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Chapter Nineteen
‘There is, first of all,’ I said, ‘the greatest lie about the things of greatest concernment, which was no pretty invention of him who told how Uranus did what Hesiod says he did to Cronos, and how Cronos in turn took his revenge; and then there are the doings and sufferings of Cronos at the hands of his son. Even if they were true I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons.’
PLATO, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey
‘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 her hands up 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;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 up with 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, department 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.
