UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE HarperCollins Publishers ..................................................................
Chapter Twenty-Nine
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls
WILLIAM BLAKE, ‘London’
The mood in the tower turned sombre after Professor Chakravarti left.
In the early days of the strike, they’d been too occupied with the exigencies of their situation – with pamphleteering, ledgers research, and barricade fortifications – to pay attention to the sheer danger they were in. It had all been so monumental, so unifying. They’d delighted in each other’s company. They’d talked long into the nights, learning about one another, marvelling at how astonishingly similar their histories were. They’d been plucked from their motherlands at a very young age, thrown into England, and instructed to thrive or be deported. So many of them were orphans, all ties to *their countries severed except that of language.
But the frantic preparations of those early days had now given way to gloomy, suffocating hours. All the pieces had been laid on the board; all hands were shown. They had no threats left to make other than ones they’d already shouted from the rooftops. What stretched before them now was only time, a ticking down to the inevitable collapse.
They‘d issued their ultimatum, sent out their pamphlets. Westminster Bridge fell in seven days, unless. Unless.
This decision had left a bad taste in their mouths. They’d said all there was to say, and no one wanted pick apart the implications. Introspection was dangerous; they only wanted to get through the day. Now, more often than not, they drifted to separate corners of the tower, reading or researching or doing
whatever it was they did to make the time pass. Ibrahim and Juliana spent all their waking hours together. Sometimes the rest of them speculated whether the two might be falling in love, but they found they could never sustain that conversation; it made them think of the future, of how this might all end up, and that made them too sad. Yusuf kept to himself. Meghana occasionally took tea with Robin and Victoire, and they would exchange stories about their overlapping acquaintances – she’d graduated recently, and had been close to both Vimal and Anthony – but as the days drew on she also started withdrawing into herself. And Robin wondered, sometimes, whether she and Yusuf were now regretting their decision to stay.
Life in the tower, life on strike – at first so novel and strangely exciting – took on a routine, monotonous air. Things were hard going at first. It was both funny and embarrassing, how little they’d learned about how to keep their living quarters in order. No one knew where the brooms were kept, so the floors remained dusty and littered with crumbs. No one knew how to do laundry – they tried producing a match-pair using the word bleach and words derived from the Proto-Indo-European root bhel (‘shining white, to flash, to burn’), but all this did was temporarily turn their clothes white and scorching-hot to the touch.
They still congregated for meals three times a day on the hour, if only because that made rationing simpler. Their luxury items had quickly disappeared. There was no coffee after the first week; they were close to running out of tea by the second. Their solution to this was to dilute the tea more and more until they were drinking little more than slightly discoloured water. There was no milk or sugar to speak of. Meghana argued they ought to just enjoy the last few teaspoons in a properly, full-brewed cup, but Professor Craft vehemently disagreed. ‘I can give up milk,’ she said. ‘But I cannot give up tea.’
Victoire was Robin’s anchor during that week.
She was furious with him, he knew. The first two days they spent together in begrudging silence – but together, still, because they needed each other for solace. They spent hours by the sixth-floor window, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor. He did not press his point. She made no recriminations.
There was nothing more to say. The course was set.
By the third day the silence became unbearable, so they began to talk; small nothings at first, and then everything that came to mind. Sometimes they reminisced about Babel, about the golden years before everything turned upside down. Sometimes they suspended reality, managed to forget everything that had happened, and gossiped about their college days as if the most important matter at hand was whether Colin Thornhill and the Sharp twins would get into fisticuffs over Bill Jameson’s pretty, visiting sister.
It was four days before they could bring themselves to broach the subject of Letty.
Robin did it first. Letty had lingered in the back of both their memories like a festering sore they didn’t dare touch, and he couldn’t keep circling around it anymore. He wanted to take a burning knife and dig into the rot. ‘Do you think she was always going to turn on us?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it was difficult for her, what she did?’ Victoire didn’t need to ask who he meant. ‘It was like an exercise in hope,’ she said after a pause. ‘Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.’ ‘Do you think there’s anything you could have said that might have changed her mind?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘Do you?’ His mind did what it always did, which was to summon a Chinese character in lieu of the thought he was afraid of. ‘When I think of Letty, I think about the character xì.’ He drew it in the air for her: . ‘It’s most commonly used to mean “a crack or a fissure”. But in Classical Chinese texts, it also means “a grudge, or a feud”. According to rumours, the Qing Emperor uses a bar engraved with the xì-feud match-pair installed under a stone mural of the imperial lineage. And when cracks appear, it shows that someone is plotting against him.’ He swallowed. ‘I think those cracks were always there. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about them. And all it took was pressure for the whole thing to collapse.’ ‘You think she resented us that much?’ He paused, deliberating the weight and impact of his words. ‘I think she killed him on purpose.’
Victoire observed him for a long moment before she responded, simply, ‘Why?’ ‘I think she wanted him dead,’ he continued hoarsely. ‘You could see it on her face – she wasn’t scared, she knew what she was doing, she could have aimed at any one of us, and she knew it was Ramy she wanted.’ ‘Robin . . .’ ‘She loved him, you know,’ he said. The words came out of him like a torrent now; the floodgates were broken, and the waters could not be stopped. No matter how devastating, how tragic, he had to say it out loud, had to burden someone else with this awful, awful suspicion. ‘She told me, the night of the commemoration ball – she spent nearly an hour weeping into my shoulder because she wanted to dance with him, and he wouldn’t even look at her. He never looked at her, he didn’t . . . ’ He had to stop; his tears threatened to choke him.
Victoire gripped his wrist. ‘Oh, Robin.’ ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘A brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’ Victoire said nothing for a long time. She gazed out over the crumbling city, thinking. At last, she pulled a rumpled piece of paper from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. ‘You should have this.’ Robin unfolded it. It was the daguerreotype portrait of the four of them, folded and refolded so many times that thin white lines crisscrossed the image. But their faces were printed so clearly. Letty, glaring proudly, her face a bit strained after such a long time. Ramy’s hands affectionately on both her and Victoire’s shoulders. Victoire’s half-smile; chin tilted down, eyes raised and luminous. His own awkward shyness. Ramy’s grin.
He took a sharp breath. His chest tightened, as if his ribs were constricting, squeezing his heart like a vice. He hadn’t realized he could still hurt so much.
He wanted to rip it to shreds. But it was the only remaining likeness he
had of Ramy. ‘I hadn’t realized you’d kept it.’ ‘Letty kept it,’ said Victoire. ‘She kept it framed in our room. I took it out the night before the garden party. I don’t think she noticed.’
‘We look so young.’ He marvelled at their expressions. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since they’d posed for that daguerreotype. ‘We look like children.’ ‘We were happy then.’ Victoire glanced down, fingers tracing their fading faces. ‘I thought about burning it, you know. I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see . . . to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I . . . I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything. She was so alone, you know. All she wanted was a group of friends, people who could understand what she’d been through. And she thought she’d finally found that in us.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘And I suppose, when it all fell apart – I suppose she felt just as betrayed as we did.’
Ibrahim, they noticed, spent a great deal of time writing in a leather-bound notebook. ‘It’s a chronicle,’ he told them when asked. ‘Of what happened inside the tower. Everything that was said. All the decisions that were made.
Everything we stood for. Would you like to contribute?’ ‘As a co-author?’ asked Robin. ‘As an interview subject. Tell me your thoughts. I’ll write them down.’ ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ Robin felt very tired, and for some reason the sight of those pages of scribbles filled him with dread. ‘I only want to be thorough,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I’ve got Professor Craft’s and the graduate fellows’ statements already. I just thought – well, if this all turns upside down . . .’ ‘You think we’re going to lose,’ said Victoire. ‘I think no one knows how this is going to end,’ said Ibrahim. ‘But I know what they’ll say about us if it ends badly. When those students in Paris died at the barricades, everyone called them heroes. But if we die here, no one’s going to think we’re martyrs. And I just want to make sure some record of us exists, a record that doesn’t make us out to be the villains.’ Ibrahim glanced at Robin. ‘But you don’t like this project, do you?’ Had he been glaring? Robin hastily rearranged his face. ‘I didn’t say
that.’ ‘You look repelled.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I just . . . ’ Robin didn’t know why he found it so hard to put the words together. ‘I suppose I just don’t like thinking of us as history when we haven’t even yet made a mark on the present.’ ‘We’ve made our mark,’ said Ibrahim. ‘We’re already in the history books, for better or for worse. Here’s a chance to intervene against the archives, no?’ ‘What sort of things are going in it?’ Victoire asked. ‘Broad strokes only?
Or personal observations?’ ‘Anything you like,’ said Ibrahim. ‘What you had for breakfast, if you want. How you while away the hours. But I’m most interested, of course, in how we all got here.’ ‘I suppose you want to know about Hermes,’ said Robin. ‘I want to know everything you’d care to tell me.’ Robin felt a very heavy weight on his chest then. He wanted to start talking, to spill out everything he knew and have it preserved in ink, but the words died on his tongue. He didn’t know how to articulate that the problem was not the existence of the record itself, but the fact that it wasn’t enough, that it was such an insufficient intervention against the archives that it felt pointless.
There was so much to say. He didn’t know where to begin. He had never thought before about the lacuna of written history they existed in and the oppressive swath of denigrating narrative they fought against, and now that he did, it seemed insurmountable. The record was so blank. No chronicle of the Hermes Society existed at all except this one. Hermes had operated like the best of clandestine societies, erasing its own history even as it changed Britain’s. No one would celebrate their achievements. No one would even know what they were.
He thought of the Old Library, destroyed and dismantled, all those mountains of research locked away and hidden forever from view. He thought of that envelope, lost to ash; of the dozens of Hermes associates who’d never been contacted, who might never know what had happened. He thought of all those years Griffin spent abroad – fighting, struggling, railing against a system that was infinitely more powerful than he was. Robin would never know the full extent of what his brother had done, what he’d suffered.
So much history, erased. ‘It just scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be all we ever were.’
Ibrahim nodded to his notebook. ‘Worth getting some of it down, then.’ ‘It’s a good idea.’ Victoire took a seat. ‘I’ll play. Ask me anything. Let’s see if we can change some future historian’s mind.’ ‘Perhaps we’ll be remembered like the Oxford Martyrs,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Perhaps we’ll get a monument.’ ‘The Oxford Martyrs were tried for heresy and burned at the stake,’ said Robin. ‘Ah,’ said Ibrahim, eyes twinkling. ‘But Oxford’s an Anglican university now, isn’t it?’
Robin wondered in the days that followed if what they’d felt that night was a shared sense of mortality, akin to how soldiers felt sitting in trenches at war.
For it was war, what was breaking out on those streets. Westminster Bridge had not fallen, not yet, but the accidents continued and the shortages grew worse. London’s patience was strained. The public demanded retribution, demanded action, in some form or another. And since Parliament would not vote no on the China invasion, they simply increased their pressure on the Army.
It appeared the guardsmen had orders to leave the tower itself alone, but were permitted to aim at individual scholars when they got the chance. Robin stopped venturing outside when a rendezvous with Abel Goodfellow was interrupted by a spate of rifle fire. Once, a window shattered next to Victoire’s head when she was searching the stacks for a book. They all dropped to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to the basement, where they were protected by walls on all sides. Later they found a bullet lodged in the shelf just behind where she’d been standing. ‘How is this possible?’ demanded Professor Craft. ‘Nothing penetrates these windows. Nothing gets through these walls.’ Curious, Robin examined the bullet: thick, warped, and unnaturally cold to the touch. He held it up to the light and saw a thin band of silver lining the base of the casing. ‘I suppose Professor Playfair thought of something.’ That raised the stakes. Babel was not impenetrable. This was not a strike any longer, but a siege. If the soldiers broke through the barricades, if soldiers wielding Professor Playfair’s inventions reached the front door, their strike was effectively over. Professor Craft and Professor Chakravarti had replaced Professor Playfair’s wards on their first night in the tower, but
even they admitted they were not as good at this as Professor Playfair had been; they were not sure how well their own defences would hold up. ‘Let’s stay away from windows from now on,’ Victoire suggested.
For now the barricades held, though outside, the skirmishing had turned vicious. Initially Abel Goodfellow’s strikers had fought a purely defensive war from behind the barricades. They reinforced their structures, they ran supply lines, but they did not provoke the guardsmen. Now the streets had turned bloody. Soldiers fired regularly now on the barricaders, and the barricaders struck back in turn. They made incendiary devices with cloth, oil, and bottles and hurled them at the Army camps. They climbed the rooftops of the Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian, from which they threw paving stones and poured boiling water onto the troops below.
It shouldn’t have been so evenly matched, civilians against guardsmen. In theory, they shouldn’t have lasted a week. But many of Abel’s men were veterans, men discharged from an army falling into disrepair after the defeat of Napoleon. They knew where to find firearms. They knew what to do with them.
The translators helped. Victoire, who’d been reading furiously through French dissident literature, composed the match-pair élan-energy, the latter of which bore connotations of a particular French revolutionary zeal, and which could be traced back to the Latin lancea, meaning ‘lance’. Carried through was an association with throwing and momentum, and it was this latent distortion into the English energy that helped the barricaders’ projectiles fly further, hit truer, and make more of an impact than bricks and cobblestones ought to have been able to do.
They’d come up with a few wilder ideas which bore no fruit. The word seduce came from the Latin seducere, meaning ‘to lead astray’, from which the late-fifteenth-century definition ‘to persuade one to abandon their allegiance’ came about. This seemed promising, but they could not think of a way to manifest it without sending the girls into the front lines, which no one was willing to suggest, or dressing up Abel’s men in women’s clothes, which seemed unlikely to work. There was also the German word Nachtmahr, a now rarely used word for nightmare’, which also referred to a malicious entity that sat upon the sleeper’s chest. Some experimentation proved this match-pair made bad dreams worse when one had them, but seemed unable to induce them in the first place.
One morning, Abel showed up in the lobby with several long, slender cloth-wrapped parcels. ‘Can any of you shoot?’ he asked.
Robin imagined aiming one of those rifles at a living body and pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure that he could do it. ‘Not well.’ ‘Not with those,’ said Victoire. ‘Then let some of my men in there,’ said Abel. ‘You’ve got the best vantage point in the city. Pity if you don’t use it.’ Day after day, the barricades held. Robin found it amazing that they didn’t shatter under the weight of the near constant cannon fire, but Abel was confident they could hold out indefinitely as long as they kept scrounging up new materials to bolster the damaged sections. ‘It’s because we’ve built them in V-shaped structures,’ he explained. ‘The cannonballs hit the protrusion, which only packs the materials in more tightly.’ Robin was sceptical. ‘They can’t hold forever, though.’ ‘No, perhaps not.’ ‘And what happens when they come pouring through?’ Robin asked. ‘Will you flee? Or will you stay and fight?’ Abel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘At the French barricades, revolutionaries would march up to the soldiers with their shirts open and
shout at them to shoot, if they dared.’ ‘Did they?’ ‘Sometimes. Sometimes they shot them dead on sight. But other times – well, think about it. You’re looking someone in the eyes. They’re around your age, or younger. From the same city. Possibly the same neighbourhood.
Possibly you know them, or you see in their face someone you could know.
Would you pull the trigger?’ ‘I suppose not,’ Robin admitted, though a small voice in his mind whispered, Letty did. ‘Every soldier’s conscience has a limit,’ said Abel. ‘I suppose they’ll try to arrest us. But firing on townspeople? Carrying out a massacre? I’m not so sure. But we’ll force that split. We’ll see what happens.’
It will all be over soon. They tried to reassure themselves at night when they looked out over the city, saw the torchlight and cannon fire burning bright.
They needed only to hold out until Saturday. Parliament could not sustain this any longer than they could. They could not let Westminster Bridge fall.
Then, always, the strange, tentative imagining of what a ceasefire might look like. Should they write up a contract with terms of amnesty? Yusuf took charge of this, drafting a treaty that saved them from the gallows. When the tower resumed normal functioning, would they be a part of it? What did scholarship look like in the age after empire, when they knew Britain’s silver stores would dwindle into nothing? They had never considered these questions before, but now, when the outcome of this strike stood on a razor’s edge, their only comfort was in prognosticating the future in such detail that it seemed possible.
But Robin couldn’t bring himself to try. He couldn’t bear those conversations; he excused himself whenever they occurred.
There was no future without Ramy, without Griffin, without Anthony and Cathy and Ilse and Vimal. As far as he was concerned, time had stopped when Letty’s bullet had left the chamber. All there was now was the fallout.
What happened after was for someone else to struggle through. Robin only wanted it all to end.
Victoire found him on the rooftop, hugging his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth to the sound of gunfire. She sat down beside him. ‘Bored with legal terminology?’ ‘It feels like a game,’ he said. ‘It feels ludicrous – and I know this, all of this, was ludicrous to begin with, but that – talking about after – just feels like an exercise in fantasy.’ ‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’ ‘They were better than us.’ ‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’
