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Chapter Twenty-Eight
What say you, then, To times, when half the city shall break out Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude
The next morning they awoke to find that a set of barricades had mysteriously sprung up around the tower overnight. Great, tottering obstructions blocked up every major street leading towards Babel – High Street, Broad Street, Cornmarket. Was this the Army’s work? They wondered. But it all seemed too slapdash, too haphazard to be an Army operation. The barricades were made of everyday materials – upturned carts, sand-filled barrels, fallen streetlamps, iron grillwork ripped away from the fences round Oxford’s parks, and the stone rubble that had been gathering at every street corner as evidence of the city’s slow deterioration. And what benefit did the Army obtain by fencing in their own streets?
They asked Ibrahim, who’d been on watch shift, what he’d seen. But Ibrahim had fallen asleep. ‘I woke up a little before dawn,’ he said defensively. ‘By then they were already in place.’ Professor Chakravarti came rushing up from the lobby. ‘There’s a man outside who wants to talk to you two.’ He nodded to Robin and Victoire. ‘What man?’ asked Victoire. ‘Why us?’ ‘Unclear,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘But he was quite adamant he speaks to whoever’s in charge. And this whole thing is your circus, isn’t it?’ They descended to the lobby together. From the window they saw a tall, broad-shouldered, bearded man waiting on the steps. He didn’t appear to be armed, nor particularly hostile, but his presence was baffling nonetheless.
He’d seen this man before, Robin realized. He wasn’t carrying his sign, but he stood the same way he always had during the mill workers’ protests: fists clenched, chin up, glaring determinedly at the tower as if he could topple it with his mind. ‘For heaven’s sake.’ Professor Craft peeked out of the window. ‘It’s one of those madmen. Don’t go out there, he’ll attack you.’ But Robin was already pulling on his coat. ‘No, he won’t.’ He had a suspicion of what was happening, and though he was afraid to hope just yet, his heart raced with excitement. ‘I think he’s here to help.’ * When they opened the door,the man courteously backed away, arms held high to show he had no weapon. ‘What’s your name?’ asked Robin. ‘I’ve seen you out here before.’ ‘Abel.’ The man’s voice was very deep; solid, like building stone. ‘Abel Goodfellow.’ ‘You threw an egg at me,’ accused Victoire. ‘That was you, last February —’ ‘Yes, but it was only an egg,’ said Abel. ‘Nothing personal.’ Robin gestured to the barricades. The nearest one obstructed nearly the whole width of High Street, cutting off the main entrance to the tower. ‘This is your work?’ Abel smiled. It was an odd sight, through that beard; it made him look briefly like a gleeful little boy. ‘Do you like them?’ ‘I’m not sure what the point is,’ said Victoire. ‘The Army’s on their way, haven’t you heard?’ ‘And I don’t see how this stops them,’ said Victoire. ‘Unless you’re telling me you’ve also brought an army to man those walls.’ ‘It’ll do a better job warding off troops than you think,’ said Abel. ‘It’s not just about the walls – though they’ll hold, you’ll see. It’s psychological.
The barricades create the impression that there’s a real resistance going on, while the Army currently thinks they’ll be marching on the tower unopposed.
And it emboldens our protestors – it creates a safe haven, a place to retreat.’ ‘And what are you out here protesting?’ Victoire asked cautiously. ‘The silver industrial revolution, of course.’ Abel held up a crinkled, waterlogged pamphlet. One of theirs. ‘Turns out we’re on the same side.’ Victoire cocked her head. ‘Are we?’
‘Certainly where industry is concerned. We’ve been trying to convince you of the same.’ Robin and Victoire exchanged a glance. They both felt rather ashamed now of their disdain for the strikers over the past year. They’d bought into Professor Lovell’s claims, that the strikers were simply lazy, pathetic, and undeserving of basic economic dignities. But how different, really, were their causes? ‘It was never about the silver,’ said Abel. ‘You realize that now, don’t you? It was about the wage-cutting. The shoddy work. The women and children kept all day in hot airless rooms, the danger of untested machines the eye can’t track. We were suffering. And we only wanted to make you see it.’ ‘I know,’ Robin said. ‘We know that now.’ ‘And we weren’t there to harm any of you. Well, not seriously.’ Victoire hesitated, then nodded. ‘I can try to believe that.’ ‘Anyhow.’ Abel gestured at the barricades behind him. The movement was preciously awkward, like a suitor showing off his roses. ‘We learned what you were up to, and thought we might come up and help. At least we can stop those buffoons from burning the tower down.’ ‘Well, thank you.’ Robin was unsure what to make of this; he still couldn’t quite believe this was happening. ‘Do – do you want to come inside? Talk things over?’ ‘Well, yes,’ said Abel. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ They stepped back through the door, and invited him in.
And so the battle lines were drawn. That afternoon commenced the strangest collaboration Robin had ever witnessed. Men who weeks ago had been screaming obscenities at Babel students now sat in the lobby among them, talking over tactics of street warfare and barrier integrity. Professor Craft and a striker named Maurice Long stood with their heads bent over a map of Oxford, discussing ideal locations for more barriers to block off Army entry points. ‘Barricades are the only good thing we ever imported * from the French,’ Maurice was saying.‘Over the wide roads, we want low- level obstructions – paving stones, overturned trees, that sort of thing. It takes time to clear, and it keeps them from bringing in horses or heavy artillery.
And here, if we cut off the narrower access points around the quadrangle, we *can keep them restricted to High Street . . . ’
Victoire and Ibrahim sat at a table with several other strikers, dutifully taking down notes on what sort of silver bars might best aid their defences.
The word barrels came up quite a lot; Robin, eavesdropping, gathered they †were planning to raid some wine cellars for structural reinforcements. ‘How many nights are you going to stay here?’ Abel gestured around the lobby. ‘As long as it takes,’ said Robin. ‘That’s the key; they can try everything they’ve got, but they’re hamstrung as long as we have the tower.’ ‘Do you have beds in here?’ ‘Not really. There’s a cot we take turns using, but mostly we just curl up
in the stacks.’ ‘Can’t be comfortable.’ ‘Not at all.’ Robin gave him a wry smile. ‘Keep getting stepped on when someone heads down to use the toilet.’ Abel hummed. His eyes roved around the expansive lobby, the polished mahogany shelves, and the pristine marble flooring. ‘Quite the sacrifice.’
* * *
The British Army marched into Oxford that evening.
The scholars watched from the rooftop as red-coated troops rolled in a single column along High Street. The arrival of an armed platoon ought to have been a grand occasion, but it was hard to feel any real fear. The troops looked rather out of place among the townhouses and shops of the city centre, and the townspeople who turned out to cheer their arrival made them look more like a parade than a punitive military force. They marched slowly, making way for civilians crossing the street. It was all rather quaint and polite.
They halted when they reached the barricades. The commander, a richly mustachioed fellow decked out in medals, dismounted from his horse and strode to the first upturned wagon. He seemed deeply confused by this. He glanced around at the watching townspeople, as if awaiting some explanation. ‘Do you think that’s Lord Hill?’ Juliana wondered. ‘He’s the Commander in Chief,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘They’re not going to send in the Commander in Chief to deal with us.’
‘They ought to,’ said Robin. ‘We’re a threat to national security.’ ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ Victoire hushed them. ‘Look, they’re talking.’ Abel Goodfellow strode out alone from behind the barricade.
The commander met Abel in the middle of the street. They exchanged words. Robin could not hear what they were saying, but the conversation seemed heated. It began in a civil manner, but then both men started gesticulating wildly; at several points he was afraid the commander was about to put Abel in handcuffs. At last they came to some agreement. Abel retreated behind the barricade, walking backwards as if making sure no one shot him in the back. The mustachioed commander returned to his battalion.
Then, to Robin’s amazement, the Army began to retreat. ‘He’s given us forty-eight hours to clear out,’ Abel reported upon his return to the tower lobby. ‘After that, he says they’re going to forcibly clear the barricades.’ ‘So we’ve only got two days,’ said Robin. ‘That’s not enough time.’ ‘More than that,’ said Abel. ‘This is all going to play out in fits and starts. They’ll give another warning. Then another. Then a third, strongly worded this time. They’ll drag their feet for as long as they can. If they were planning to storm us, they would have done so right then and there.’ ‘They were perfectly happy shooting on the Swing Rioters,’ said Victoire. ‘And the Blanketeers.’ ‘Those weren’t riots over territory,’ said Abel. ‘Those were riots over policies. The rioters didn’t need to hold their ground; when they were fired upon, they scattered. But we’re embedded in the heart of a city. We’ve staked our claim on the tower, and on Oxford itself. If any of those soldiers accidentally strikes a bystander, this spirals out of their control. They can’t break the barricades without breaking the city. And that, I think, Parliament cannot afford.’ He rose to leave. ‘We’ll keep them out. You keep writing your pamphlets.’ So this, an impasse between the strikers and the Army at the barricades on High Street, became their new status quo.
When it came down to it, the tower itself would provide much better protection than Abel Goodfellow’s hotchpotch obstructions could. But the barricades had more than mere symbolic value. They covered an area large enough to allow crucial supply lines in and out of the tower. This meant the scholars now got fresh food and fresh water (dinner that night was a bounty
of fluffy white rolls and roast chicken), and it meant they had a reliable source for information on what was going on beyond the tower walls.
Despite all expectations, Abel’s supporters grew in number over the following days. The workmen strikers were better at getting the message out than any of Robin’s pamphlets. They spoke the same language, after all. The British could identify with Abel in a way they could not with foreign-born translators. Striking labourers from all over England came to join their cause.
Young Oxford boys, bored with being cooped up at home and looking for something to do, turned up to the barricades simply because it seemed exciting. Women joined the ranks as well, out-of-work seamstresses and factory girls.
What a sight, this influx of defenders to the tower. The barricades had the peculiar effect of building community. They were all comrades in arms behind those walls, no matter their origins, and the regular deliveries of foodstuffs to the tower came with handwritten messages of encouragement.
Robin had expected only violence, not solidarity, and he wasn’t sure what to do with this show of support. It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.
One morning he discovered Abel had left them a gift – a wagon deposited before the tower doors, piled high with mattresses, pillows, and homespun blankets. A scrawled note was pinned to the top. This is on loan, it said.
We’ll want these back when you’re done.
Meanwhile, inside the tower, they devoted themselves to making London fear the costs of prolonged striking.
Silver afforded London all of its modern conveniences. Silver powered the ice-making machines in the kitchens of London’s rich. Silver powered the engines of the breweries which supplied London’s pubs, and the mills which produced London’s flour. Without silver, the locomotives would cease to run.
No new railways could be built. The water would run foul; the air would thicken with grime. When all the machines that mechanized the processes of spinning, weaving, carding, and roving ground to a halt, Britain’s textile industry would wholly collapse. The entire country faced possible starvation, for there was silver in the plough-frames, seed drills, threshing *machines, and drainage pipes throughout Britain’s countryside.
These effects would not be fully felt for months. There were still regional silver-working centres in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Birmingham, where Babel scholars who hadn’t dazzled enough during their undergraduate years to win fellowships eked out a mundane living fiddling with the bars invented by their more talented peers. These centres would function as a stopgap in the interim. But they could not fully make up the deficit – especially since, crucially, they did not have access to the same maintenance ledgers. ‘Don’t you think they’ll remember?’ asked Robin. ‘At least, the scholars who walked out with Professor Playfair?’ ‘They’re academics,’ said Professor Craft. ‘All we know is the life of the mind. We don’t remember anything unless it’s written in our diaries and circled several times over. Jerome will do his very best, supposing he’s not still drugged up from surgery, but too much will slip through the cracks. This country’s going to pieces in months.’ ‘And the economy is going to fail even more quickly than that,’ said Yusuf, who, alone among them, actually knew something about markets and banking. ‘It’s all the speculation, see – people have been going mad buying shares of railways and other silver-powered industries in the past decade because they all think they’re on the verge of getting rich. What happens when they realize all those shares will come to naught? The railroad industry might take months to falter. The markets themselves will fail in weeks.’ Market failure. The thought was absurd, yet tantalizing. Could they win this with the threat of a stock market collapse and the inevitable bank run?
For that was the key, wasn’t it? For this to work, they had to frighten the rich and powerful. They knew the strike would have a disproportionate impact on the working poor; those living in the dirtiest, most crowded parts of London, who could not simply pack up and escape to the country when their air blackened and their water grew foul. But in another important sense, silver scarcity would most acutely hit those who had the most to gain from its development. The newest buildings – the private clubs, the dance halls, the freshly renovated theatres – would collapse first. London’s shabby tenements were built from ordinary lumber, not foundations enhanced by silver to support weight much heavier than natural materials could. The architect Augustus Pugin was a frequent collaborator of Babel’s faculty, and had made great use of silver bars in his recent projects – Scarisbrick Hall in
Lancashire, the Alton Towers renovation, and most notably, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire. According to the work-order ledgers, all these buildings would fail by the end of the year. Sooner, if the right rods were pulled away.
How would London’s wealthy respond when the ground gave way beneath their feet?
The strikers gave fair warning. They loudly advertised this information.
They wrote endless pamphlets, which Abel communicated to associates in London. Your roads will fail, they wrote. Your water will run dry. Your lights will go dark, your food will rot, and your ships sink. All this will come to pass, unless you choose peace. ‘It’s like the Ten Plagues,’ Victoire observed.
Robin had not cracked open a Bible in years. ‘The Ten Plagues?’ ‘Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go,’ said Victoire. ‘But Pharaoh’s heart was unyielding, and he refused. So the Lord cast ten plagues on the Pharaoh’s land. He turned the Nile to blood. He sent locusts, frogs, and pestilence. He cast all of Egypt into darkness, and through these feats he made Pharaoh know his power.’ ‘And did Pharaoh let them go?’ Robin asked. ‘He did,’ said Victoire. ‘But only after the tenth plague. Only after he had suffered the death of his firstborn son.’
Occasionally the effects of the strike reversed themselves. Sometimes the lights would flicker back on for a night, or a patchwork of roads would clear up, or news would spread that clean water silver-work was now available and selling at exorbitant prices in certain neighbourhoods of London.
Occasionally the disaster the ledgers predicted did not come to pass.
This was not a surprise. The exiled scholars – Professor De Vreese, Professor Harding, and all the faculty and fellows who had not remained in the tower – had regrouped in London and established a defence society to counteract the strikers. The country now lay in the throes of an invisible battle of words and meaning; its fate teetered between the university centre and the desperate, striving periphery.
The strikers were not concerned. The exiles could not win; they simply lacked the tower’s resources. They could stick their fingers in the mud. They could not stop the river from flowing, nor the dam from bursting.
‘It’s very embarrassing,’ Victoire observed one afternoon over tea, ‘how much it all depends on Oxford, in the end. You’d think they would have known better than to put all their eggs in one basket.’ ‘Well, it’s just so funny,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Technically, those supplementary stations do exist, precisely to alleviate such a crisis of dependence. Cambridge, for example, has been trying to establish a rival programme for years. But Oxford wouldn’t share any resources.’ ‘Because of scarcity?’ Robin asked. ‘Because of jealousy and avarice,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Scarcity’s * never been an issue.We simply don’t like the Cambridge scholars. Nasty little upstarts, thinking they can make it on their own.’ ‘No one goes to Cambridge unless they can’t find a job here,’ Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Sad.’ Robin cast them an amazed look. ‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’ ‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’
Still Parliament refused to cooperate. Every night the Foreign Office sent them the same telegram, always worded in precisely the same way, as if shouting a message over and over again could induce obedience: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP. In a week, these offers stopped including an offer of amnesty. Shortly after that, they came with a rather redundant threat attached: CEASE STRIKE NOW STOP OR ARMY WILL TAKE BACK THE TOWER STOP. † Very soon the effects of their strike became deadly. One of the major breaking points, it turned out, was the roads. In Oxford, but even more so in London, traffic was the dominant problem facing city officials – how to manage the flow of carts, horses, pedestrians, stagecoaches, hackney carriages, and wagons without gridlock or accidents. Silver-work had kept pile-ups at bay by reinforcing wooden roads, regulating turnpikes, reinforcing toll gates and bridges, ensuring smooth turns by carts, replenishing the water pumps meant for suppressing dust, and keeping horses docile. Without Babel maintenance, all of these minute adjustments began to fail one by one, and dozens died as a result.
Transportation tipped the domino that led to a slew of other miseries.
Grocers could not stock their shelves. Bakers could not obtain flour. Doctors could not see their patients. Solicitors could not make it to court. A dozen carriages in London’s richer neighbourhoods had made use of a match-pair by Professor Lovell that played on the Chinese character (fǔ), which meant ‘to help’ or ‘to assist’. The character had originally referred to the protective sidebars on a carriage. Professor Lovell had been due in London to touch them up mid-January. The bars failed. The carriages were now too *dangerous to drive.
Everything they knew would transpire in London was already happening in Oxford, for Oxford, by proximity to Babel, was the most silver-reliant city in the world. And Oxford was rotting. Its people were going broke, they were hungry, their trades had been interrupted, their rivers were blocked up, their markets had shut down. They sent out to London for food and supplies, but the roads had become perilous, and the Oxford-to-Paddington line was no longer running.
The attacks on the tower redoubled. Townspeople and soldiers together crowded the streets, shouting obscenities at the windows, skirmishing with men at the barricades. But it made no difference. They could not hurt the translators, who were the only people who could end their misery. They could not get past the tower’s wards, could not burn it down or set explosives at its base. They could only beg the scholars to stop.
We only have two demands, Robin wrote in a series of pamphlets, which had become his way of responding to the town’s outcries. Parliament knows this. Refusal to go to war, and amnesty. Your fate lies in their hands.
He requested that London capitulate before all these things came to pass.
He hoped, and knew, they would not. He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.
Victoire did not like this. Every time they ascended to the eighth floor, they quarrelled over which resonance bars to pull out, and how many. He wanted to deactivate two dozen; she wanted only two. Usually, they settled on five or six.
‘You’re pushing things too fast,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even given them a chance to respond.’ ‘They can respond whenever they like,’ said Robin. ‘What’s stopping them? Meanwhile, the Army’s already here—’ ‘The Army’s here because you pushed them to it.’ He made an impatient noise. ‘I’m sorry I won’t be squeamish—’ ‘I am not being squeamish, I am being prudent.’ Victoire folded her arms. ‘It’s too fast, Robin. It’s too much all at once. You need to let the debates settle, you need to let public opinion turn against the war—’ ‘It’s not enough,’ he insisted. ‘They won’t reason themselves into justice now when they never have before. Fear’s the only thing that works. This is just tactics—’ ‘This is not coming from tactics.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘It’s coming from grief.’ He couldn’t turn around. He didn’t want her to see his expression. ‘You said yourself you wanted this place to burn.’ ‘But even more,’ said Victoire, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘I want us to survive.’
It was impossible to say, in the end, how much of a difference the pace of their destruction really made. The choice remained with Parliament. The debates continued in London.
No one knew what was going on inside the House of Lords, except that neither the Whigs nor the Radicals felt good enough about their numbers yet to call a vote. The papers revealed more about public sentiment. The mainstream rags expressed the opinion Robin had expected, which was that the war on China was a matter of defending national pride, that invasion was nothing more than a just punishment for the indignities imposed by the Chinese on the British flag, that the occupation of Babel by foreign-born students was an act of treason, that the barricades in Oxford and the strikes in London were the work of brutish malcontents, and that the government ought to hold firm against their demands. Prowar editorials stressed the ease with which China would be defeated. It would only be a little war, and not even a proper war at that; all it took was the ignition of several cannons and the Chinese would admit defeat within a day.
The papers could not seem to make up their minds about the translators.
The prowar publications offered a dozen theories. They were in cahoots with the corrupt Chinese government. They were co-conspirators of mutineers in India. They were malicious ingrates with no agenda at all except a desire to hurt England, to bite the hand that had fed them – and this required no further explanation, for it was a motive that the British public were all too ready to believe. We will not negotiate with Babel, promised members of Parliament *on both sides. Britain does not bow to foreigners.
Yet not all the papers were against Babel or for the war. Indeed, for every headline that urged swift action in Canton, there was another by a publication (albeit smaller, more niche, more radical) that called the war a moral and religious outrage. The Spectator accused the prowar party of greed and profiteering; the Examiner called the war criminal and indefensible. JARDINE’S OPIUM WAR A DISGRACE, read one headline by the Champion. Others were not so tactful: DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA read the Political Register.
Every social faction in England had an opinion. The abolitionists put out statements of support for the strikers. So too did the suffragists, though not quite so loudly. Christian organizations printed pamphlets criticizing the spread of an illegal vice to an innocent people, though the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade.
Meanwhile, Radical publications made the argument that the opening up of China was antithetical to the interests of workers in northern England. The Chartists, a movement of disillusioned industrial and artisanal workers, came out most strongly in support of the strikers; the Chartist circular The Red Republican, in fact, put out a headline calling the translators heroes of the working class.
This gave Robin hope. The Radicals were, after all, the party that the Whigs needed to appease, and if such headlines could convince the Radicals that war was not in their long-term interests, then perhaps all this could be resolved.
And indeed, the conversation about the dangers of silver-work had fared better in the court of public opinion than did the conversation about China.
Here was an issue that was close to home, that affected the average Briton in
ways he could understand. The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories (although these had their rebuttals, including one refutation by Andrew Ure, who argued that factory workers would feel a good deal better if they only consumed less gin and tobacco). In 1833, the surgeon Peter Gaskell had published a thoroughly researched manuscript entitled The Manufacturing Population of England, focusing chiefly on the moral, social, and physical toll of silver-working machinery on British labourers. It had gone largely unheeded at the time, except by the Radicals, who were known to exaggerate everything. Now, the antiwar papers ran excerpts from it every day, reporting in grisly detail the coal dust inhaled by small children forced to wriggle into tunnels that adults could not, the fingers and toes lost to silver-powered machines working at inhuman speeds, the girls who’d been strangled by their own hair caught in whirring spindles and looms.
The Spectator printed a cartoon illustration of emaciated children being crushed to death under the wheels of some nebulous contraption, which they captioned WHITE SLAVES OF THE SILVER REVOLUTION. In the tower, they laughed themselves silly over this comparison, but the general public seemed genuinely horrified. Someone asked a member of the House of Lords why he supported exploiting children in factories; he replied quite flippantly that employing children under the age of nine had been outlawed in 1833, which led to more general outcry over the suffering of ten- and eleven-year-olds in the country. ‘Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’ ‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?’ ‘No,’ said Robin, feeling embarrassed. ‘They don’t.’ The Spectator story seemed to greatly affect Professor Craft in particular. Robin found her sitting with it at the tea table, red in the eyes, long
after the others had finished their breakfast. She hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief when she saw him approach.
He sat down beside her. ‘Are you all right, Professor?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ She cleared her throat, paused, then nudged the paper. ‘It’s just . . . it’s a side of the story we don’t often think about, isn’t it?’ ‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’ She seemed not to hear him. She stared out of the window at the green below, where the strikers’ protest grounds had been turned into what looked like a military camp. ‘My first patented match-pair improved the efficiency of equipment at a mine in Tyneshire,’ she said. ‘It kept coal-laden trolleys firmly on their tracks. The mine owners were so impressed they invited me up for a visit, and of course I went; I was so excited about contributing something to the country. I remember being shocked at all the little children in the pits. When I asked, the miners said that they were completely safe, and that helping out in the mines kept them from trouble when their parents were at work.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘Later they told me that the silver-work made the trolleys impossible to move off the tracks, even when there were people in the way. There was an accident. One little boy lost both his legs. They stopped using the match-pair when they couldn’t figure out a workaround, but I didn’t give it a second thought. By then I’d received my fellowship. I had a professorship in sight, and I’d moved on to other, bigger projects. I didn’t think about it. I simply didn’t think about it, for years, and years and years.’ She turned back towards him. Her eyes were wet. ‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’
Jesus Christ,’ said Robin.
Victoire glanced up. ‘What is it?’ They were holed up in an office on the sixth floor, poring through the ledgers to find portents of future disasters. They’d already been through the Oxford town appointments up to the next year. London’s maintenance schedules were harder to find – Babel’s bookkeeping was astonishingly bad, and the categorization system used by its clerks seemed not to be organized by date, which would have been logical, or by language, which would have
made less but at least some sense, but by the postal code of the London neighbourhood in question.
Robin tapped his ledger. ‘I think we might be close to a breaking point.’ ‘Why?’ ‘They’re due for maintenance on Westminster Bridge in a week. They contracted for silver-work at the same time that the New London Bridge was built in 1825, and the bars were meant to expire after fifteen years. That’s now.’ ‘So what happens?’ asked Victoire. ‘The turnstiles lock in?’ ‘I don’t think so, it was quite a major . . . F is code for foundation, isn’t it?’ Robin trailed off, then fell silent. His eyes darted up and down the ledger, trying to confirm what was in front of him. It was quite a large entry, a list of silver bars and match-pairs in various languages that stretched nearly half a page. A good number of them had corresponding numbers in a subsequent column – an indication they employed resonance links. He turned the page, then blinked. The column continued over the next two pages. ‘I think it just falls right into the river.’ Victoire leaned back and exhaled very slowly, deflating.
The implications were enormous. Westminster Bridge was not the only bridge to cross the Thames, but it saw the heaviest traffic. And if Westminster Bridge fell into the river, then no steamers, no houseboats, no sculls or canoes would be able to get around the wreckage. If Westminster Bridge went down, the whole city stopped moving.
And in the weeks to come, when the bars that kept the Thames clean of sewage and pollution from gas factories and chemical works at last expired, the waters would revert to a state of diseased and putrid fermentation. Fish would float belly-up to the surface, dead and stinking. Urine and piss, already moving sluggishly through sewer drains, would solidify.
Egypt would suffer her ten plagues.
But as Robin explained this, Victoire’s face mirrored none of his glee.
Rather, she was looking at him with a very odd expression, brows furrowed and lips pursed, and it turned his insides with discomfort. ‘It’s Armageddon,’ he insisted, spreading his hands in the air. How could he make her see? ‘It’s the worst possible thing that could happen.’ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Except once you’ve played it, we’ve nothing left.’
‘We won’t need anything else,’ he said. ‘We only need to turn the screws once, to push them to the limit—’ ‘A limit you know they’ll ignore? Please, Robin—’ ‘Then what’s the alternative? Defanging ourselves?’ ‘It’s giving them time, it’s letting them see the consequences—’ ‘What more is there to see?’ He had not meant to yell. He took a deep breath. ‘Victoire, please, I just think we need to escalate, otherwise—’ ‘I think you want it to fall,’ she accused. ‘I think this is just retribution for
you, because you want to see it fall.’ ‘And why not?’ They’d had this argument before. The ghosts of Anthony and Griffin loomed between them: one guided by the conviction that the enemy would at least act in rational self-interest, if not altruism, and the other guided less by conviction, less by telos, and more by sheer, untrammelled rage. ‘I know it hurts.’ Victoire’s throat pulsed. ‘I know – I know it feels impossible to move on. But your motivating goal cannot be to join Ramy.’ A silence. Robin considered denying this. But there was no point lying to Victoire, or to himself. ‘Doesn’t it kill you?’ His voice broke. ‘Knowing what they’ve done?
Seeing their faces? I can’t imagine a world where we coexist with them.
Doesn’t it split you apart?’ ‘Of course it does,’ she cried. ‘But that’s no excuse not to keep living.’ ‘I’m not trying to die.’ ‘What do you think making this bridge collapse does, then? What do you think they’ll do to us?’ ‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘End this strike? Open up the tower?’ ‘If I tried,’ she said, ‘could you stop me?’ They both stared at the ledger. Neither of them spoke for a very long time.
They did not want to follow this conversation where it might lead. Neither of them could bear any more heartbreak. ‘A vote,’ Robin proposed at last, unable to take this any longer. ‘We can’t – we can’t just break the strike like this. It’s not up to us. Let’s not decide, Victoire.’ Victoire’s shoulders sagged. He saw such sorrow on her face. She lifted her chin, and for a moment he thought she might argue further, but all she did then was nod.
The vote came out narrowly in Robin’s favour. Victoire and the professors were against; all the students were for. The students agreed with Robin that they had to push Parliament to the breaking point, but they were not thrilled about it. Ibrahim and Juliana both hugged their arms against their chest as they voted, as if shrinking from the idea. Even Yusuf, who usually took great pleasure in helping Robin compose threatening pamphlets to London, stared down at his feet. ‘So that’s that,’ said Robin. He’d won, but it did not feel like such a victory. He could not meet Victoire’s eye. ‘When does this happen?’ Professor Chakravarti asked. ‘This Saturday,’ Robin said. ‘The timing is marvellous.’ ‘But Parliament isn’t going to capitulate by Saturday.’ ‘Then I suppose we’ll hear about the bridge when it’s collapsed.’ ‘And you are comfortable with this?’ Professor Chakravarti glanced about, as if trying to gauge the moral temperature of the room. ‘Dozens of people will die. There are whole crowds there trying to get on boats at all times of day; what happens when—’ ‘That’s not our choice,’ said Robin. ‘It’s theirs. It’s inaction. It’s killing by letting die. We’re not even touching the resonance rods, it’s going to fall on its own—’ ‘You know very well that doesn’t matter,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Don’t mince the ethics. Westminster Bridge falling down is your choice. But innocent people can’t determine the whims of Parliament.’ ‘But it’s their government’s duty to look out for them,’ said Robin. ‘That’s the entire point of Parliament, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we don’t have the option of civility. Or grace. It’s an indiscriminate torch, I’ll admit that, but that’s what the stakes demand. You can’t put the moral blame on me.’ He swallowed. ‘You can’t.’ ‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’ ‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ‘Even so, there are lines you can’t cross.’ ‘Lines? If we play by the rules, then they’ve already won—’
‘You’re trying to win by punishing the city,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That means the whole city, everyone in it – men, women, children. There are sick children who can’t get their medicine. There are whole families with no income and no source of food. This is more than an inconvenience to them, it’s a death threat.’ ‘I know,’ said Robin, frustrated. ‘That’s the point.’ They glared at each other, and Robin thought he understood now the way that Griffin had once looked at him. This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it?
Professor Chakravarti stood. ‘I can’t follow you down this path.’ ‘Then you ought to leave the tower,’ Robin said promptly. ‘It’ll help keep
your conscience clear.’ ‘Mr Swift, please, listen to reason—’ ‘Turn out your pockets.’ Robin raised his voice, speaking over the ringing in his ears. ‘Take nothing with you – not silver, not ledgers, not notes you’ve written to yourself.’ He kept waiting for someone to interrupt him; for Victoire to intervene, to tell him he was wrong, but no one spoke. He took this silence as tacit approval. ‘And if you leave, I’m sure you know, you can’t come back.’ ‘There is no path to victory here,’ warned Professor Chakravarti. ‘This will only make them hate you.’ Robin scoffed. ‘They can’t hate us any more than they do.’ But no, that was not true; they both knew it. The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet.
That might change after the bridge fell.
But then, Robin thought, invoking hatred might be good. Hatred might force respect. Hatred might force the British to look them in the eyes and see not an object, but a person. Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him.
And the system cannot survive the shock.
* ‘Oderint dum metuant,’ he said.‘That’s our path to victory.’ ‘That’s Caligula,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘You’re invoking
Caligula?’
‘Caligula got his way.’
‘Caligula was assassinated.’ Robin shrugged, wholly unbothered. ‘You know,’ said Professor Chakravarti, ‘you know, one of the most commonly misunderstood Sanskrit concepts is ahimsa. Nonviolence.’ ‘I don’t need a lecture, sir,’ said Robin, but Professor Chakravarti spoke over him. ‘Many think ahimsa means absolute pacifism, and that the Indian people are therefore a sheepish, submissive people who will bend the knee to anything. But in the Bhagavad Gita, exceptions are made for a dharma yuddha. A righteous war. A war in which violence is applied as the last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause.’ He shook his head. ‘This is how I have justified this strike, Mr Swift. But what you’re doing here is not self-defence; it has trespassed into malice. Your violence is personal, it is vindictive, and this I cannot support.’ Robin’s throat pulsed. ‘Then take your blood vial before you go, sir.’ Professor Chakravarti examined him for a moment, nodded, and then began turning out the contents of his pockets onto the middle table. A pencil.
A notebook. Two blank silver bars.
Everyone watched, silent.
Robin felt a flash of irritation. ‘Would anyone else like to voice a complaint?’ he snapped.
No one else said a word. Professor Craft stood and walked away up the stairs. A moment later, Ibrahim joined her, then Juliana; and then the rest until only Robin and Victoire stood in the lobby, watching Professor Chakravarti stride down the front steps towards the barricades.
