‘Good God, where are we going?’

They had, Robin realized, been walking without purpose. They were headed now for High Street, but what would they do there? If Professor Playfair called for the police, they’d be spotted in seconds. They couldn’t go back into Number 4; they’d be trapped. But they had no money on their persons, and no means to pay the fare to anywhere else.

‘There you are.’

They all flinched backwards in fright.

Anthony Ribben stepped out onto the main road and looked them over, counting them with one finger like they were ducklings. ‘You’re all here? Excellent. Come with me.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Their shock was fleeting. Anthony broke into a run, and they followed without question. But instead of doubling back on Magpie Lane all the way to Merton Street, from where they might escape out towards Christ Church meadow, he took them back onto Kybald towards the college.

‘What are you doing?’ Ramy panted. ‘That’s where everyone—’

‘Just hurry,’ Anthony hissed.

They obeyed. It was wonderful to have someone tell them what to do. Anthony led them through the doors behind the kitchen, past the Old Library, and straight into the hall. On the other side of the wall, the garden party was still going on in full force; they could hear string instruments and voices through the stone.

‘In here.’ Anthony waved them into the chapel.

They darted in and shut the heavy wooden doors behind them. Outside service hours, the chapel felt strange: unearthly, silent. The air inside was repressively still. Apart from their panting, the only movement was the dust motes floating in the prisms of light streaming through the windows.

Anthony stopped before the memorial frieze of Sir William Jones.

‘What are you—’ Letty began.

‘Hush.’ Anthony reached towards the epigram, which read, He formed a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan Laws. He touched a succession of letters in turn, which sank slightly back into the stone when pushed. G, O, R . . .

Ramy snickered. Anthony touched a final letter in the much longer Latin inscription above the frieze, a rambling celebration of William Jones’s life and accomplishments. B.

Gorasahib.[86]

There was a scraping noise, then a whoosh of cold air. The frieze popped several inches out from the wall. Anthony pushed his fingers into the crack at the bottom edge and slid the panel upwards to reveal a pitch-black hole in the wall. ‘Get in.’

One by one, they helped each other inside. The tunnel turned out to be much wider than it appeared from the outside. They only had to crawl on their hands and knees for several seconds before the shaft emptied into a larger corridor. Robin could just feel the damp earth skimming the top of his head when he stood, though Ramy exclaimed when his head bumped against the ceiling.

‘Hush,’ Anthony grunted again as he pulled the door down behind them. ‘The walls are thin.’

The frieze slid back into place with a thud. The light in the passage disappeared. They groped their way forward, cursing as they stumbled against each other.

‘Ah, sorry.’ Anthony struck a match, and a flame materialized in his palm. Now they could see that several yards in, the cramped shaft expanded outwards into something more like a hallway. ‘There we go. Keep going, there’s a long walk ahead.’

‘Where—’ Letty began, but Anthony shook his head, lifted a finger to his lips, and pointed to the walls.

The tunnel widened more and more as they walked. The branch leading to the Univ chapel was apparently a new addition, for the passage where they walked now seemed much larger and older. Dried mud gave way to brick walls, and at several junctures, Robin saw sconces affixed to the upper corners. The dark should have felt claustrophobic, but in fact it felt comforting. Swallowed in the belly of the earth, truly hidden from view for the first time since their return voyage, they all found that they could finally breathe.

After several minutes of silence, Ramy asked, ‘How long’s that been there?’

‘Only a few decades, actually,’ said Anthony. ‘The tunnels have been here forever – they aren’t a Hermes project, we only took advantage of them – but that entryway is new. Lady Jones had the frieze installed not too many years ago, but we got in fast before construction work was done. Don’t worry, no one else knows. Is everyone all right?’

‘We’re okay,’ said Robin. ‘But, Anthony, there’s something you have to—’

‘I imagine there’s quite a lot you need to tell me,’ said Anthony. ‘Why don’t we start with what you’ve done with Professor Lovell? Is he dead? The faculty seem to think so.’

‘Robin killed him,’ Ramy said cheerily.

Anthony turned to glance at Robin over his shoulder. ‘Oh, really?’

‘It was an accident,’ Robin insisted. ‘We were quarrelling, and he – I don’t know, I suddenly . . . I mean, I did use this match-pair, only I didn’t know I was doing it until it was over—’

‘What’s more important is the war on China,’ said Victoire. ‘We’ve been trying to find you, to tell you. They’re planning an invasion—’

‘We know,’ said Anthony.

‘You do?’ asked Robin.

‘Griffin’s been afraid of this for a while. We’ve kept an eye on Jardine and Matheson, been tracking developments in the Factories. Though it’s never got this bad before. Up until now it was all noise. But they’ll really go to war, you think?’

‘I’ve got papers—’ Robin reached for his breast pocket as if they were still stowed within his jacket, and then cursed. ‘Damn it, they’re all in my room—’

‘What do they say?’

‘They’re letters, correspondence between Lovell and Jardine and Matheson both – and Palmerston, and Gützlaff, the whole lot of them – oh, but I left them on Magpie Lane—’

‘What do they say?’

‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin, flustered. ‘They’re plans that have been months, years in the making—’

‘They’re evidence of direct collusion?’ Anthony pressed.

‘Yes, they indicate that the negotiations were never in good faith, that the last round was only a pretext—’

‘Good,’ said Anthony. ‘That’s very good. We can work with that. We’ll send someone over to retrieve them. You’re in Griffin’s old room, correct? Number seven?’

‘I – yes.’

‘Very good. I’ll have that sorted. In the meantime, I suggest you all calm down.’ He paused, turned around, and gave them a warm smile. After the week they’d just had, the sight of Anthony’s face in the soft candlelight made Robin want to cry with relief. ‘You’re in safe hands now. I agree it’s quite dire, but we can’t solve anything in this tunnel. You’ve done very well, and I imagine you’re quite scared, but you can relax now. The grown-ups are here.’

The underground passage turned out to be quite long. Robin lost track of how far they walked; it had to be nearly a mile. He wondered how vast the network was – now and then they passed a split in the tunnel or a door embedded in the wall, suggesting more hidden entrances across the university, but Anthony shepherded them along without comment. These were, Robin assumed, among Hermes’s many secrets.

At last, the passage narrowed again until there was only space to walk in single file. Anthony took the lead, holding the candle high above his head like a beacon. Letty followed just behind him.

‘Why you?’ she asked quietly. Robin couldn’t tell if she meant to be discreet, but the tunnel was so narrow, her voice carried to the back of the line.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ murmured Anthony.

‘You loved it at Babel,’ said Letty. ‘I remember, you gave us our orientation tour. You adored it there, and they adored you.’

‘That’s true,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel treated me better than anyone ever had.’

‘Then why—’

‘She thinks it’s about personal happiness,’ Ramy interjected. ‘But Letty, we’ve told you, it doesn’t matter how happy we were personally, it’s about the broader injustice—’

‘That’s not what I meant, Ramy, I only—’

‘Let me try to explain,’ Anthony said gently. ‘On the eve of abolition throughout the colonies, my master decided he wanted to pack up and return to America. I wouldn’t be free there, you see. He could keep me in his household and call me his. This man had labelled himself an abolitionist. He’d decried the general trade for years; he just seemed to think our relationship was special. But when the proposals he’d publicly supported became law, he decided he really couldn’t bear the sacrifice of losing me. So I went on the run and sought refuge at Oxford. The college took me in and hid me until I was legally declared a free man – not because they care much about abolition either, but because the professors at Babel knew my worth. And they knew if I were sent back to America, they would lose me to Harvard or Princeton.’

Robin couldn’t see Letty’s face in the darkness, but he could hear her breathing growing shallower. He wondered if she was about to cry again.

‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’

‘But you don’t really believe that about Babel,’ Letty whispered. ‘Do you? It’s just not the same – they weren’t enslaving you – I mean, Christ, you had a fellowship—’

‘Do you know what Equiano’s master told him when he was manumitted?’ Anthony asked mildly. ‘He told him that in a short time, he’d have slaves of his own.’

At last, the tunnel ended in a set of steps covered with a wooden board, sunlight streaming in through the slats. Anthony pressed his ears to the slats, waited a moment, then unlocked the board and pushed. ‘Come on up.’

They emerged in a sunny yard facing an old one-storey brick building half-hidden behind a mass of overgrown shrubbery. They couldn’t have strayed too far from the town centre – they were only two miles out at most – but Robin had never seen this building before. Its doors looked rusted shut, and its walls were nearly swallowed by ivy, as if someone had built this place and then abandoned it decades ago.

‘Welcome to the Old Library.’ Anthony helped them out of the tunnel. ‘Durham College built this place in the fourteenth century as an overflow room for old books, then forgot about it when they secured funding to build a new library closer to the centre of town.’

‘Just the Old Library?’ asked Victoire. ‘No other name?’

‘None that we use. A name would mark its importance, and we want it unnoticed and forgotten – something you skim over when you see it in the records, something easily confused for something else.’ Anthony spread his palm against the rusted door, murmured something under his breath, and then pushed. The door screeched open. ‘Come on in.’

Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From the outside, it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library. Wooden bookshelves radiated from the centre, and more lined walls which looked, magically and contradictorily, circular. All the shelves were meticulously labelled, and a long yellowed parchment listing the classification system hung from the opposite wall. Near the front was a shelf boasting new arrivals, on which Robin recognized a few of the titles he’d snuck out for Griffin over the past few years. They’d all had their Babel serial numbers scratched out.

‘We don’t like their categorization system,’ explained Anthony. ‘It only makes sense in Roman characters, but not every language is so easily Romanized, is it?’ He pointed to a mat near the door. ‘Wipe your shoes off, we don’t like tracking mud between the shelves. And there’s a stand over there for your coats.’

A rusted iron kettle hung inexplicably from the top rung of the coat stand. Robin reached towards it, curious, but Anthony said sharply, ‘Leave that alone.’

‘Sorry – what’s it for?’

‘Not tea, clearly.’ Anthony swung the kettle towards them to reveal the bottom, which displayed a familiar glint of silver. ‘It’s a security system. It whistles when someone we don’t know gets near the library.’

‘With what match-pair?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Anthony winked. ‘We do security like Babel does. Everyone devises their own traps, and we don’t tell the others how it’s done. The best thing we have set up is the glamour – it keeps sound from escaping the building, which means no passerby can eavesdrop on our conversations.’

‘But this place is massive,’ said Ramy. ‘I mean, you’re not invisible – how on earth do you stay hidden?’

‘Oldest trick in the world. We’re hidden in plain sight.’ Anthony led them further into the library. ‘When Durham went extinct in the mid-sixteenth century and Trinity took over its property, they overlooked the supplemental library in the deed transfer. The only things listed in that library on the catalogue were materials no one had used for decades, and which have more accessible duplicates in the Bodleian. So now we live on the edge of bureaucracy – everyone who walks past knows this is a storage library, but everyone assumes it belongs to some other, poorer college. These colleges are all too rich, you see. It makes them lose track of their holdings.’

‘Ah, you found the undergraduates!’

Figures emerged from within the shelves. Robin recognized them all – they were all former students or current graduate fellows he’d seen lurking around the tower. He supposed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were Vimal Srinivasan, Cathy O’Nell, and Ilse Dejima, who gave them a small wave as she approached.

‘Heard you’d had a bad week.’ She was much friendlier now than she’d ever been at the tower. ‘Welcome to Chez Hermes. You’re just in time for dinner.’

‘I didn’t realize there were so many of you,’ said Ramy. ‘Who else here has faked their death?’

Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m the only ghost in residence at Oxford. We have a few others overseas – Vaibhav and Frédérique, you might have heard of them – they faked drowning on a clipper back from Bombay and they’ve been operating from India since. Lisette simply announced she was leaving for home to get married, and all the Babel faculty were too disappointed in her to follow up on her story. Obviously, Vimal, Cathy, and Ilse are still at Babel. Easier for them to siphon out resources.’

‘Then why’d you leave?’ asked Robin.

‘Someone needs to be in the Old Library full time. In any case, I’d got tired of the campus life, so I faked my death in Barbados, bought a passage on the next packet home, and made my way back to Oxford unnoticed.’ Anthony winked at Robin. ‘I thought you had me that day at the bookshop. I didn’t dare leave the Old Library for a week. Come on, let me show you the rest.’

A quick tour of the workspaces past the shelves revealed a number of ongoing projects, which Anthony introduced with pride. These included the compilation of dictionaries between regional languages (‘We lose a lot by assuming everything must first come through English’), non-English silver match-pairs (‘Same principle – Babel won’t fund match-pairs that don’t translate into English since all of its bars are for use by the British. But that’s like painting with only one colour, or playing only one note on a piano.’), and critiques of existing English translations of religious texts and literary classics (‘Well – you know my opinion on literature in general, but something has to keep Vimal occupied.’) The Hermes Society was not only a hotbed of Robin Hoods, as Griffin had led Robin to believe; it was also a research centre in its own right, though its projects had to be done in secret, with scant and stolen resources.[87]

‘What are you going to do with all this?’ asked Victoire. ‘You can’t publish, surely.’

‘We’ve got partners at a few other translation centres,’ said Vimal. ‘We ship them work for review, sometimes.’

‘There are other translation centres?’ asked Robin.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s only recently that Babel achieved pre-eminence in linguistics and philology. It was the French who ran the show for most of the eighteenth century, and then the German Romanticists had their heyday for a bit. The difference now is that we have silver to spare, and they don’t.’[88]

‘They’re fickle allies, though,’ said Vimal. ‘They’re helpful insofar as they, too, hate the British, but they’ve no real commitment towards global liberation. Really, all this research is just gambling on the future. We can’t make good use of it yet. We haven’t got the reach or the resources. So it’s all we can do to produce the knowledge, write it down, and hope one day there exists a state that can put all this to proper, altruistic use.’

At the other end of the library, the back wall resembled the aftermath of several mortar explosions, charred and cratered across the centre. Underneath, two equally charred tables stood side by side, both somehow upright despite their blackened, shrivelled legs.

‘Right,’ said Anthony. ‘So that’s our silver-work and, er, munitions workshop.’

‘Did that happen over time, or all at once?’ Victoire asked drily.

‘That’s entirely Griffin’s fault,’ said Vimal. ‘Doesn’t seem to think gunpowder is an outdoor activity.’

The intact portion of the back wall was covered with a massive map of the world, dotted with differently coloured pins attached by strings to notes covered in dense, tiny handwriting. Robin wandered closer, curious.

‘That’s a group project.’ Cathy joined him before the map. ‘We add to it little by little when we get back from overseas.’

‘Do all of these pins represent languages?’

‘We think they do. We’re trying to track the number of languages still spoken around the world, and where they’re dying out. And there are a good deal of languages which are dying, you know. A great extinction event began the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, French, English – they’ve been edging out regional languages and dialects like cuckoo chicks. I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’ She sighed, looking up at the map. ‘I was born a generation too late. It’s not so long ago that I might have grown up around Gaelic.’

‘But that would destroy silver-working,’ said Robin. ‘Wouldn’t it? It’d collapse the linguistic landscape. There would be nothing to translate. No differences to distort.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

‘Come on, you two.’ Anthony waved them over to a doorway, which led to a small reading room that had been converted into a dining room. ‘Let’s eat.’

The offerings at dinner were global – a vegetable curry, a platter of boiled potatoes, a fried fish dish that tasted startlingly similar to a kind Robin had once eaten in Canton, and a flat, chewy bread that paired well with everything else. The eight of them sat around a very fine ornamented table that looked incongruous against the plain wooden panels. There weren’t enough chairs for all of them, so Anthony and Ilse had dragged over benches and sitting stools from around the library. None of the tableware matched, nor the silverware. Flames burned merrily from a fireplace in the corner, heating the room unevenly so that Robin’s left side dripped sweat while his right side felt chilly. The whole scene was quintessentially collegial.

‘Is it just you lot?’ Robin asked.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Vimal.

‘Well, you’re . . .’ Robin gestured around the table. ‘You’re all very young.’

‘Necessarily,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s dangerous business.’

‘But aren’t there – I don’t know—’

‘Proper adults? Reinforcements?’ Anthony nodded. ‘Some, yes. They’re scattered across the globe. I don’t know who they all are – not one of us knows exhaustively who they all are, and that’s intentional. There are probably even Hermes associates at Babel I’m still not aware of, though whoever they are, I hope they start making a bit more of an effort.’

‘That, and attrition’s a problem,’ said Ilse. ‘Take Burma.’

‘What happened in Burma?’ asked Robin.

‘Sterling Jones happened,’ Anthony said tightly, but did not elaborate.

This seemed a sensitive topic. For a moment, everyone stared at their food.

Robin thought of the two thieves he’d met his first night at Oxford, the young woman and the blond-haired man, neither of whom he’d ever seen again. He did not venture to ask. He knew the answer: attrition.

‘But how do you get anything done?’ asked Ramy. ‘That is, if you don’t even know who your allies are?’

‘Well, it’s not so different from Oxford bureaucracy,’ Anthony said. ‘The university, the colleges, and the faculties never seem to agree on who’s in charge of what, but they get things done, don’t they?’

‘Langue de bœuf sauce Madère,’ Cathy announced, setting a heavy pot in the centre of the table. ‘Beef tongue in Madeira sauce.’

‘Cathy loves to serve tongue,’ Vimal informed them. ‘She thinks it’s funny.’

‘She’s creating a dictionary of tongues,’ said Anthony. ‘Boiled tongue, pickled tongue, dried tongue, smoked—’

‘Shush.’ Cathy slid onto the bench in between them. ‘Tongue’s my favourite cut.’

‘It’s the cheapest cut,’ said Ilse.

‘It’s disgusting,’ said Anthony.

Cathy flung a potato at him. ‘Fill up on these, then.’

‘Ah, pommes de terre à l’anglaise.’ Anthony speared a potato with his fork. ‘You know why the French called boiled potatoes à l’anglaise? Because they think boiling things is boring, Cathy, just like all of English cooking is deathly boring—’

‘Then don’t eat them, Anthony.’

‘Roast them,’ Anthony persisted. ‘Braise them with butter, or bake them with a cheese – just don’t be so English.’

Watching them, Robin felt a sharp prickle at the base of his nose. He felt the same as he had the night of the commemoration ball, dancing on the tables under the fairy lights. How magical, he thought; how impossible, that a place like this could exist, a distillation of all that Babel promised. He felt he’d been looking for a place like this all his life, and still he’d betrayed it.

To his horror, he began to cry.

‘Oh, there, there.’ Cathy patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re safe, Robin. You’re with friends.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said miserably.

‘It’s all right.’ Cathy did not ask him what he was apologizing for. ‘You’re here now. That’s what matters.’

Three sudden, violent raps sounded at the door. Robin flinched, dropping his fork, but none of the postgraduates looked alarmed.

‘That’ll be Griffin,’ Anthony said cheerfully. ‘He forgets the passcodes whenever we change them, so he beats out a rhythm instead.’

‘He’s come too late for dinner,’ Cathy said, annoyed.

‘Well, make him up a plate.’

‘Please.’

‘Please, Cathy.’ Anthony stood up. ‘The rest of you, into the Reading Room.’

Robin’s heart hammered as he filed out of the dining room with the others. He suddenly felt very nervous. He didn’t want to see his brother. The world had turned upside down since they’d last spoken, and he was terrified of what Griffin had to say about it.

Griffin strode through the door looking lean, haggard, and as travel-weary as ever. Robin scrutinized his brother as he shrugged off his ratty black coat. He seemed like an utter stranger, now that Robin knew what he had done. Each of his features told a new story; those lean, capable hands; those sharp, darting eyes – were those the traits of a murderer? How had he felt when he threw a silver bar at Evie Brooke, knowing full well it would rip her chest apart? Had he laughed when she died, the way he did upon seeing Robin now?

‘Hello, brother.’ Griffin smiled his wolf’s smile and reached out to clasp Robin’s hand. ‘I heard you killed dear old Pa.’

It was an accident, Robin wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat. They had never rung true before; he could not bring himself to speak them now.

‘Well done,’ said Griffin. ‘I never thought you had it in you.’

Robin had no response. He found it hard to breathe. He had the strangest urge to sock Griffin in the face.

Griffin, indifferent, gestured towards the Reading Room. ‘Shall we get to work?’

‘The task, as we see it, is to convince Parliament and the British public that it would be against their best interests to take Britain to war against China,’ said Anthony.

‘The opium-burning disaster has brought everything to a head,’ said Griffin. ‘Commissioner Lin has issued a proclamation banning English trade from Canton entirely. Jardine & Matheson, meanwhile, have taken those hostilities as justification for war. They’re saying England must act now to defend her honour, or face humiliation in the East forever. Nice way to ruffle some nationalist feathers. The House of Lords began debating a military expedition last week.’

But a vote had not yet come to pass. The lords of Parliament were still hesitant, uncertain about throwing the country’s resources at such a distant and unprecedented endeavour. The issue at hand, however, was silver. Defeating China would give the British Empire access to the greatest reserve of silver in the world, silver that would make their warships sail faster, their guns shoot further and more precisely. If Parliament did choose war, the future of the colonized world was unimaginable. Britain, flush with China’s riches, could enact any number of agendas towards Africa, Asia, and South America that until now had remained pipe dreams.

‘But we can’t do anything about those plots right now,’ said Griffin. ‘And we can’t think on the scale of a global revolution, because it’s impossible. We don’t have the numbers. What we must focus on now, before we can turn to anything else, is stopping the invasion of Canton. If England wins – for she absolutely will win, there’s no question – she obtains a near infinite supply of silver for the foreseeable future. If she doesn’t, her silver supply dries up, and her imperial capacities shrink considerably. That’s it. Everything else is inconsequential.’

He rapped the blackboard, on which names of various lords were sorted into different columns. ‘The House of Commons hasn’t voted yet. It’s still an open debate. There’s a strong antiwar faction, headed by Sir James Graham, Viscount Mahon, and William Gladstone. And Gladstone’s a very good man to have on our side – he hates opium more than anyone; he’s got a sister who’s addicted to laudanum, I think.’

‘But there are internal politics at play too,’ Cathy explained. ‘The Melbourne ministry’s facing a political crisis at home. The Whigs have just barely survived a vote of no confidence, so now they’re walking an impossible tightrope between the Conservatives and Radicals, exacerbated by the fact that they’ve been weak in foreign trade in Mexico, Argentina, and Arabia—’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ramy. ‘What, now?’

Cathy waved her hand impatiently. ‘The bottom line is, the Radicals and their northern constituencies need a healthy overseas trade, and the Whigs need to keep their support to counterbalance the Tories. A show of force regarding the Opium Crisis is precisely the way to do that. It’ll be a tight vote either way, though.’

Anthony nodded at the board. ‘Our mission now, then, is to swing enough votes that the war proposal’s shot down.’

‘Just to be clear,’ Ramy said slowly, ‘your plan right now is to become lobbyists?’

‘Indeed,’ said Anthony. ‘We’ll have to convince them that war is against the best interests of their constituents. Now, that’s a tricky argument to make, because it affects different classes differently. Obviously, siphoning all the silver out of China will be a massive boon to anyone who’s already got money. But there’s also an existing movement that believes that increased silver use is the worst thing that could happen to labourers. A silver-enhanced loom puts a dozen weavers out of work; that’s why they’re always striking. That’s a decent argument for a Radical to vote no.’

‘So you’re just targeting the House of Lords?’ asked Robin. ‘Not the general public?’

‘Good question,’ said Anthony. ‘The lords are the decision-makers, yes, but a certain amount of pressure from the press and public can sway those still on the fence. The trick is how to get the average Londoner worked up over a war they’re not likely to have ever heard of.’

‘Appeal to their human nature and sympathy for the oppressed,’ said Letty.

‘Ha,’ said Ramy. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’

‘It simply seems to me that all this aggression is quite pre-emptive,’ Letty insisted. ‘I mean, you haven’t even tried making your case to the public. Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?’

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’[89] said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

‘But public opinion on China is malleable,’ Anthony intervened. ‘Most Londoners oppose the opium trade to begin with, and there’s quite a lot of sympathetic coverage for Commissioner Lin in the newspapers. You can get pretty far with moralists and religious conservatives in this country. The question there is how to get them sufficiently bothered about it to exert pressure on Parliament. Unpopular wars have been fought over less.’

‘In terms of sparking public outcry, we’ve had one idea,’ said Griffin. ‘The match-pair polemic and the Greek root polemikós, which of course, means—’

‘War,’ said Ramy.

‘Correct.’

‘So you’ve got a war of ideas.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What does the match-pair do?’

‘That’s a work in progress; we’re still fiddling around with it. If we can just connect that semantic warp with the right medium, we might get somewhere. But the point is, we can’t achieve anything until more people understand where we’re coming from. Most of the British don’t understand there’s a fight to be had at all. For them, this war is something imaginary – something that could only benefit them, something they don’t have to look at or worry over. They don’t know the cruelty involved, or the continued violence it will enable. They don’t know what opium does to people.’

‘You won’t get anywhere with that argument,’ said Robin.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they don’t care,’ said Robin. ‘It’s a war happening in a foreign land that they can’t even imagine. It’s too distant for them to care.’

‘What makes you so sure of that?’ asked Cathy.

‘Because I didn’t,’ said Robin. ‘I didn’t, even though I’d been told time and time again how awful things were. It took witnessing it happening, in person, for me to realize all the abstractions were real. And even then, I tried my very hardest to look away. It’s hard to accept what you don’t want to see.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Well then,’ Anthony said, with forced cheer, ‘we’ll have to get creative with our persuasions, won’t we?’

So that was the goal of the night: to shift the engines of history onto a different track. Things were not as helpless as they seemed. The Hermes Society had several plans already in motion, most including various forms of bribery and blackmail, and one including the destruction of a shipyard in Glasgow.

‘The vote for war hinges on Parliament’s belief that it’ll be easily won,’ Griffin explained. ‘And technically, yes, our ships could blow Canton’s navy out of the water. But they run on silver to work. A few months ago, Thomas Peacock—’

‘Oh,’ Ramy made a face. ‘Him.’[90]

‘Indeed. He’s a rabid enthusiast of steam technology, and he put in an order for six iron steamboats at the shipbuilders Laird’s. William Laird and Son, that is – they’re based in Glasgow. These ships are more frightening than anything the waters of Asia have ever seen. They’ve got Congreve rockets, and their shallow draught and steam power make them more mobile than anything in the Chinese fleet. If Parliament votes yes, at least one of them is heading straight to Canton.’

‘So I assume you’re going to Glasgow,’ said Robin.

‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ said Griffin. ‘It’ll take ten hours by train. But I expect Parliament will hear within the day once I’m there.’

He did not elaborate on precisely what he would do in Glasgow, though Robin did not doubt his brother was capable of demolishing an entire shipyard.

‘Well, that sounds much more effective,’ Ramy said happily. ‘Why aren’t we putting all of our efforts into sabotage?’

‘Because we’re scholars, not soldiers,’ said Anthony. ‘The shipyard’s one thing, but we’re not going to take on the entire British Navy. We’ve got to leverage influence where we can. Leave the violent theatrics to Griffin—’

Griffin bristled. ‘They aren’t mere theatrics—’

‘The violent high jinks,’ Anthony amended, though Griffin bristled at that too. ‘And let’s focus on how to sway the vote in London.’

So they went back to the blackboard. A war for the fate of the world could not be won overnight – this they all knew in theory – but they could not bring themselves to stop and go to sleep. Every passing hour brought new ideas and tactics, though as the hours dragged far past midnight, their thoughts began to lose some coherence. Suppose they ensnared Lord Palmerston in a prostitution scandal by sending in Letty and Cathy to seduce him in disguise. Suppose they convinced the British public that the country China did not actually exist and was in fact an elaborate hoax by Marco Polo. At some point, they dissolved into helpless laughter as Griffin described in intricate detail a plot to kidnap Queen Victoria in the gardens of Buckingham Palace under the guise of an underground Chinese crime ring and hold her hostage in Trafalgar Square.

Theirs was a harrowing and impossible mission, yes, but Robin also found a certain exhilarating pleasure in this work. This creative problem-solving, this breaking up of a momentous mission into a dozen small tasks which, combined with enormous luck and possibly divine intervention, might carry them to victory – it all reminded him of how it felt to be in the library working on a thorny translation at four in the morning, laughing hysterically because they were so unbelievably tired but somehow thrumming with energy because it was such a thrill when a solution inevitably coalesced from their mess of scrawled notes and wild brainstorming.

Defying empire, it turned out, was fun.

For some reason they kept coming back to the polemikós match-pair, perhaps because it did in fact seem like they were fighting a war of ideas, a battle for Britain’s soul. Discursive metaphors, Letty observed, revolved around war imagery rather often. ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Their stance is indefensible. We must attack their weak points. We must shoot down their premises.’

‘We do that in French too,’ said Victoire. ‘Cheval de bataille.’[91]

‘Warhorse,’ Letty said, smiling.

‘Well then,’ said Griffin, ‘as long as we’re talking about military solutions, I still think we should go with Operation Divine Fury.’

‘What’s Operation Divine Fury?’ asked Ramy.

‘Never mind,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s a stupid name, and a stupider idea.’

‘When God saw this, He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest,’[92] Griffin said grandly. ‘Look, it’s a good idea. If we could just take out the tower—’

‘With what, Griffin?’ Anthony asked, exasperated. ‘With what army?’

‘We don’t need an army,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re scholars, not soldiers. You take a gun in there, wave it around and shout for a bit, and you’ve taken the whole tower hostage. And then you’ve taken the whole country hostage. Babel is the crux, Anthony; it’s the source of all the Empire’s power. We’ve only got to seize it.’

Robin stared at him, alarmed. In Chinese, the phrase huǒyàowèi[93] meant literally ‘the taste of gunpowder’; figuratively, ‘belligerence, combativeness’. His brother smelled of gunpowder. He reeked of violence.

‘Wait,’ said Letty. ‘You want to storm the tower?’

‘I want to occupy the tower. It wouldn’t be so very difficult.’ Griffin shrugged. ‘And it’s a more direct solution to our problems, isn’t it? I’ve been trying to convince these fellows, but they’re too scared to pull it off.’

‘What would you need to pull it off?’ Victoire inquired.

‘Now that’s the right question.’ Griffin beamed. ‘Rope, two guns, perhaps not even that – some knives, at least—’

‘Guns?’ Letty repeated. ‘Knives?’

‘They’re just for intimidation, darling, we wouldn’t actually hurt anyone.’

Letty reeled. ‘Do you honestly—’

‘Don’t worry.’ Cathy glared at Griffin. ‘We’ve made our thoughts on this quite clear.’

‘But think of what would happen,’ Griffin insisted. ‘What does this country do without enchanted silver? Without the people to maintain it? Steam power, gone. Perpetual lamps, gone. Building reinforcements, gone. The roads would deteriorate, the carriages would malfunction – forget Oxford, the whole of England would fall apart in months. They’d be brought to their knees. Paralysed.’

‘And dozens of innocent people would die,’ said Anthony. ‘We are not entertaining this.’

‘Fine.’ Griffin sat back and folded his arms. ‘Have it your way. Let’s be lobbyists.’

They adjourned at three in the morning. Anthony showed them to a sink at the back of the library where they could wash – ‘No tub, sorry, so you’ll have to soap your armpits standing up –’ and then pulled a stack of quilts and pillows from a cupboard.

‘We only have three cots,’ he said apologetically. ‘We don’t often all spend the night here. Ladies, why don’t you follow Ilse to the Reading Room – and gents, you can bunk on your own between the stacks. Creates a bit of privacy.’

Robin was so exhausted then that a space of hardwood between the shelves sounded wonderful. It felt as if he had been awake for one long day ever since their arrival in Oxford; that he had experienced enough for one lifetime. He accepted a quilt from Anthony and made his way towards the stacks, but Griffin materialized by his side before he could settle down. ‘Have a moment?’

‘You’re not going to sleep?’ Robin asked. Griffin was fully dressed, buttoned up in that black overcoat.

‘No, I’m heading out early,’ said Griffin. ‘There’s no direct line to Glasgow – I’ll ride into London, then take the first train in the morning. Come out to the yard with me.’

‘Why?’

Griffin patted the gun at his belt. ‘I’m going to show you how to fire this.’

Robin hugged the quilt closer to his chest. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Then you’re going to watch me fire a gun,’ said Griffin. ‘I think we’re long overdue for a chat, don’t you?’

Robin sighed, set the quilt down, and followed Griffin out the door. The yard was very bright under the full moon. Griffin must have used it for shooting practice often, for Robin could see that the trees across the yard were riddled with bullet holes.

‘Aren’t you afraid someone will hear?’

‘This whole area’s protected by the glamour,’ said Griffin. ‘Very clever work. No one can see or hear much who doesn’t already know we’re here. Do you know anything about guns?’

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Well, it’s never too late to learn.’ Griffin placed the gun in Robin’s hands. Like silver bars, it was heavier than it looked, and very cool to the touch. There was a certain inarguable elegance to the curve of the wooden handle, how easily it fitted into his hand. Still, Robin felt a wave of revulsion as he held it. It felt mean, like the metal was trying to bite him. He wanted very much to fling it to the ground, but was afraid of accidentally setting it off.

‘This is a pepperbox revolver,’ said Griffin. ‘Very popular with civilians. It uses a caplock mechanism, which means it can fire when it’s wet – don’t look down the barrel, you idiot, never look straight down the barrel. Try aiming it.’

‘I don’t see the point,’ said Robin. ‘I’m never going to fire this.’

‘It doesn’t matter that you’ll fire it. It matters that someone thinks you will. You see, my colleagues in there are still holding on to this unbelievable faith in human goodness.’ Griffin cocked the gun and pointed it at a birch tree across the yard. ‘But I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.’

He pulled the trigger. The blast was very loud. Robin jumped back, but Griffin was unfazed. ‘It’s not double action,’ he said, adjusting the barrels. ‘You’ve got to cock the hammer after each shot.’

His aim was quite good. Robin squinted and saw a notch in the centre of the birch that hadn’t been there before.

‘See, a gun changes everything. It’s not just about the impact, it’s about what it signals.’ Griffin ran his fingers over the barrel, then spun around to point the gun at Robin.

Robin jumped back. ‘Jesus—’

‘Scary, isn’t it? Think, why is this more frightening than a knife?’ Griffin did not move his arm. ‘It says I’m willing to kill you, and all I have to do is pull this trigger. I can kill at a distance, without effort. A gun takes all the hard work out of murder and makes it elegant. It shrinks the distance between resolve and action, you see?’

‘Have you ever shot at someone?’ Robin asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Did you hit them?’

Griffin didn’t answer the question. ‘You have to understand where I’ve been. It’s not all libraries and debating theatres out there, brother. Things look different on a battlefield.’

‘Is Babel a battlefield?’ Robin asked. ‘Was Evie Brooke an enemy combatant?’

Griffin lowered the gun. ‘So that’s what we’re hung up on?’

‘You killed an innocent girl.’

‘Innocent? Is that what our father told you? That I killed Evie in cold blood?’

‘I’ve seen that bar,’ said Robin. ‘It’s in my pocket, Griffin.’

‘Evie wasn’t some innocent bystander,’ Griffin sneered. ‘We’d been trying to recruit her for months. It was tricky, see, because she and Sterling Jones were so close, but if either of them had a conscience it was bound to be her. Or so we thought. I spent months and months talking things over with her at the Twisted Root until one night she decided she was ready, she was in. Only it was all a set-up – she’d been talking to the constables and the professors the whole time, and they’d hatched this plan to catch me in the act.

‘She was a brilliant actor, you see. She had this way of looking at you, eyes wide, nodding like you had all of her sympathy. Of course, I didn’t know it was all a performance. I thought I’d made an ally – I was thrilled when she seemed to be coming around – and with everyone we lost in Burma, I felt very alone. And Evie was so clever about it. Asked all these questions, far more than you did – made it sound like she just wanted to know because she was so thrilled to join the cause, because she wanted to learn all the ways she could help.’

‘Then how’d you find out?’

‘Well, she wasn’t that clever. If she were smarter, she wouldn’t have dropped her cover until she was safe.’

‘But she told you.’ Robin’s stomach twisted. ‘She wanted to gloat.’

‘She smiled at me,’ said Griffin. ‘When the siren sounded, she grinned at me and told me it was all over. And so I killed her. I didn’t mean to. You won’t believe me, but it’s the truth. I meant to frighten her. But I was angry and scared – and Evie was vicious, you know. If I’d given her an opening, I still think she might have hurt me first.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Robin whispered. ‘Or is it a lie you conjure so you can sleep at night?’

‘I sleep just fine.’ Griffin sneered. ‘But you need your lies, don’t you? Let me guess – you’re telling yourself it was an accident? That you didn’t mean it?’

‘I didn’t,’ Robin insisted. ‘It just happened – and it wasn’t on purpose, I never wanted—’

‘Don’t,’ said Griffin. ‘Don’t hide, don’t pretend – that’s so cowardly. Say how you feel. It felt good, admit it. The sheer power felt so good—’

‘I’d take it all back if I could,’ Robin insisted. He didn’t know why it felt so important that Griffin believe him, but this seemed like the last line he had to hold, the last truth he had to maintain about his identity. Otherwise he didn’t recognize himself. ‘I wish he’d lived—’

‘You don’t mean that. He deserved what he got.’

‘He didn’t deserve to die.’

‘Our father,’ Griffin said loudly, ‘was a cruel, selfish man who thought anyone who wasn’t white and English was less than human. Our father destroyed my mother’s life, and let yours perish. Our father is one of the principal engineers of a war on our motherland. If he’d come back from Canton alive, Parliament wouldn’t be debating right now. They’d have voted already. You’ve bought us days, perhaps weeks. So what if you’re a killer, brother? The world’s better off without the professor in it. Stop shrivelling under the weight of your conscience and take the damned credit.’ He turned the gun around and offered it handle-first to Robin. ‘Take it.’

‘I said no.’

‘You still don’t understand.’ Impatiently, Griffin grabbed Robin’s fingers and forced them around the handle. ‘We’ve moved out of the realm of ideas now, brother. We’re at war.’

‘But if this is a war, then you’ve lost.’ Still Robin refused to take the gun. ‘There’s no way you win on the battlefield. Your ranks are what, a couple dozen? At most? And you’re going to take on the entire British Army?’

‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Griffin. ‘The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.

‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.’ Once again, Griffin offered the gun to Robin. ‘Careful, it’s front-heavy.’

This time Robin accepted it. He aimed it experimentally at the trees. The barrel did, indeed, tip downwards; he tilted his hand up against his wrist to keep it level.

‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.’

Robin obeyed. The bang split his ears; he nearly dropped the gun. He was sure he had not aimed true. He had not been prepared for the force of the kickback, and his arm trembled from wrist to shoulder. The birch was untouched. The bullet had flown pointlessly into the dark.

But he had to admit that Griffin was right – the rush of that moment, the explosion of force contained within its hands, the sheer power he could trigger with just a twitch of his finger – it felt good.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Robin couldn’t fall asleep after Griffin left for Glasgow. He sat in the dark, thrumming with nervous energy. He felt a breathless vertigo, the sensation of looking out over a steep cliff the moment before he jumped. The whole world was on the verge of some cataclysmic shift, it seemed, and he could only cling on to what was around him as they all hurtled towards the breaking point.

An hour later the Old Library began to stir. Just as the clock struck seven, a symphony of birdsong echoed through the stacks. The noise was too loud to be coming from outside; rather, it sounded as if a whole flock of birds was perched invisibly among the books.

‘What is that?’ Ramy asked, rubbing his eyes. ‘Have you got a menagerie in a cupboard out the back?’

‘It’s coming from here.’ Anthony showed them a wooden grandfather clock decorated with carved songbirds around the edges. ‘A gift from one of our Swedish associates. She translated gökatta to “rising at dawn”, only in Swedish, gökatta has the particular meaning of waking up early to listen to the birds sing. There’s some music box mechanism inside, but the silver really imitates true birdsong. It’s lovely, isn’t it?’

‘Could be a little quieter,’ said Ramy.

‘Ah, ours is a prototype. It’s getting old. You can get these in London boutiques now, you know. They’re very popular, the wealthy love them.’

One by one they took their turns at washing themselves with cold water in the sink. Then they joined the girls in the Reading Room around yesterday’s clustered notes to resume their work.

Letty looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink either. She had great dark shadows under her eyes, and she hugged her arms miserably against her chest as she yawned.

‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.

‘It feels rather as if I’m dreaming.’ She blinked around the room, her gaze unfocused. ‘Everything’s upside down. Everything’s backwards.’

Fair enough, Robin thought. Letty was holding up rather well, all considered. He didn’t know how to politely phrase what he wanted to say next, so he asked obliquely, ‘What do you think?’

‘About what, Robin?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘The murder we’re covering up, the fall of the British Empire, or the fact that we’re fugitives now for the rest of our lives?’

‘All of it, I suppose.’

‘Justice is exhausting.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘That’s what I think.’

Cathy brought out a steaming pot of black tea, and they held their mugs forth in gratitude. Vimal stumbled yawning from the bathroom towards the kitchen. A few minutes later, the wonderful aroma of a fry-up seeped up through the Reading Room. ‘Masala eggs,’ he announced, heaping scrambled eggs in a tomatoey mess onto their plates. ‘There’s toast coming.’

‘Vimal,’ Cathy groaned. ‘I could marry you.’

They wolfed down their food in fast, mechanical silence. Minutes later the table was cleared, the dirty plates returned to the kitchenette. The front door screeched open. It was Ilse, back from the city centre with that morning’s newspapers.

‘Any word on the debates?’ Anthony asked.

‘They’re still at loggerheads,’ she said. ‘So we have some time yet. The Whigs are shaky on their numbers, and they won’t hold a vote until they’re confident. But we still want those pamphlets in London today or tomorrow. Get someone on the noon train, then get them printed on Fleet Street.’

‘Do we still know anyone in Fleet Street?’ Vimal asked.

‘Yes, Theresa’s still at the Standard. They go to print on Fridays. I can get in and use the machines, I’m sure, if you have something for me by tonight.’ She pulled a crumpled newspaper out of her messenger bag and slid it across the table. ‘Here’s the latest from London, by the way. Thought you’d like to see it.’

Robin craned his neck to read the upside-down text. OXFORD PROFESSOR MURDERED IN CANTON, it read. PERPETRATORS IN CONSPIRACY WITH CHINESE LOBBYISTS.

‘Well.’ He blinked. ‘I guess that’s got most of the details right.’

Ramy flipped the paper open. ‘Oh, look. It’s got drawings of our faces.’

‘That doesn’t look like you,’ said Victoire.

‘No, they haven’t quite captured my nose,’ Ramy agreed. ‘And they’ve made Robin’s eyes very small.’

‘Have they printed this in Oxford, too?’ Anthony asked Ilse.

‘Surprisingly, no. They’ve kept it all quiet.’

‘Interesting. Well, London’s still cancelled for you lot,’ said Anthony. They all began protesting at once, but he held up a hand. ‘Don’t be mad. It’s too dangerous, we’re not risking it. You’re hiding out in the Old Library until this is over. You can’t be recognized.’

‘Neither can you,’ Ramy retorted.

‘They think I’m dead. They think you’re a murderer. Those are very different things. No one’s printing my face in the papers.’

‘But I want to be out there,’ Ramy said, unhappy. ‘I want to do something, I want to help—’

‘You can help by not getting yourself thrown in gaol. This isn’t open war, as much as dear Griffin would like to pretend it is. These matters demand finesse.’ Anthony pointed to the blackboard. ‘Focus on the agenda. Let’s pick up where we left off. I think we tabled the issue of Lord Arsenault last night. Letty?’

Letty took a long draught of her tea, closed her eyes, then seemed to pull herself together. ‘Yes. I believe Lord Arsenault and my father are on rather good terms. I could write to him, try to set up a meeting—’

‘You don’t think your father’s going to be distracted by the news that you’re a murderer?’ asked Robin.

‘It doesn’t name Letty as a perpetrator.’ Victoire scanned the column. ‘It’s only the three of us. She’s not mentioned here at all.’

There was a brief, awkward silence.

‘No, that’s very good for us,’ Anthony said smoothly. ‘Gives us some freedom of movement. Now you start writing to your father, Letty, and the rest of you get to your assignments.’

One by one they filtered out of the Reading Room to carry out their designated tasks. Ilse set off to Babel to retrieve further news on developments in London. Cathy and Vimal went to the workshop to tinker with match-pairs using polemikós. Ramy and Victoire were put to work writing letters to prominent Radical leaders by impersonating white, middle-aged Radical supporters. Robin sat with Anthony in the Reading Room, pulling the most damning evidence of collusion from Professor Lovell’s letters as quotations for short, inflammatory pamphlets. Their hope was that such evidence might prove scandalous enough to get picked up by the London papers.

‘Be careful with your language,’ Anthony told him. ‘You’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anticolonialism and respecting national sovereignty. Use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency, and whatnot. Cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race.’

‘You want me to translate things for white people,’ said Robin.

‘Precisely.’

They worked in comfortable silence for about an hour, until Robin’s hand grew too sore to continue. He sat back, cradling a mug of tea in silence, until it seemed as if Anthony had reached the end of a paragraph. ‘Anthony, can I ask you something?’

Anthony put down his pen. ‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Do you honestly think this will work?’ Robin nodded to the stack of draft pamphlets. ‘Winning in the realm of public opinion, I mean.’

Anthony leaned back and flexed his fingers. ‘I see your brother’s got to you.’

‘Griffin spent last night teaching me how to use a gun,’ said Robin. ‘He thinks revolution’s impossible without violent insurrection. And he’s quite persuasive.’

Anthony thought for a while, nodding, tapping his pen against the inkwell. ‘Your brother likes to call me naive.’

‘That’s not what I—’

‘I know, I know. I only mean to say that I’m not as soft as Griffin thinks. Let me remind you that I came to this country before they’d decided I could no longer be legally called a slave. I’ve lived most of my life in a country that is deeply confused on whether I fully count as human. Trust me, I am no jolly optimist on the ethical qualms of white Britain.’

‘But I suppose they did come around on abolition,’ said Robin. ‘Eventually.’

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. The abolitionist movement you know is a load of pomp. Rhetoric only. Pitt first raised the motion because he saw the need to cut off the slave trade to France. And Parliament got on board with the abolitionists because they were so very afraid of Black insurrection in the West Indies.’

‘So you think it’s purely risk and economics.’

‘Well, not necessarily. You brother likes to argue that the Jamaican slave revolt, failed though it was, is what impelled the British to legislate abolition. He’s right, but only half right. See, the revolt won British sympathy because the leaders were part of the Baptist church, and when it failed, proslavery whites in Jamaica started destroying chapels and threatening missionaries. Those Baptists went back to England and drummed up support on the grounds of religion, not natural rights. My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘there’s Letty.’

‘Yes,’ said Anthony after a pause. ‘I suppose there’s Letty. But she’s a rare case, isn’t she?’

‘Then what’s our path forward?’ asked Robin. ‘Then what’s the point of any of this?’

‘The point is to build a coalition,’ said Anthony. ‘And it needs to include unlikely sympathizers. We can siphon as many resources from Babel as we want, but it still won’t be enough to budge such firmly entrenched levers of power as the likes of Jardine and Matheson. If we are to turn the tides of history, we need some of these men – the same men who find no issue in selling me and my kind at auction – to become our allies. We need to convince them that a global British expansion, founded on pyramids of silver, is not in their own best interest. Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’

‘You may as well convince them to walk the streets naked.’

‘Ha. No, the seeds for a coalition are there. The time’s ripe for a revolution in England, you know. The whole of Europe has been feverish for reform for decades; they caught it from the French. We must simply make this a war of class instead of race. And this is, indeed, an issue of class. It seems like a debate over opium and China, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones who stand to lose, are they? It’s all related. The silver industrial revolution is one of the greatest drivers of inequality, pollution, and unemployment in this country. The fate of a poor family in Canton is in fact intricately tied to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire. Neither benefits from the expansion of empire. Both only get poorer as the companies get richer. So if they could only form an alliance . . .’ Anthony wove his fingers together. ‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’

‘There’s a Chinese idiom that catches the gist,’ said Robin. ‘Tùsĭhúbēi.[94] The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’

‘Precisely,’ said Anthony. ‘Only we’ve got to convince them we’re not their prey. That there’s a hunter in the forest, and we’re all in danger.’

Robin glanced down at the pamphlets. They seemed so inadequate just then; just words, just ink scrawls on flimsy white paper. ‘And you truly think you can convince them so?’

‘We have to.’ Anthony flexed his fingers once more, then picked up his pen and resumed flipping through Professor Lovell’s letters. ‘I don’t see any other way out.’

Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access within an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.

At noon they regrouped in the Reading Room for lunch. Cathy and Vimal were quite excited with what they’d done with the polemikós match-pair, which, true to Griffin’s predictions, caused pamphlets to fly about and continue flapping around bystanders if thrown into the air. Vimal had supplemented this with the Latin origin of the word discuss: discutere could mean ‘to scatter’, or ‘to disperse’.

‘Suppose we apply both bars to a stack of printed pamphlets,’ he said. ‘They’d fly all over London, wind or no. How’s that for getting people’s attention?’

Gradually, the ideas that had seemed so ridiculous last night, those chaotic scribblings of sleep-deprived minds, coalesced into a rather impressive plan of action. Anthony summed up their numerous endeavours on the blackboard. Over the next few days, weeks if necessary, the Hermes Society would try to influence the debates in any way they could. Ilse’s connection on Fleet Street would soon publish a hit piece on how William Jardine, who’d stirred up all this mess in the first place, was whiling away his days at a spa town in Cheltenham. Vimal and Cathy, through several more respectable white intermediaries, would try to convince waffling Whigs that restoring good relations with China would at least keep open avenues trading legal goods, such as teas and rhubarbs. Then there were Griffin’s efforts in Glasgow, as well as the pamphlets about to fly all over London. Through blackmail, lobbying, and public pressure, Anthony concluded, they might make up enough votes to defeat the war motion.

‘This could work,’ Ilse said, blinking at the blackboard as if surprised.

‘It could work,’ Vimal agreed. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Are you sure we can’t come with you?’ Ramy asked.

Anthony gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. ‘You’ve done your part. You’ve been very brave, all of you. But it’s time to leave things to the professionals.’

‘You’ve barely got five years on us,’ said Robin. ‘How does that make you a professional?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Anthony. ‘It just does.’

‘And we’re supposed to just wait without knowing anything?’ Letty asked. ‘We can’t even get the papers here.’

‘We’ll all be back after the vote,’ said Anthony. ‘And we’ll come back occasionally to check on you – every other day, if you’re that nervous.’

‘But what if something happens?’ Letty persisted. ‘What if you need our help? What if we need your help?’

The graduate fellows all exchanged glances with each other. It looked like they were having a silent conversation – a repeat, Robin guessed, of a conversation they’d had many times before, for it was clear what everyone’s position was. Anthony raised his eyebrows. Cathy and Vimal both nodded. Ilse, lips pursed, seemed reluctant, but at last she sighed and shrugged.

‘Go ahead,’ she said.

‘Griffin would say no,’ said Anthony.

‘Well,’ said Cathy, ‘Griffin’s not here.’

Anthony stood up, disappeared for a moment into the stacks, and returned bearing a sealed envelope. ‘This,’ he said, placing it down on the table, ‘contains the contact information for a dozen Hermes associates across the globe.’

Robin was astonished. ‘You’re sure you should be showing us that?’

‘No,’ said Anthony. ‘We really shouldn’t. I see Griffin’s paranoia has rubbed off on you, and that’s not a bad thing. But suppose you lot are the only ones left. There are no names or addresses here – only drop points and contact instructions. If you end up on your own, you’ll have at least some means to keep Hermes alive.’

‘You’re talking like you might not come back,’ said Victoire.

‘Well, there’s a non-zero chance we don’t, isn’t there?’

The library felt silent.

Suddenly Robin felt so young, so childish. It had seemed like such a fun game, plotting into the deep hours with the Hermes Society, playing around with his older brother’s gun. Their situation was so bizarre, and the conditions of victory so unimaginable, it had felt more like an exercise than real life. It sank in now that the forces they were playing with were actually quite terrifying, that the trading companies and political lobbies they were attempting to manipulate were not the laughable bogeymen they’d made them out to be but incredibly powerful organizations with deep, entrenched interests in the colonial trade, interests they would murder to protect.

‘But you’ll be all right,’ said Ramy. ‘Won’t you? Babel’s never caught you before—’

‘They’ve caught us many times,’ Anthony said gently. ‘Hence the paranoia.’

‘Hence the attrition,’ Vimal said as he slid a pistol into his belt. ‘We know the risks.’

‘But you’ll be safe here even if we’re compromised,’ Cathy reassured them. ‘We won’t give you up.’

Ilse nodded. ‘We’ll bite our tongues and suffocate first.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Letty stood up abruptly. She looked very pale; she touched her fingers to her mouth, as if she might vomit. ‘I just – I just need some air.’

‘Do you want some water?’ Victoire asked, concerned.

‘No, I’ll be fine.’ Letty bustled past their crowded chairs to the door. ‘I just need to breathe for a moment, if that’s all right.’

Anthony pointed. ‘The yard is that way.’

‘I think I’ll take a stroll round the front,’ said Letty. ‘The yard feels a bit . . . a bit penned in.’

‘Keep to the block, then,’ said Anthony. ‘Don’t be seen.’

‘Yes – yes, of course.’ Letty seemed quite distressed; her breath came in such quick, shallow bursts that Robin was worried she might faint. Ramy pushed his chair back to give her space to break free. Letty paused by the doorway and glanced over her shoulder – her eyes lingered on Robin, and she seemed on the verge of saying something – but then she pursed her lips and hurried out the door.

In the last minutes before the postgraduates left, Anthony went over housekeeping matters with Robin, Ramy, and Victoire. The kitchenette stocked enough provisions to last a week, and longer if they were happy with gruel and salt-cured fish. Fresh drinking water was trickier to acquire – the Old Library did receive its water supply from the city pumps, but they couldn’t run the taps too late at night or for too long at any time, since drainage elsewhere might draw attention. Otherwise, there were more than enough books in the library to keep them occupied, though they had strict orders not to mess with any ongoing projects in the workshop.

‘And try to stay inside as much as you can,’ Anthony said as he finished packing his bag. ‘You can take turns in the yard if you like, but keep your voices down – the glamour acts up every now and then. If you must get some fresh air, do it after sunset. If you get scared, there’s a rifle in that broom cupboard – I do hope you’ll never have to do it, but if you do, can any of you—’

‘I can manage,’ said Robin. ‘I think. It’s the same principle as a pistol, right?’

‘It’s close enough.’ Anthony laced up his boots. ‘Fiddle with it in your spare time; the weighting’s a bit different. As for comfort, you’ll find soaps and things in the bathroom cabinet. Make sure you rake the ashes out of the fireplace every morning, or it’ll get stuffy. Oh – we used to have a laundry tub, but Griffin destroyed it messing around with pipe bombs. You can go a few days without changing, can’t you?’

Ramy snorted. ‘That’s a question for Letty.’

There was a pause. Then Anthony asked, ‘Where is Letty?’

Robin glanced at the clock. He had not noticed the time slipping away; it was nearly a half hour since Letty stepped out of the house.

Victoire stood. ‘Perhaps I should—’

Something shrieked near the front door. The sound was so sharp and raw, so like a human scream, that it took Robin a moment to realize it was the kettle.

‘Damn it.’ Anthony pulled the rifle down. ‘Into the yard, quick, all of you—’

But it was too late. The shrieking grew louder and louder, until the walls to the library seemed to vibrate. Seconds later the front door crashed inwards, and Oxford policemen poured inside.

‘Hands up!’ someone shouted.

The postgraduates seemed to have drilled for this. Cathy and Vimal ran in from the workshop, each holding silver bars in hand. Ilse threw her weight at a towering shelf; it toppled forward, starting a chain reaction that collapsed the path in front of the police. Ramy started forward to help, but Anthony shouted, ‘No, hide – the Reading Room—’

They stumbled back. Anthony kicked the door shut behind them. Outside they heard booms and crashes – Anthony shouted something that sounded like ‘The beacon’, and Cathy screamed something in response – the postgraduates were fighting, fighting to defend them.

But what was the point? The Reading Room was a dead end. There were no other doors, no windows. They could only huddle behind the table, flinching at the gunshots outside. Ramy made a noise about barricading the door, but the moment they moved to push the chairs forward, the door swung open.

Letty stood in the frame. She held a revolver.

‘Letty?’ Victoire asked in disbelief. ‘Letty, what are you doing?’

Robin felt a very brief, naive swell of relief before it became very clear Letty was not here to rescue them. She lifted the revolver, aimed at each one of them in turn. She seemed quite practised with the gun. Her arm did not tremble beneath its weight. And the sight was so absurd – their Letty, their prim English rose, wielding a weapon with such calm, deadly precision – that he wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating.

But then he remembered: Letty was an admiral’s daughter. Of course she knew how to shoot.

‘Put your hands above your heads,’ she said. Her voice was high and clear, like polished crystal. She sounded like an utter stranger. ‘They won’t hurt anyone, as long as you come quietly. If you don’t resist. They’ve killed the rest, but they’ll take you alive. Unhurt.’

Victoire eyed the envelope on the table, and then the crackling fireplace.

Letty followed her gaze. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

Victoire and Letty stood glaring at each other, breathing hard, just for a moment.

Several things happened at once. Victoire lunged for the envelope. Letty whipped the gun around. By instinct, Robin rushed towards her – he didn’t know what he intended, only that he was sure Letty would hurt Victoire – but just as he approached her, Ramy shoved him to the side. He fell forward, tripping against a table leg—

And then Letty broke the world.

A click; a bang.

Ramy collapsed. Victoire screamed.

‘No—’ Robin dropped to his knees. Ramy was limp, unmoving; he struggled to turn him over onto his back. ‘No, Ramy, please—’ For a moment he thought Ramy was pretending, for how was this possible? He’d been upright, moving and alive, just a second ago. The world could not end so abruptly; death could not be so swift. Robin patted Ramy’s cheek, his neck, anything he could to provoke a reaction, but it was no use, his eyes would not open – why wouldn’t they open? Surely this was a joke; he couldn’t see any blood – but then he spotted it, a tiny red dot over Ramy’s heart that rapidly blossomed outwards until it soaked through his shirt, his coat, through everything.

Victoire stepped back from the fireplace. The papers crackled inside the flames, blackening to ash. Letty made no move to retrieve them. She stood stunned, eyes wide, the revolver hanging limply at her side.

No one moved. They were all staring at Ramy, who was undeniably, irreversibly still.

‘I didn’t . . .’ Letty touched her fingers to her mouth. She’d lost her cool. Now her voice was very shrill and high, like a little girl’s. ‘Oh, my God . . .’

‘Oh, Letty.’ Victoire moaned softly. ‘What have you done?’

Robin lowered Ramy to the floor and stood.

One day Robin would ask himself how his shock had turned so easily to rage; why his first reaction was not disbelief at this betrayal but black, consuming hatred. And the answer would elude and disturb him, for it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation, a truth they’d only been starting to wake up to and now, after this, would never acknowledge.

But just then, all he knew was red blurring out the edges of his vision, crowding out everything but Letty. He knew now how it felt to truly want a person dead, to want to tear them apart limb by limb, to hear them scream, to make them hurt. He understood now how murder felt, how rage felt, for this was it, the intent to kill he ought to have felt when he killed his father.

He lunged at her.

‘Don’t,’ Victoire cried. ‘She’s—’

Letty turned and fled. Robin rushed after her just as she retreated behind a mass of constables. He pushed against them; he didn’t care about the danger, the truncheons and guns; he only wanted to get through to her, wanted to wring the life from her neck, to tear the white bitch to pieces.

Strong arms wrenched him back. He felt a blunt force against the small of his back. He stumbled. He heard Victoire screaming but couldn’t see her past the tangle of constables. Someone threw a cloth bag over his head. He flailed violently; his arm struck something solid, and the pressure against his back let up so slightly, but then something hard connected against his cheekbone, and the explosion of pain was so blinding it made him go limp. Someone cuffed his hands behind his back. Two sets of hands gripped his arms, hoisted him up, and dragged him out of the Reading Room.

The struggle was over. The Old Library was quiet. He shook his head frantically, trying to shake the bag off, but all he caught were glimpses of overturned shelves and blackened carpet before someone yanked the bag tighter over his head. He saw nothing of Vimal, Anthony, Ilse, or Cathy. He could no longer hear Victoire’s screaming.

‘Victoire?’ he gasped, terrified. ‘Victoire?’

‘Quiet,’ said a deep voice.

‘Victoire!’ he shouted. ‘Where—’

‘Quiet, you.’ Someone pulled the hood away just long enough to stuff a rag in his mouth. Then he was plunged back into darkness. He saw nothing, heard nothing; just bleak, awful silence as they pulled him out of the ruins of the Old Library and into a waiting cab.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Bumpy cobblestones, painful jostles. Get out, walk. He obeyed, unthinking. They pulled him from the carriage, tossed him in a cell, and left him to his thoughts.

Hours or days might have passed. He couldn’t tell – he had no sense of time. He was not in his body, not in this cell; he curled miserably on the stone tiles and left the bruised and aching present behind. He was in the Old Library, helpless, watching over and over as Ramy jerked and lurched forward like someone had kicked him between the shoulder blades, as Ramy lay limp in his arms, as Ramy, despite everything he tried, did not stir again.

Ramy was dead.

Letty had betrayed them, Hermes had fallen, and Ramy was dead.

Ramy was dead.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where from. He ached all over from the handcuffs digging into his wrists, from the hard stone floor against his limbs, from the way the police had flung him down as if trying to break all of his bones. He registered these hurts as factual, but he could not really feel them; he couldn’t feel anything other than the singular, blinding pain of Ramy’s loss. And he did not want to feel anything else, did not want to sink into his body and register its hurts, because that physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this.

He was stuck in the past. He revisited that memory a thousand times, the same way he had revisited his father’s death. Only this time instead of convincing himself he had not intended to kill, he tried to convince himself of the possibility Ramy was alive. Had he really watched Ramy die? Or had he only heard the gunshot, seen the burst of blood and the fall? Was there breath left in Ramy’s lungs, life left in his eyes? It seemed so unfair. No, it seemed impossible that Ramy could just leave this world so abruptly, that he could be so alive one moment and so still the next. It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.

And, certainly, Letty could not have been aiming for his heart. That was also impossible. She loved him, she loved him almost like Robin loved him – she’d told him so, he remembered, and if that were true, then how could she look into Ramy’s eyes and shoot to kill?

Which meant Ramy might still be alive, might have survived against all odds, might have dragged himself from the carnage of the Old Library and found himself somewhere to hide, might yet recover if only someone found him in time, stanched the wound in time. Unlikely, but perhaps, perhaps, perhaps . . .

Perhaps when Robin escaped this place, when they were reunited, they’d laugh so hard over this whole thing that their ribs hurt.

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad, until he started hearing fragments of his thoughts as if spoken outside of him, low, gruff words that echoed around the stone.

I wish—

I regret—

And then a flurry of confessions that weren’t his.

I wish I’d loved her better.

I wish I’d never touched that knife.

This wasn’t his imagination. He lifted his throbbing head, his cheek sticky with blood and tears. He glanced around, astonished. The stones were talking, whispering a thousand different testimonies, each too drowned out by the next for him to make out anything but passing phrases.

If only, they said.

It isn’t fair, they said.

I deserve this, they said.

And yet, amidst of all that despair:

I hope—

I hope—

I hope against hope—

Wincing, he stood up, pressed his face against the stone, and inched down the wall until he found the telltale glint of silver. The bar was inscribed with a classic Greek to Latin to English daisy-chain. The Greek epitaphion meant ‘a funeral oration’ – something spoken, something meant to be heard; the Latin epitaphium, similarly, referred to a eulogy. It was only the modern English epitaph that referred to something written and silent. The distorted translation gave voices to the written. He was surrounded by the confessions of the dead.

He sank down and clutched his head in his hands.

What a uniquely terrible torture. What genius had thought this up? The point was, surely, to inundate him with the despair of every other poor soul who had been imprisoned here, to fill him with such unfathomable sadness that, when questioned, he would give up anyone and anything to make it stop.

But these whispers were redundant. They did not darken his thoughts; they merely echoed them. Ramy was dead; Hermes was lost. The world could not go on. The future was only a vast expanse of black, and the only thing that gave him a shred of hope was the promise that someday, all this would end.

The door opened. Robin jerked awake, startled by the creaking hinges. In walked a graceful young man, blond hair gathered into a knot just above his neck.

‘Hello, Robin Swift,’ he said. His voice was gentle, musical. ‘Do you remember me?’

Of course not, Robin almost said, but then the man walked closer, and the words died on his tongue. He wore the same features as the likeness in the frieze in the University College chapel: the same straight, aristocratic nose and intelligent, deep-set eyes. Robin had seen this face just once, over three years ago, in Professor Lovell’s dining room. He’d never forget it.

‘You’re Sterling.’ Brilliant, famed Sterling Jones, nephew of Sir William Jones, the greatest translator of the age. His appearance here was so unexpected that for a moment Robin could only blink at him. ‘Why—’

‘Why am I here?’ Sterling laughed. Even his laughter was graceful. ‘I couldn’t miss it. Not after they told me they’d caught Griffin Lovell’s little brother.’

Sterling drew two chairs into the room and sat down opposite Robin, crossing his legs at the knees. He tugged his jacket down to straighten it, then cocked his head at Robin. ‘My word. You’ve really grown alike. You’re a bit easier on the eye, though. Griffin was all sneers and hackles. Like a wet dog.’ He placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward. ‘So you killed your father, did you? You don’t look like a killer.’

‘And you don’t look like a county policeman,’ said Robin.

But even as he said this, the last false binary he’d constructed in his head – the one between scholars and the blades of empire – fell away. He recalled Griffin’s words. He recalled his father’s letters. Slave traders and soldiers. Ready killers, all of them.

‘You are so like your brother.’ Sterling shook his head. ‘What’s the Chinese expression? Badgers of the same mound, or jackals of the same tribe? Cheeky, impudent, and so unbearably self-righteous.’ He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back, appraising him. ‘Help me understand. I could never figure this out with Griffin. Simply – why? You got everything you could possibly want. You’ll never have to work a day in your life – not real work, anyhow; it doesn’t count when it’s scholarship. You’re swimming in riches.’

‘My countrymen aren’t,’ said Robin.

‘But you aren’t your countrymen!’ exclaimed Sterling. ‘You are the exception. You are the lucky one, the elevated. Or do you really find more in common with those poor fools in Canton than your fellow Oxfordians?’

‘I do,’ said Robin. ‘Your country reminds me every day that I do.’

‘Is that the problem, then? Some white Brits weren’t very nice to you?’

Robin saw no point in arguing further. It had been foolish to play along at all. Sterling Jones was just the same as Letty, except without the shallow sympathy of purported friendship. They both thought this was a matter of individual fortunes instead of systematic oppression, and neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them.

‘Oh, don’t tell me.’ Sterling sighed. ‘You’ve formed the half-baked idea that empire is somehow a bad thing, haven’t you?’

‘You know what they do is wrong,’ Robin said tiredly. Enough with the euphemisms; he simply could not, would not believe that intelligent men like Sterling Jones, Professor Lovell, and Mr Baylis really believed their flimsy excuses were anything but that. Only men like them could justify the exploitation of other peoples and countries with clever rhetoric, verbal ripostes, and convoluted philosophical reasoning. Only men like them thought this was still a matter of debate. ‘You know.’

‘Suppose you have your way,’ said Sterling, conceding nothing. ‘Suppose we don’t go to war, and Canton keeps all of its silver. What do you think they’re doing with it?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Robin, ‘they’ll spend it.’

Sterling scoffed. ‘This world belongs to those who grasp. You and I both know that, that’s how we got to Babel. Meanwhile your motherland is ruled by indolent, lazy aristocrats who are terrified by the very mention of a railroad.’

‘One thing we have in common.’

‘Very funny, Robin Swift. Do you think England should be punished, then, for daring to use those natural gifts given to us by God? Shall we leave the East in the hands of corrupt denigrates who would squander their riches on silks and concubines?’ Sterling leaned forward. His blue eyes glittered. ‘Or shall we lead? Britain hurtles towards a vast, glowing future. You could be part of that future. Why throw it all away?’

Robin said nothing. There was no point; this was not a dialogue in good faith. Sterling wanted nothing but conversion.

Sterling threw his hands in the air. ‘What about this is so difficult to understand, Swift? Why fight the current? Why this absurd impulse to bite the hand that feeds you?’

‘The university doesn’t own me.’

‘Bah. The university gave you everything.’

‘The university ripped us from our homes and made us believe that our futures could only consist of serving the Crown,’ said Robin. ‘The university tells us we are special, chosen, selected, when really we are severed from our motherlands and raised within spitting distance of a class we can never truly become a part of. The university turned us against our own and made us believe our only options were complicity or the streets. That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don’t ask me to love my master.’

Sterling glared at him. He was breathing very hard. It was the strangest thing, Robin thought, how much he’d worked himself up. His cheeks were flushed, and his forehead was beginning to shine with sweat. Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

‘Your friend Miss Price warned me you’d become a bit of a fanatic.’

This was quite nakedly bait. Robin held his tongue.

‘Go on,’ Sterling sneered. ‘Don’t you want to ask about her? Don’t you want to know why?’

‘I know why. Your sort is predictable.’

Anger twisted over Sterling’s face. He stood up and dragged his chair closer until their knees nearly touched.

‘We have ways of extricating the truth. The word soothe derives from a Proto-Germanic root that means “truth”. We daisy-chain it with the Swedish sand. It lulls you, lets you put your guard down, comforts you until you’re singing.’ Sterling leaned forward. ‘But I’ve always found that one quite boring.

‘Do you know where the word agony comes from?’ He fished inside his coat pocket, then pulled out a pair of silver handcuffs, which he laid across his knees. ‘Greek, by way of Latin and later, Old French. The Greek agōnia means a contest – originally, a sports gathering between athletes. It gained the connotation of suffering much later. But I’m translating from English back into the Greek, so the bar knows to induce suffering, not remove it. Clever, no?’

He gave the cuffs a satisfied smile. There was no malice in that smile – only a gleeful triumph that ancient languages could be hacked apart and reworked for his intended purpose. ‘It took some experimenting before we got it right, but we’ve now perfected the effect. It’ll hurt, Robin Swift. It’ll hurt like hell. I’ve tried it before, just out of curiosity. It’s not a surface-level pain, see; it’s not like being stabbed with a blade, or even like being burned by flames. It’s inside you. Like your wrists are shattering, over and over again, only there’s no upper limit to the agony, because physically, you’re fine – it’s all in your head. It’s quite awful. You’ll strain against it, of course. The body can’t help it, not against pain like that. But every time you struggle, the pain will double, and double again. Would you like to see for yourself?’

I’m tired, thought Robin; I’m so tired; I would rather you shoot me in the head.

‘Here, let me.’ Sterling rose, then knelt down behind him. ‘Try this.’

He snapped the cuffs shut. Robin screamed. He could not help it. He’d wanted to keep silent, to refuse Sterling the satisfaction, but the pain was so overwhelming he had no control, no sense of his body at all except for the pain, which was far worse than Sterling had described. It did not feel like his wrists were breaking. It felt as if someone were hammering thick iron spikes into his bones, straight into the marrow, and every time he writhed, flailing to break free, the pain intensified.

Control, said a voice inside his head, a voice that sounded like Griffin. Control yourself, stop, it’ll hurt less—

But the pain only grew. Sterling hadn’t lied; there was no limit. Every time he thought that this was it, that if he suffered one more moment of this then he would die, it somehow amplified. He had not known human flesh could feel such pain.

Control, said Griffin again.

Then another voice, horribly familiar: That’s one good thing about you. When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.

Restraint. Repression. Had he not practised this his entire life? Let the pain slide off you like raindrops, without acknowledgment, without reaction, because to pretend it is not happening is the only way to survive.

Sweat dripped down his forehead. He fought to push past the blinding agony, to gain a sense of his arms and hold them still. It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done; it felt like he was forcing his own wrists under a hammer.

But the pain subsided. Robin slumped forward, gasping.

‘Impressive,’ said Sterling. ‘See how long you can keep that up. Meanwhile, I’ve got something else to show you.’ He pulled another bar out from his pocket and held it down over Robin’s face. The left side read: φρήν. ‘I don’t suppose you did Ancient Greek? Griffin’s was very poor, but I’m told you’re the better student. You’ll know what phren refers to, then – the seat of intellect and emotion. Only the Greeks didn’t think it resided in the mind. Homer, for instance, describes the phren as being located in the chest.’ He placed the bar into Robin’s front pocket. ‘Imagine what this does, then.’

He drew back his fist and slammed it against Robin’s sternum.

The physical torture was not so bad – more of a hard pressure than acute pain. But the moment Sterling’s knuckles touched his chest, Robin’s mind exploded: feelings and memories flooded to the fore, everything he’d hidden, everything he feared and dreaded, all the truths he dared not acknowledge. He was a babbling idiot, he had no idea what he was saying; words in Chinese and English both spilled out of him without reason or order. Ramy, he said, or thought, he didn’t know; Ramy, Ramy, my fault, father, my father – my father, my mother, three people I have witnessed die and not once could I lift a finger to help—

Vaguely he was aware of Sterling urging him along, trying to guide his fount of babble. ‘Hermes,’ Sterling kept saying. ‘Tell me about Hermes.’

‘Kill me,’ he gasped. He meant it; he’d never wanted anything more in the world. A mind was not meant to feel this much. Only death would silence the chorus. ‘Holy God, kill me—’

‘Oh, no, Robin Swift. You don’t get off that easily. We don’t want you dead; that defies the point.’ Sterling pulled a watch out of his pocket, examined it, and then cocked his ear towards the door as if listening for something. Seconds later, Robin heard Victoire scream. ‘Can’t say the same for her.’

Robin gathered his legs beneath him and launched himself at Sterling’s waist. Sterling stepped to the side. Robin crashed to the ground, his cheek slamming painfully against stone. His wrists pulled against the cuffs, and his arms once again exploded into pain that did not stop until he curled in on himself, gasping, pouring every ounce of his focus into keeping still.

‘Here’s how it works.’ Sterling dangled the watch chain over Robin’s eyes. ‘Tell me everything you know about the Hermes Society, and all of this stops. I’ll remove the cuffs, and I’ll set your friend free. Everything will be all right.’

Robin glared at him, panting.

‘Tell me, and this stops,’ said Sterling once more.

The Old Library was gone. Ramy was dead. Anthony, Cathy, Vimal, and Ilse – all likely dead. They’ve killed the rest, Letty had said. What else was there to give up?

There’s Griffin, spoke a voice. There are those who were in the envelope, there are countless others you don’t know about. And that was the point – he didn’t know who was still out there or what they were doing, and he could not risk revealing anything that put them in danger. He’d made that mistake once before; he could not fail Hermes again.

‘Tell me or we’ll shoot the girl.’ Sterling dangled his pocket watch over Robin’s face. ‘In one minute, at half past the hour, they’re going to put a bullet in her skull. Unless I tell them to stop.’

‘You’re lying,’ Robin gasped.

‘I am not. Fifty seconds.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘We only need one of you alive, and she’s more stubborn to work with.’ Sterling shook the watch again. ‘Forty seconds.’

It was a bluff. It had to be a bluff; they couldn’t possibly have timed things so precisely. And they ought to want them both alive – two sources of information were better than one, weren’t they?

‘Twenty seconds.’

He thought frantically for a passable lie, anything to make the time stop. ‘There are other schools,’ he breathed, ‘there are contacts at other schools, stop—’

‘Ah.’ Sterling put away the pocket watch. ‘Time’s up.’

Down the hall, Victoire screamed. Robin heard a gunshot. The scream broke off.

‘Thank heavens,’ said Sterling. ‘What a screech.’

Robin threw himself at Sterling’s legs. This time it worked; he’d caught Sterling by surprise. They crashed to the floor, Robin above Sterling, cuffed hands above his head. He brought his fists down onto Sterling’s forehead, his shoulders, anywhere he could reach.

‘Agony,’ Sterling gasped. ‘Agōnia.’

The pain in Robin’s wrists redoubled. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. Sterling struggled out from beneath him. He toppled sideways, choking. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Sterling stood over him for a moment, breathing hard. Then he drew his boot back and aimed a vicious kick at Robin’s sternum.

Pain; white-hot, blinding pain. Robin could perceive nothing else. He didn’t have the breath to scream. He had no bodily control at all, no dignity; his eyes were blank, his mouth slack, leaking drool onto the floor.

‘Good Lord.’ Sterling adjusted his necktie as he straightened up. ‘Richard was right. Animals, the lot of you.’

Then Robin was alone again. Sterling did not say when he would return, or what would happen to Robin next. There was only the vast expanse of time and the black grief that engulfed it. He wept until he was hollow. He screamed until it hurt to breathe.

Sometimes the waves of pain subsided ever so slightly and he thought he could organize his thoughts, take stock of his situation, ponder his next move. What came next? Was victory on the table any longer, or was there only survival? But Ramy and Victoire permeated everything. Every time he saw the slightest glimpse of the future, he remembered they would not be in it, and then the tears flowed again, and the suffocating boot of grief came down again on his chest.

He considered dying. It would not be so hard; he needed only to strike his head against stone with enough effort or figure out some way to strangle himself with his cuffs. The pain of it did not frighten him. His whole body felt numb; it seemed impossible that he might feel anything ever again except the overwhelming sense of drowning – and perhaps, he thought, death was the only way to break the surface.

He might not have to do it himself. When they’d wrung everything they could from his mind, wouldn’t they try him in court and then hang him? In his youth he had once glimpsed a hanging at Newcastle; he’d seen the crowd gathered around the gallows during one of his jaunts around the city and, not knowing what he was seeing, drawn closer to the crush. There had been three men standing in a line on the platform. He remembered the whack of the panel giving way, the abrupt snap of their necks. He remembered hearing someone mutter their disappointment that the victims had not kicked.

Death by hanging might be quick – perhaps even easy, painless. He felt guilty for even considering it – that’s selfish, Ramy had said, you don’t get to take the easy way out.

But what in God’s name was he still alive for? Robin could not see how anything he did from now on mattered. His despair was total. They had lost, they had lost with such crushing completeness, and there was nothing left. If he clung to life for the days or weeks he had left, it was solely for Ramy’s sake, because he did not deserve what was easy.

Time crept on. Robin drifted between waking and sleep. Pain and grief made it impossible to truly rest. But he was tired, so tired, and his thoughts spiralled, became vivid, nightmarish memories. He was on the Hellas again, speaking the words that set all this in motion; he was staring down at his father, watching blood bubble over that ruin of a chest. And it was such a perfect tragedy, wasn’t it? An age-old story, parricide. The Greeks loved parricide, Mr Chester had been fond of saying; they loved it for its infinite narrative potential, its invocations of legacy, pride, honour, and dominance. They loved the way it struck every possible emotion because it so deviously inverted the most basic tenet of human existence. One being creates another, moulds and influences it in its own image. The son becomes, then replaces, the father; Kronos destroys Ouranos, Zeus destroys Kronos and, eventually, becomes him. But Robin had never envied his father, never wanted anything of his except his recognition, and he hated to see himself reflected in that cold, dead face. No, not dead – reanimated, haunting; Professor Lovell leered at him, and behind him, opium burned on Canton’s shores, hot and booming and sweet.

‘Get up,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Get up.’

Robin jerked awake. His father’s face became his brother’s. Griffin loomed above him, covered in soot. Behind him, the cell door was in pieces.

Robin stared. ‘How—’

Griffin brandished a silver bar. ‘Same old trick. Wúxíng.’

‘I thought it couldn’t work for you.’

‘Funniest thing, isn’t it? Sit up.’ Griffin knelt down behind him and set to work on Robin’s cuffs. ‘Once you said it for the first time, I finally got it. Like I’ve been waiting for someone to say those words my whole life. Christ, kid, who did this to you?’

‘Sterling Jones.’

‘Of course. Bastard.’ He fiddled a moment with the lock. Metal dug into Robin’s wrists. Robin winced, trying his hardest not to move.

‘Ah, damn it.’ Griffin rummaged around in his bag and pulled out a large pair of shears. ‘I’m cutting through, hold still.’ Robin felt an agonizing, intense pressure – and then nothing. His hands sprang free – still cuffed, but no longer bolted together.

The pain vanished. He sagged from the reprieve. ‘I thought you were in Glasgow.’

‘I was fifty miles out when I got word. Then I jumped out, waited, and hopped onto the first train I could coming back.’

‘Got word?’

‘We have our ways.’ Robin noticed then that Griffin’s right hand shone mottled pale, red, and angry. It looked like a burn scar. ‘Anthony didn’t elaborate, he only sent an emergency signal, but I reckoned it was bad. Then all the rumours from the tower said they’d hauled you lot here, so I skipped the Old Library – would have been dangerous, regardless – and came here. Good bet. Where is Anthony?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Robin.

‘I see.’ Something rippled across Griffin’s face, but he blinked, and his features resumed their calm. ‘And the rest—?’

‘I think they’re all dead.’ Robin felt wretched; he could not meet Griffin’s eyes. ‘Cathy, Vimal, Ilse – everyone in the house – I didn’t see them fall, but I heard the shooting, and then I didn’t see them again.’

‘No other survivors?’

‘There’s Victoire. I know they brought Victoire, but—’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robin said miserably. She could be lying dead in her cell. They could have already dragged her body outside, dumped it in a shallow grave. He couldn’t speak the words to explain; that would shatter him.

‘Then let’s look.’ Griffin grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard shake. ‘Your legs are fine, aren’t they? Come, get up.’

The hallway was miraculously empty. Robin glanced left and right, baffled. ‘Where are all the guards?’

‘Got rid of them.’ Griffin tapped another bar in his belt. ‘A daisy-chain riff on the word explode. The Latin explōdere is a theatre term – it refers to driving an actor off the stage by clapping one’s hands. From there we get the Old English meaning “to reject or drive away with loud noise”. It’s not until the modern English that we get a detonation.’ He looked very pleased with himself. ‘My Latin’s better than my Chinese.’

‘So that didn’t destroy the door?’

‘No, it only makes a sound so awful it drives all listeners away. I got them all running to the second floor, and then I crept up here and locked the doors behind me.’

‘Then what made that hole?’

‘Just black powder.’ Griffin hauled Robin along. ‘Can’t rely on silver for everything. You scholars always forget that.’

They searched every cell in the hall for Victoire. Most were empty, and Robin felt a growing dread as they moved down the doors. He did not want to look; he did not want to see the blood-streaked floor – or worse, her limp body lying where they’d left it, a bullet wound through her head.

‘Here,’ Griffin called from the end of the hallway. He banged on the door. ‘Wake up, dear.’

Robin nearly collapsed with relief when he heard Victoire’s muffled response. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Can you walk?’ Griffin asked.

This time Victoire’s voice was clearer; she must have approached the door. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No, I’m all right.’ Victoire sounded confused. ‘Robin, is that—?’

‘It’s Griffin. Robin’s here too. Don’t fret, we’re going to get you out.’ Griffin reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like an improvised hand grenade – a ceramic sphere a quarter the size of a cricket ball with a fuse sticking out one end.

It seemed rather small to Robin. ‘Can that blow through iron?’

‘Doesn’t have to. The door’s made of wood.’ Griffin raised his voice. ‘Victoire, get against the far corner and put your head between your arms and knees. Ready?’

Victoire yelled her assent. Griffin placed the grenade at the corner of the door, lit it with a match, and hastily dragged Robin several paces down the hall. The bang came seconds later.

Robin waved the smoke from his face, coughing. The door hadn’t blasted apart – any explosion that large would have surely killed Victoire. But it had made a hole at the bottom just large enough for a child to crawl through. Griffin kicked at the charred wood until several large pieces fell away. ‘Victoire, can you—’

She crawled out, coughing. Griffin and Robin seized her by each arm and pulled her through the rest of the way. When at last she slid free, she clambered to her knees and threw her arms around Robin. ‘I thought—’

‘Me too,’ he murmured, hugging her tight. She was, thank God, largely unharmed. Her wrists were somewhat chafed, but free of cuffs, and there was no blood on her, no gaping bullet wounds. Sterling had been bluffing.

‘They said they’d shot you.’ She pressed against his chest, shaking. ‘Oh, Robin, I heard a gunshot—’

‘Did you—?’ He couldn’t finish the question. Immediately he regretted asking; he didn’t want to know.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry, I thought – since they had us anyhow, I thought . . .’ Her voice broke; she looked away.

He knew what she meant. She had chosen to let him die. This did not hurt as much as it should have. Rather, it clarified things; the stakes before them, the insignificance of their lives against the cause they’d chosen. He saw her begin to apologize, and then catch herself – good, he thought; she had nothing to be sorry for, for between them only one had refused to break.

‘Which way is the door?’ Victoire asked.

‘Four floors down,’ said Griffin. ‘The guards are all trapped in the stairwell, but they’ll break through soon.’

Robin glanced out of the window at the end of the hall. They were quite far up, he realized. He’d thought they were in the city gaol on Gloucester Green, but that building was only two storeys high. The ground looked so far away from where they stood. ‘Where are we?’

‘Oxford Castle,’ said Griffin, pulling a rope out from his satchel. ‘North tower.’

‘There’s not another staircase?’

‘None.’ Griffin nodded to the window. ‘Break the glass with your elbow. We’re climbing.’

Griffin descended first, then Victoire, and then Robin. Climbing down was far harder than Griffin made it look; Robin slid too quickly down the last ten feet as his arms gave out, and the rope left searing burns on his palms. Outside, it was apparent Griffin had caused much more than a simple diversion. The entire north front of Oxford Castle was ablaze, and flames and smoke were quickly spreading through the building.

Had Griffin done this all himself? Robin glanced sideways at his brother, and it was like seeing a stranger. Griffin became new in his imagination every time he encountered him, and this version was most frightening, this hard, sharp-edged man who shot and killed and burned without flinching. It was the first time he’d ever connected his brother’s abstract commitments to violence with its material effects. And they were awesome. Robin didn’t know if he feared him, or admired his sheer ability.

Griffin tossed them two plain black cloaks from his satchel – from a distance, they’d look vaguely like the constables’ cloaks – then shepherded them along the side of the castle towards the main street. ‘Move quickly and don’t look behind you,’ he muttered. ‘They’re all distracted – be calm, be fast, we’ll be out of here just fine.’

And for a moment, it did seem like escape really could be that easy. The whole of the castle square looked deserted; all sentries were preoccupied with the flames and the high stone walls cast plenty of shadows in which to hide.

Only one figure stood between them and the gate.

‘Explōdere.’ Sterling Jones lurched towards them. His hair was burned, his princely face scratched and bloody. ‘Clever. Didn’t think you had the Latin to pull it off.’

Griffin put a hand out before Robin and Victoire as if shielding them from a charging beast. ‘Hello, Sterling.’

‘I see you’ve reached new heights of destruction.’ Sterling gestured vaguely at the castle. In the dim lamplight, with blood coating his pale hair and white-grey dust all over his coat, he looked quite deranged. ‘Wasn’t enough for you to kill Evie?’

‘Evie chose her fate,’ Griffin snarled.

‘Bold words from a killer.’

‘I’m the killer? After Burma?’

‘She was unarmed—’

‘She knew what she’d done. So do you.’

There was history here, Robin saw. Something beyond belonging to the same cohort. Griffin and Sterling spoke with the intimacy of old friends caught in some complicated tangle of love and hatred to which he was not privy, something that had brewed over many years. He didn’t know their story, but it was obvious that Griffin and Sterling had been anticipating this confrontation for quite some time.

Sterling raised his gun. ‘I’d put your hands up now.’

‘Three targets,’ said Griffin said. ‘One gun. Who are you aiming at, Sterling?’

Sterling had to realize he was outnumbered. He seemed not to care. ‘Oh, I think you know.’

It was over so quickly Robin hardly registered what was happening. Griffin whipped out his revolver. Sterling pointed his gun at Griffin’s chest. They must have pulled their triggers simultaneously, for the noise that split the night sounded like a single shot. They both collapsed at once.

Victoire screamed. Robin dropped to his knees, pulling at Griffin’s coat, patting frantically at his chest until he found the wet, growing patch of blood over his left shoulder. Shoulder wounds were not fatal, were they? Robin tried to remember what little he’d gleaned from adventure stories – one might bleed to death, but not if they got help in time, not if someone stanched the bleeding long enough to bind the wound, or stitch it, or whatever it was doctors did to fix a bullet through the shoulder—

‘Pocket,’ Griffin gasped. ‘Front pocket—’

Robin rooted through his front pocket and pulled out a thin silver bar.

‘Try that – I wrote it, don’t know if it’ll—’

Robin read the bar, then pressed it against his brother’s shoulder. ‘Xiū,’ he whispered. ‘Heal.’

修. To fix. Not merely to heal, but to repair, to patch over the damage; undo the wound with brute, mechanical reparation. The distortion was subtle, but it was there, it could work. And something was happening – he felt it under his hand, the knitting together of broken flesh, a crackling noise of bone regrowing. But the blood wouldn’t stop; it spilled over his hands, coating the bar, coating the silver. Something was wrong – the flesh was moving but it wouldn’t patch together; the bullet was in the way, and it was too deep for him to prise out. ‘No,’ Robin begged. ‘No, please—’ Not again; not thrice; how many times was he doomed to bend over a dying body, watching a life slip away, helpless to snatch it back?

Griffin writhed beneath him, face contorted with pain. ‘Stop,’ he begged. ‘Stop, just let it—’

‘Someone’s coming,’ said Victoire.

Robin felt paralysed. ‘Griffin—’

‘Go.’ Griffin’s face had turned paper-white, almost green. χλωρός, Robin thought stupidly; it was the only thing his mind could process, a memory of a frivolous debate over the translation of colour. He found himself remembering in detail how Professor Craft had questioned why they kept translating χλωρός as ‘green’, when Homer had also applied it to fresh twigs, to honey, to faces pale with fright. Was the bard merely blind, then? No. Perhaps, proposed Professor Craft, it was simply the colour of fresh nature, of verdant life – but that could not be right, for the sickly green of Griffin’s body was nothing but the onset of death.

‘I’m trying—’

‘No, Robin, listen.’ Griffin spasmed in pain; Robin held him tight, unable to do anything more. ‘There’s more than you think. Hermes – the safe room, Victoire knows where, she knows what to do – and in my satchel, wúxíng, there’s—’

‘They’re coming,’ Victoire urged. ‘Robin, the constables, they’ll see us—’

Griffin pushed him away. ‘Go, run—’

‘No.’ Robin slid his arms under Griffin’s torso. But Griffin was so heavy, and his own arms so weak. Blood spilled all over his hands. The smell of it, salty; his vision went fuzzy. He tried pulling his brother upright. They lurched to the side.

Griffin moaned. ‘Stop . . .’

‘Robin.’ Victoire grasped his arm. ‘Please, we have to hide—’

Robin reached into the satchel, dug around until he felt the cold burn of silver. ‘Wúxíng,’ he whispered. ‘Invisible.’

Robin and Victoire flickered, then disappeared just as three constables came running down the square.

‘Christ,’ someone said. ‘It’s Sterling Jones.’

‘Dead?’

‘He’s not moving.’

‘This one’s still alive.’ Someone bent over Griffin’s body. A rustle of fabric – a gun drawn. A sharp, surprised laugh; a half-hearted utterance, ‘Don’t – he’s—’

The click of a trigger.

‘No,’ Robin almost shouted, but Victoire clamped a hand over his mouth.

The shot boomed like a cannon. Griffin convulsed and lay still. Robin doubled over, screaming, but there was no sound to his anguish, no shape to his pain; he was incorporeal, voiceless, and though he suffered the kind of shattering grief that demanded shrieking, beating, a ripping of the world – and if not the world, then himself – he could not move; until the square was clear, all he could do was wait, and watch.

When at last the guards had gone, Griffin’s body had turned a ghastly white. His eyes were open, glassy. Robin pressed his fingers against his neck, looking for a pulse and knowing he’d find none; the blast had been so direct, from such a short range.

Victoire stood over him. ‘Is he—’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we have to go,’ she said, fingers closing around his wrist. ‘Robin, we don’t know when they’ll be back.’

He stood. What an awful tableau, he thought. Griffin’s and Sterling’s bodies lay adjacent on the ground, blood pooling beneath each one, running together under the rain. Some kind of love story had concluded on this square – some vicious triangle of desire, resentment, jealousy, and hatred had opened with Evie’s death and closed with Griffin’s. Its details were murky, would never be known to Robin in full;[95] all he knew, with certainty, was that this was not the first time Griffin and Sterling had tried to kill each other, only the first time one of them had succeeded. But all the principal characters were dead now, and the circle was closed.

‘Let’s go,’ Victoire urged again. ‘Robin, there’s not much time.’

It felt so wrong to leave them like this. Robin wanted at least to pull his brother’s body away, to lay it somewhere quiet and private, to close his eyes and place his hands over his chest. But there was only time now to run, to put the scene of the massacre behind.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Robin did not remember how they escaped unnoticed from Oxford Castle. His mind had fled with Griffin’s death; he could not make decisions; he could hardly register where he was. The most he could do was to put one foot in front of the other, blindly following Victoire wherever she led them: into forests, through bushes and brambles, down a riverbank where they waited, huddled together in the mud, as dogs raced past, barking; then up onto a winding back road into the centre of town. Only when they were back among familiar surroundings, nearly in the shadows of Babel and the Radcliffe Library, did he find the self-possession to take stock of where they were going.

‘Isn’t this a bit close?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t we try the canal . . . ?’

‘Not the canal,’ whispered Victoire. ‘It’ll take us right to the police station.’

‘But why aren’t we heading to the Cotswolds?’ He didn’t know why his mind had seized upon the Cotswold Hills, northwest of Oxford, filled with rolling empty plains and forests. They just seemed like the natural place to flee to. Perhaps he’d read it in a penny dreadful once, and had assumed the Cotswolds were a place for fugitives ever since. Certainly they seemed better than the heart of Oxford.

‘They’ll be looking for us in the Cotswolds,’ said Victoire. ‘They’ll be expecting us to run, they’ll have dogs combing the woods. But there’s a safe house near the city centre—’

‘No, we can’t – I gave that one up; Lovell knew, and so Playfair must too—’

‘There’s another. Anthony showed me – right near the Radcliffe Library, there’s a tunnel entrance at the back of Vaults. Just follow me.’

Robin could hear dogs barking in the distance as they approached the Radcliffe quadrangle. The police must have launched a city-wide manhunt; surely there were men and dogs trawling every street for them. Yet suddenly, absurdly, he felt no urgency to flee. They had Griffin’s wúxíng bar in hand; they could disappear at any moment.

And Oxford at night was still so serene, still seemed like a place where they were safe, where arrest was impossible. It still looked like a city carved out of the past; of ancient spires, pinnacles, and turrets; of soft moonlight on old stones and worn, cobbled roads. Its buildings were still so reassuringly heavy, solid, ancient and eternal. The lights that shone through arched windows still promised warmth, old books, and hot tea within; still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life, where ideas were abstract entertainments that could be bandied about without consequences.

But the dream was shattered. That dream had always been founded on a lie. None of them had ever stood a chance of truly belonging here, for Oxford wanted only one kind of scholar, the kind born and bred to cycle through posts of power it had created for itself. Everyone else it chewed up and discarded. These towering edifices were built with coin from the sale of slaves, and the silver that kept them running came blood-stained from the mines of Potosí. It was smelted in choking forges where native labourers were paid a pittance, before making its way on ships across the Atlantic to where it was shaped by translators ripped from their countries, stolen to this faraway land and never truly allowed to go home.

He’d been so foolish ever to think he could build a life here. There was no straddling the line; he knew that now. No stepping back and forth between two worlds, no seeing and not seeing, no holding a hand over one eye or the other like a child playing a game. You were either a part of this institution, one of the bricks that held it up, or you weren’t.

Victoire’s fingers wound around his.

‘There’s no redeeming it, is there?’ he asked.

She squeezed his hand. ‘No.’

Their mistake had been so obvious. They had assumed that Oxford might not betray them. Their dependence on Babel was ingrained, unconscious. On some level, they had still believed that the university, and their status as its scholars, might protect them. They had assumed, in spite of every indication otherwise, that those with the most to gain from the Empire’s continued expansion might find it within themselves to do the right thing.

Pamphlets. They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets.

He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

‘I think Griffin was right,’ Robin murmured. ‘It had to be the tower all along. We have to take the tower.’

‘Hm.’ Victoire’s lip curled up; her fingers tightened around his. ‘How do you want to do that?’

‘He said it would be easy. He said they were scholars, not soldiers. He said all you’d need was a gun. Perhaps a knife.’

She laughed bitterly. ‘I believe it.’

It was only an idea, a wish more than anything, but it was a beginning. And it took root and grew inside them, unfurled until it became less a ludicrous fantasy and more a question of logistics, of how and when.

Across the town students were fast asleep. Next to them, tomes by Plato and Locke and Montesquieu waited to be read, discussed, gesticulated about; theoretical rights like freedom and liberty would be debated between those who already enjoyed them, stale concepts that, upon their readers’ graduation ceremonies, would promptly be forgotten. That life, and all of its preoccupations, seemed insane to him now; he could not believe there was ever a time when his greatest concerns were what colour neckties to order from Randall’s, or what insults to shout at houseboats hogging the river during rowing practice. It was all such frippery, fluff, trivial distractions built over a foundation of ongoing, unimaginable cruelty.

Robin gazed at the curve of Babel against the moonlight, at the faint silver glow cast off by its many reinforcements. He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that had made possible its rarefied existence. ‘I want it to crumble.’

Victoire’s throat pulsed, and he knew she was thinking of Anthony, of gunshots, of the wreckage of the Old Library. ‘I want it to burn.’