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Chapter Twenty
To the assistance and information which you and Mr Jardine so handsomely afforded to us it was mainly owing that we were able to give our affairs naval, military and diplomatic, in China those detailed instructions which have led to these satisfactory results.
Foreign Secretary Palmerston, letter to John Abel Smith
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 parlor, 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 parlor 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: <display quotation>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.</display quotation>.
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 a letter up 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 sidewalk 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—’ ‘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.’ ‘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 are 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.
