UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE HarperCollins Publishers ..................................................................
Chapter Twenty-Two
This group is remarkable, although it has vanished in the invisible depths which are behind us.
VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables, trans. Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall
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.
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 now. 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 labeled 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 Camera. 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. ‘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.’ ‘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’,’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.’ ‘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 is 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.’
‘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,’ 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 huǒyàowèimeant 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. Paralyzed.’ ‘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 up – ‘–No tub, sorry, so you’ll have to soap your armpits standing up’ – and then pulled a stack of quilts and pillows out 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.
