Babel, page 41
Two things were clear. First, there was no ambiguity what these documents were. A letter from Reverend Gützlaff from four months ago contained a detailed sketch of Canton’s main docks. On the other side was a list of all the known ships in the Chinese navy. These were not hypotheticals of Britain’s China policy. These were war plans. These letters included thorough accounts of the Qing government’s coastal defences, reports detailing the number of junks defending the naval stations, the number and placement of forts on the surrounding islands, and even the precise number of troops stationed at each.
Second, Professor Lovell’s voice emerged as one of the most hawkish among his interlocutors. Initially, Robin had conceived a silly, baseless hope that perhaps this war was not Professor Lovell’s idea, and that perhaps he had been urging them to stop. But Professor Lovell was quite vocal, not only on the many benefits of such a war (including the vast linguistic resources that would then be at his disposal), but about the ease with which the ‘Chinese, languid and lazy, with an army without one iota of bravery or discipline, might be defeated’. His father had not simply been a scholar caught up in trade hostilities. He had helped design them. One unsent missive, written in Professor Lovell’s neat, tiny hand and addressed to Lord Palmerston, read:
The Chinese fleet consists of outdated junks whose cannons are too small to aim effectively. The Chinese have only one ship worthy of combat against our fleet, the merchantman the Cambridge, purchased from the Americans, but they have no sailors that can handle her. Our agents report she sits idle in the bay. We will make short work of her with the Nemesis.
Robin’s heart was beating very quickly. He felt seized by a sudden urge to discover all he could, to determine the full extent of this conspiracy. He read frantically through the stack; when the letters ran out, he pulled another pile of correspondence from the left drawer. It revealed much of the same. The desirability of war was never a question, only its timing, and the difficulty of persuading Parliament to act. But some of these letters dated as far back as 1837. How had Jardine, Matheson, and Lovell known negotiations in Canton would break out in hostilities more than two years ago?
But that was obvious. They’d known because this was their intent all along. They wanted hostilities because they wanted silver, and without some miraculous change in the Qing Emperor’s mind, the only way to get that was to turn their guns on China. They’d planned on war before they had even set sail. They’d never meant to negotiate with Commissioner Lin in good faith. Those talks were merely a pretext for hostilities. Those men had funded Professor Lovell’s trip to Canton as a final expedition before they introduced the bill to Parliament. These men were relying on Professor Lovell to help them win a short, brutal, efficient war.
What would happen when they learned Professor Lovell was never coming back?
‘What’s that?’
Robin glanced up. Ramy stood in the doorway, yawning.
‘You’ve got an hour left before your turn,’ Robin said.
‘Couldn’t sleep. And these shifts are nonsense anyway, no one’s coming for us tonight.’ Ramy joined Robin behind Professor Lovell’s desk. ‘Digging around, are we?’
‘Look.’ Robin tapped the letters. ‘Read these.’
Ramy picked up a letter from the top of the pile, skimmed it, and then sat down across from Robin to take a closer look at the rest. ‘Good heavens.’
‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin. ‘Everyone’s in on it, everyone we met in Canton – look, here are letters from Reverends Morrison and Gützlaff – they’ve been using their covers as missionaries to spy on the Qing military. Gützlaff’s even been bribing informants to tell him particulars of Chinese troop deployment, which influential Chinese traders are against the British, and even which pawnshops would be good places to raid.’
‘Gützlaff?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Really? I didn’t know that German had it in him.’
‘There are also pamphlets to whip up public support for the war – look, here Matheson calls the Chinese “a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy”. And here someone called Goddard writes that deploying warships would be a “tranquil and judicious visit”. Imagine. A tranquil and judicious visit. What a way to describe a violent invasion.’
‘Incredible.’ Ramy’s eyes roved up and down the documents as he flipped through with increasing speed. ‘Makes you wonder why they sent us in the first place.’
‘Because they still needed a pretext,’ said Robin. It was falling into place now. It was all so clear, so ridiculously simple that he wanted to kick himself for not seeing it earlier. ‘Because they still needed something to take to Parliament to prove the only way they were going to get what they wanted was by sheer force. They wanted Baylis to humiliate Lin, not compromise with him. They wanted to bait Lin into declaring hostilities first.’
Ramy snorted. ‘Only they didn’t count on Lin blowing up all that opium in the harbour.’
‘No,’ said Robin. ‘But I suppose they’re getting the just cause they wanted anyway.’
‘There you are,’ said Victoire.
They both jumped, startled.
‘Who’s watching the door?’ asked Robin.
‘It’ll be fine, no one’s breaking in at three in the morning. And Letty’s out like a log.’ Victoire crossed the room and peered down at the stack of letters. ‘What are these?’
Ramy gestured for her to sit. ‘You’ll see.’
Victoire, like Ramy, started reading faster and faster when she realized what she was looking at. ‘Oh, goodness.’ She touched her fingers to her lips. ‘So you think – so they never even—’
‘Right,’ said Robin. ‘It was all for show. We weren’t meant to negotiate peace at all.’
She gave the papers a helpless shake. ‘Then what do we do with this?’
‘What do you mean?’ Robin asked.
She shot him a puzzled look. ‘These are war plans.’
‘And we’re students,’ he replied. ‘What can we do?’
There was a long silence.
‘Oh, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘What are we even doing here? What do we think we’re running back to?’
Oxford was the answer. Oxford, which was what they’d all agreed on, because when they’d been trapped on the Hellas, their professor’s corpse sinking into the depths of the ocean behind them, the promise of a return to the normal and familiar was what kept them calm, a shared delusion of stability that kept them from going mad. All their planning had always stopped at their safe arrival in England. But they couldn’t keep skirting the issue, couldn’t keep up the blind and ridiculous faith that if they just got back to Oxford, then everything would be all right.
There was no going back. They all knew it. There was no pretending anymore, no hiding in their supposedly safe corner of the world while unimaginable cruelty and exploitation carried on beyond. There was only the vast, frightening web of the colonial empire, and the demands of justice to resist it.
‘Then what?’ asked Robin. ‘Where do we go?’
‘Well,’ said Victoire, ‘the Hermes Society.’
It seemed so obvious when she said it. Only Hermes might know what to do with this. The Hermes Society, which Robin had betrayed, which might not even be willing to take them back, was the only entity they’d encountered that had ever professed to bother with the problem of colonialism. Here was a way out, a rare and undeserved second chance to make good on wrong choices – if only they could find Hermes before the police found them.
‘We’re agreed, then?’ Victoire glanced back and forth between them. ‘Oxford, then Hermes – and then whatever Hermes needs of us, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Ramy said firmly.
‘No,’ said Robin. ‘No, this is madness. I’ve got to turn myself in, I need to go to the police as soon as I can—’
Ramy scoffed. ‘We’ve been over this, over and over and over. You turn yourself in and what? Forget that Jardine and Matheson are trying to start a war? This is bigger than us now, Birdie. Bigger than you. You’ve got obligations.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Robin insisted. ‘If I turn myself in, that takes the heat off the two of you. It disentangles this opium war from the murder, don’t you see? It frees you up—’
‘Stop it,’ said Victoire. ‘We won’t let you.’
‘Course we won’t,’ said Ramy. ‘Besides, that’s selfish – you don’t get to take the easy way out.’
‘How is that the easy—’
‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’
‘I do not—’
‘That’s why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.’
Robin thought this was supremely unfair. ‘I was only trying to save you that night.’
‘You were trying to let yourself off the hook,’ Ramy said, not unkindly. ‘But all sacrifice does is make you feel better. It doesn’t help the rest of us, so it’s an ultimately meaningless gesture. Now, if you’re finished with grand attempts at martyrdom, I think we should discuss . . .’
He trailed off. Victoire and Ramy followed his gaze to the door, where Letty stood, hands clutched against her chest. None of them knew how long she’d been there. Her face had gone very pale, save for two blotches of colour high on her cheeks.
‘Oh,’ said Ramy. ‘We thought you were asleep.’
Letty’s throat pulsed. She looked about to burst into sobs. ‘What,’ she asked in a tremulous whisper, ‘is the Hermes Society?’
‘But I don’t understand.’
Letty had been repeating this for the last ten minutes at regular intervals. It didn’t matter how they explained it – the necessity of the Hermes Society, and the myriad reasons why such an organization had to exist in the shadows – she kept shaking her head, her eyes blank and uncomprehending. She didn’t seem outraged or upset so much as truly baffled, as if they were trying to convince her that the sky was green. ‘I don’t understand. Weren’t you happy at Babel?’
‘Happy?’ Ramy repeated. ‘I suppose no one’s ever asked you if your skin’s been washed with walnut juice.’
‘Oh, Ramy, do they really?’ Her eyes widened. ‘But I never heard – but your skin is lovely—’
‘Or said you weren’t allowed in a shop, for reasons unclear,’ Ramy continued. ‘Or cut a wide circle around you on the pavement as if you had fleas.’
‘But that’s just Oxfordians being stupid and provincial,’ said Letty, ‘it doesn’t mean—’
‘I know you don’t see it,’ said Ramy. ‘And I don’t expect you to, that’s not your lot in life. But it’s not really about whether we were happy at Babel. It’s about what our conscience demands.’
‘But Babel gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’
‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’
‘But the scholarships – I mean, without those scholarships all of you would have been – I don’t understand—’
‘You’ve made that abundantly clear,’ Ramy snapped. ‘You’re a proper little princess, aren’t you? Big estate in Brighton, summers in Toulouse, porcelain china on your shelves and Assam in your teacups? How could you understand? Your people reap the fruits of the Empire. Ours don’t. So shut up, Letty, and just listen to what we’re trying to tell you. It’s not right what they’re doing to our countries.’ His voice grew louder, harder. ‘And it’s not right that I’m trained to use my languages for their benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good.’
Letty took this better than Robin thought she would. She sat in silence for a moment, blinking, her eyes huge. Then her brows furrowed, and she asked, ‘But . . . but if inequality is the issue, then couldn’t you have gone through the university? There are all sorts of aid programmes, missionary groups. There’s philanthropy, you know, why couldn’t we just go to the colonial governments and—’
‘That’s a bit difficult when the whole point of the institution is preserving the Empire,’ said Victoire. ‘Babel doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit itself.’
‘But that’s not true,’ said Letty. ‘They contribute to charity all the time, I know, Professor Leblanc was leading research into London’s waterworks so that the tenement housing wouldn’t be so diseased, and there are humanitarian societies all over the globe—’*
‘Did you know that Babel sells bars to slave traders?’ Victoire interrupted.
Letty blinked at her. ‘What?’
‘Capitale,’ Victoire said. ‘The Latin capitale, derived from caput, becomes the Old French chatel, which in English becomes chattel. Livestock and property become wealth. They write that on the bars, daisy-chain it with the word cattle, and then they fix those bars to iron chains so that slaves can’t escape. You know how? It makes them docile. Like animals.’
‘But that’s . . .’ Letty was blinking very rapidly now, as if trying to force a mote of dust from her eye. ‘But, Victoire love, the slave trade was abolished in 1807.’*
‘And you think they just stopped?’ Victoire made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. ‘You don’t think we sell bars to America? You think British manufacturers don’t still profit from shackles and irons? You don’t think there are people who still keep slaves in England who simply manage to hide it well?’
‘But Babel scholars wouldn’t—’
‘That’s exactly the kind of thing Babel scholars do,’ Victoire said viciously. ‘I should know. It’s the kind of thing our supervisor was working on. Every time I met with Leblanc he’d change the subject to his precious chattel bars. He said he thought I might have special insight. He even asked once if I would put them on. He said he wanted to make sure it worked on Negroes.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Letty, I tried.’ Victoire’s voice broke. There was such pain in her eyes. And it made Robin deeply ashamed, for only now did he see the cruel pattern of their friendship. Robin had always had Ramy. But at the end of the day, when they parted ways, Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.
And where were he and Ramy? Looking away, failing to notice, hoping secretly the girls would simply stop bickering and move on. Occasionally Ramy made jabs at Letty, but only for his own satisfaction. Never had either of them paused to consider how deeply alone Victoire had to have felt, all this time.
‘You didn’t care,’ Victoire continued. ‘Letty, you don’t even care that our landlady doesn’t let me use the indoor bathroom—’
‘What? That’s ridiculous, I would have noticed—’
‘No,’ said Victoire. ‘You didn’t. You never did, Letty, and that’s the point. And we’re asking you now to finally, please, hear what we’re trying to tell you. Please believe us.’
Letty, Robin thought, was close to a breaking point. She was running out of arguments. She had the look of a dog backed into a corner. But her eyes darted around, desperately seeking an escape. She would find any flimsy excuse, accept any convoluted alternative logic before she let go of her illusions.
He knew, because not so long ago, he’d done the same.
‘So there’s a war,’ she said after a pause. ‘You’re absolutely sure there’s going to be a war.’
Robin sighed. ‘Yes, Letty.’
‘And it’s absolutely Babel’s doing.’
‘You can read the letters yourself.’
‘And what’s – what’s the Hermes Society going to do about it?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘But they’re the only ones who can do something about it. We’ll bring them these documents, we’ll tell them all we know—’
‘But why?’ Letty persisted. ‘Why involve them? We should just do this ourselves. We should make pamphlets, we should go to Parliament – there are a thousand options we’ve got other than going through some . . . some secret ring of thieves. This degree of collusion, of corruption – if the public just knew, they wouldn’t possibly be for it, I’m certain. But operating underground, stealing from the university – that only hurts your cause, doesn’t it? Why can’t you simply go public?’
They were silent for a moment, all of them wondering who would tell Letty first.
Victoire shouldered the task. ‘I wonder,’ she said, very slowly, ‘if you’ve ever read any of the abolition literature published before Parliament finally outlawed slavery.’
Letty frowned. ‘I don’t see how . . .’
‘The Quakers presented the first antislavery petition to Parliament in 1783,’ said Victoire. ‘Equiano published his memoir in 1789. Add that to the countless slave stories the abolitionists were telling the British public – stories of the cruellest, most awful tortures you can inflict on a fellow human. Because the mere fact that Black people were denied their freedom was not enough. They needed to see how grotesque it was. And even then, it took them decades to finally outlaw the trade. And that’s slavery. Compared to that, a war in Canton over trade rights is going to look like nothing. It’s not romantic. There are no novelists penning sagas about the effects of opium addiction on Chinese families. If Parliament votes to force Canton’s ports open, it’s going to look like free trade working as it should. So don’t tell me that the British public, if they knew, would do anything at all.’
