Babel, page 25
‘These things happen.’ Griffin shrugged. ‘The good thing is that no one got caught—’
‘I was shot in the arm.’
‘So I heard.’ Griffin peered over the table, as if he could see Robin’s wound through his shirt sleeve. ‘You seem quite all right, though.’
‘I had to stitch myself together—’
‘Well done, you. Smarter than going to the college nurse. You didn’t, did you?’
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ said Griffin.
‘Keep my—’
‘I don’t see why we’re labouring the point. I made a mistake, you got away, it won’t happen again. We’re going to stop sending people in with you. Instead you’ll drop off the contraband outside on your own—’
‘That’s not the point,’ Robin hissed once more. ‘You let me get hurt. Then you left me out in the cold.’
‘Please don’t be so dramatic.’ Griffin sighed. ‘Accidents happen. And you’re fine.’ He paused, considering, and then said more quietly, ‘Look, if this will make you feel better, there’s a safe house on St Aldate’s we use when we need to hide out for a bit. There’s a basement door by the church – it looks rusted shut, but you’ve only got to look for where the bar’s installed and say the words. It leads to a tunnel end that got overlooked when they did the renovations—’
Robin shook his arm at Griffin. ‘A safe house doesn’t fix this.’
‘We’ll be better next time,’ Griffin insisted. ‘That was a slip-up, that was my fault, we’re adjusting for it. So calm down before someone overhears.’ He settled back in his chair. ‘Now. I’ve been out of town for months, so I need to hear what’s been going on at the tower, and I’d like you to be efficient about it, please.’
Robin could have hit him then. He would have, if it would not have attracted stares, if Griffin were not so clearly already in pain.
He was getting nothing out of his brother, he knew. Griffin, like Professor Lovell, could be astonishingly single-minded; if something did not suit them, they simply failed to acknowledge it, and indeed any attempt to procure acknowledgment would only end in more frustration. He had the fleeting impulse simply to stand up and walk away, if only to see Griffin’s expression. But that would grant no lasting satisfaction. If he turned back around, Griffin would mock him; if he kept walking out, he would only have severed his own ties to Hermes. So he did what he did best, with father and brother both – he swallowed his frustrations and resigned himself to letting Griffin set the terms of the conversation.
‘Not much,’ he said after a calming breath. ‘The professors haven’t been travelling abroad recently, and I don’t think the wards have changed since last time either. Oh – something terrible happened. A graduate fellow – Anthony Ribben—’
‘Sure, I know Anthony,’ Griffin said, then cleared his throat. ‘Knew, I mean. Same cohort.’
‘So you’ve heard?’ Robin asked.
‘Heard what?’
‘That he’s dead.’
‘What? No.’ Griffin’s voice was oddly flat. ‘No, I just meant – I knew him before I left. He’s dead?’
‘Lost at sea sailing back from the West Indies, apparently,’ said Robin.
‘Terrible,’ Griffin said blandly. ‘Just awful.’
‘That’s all?’ Robin asked.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘He was your classmate!’
‘I hate to tell you, but these incidents aren’t uncommon. Voyages are dangerous. Someone goes missing every few years.’
‘But it’s just . . . it feels wrong. That they won’t even give him a memorial. They’re just carrying on like it never happened. It’s . . .’ Robin trailed off. Suddenly he wanted to cry. He felt foolish for bringing this up. He didn’t know what he had wanted – some kind of validation, perhaps, that Anthony’s life had mattered and that he could not be so easily forgotten. But Griffin, he should have known, was the worst person from whom to seek comfort.
Griffin was silent for a long time. He stared out of the window, brows furrowed in concentration as if he were pondering something. He didn’t seem to be listening to Robin at all. Then he cocked his head, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. ‘You know, that’s not a surprise. The way Babel treats its students, particularly those they recruit from abroad. You’re an asset to them, but that’s all you are. A translation machine. And once you fail them, you’re out.’
‘But he didn’t fail, he died.’
‘Same thing.’ Griffin stood up and grabbed his coat. ‘Anyhow. I want those texts within the week; I’ll leave you instructions on where to drop them.’
‘We’re done?’ Robin asked, startled. He felt a fresh wave of disappointment. He didn’t know what he wanted from Griffin, or indeed if Griffin was capable of giving it, but still he’d hoped for more than this.
‘I’ve places to be,’ Griffin said without turning round. He was already on his way out. ‘Watch your window.’
It was, by every measure, a very bad year.
Something had poisoned Oxford, had sucked out everything about the university that gave Robin joy. The nights felt colder, the rains heavier. The tower no longer felt like a paradise but a prison. Coursework was torture. He and his friends took no pleasure in their studies; they felt neither the thrilling discovery of their first year nor the satisfaction of actually working with silver that might one day come with their fourth.
The older cohorts assured them that this always happened, that the third-year slump was normal and inevitable. But that year seemed a markedly bad year in several other respects. For one, the number of assaults on the tower rose alarmingly. Before, Babel could expect two to three attempted break-ins per year, all of which were the subject of great spectacle as the students crowded around the doors to see what cruel effect Playfair’s wards had wrought that time. But by February of that year, the attempted thefts started happening nearly every week, and the students began to grow sick of the sight of policemen dragging maimed perpetrators down the cobblestones.
They weren’t only targeted by thieves. The base of the tower was constantly being defiled, usually with urine, broken bottles, and spilt booze. Twice they discovered graffiti painted overnight in large, crooked scarlet letters. TONGUES OF SATAN read the one on the back wall; DEVIL’S SILVER read the one beneath the first-floor window.
Another morning, Robin and his cohort arrived to find dozens of townsmen assembled on the green, shouting viciously at the scholars going in and out of the front door. They approached cautiously. The crowd was a bit frightening, but not so dense that they couldn’t weave their way through. Perhaps it said something that they were willing to risk a mob rather than miss class, but it really looked like they might get by without harassment until a large man stepped in front of Victoire and began snarling something in a rough and incomprehensible northern accent.
‘I don’t know you,’ Victoire gasped. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’
‘Christ!’ Ramy lurched forward like he’d been shot. Victoire yelped. Robin’s heart stopped. But it was only an egg, he saw; it was aimed at Victoire, and Ramy had lurched because he’d stepped forward to protect her. Victoire flinched back, arms shielding her face; Ramy put an arm around her shoulder and ushered her up the front steps.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Letty screamed.
The man who’d thrown the egg shouted something unintelligible in return. Hastily Robin clenched Letty’s hand and dragged her through the door behind Ramy and Victoire.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Victoire was trembling so hard she could barely speak. ‘Fine, I’m fine – oh, Ramy, let me, I’ve got a handkerchief . . .’
‘Don’t worry.’ Ramy shrugged off his jacket. ‘It’s a lost cause, I’ll buy a new one.’
Inside the lobby, students and clients alike were clustered at the wall, watching the crowd through the windows. Robin’s first instinct was to wonder if this was the work of Hermes. But it couldn’t be – Griffin’s thefts were so meticulously planned; they belied a far more sophisticated apparatus than this furious mob.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Robin asked Cathy O’Nell.
‘They’re mill workers, I think,’ said Cathy. ‘I heard Babel’s just signed a contract with mill owners north of here and that’s put all these people out of work.’
‘All these people?’ Ramy asked. ‘With just some silver bars?’
‘Oh, they’ve laid off several hundred workers,’ said Vimal, who’d overheard. ‘Supposedly it’s a brilliant match-pair, something Professor Playfair came up with, and it’s netted us enough to fund renovations for the entire east wing of the lobby. Which doesn’t surprise me, if it can do the work of all those men combined.’
‘But it’s quite sad, isn’t it?’ mused Cathy. ‘I wonder what they’ll do now.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Robin.
Cathy gestured to the window. ‘Well, how are they going to provide for their families?’
It shamed Robin that he hadn’t even considered this.
Upstairs in their Etymology class, Professor Lovell expressed a decidedly more cruel opinion. ‘Don’t worry about them. Just the usual riffraff. Drunkards, malcontents from up north, lowlifes with no better way to express their opinions than shouting about them on the street. I’d prefer they wrote a letter, of course, but I doubt half of them can read.’
‘Is it true they’re out of work?’ asked Victoire.
‘Well, of course. The sort of labour they do is redundant now. It should have been made redundant long ago; there’s simply no reason that weaving, spinning, carding, or roving hasn’t all been mechanized already. This is simply human progress.’
‘They seem rather cross about it,’ Ramy observed.
‘Oh, they’re furious for sure,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You can imagine why. What has silver-working done for this country over the past decade? Increased agricultural and industrial productivity to an unimaginable extent. It’s made factories so efficient they can run with a quarter of their workers. Take the textile industry – Kay’s flying shuttle, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s loom were all made possible with silver-working. Silver-working has catapulted Britain ahead of every other nation, and put thousands of labourers out of work in the process. So instead of using their wits to learn a skill that might actually be useful, they’ve decided to whine about it on our front steps. Those protests outside aren’t anything new, you know. There’s a sickness in this country.’ Professor Lovell spoke now with a sudden, nasty vehemence. ‘It started with the Luddites – some idiot workers in Nottingham who thought they’d rather smash machinery than adapt to progress – and it’s spread across England since. There are people all over the country who’d rather see us dead. It’s not just Babel that gets attacked like this; no, we don’t even see the worst of it, since our security’s better than most. Up north, those men are pulling off arson, they’re stoning building owners, they’re throwing acid on factory managers. They can’t seem to stop smashing looms in Lancashire. No, this isn’t the first time our faculty have received death threats, it’s only the first time they’ve dared to come as far south as Oxford.’
‘Do you get death threats?’ Letty asked, alarmed.
‘Of course. I get more and more every year.’
‘But doesn’t it bother you?’
Professor Lovell scoffed. ‘Never. I look at those men, and I think of the vast differences between us. I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They are where they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward with the future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’
‘Is it going to be like this all year?’ Victoire asked in a small voice. ‘Out on the green, I mean.’
‘Not for long,’ Professor Lovell assured her. ‘No, they’ll have cleared off by this evening. Those men have no persistence. They’ll be gone by sunset once they get hungry, or once they wander off in search of a drink. And if they don’t, the wards and the police will move them on.’
But Professor Lovell was wrong. This wasn’t the work of an isolated handful of discontents, nor did they simply dissipate overnight. The police did clear the crowd away that morning, but they returned in smaller numbers; several times a week, a dozen or so men showed up to harass scholars on their way into the tower. One morning, the entire building had to be evacuated when a package making a ticking noise was delivered to Professor Playfair’s office. It turned out to be a clock connected to an explosive. Fortunately, rain had soaked through the package, eroding the fuse.
‘But what happens when it doesn’t rain?’ Ramy asked.
No one had a good answer to that.
Security at the tower doubled overnight. The post was now received and sorted by newly hired clerks at a processing centre halfway across Oxford. A rotating team of policemen guarded the tower entrance at all hours. Professor Playfair installed a new set of silver bars over the front door, though as usual he refused to reveal what match-pairs he’d inscribed them with, or what they would do when triggered.
These protests were not the symptoms of a minor disturbance. Something was happening throughout England, a set of changes the consequences of which they were only beginning to fathom. Oxford, which consistently ran about a century behind the rest of England’s major cities, could only pretend to be immune to change for so long. The vicissitudes of the world outside had now become impossible to ignore. This was about more than mill workers. Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade. The full impact of a so-called silver industrial revolution, a term coined by Peter Gaskell just six years before, was just beginning to be felt across the country. Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens. Rural agriculture was in decline; men, women, and children moved en masse to urban centres to work in factories, where they laboured unimaginably long hours and lost limbs and lives in frightful accidents. The New Poor Law of 1834, which had been designed to reduce the costs of poverty relief more than anything else, was fundamentally cruel and punitive in design; it withheld financial aid unless applicants moved into a workhouse, and those workhouses were designed to be so miserable no one would want to live in them. Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized. Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.
These currents were unsustainable. The gears of history were turning fast in England. The world was getting smaller, more mechanized, and more unequal, and it was as yet unclear where things would end up, or what that would mean for Babel, or for the Empire itself.
Robin and his cohort, though, did what scholars always did, which was to bend their heads over their books and focus solely on their research. The protestors eventually dispersed after troops sent in from London dragged the ringleaders off to Newgate. The scholars stopped holding their breath every time they ascended the steps to the tower. They learned to put up with the swarming police presence, along with the fact that now it took twice as long for new books and correspondence to arrive. They stopped reading the editorials in the Oxford Chronicle, which was a newly minted proreform, pro-Radical publication that seemed intent on destroying their reputation.
Still, they couldn’t quite ignore the headlines, hawked from every street corner on their way to the tower:
BABEL A THREAT TO THE NATIONAL ECONOMY?
FOREIGN BARS SEND DOZENS TO THE WORKHOUSE
SAY NO TO SILVER!
It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.
One stormy night, on his way to dinner at Professor Lovell’s home, Robin glimpsed a family sitting at the corner of Woodstock Road holding out tin mugs for alms. Beggars were a common sight in Oxford’s outskirts, but entire families were rare. The two small children gave him little waves as he approached, and the sight of their pale, rain-streaked faces made him feel guilty enough to stop and fish several pennies out of his pocket.
‘Thank you,’ murmured the father. ‘God bless you.’
The man’s beard had grown out, and his clothes had got a good deal tattier, but Robin still recognized him – he was, without question, one of the men who had screamed obscenities at him on his way into the tower several weeks ago. He met Robin’s eyes. It wasn’t clear if he recognized Robin as well; he opened his mouth to say something, but Robin quickened his pace, and whatever the man might have called after him was soon drowned out by the wind and the rain.
He didn’t mention the family to Mrs Piper or Professor Lovell. He didn’t want to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all. He’d seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his next meal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. For all his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he had not once gone to sleep hungry.
That night he ate his dinner, smiled at Mrs Piper’s compliments, and shared a bottle of wine with Professor Lovell. He walked a different route back to the college. The next month, he forgot to take the same detour on his way up, but it didn’t matter – by then, the little family was already gone.
