Babel, page 44
‘Quite all right, Swift?’
Robin’s eyes watered. ‘What did you—’
‘I’m with Hermes,’ Professor Playfair murmured pleasantly, eyes fixed on the string quartet. ‘Whatever you’re hiding, you’re safe telling me.’
Robin had no idea what to make of this. Certainly he felt no relief. Trust no one – Griffin had all but engraved this lesson in his bones. Professor Playfair could be easily lying – and this would be the simplest trick, too, if his goal was to coax Robin into spilling everything that he knew. Or Professor Playfair could be the ally, the saviour they’d been waiting for. He felt a pang of residual frustration. If only Griffin had ever told him more, if only Griffin hadn’t been so happy to leave him in the dark, cut off from others, and so utterly helpless.
He had no useful information to act on, only a gut instinct that something was badly wrong. ‘Thank the Lord,’ he said, mirroring Professor Playfair’s covert murmur. ‘So you know about Griffin’s Canton plot?’
‘Of course,’ Professor Playfair said, just a bit too eagerly. ‘Did it work?’
Robin paused. He had to play this next part very carefully. He had to reel out just enough to keep Professor Playfair on the line, curious but not quite ready to pounce. And he needed time – at least enough time to gather the others and run.
Professor Playfair slung his arm around Robin’s shoulders, drawing him in close. ‘Why don’t you and I go and have a chat?’
‘Not here.’ Robin’s eyes darted around the quad. Letty and Victoire were both staring at him over their shoulders. He blinked hard, glanced pointedly at the front exit, then back at them. ‘Not in front of the faculty, you never know who’s listening.’
‘Of course,’ said Professor Playfair.
‘The tunnels,’ said Robin, before Professor Playfair could suggest that they leave the party right then. ‘I’m meeting Griffin and the others tonight at the Taylorian tunnels at midnight, why don’t you come? I’ve got . . . I’ve got all those documents they’ve been waiting for.’
It worked. Professor Playfair let go of Robin’s shoulders and stepped away.
‘Very well.’ His eyes shone with glee; he looked one step away from rubbing his hands together like a villain on a stage. ‘Good work, Swift.’
Robin nodded, and only barely managed to keep a straight face until Professor Playfair moved on to chat with Professor Chakravarti across the green.
Then it took everything he had not to break into a run. He scanned the quad for Ramy, who was trapped in a conversation with Reverend Doctor Plumptre. Robin blinked frantically at him. Immediately Ramy spilled his wineglass all over his own front, exclaimed loudly in dismay, made his excuses, and beelined through the garden towards Robin.
‘Playfair knows,’ Robin told him.
‘What?’ Ramy glanced around. ‘Are you sure—’
‘We have to go.’ To his relief, Robin saw that Victoire and Letty were already moving towards the front gate. He wanted to follow, but too many faculty stood between them; he and Ramy would have to go out the back, by the kitchens. ‘Come on.’
‘How—’
‘Later.’ Robin hazarded a glimpse over his shoulder just before they left the garden. His stomach twisted – Playfair was saying something to Professor De Vreese, their heads bent close together. De Vreese glanced up and looked straight into Robin’s eyes. Robin looked away. ‘Just – come on.’
Victoire and Letty rushed towards them the moment they stepped outside.
‘What’s happened?’ Letty breathed. ‘Why—’
‘Not here,’ Robin said. ‘Walk.’
They marched at a hasty pace down Kybald Street, then turned right onto Magpie Lane.
‘Playfair’s onto us,’ said Robin. ‘We’re done.’
‘How do you know?’ Letty asked. ‘What did he say? Did you tell him?’
‘Of course not,’ Robin said. ‘But he pretended he was with Hermes, tried to get me to confess everything—’
‘How do you know he’s not?’
‘Because I lied,’ said Robin. ‘And he fell for it. He hasn’t a clue what Hermes does, he was fishing for information.’
‘Then what are we doing?’ Victoire asked suddenly. ‘Good God, where are we going?’
They had, Robin realized, been walking without purpose. They were headed now for High Street, but what would they do there? If Professor Playfair called for the police, they’d be spotted in seconds. They couldn’t go back into Number 4; they’d be trapped. But they had no money on their persons, and no means to pay the fare to anywhere else.
‘There you are.’
They all flinched backwards in fright.
Anthony Ribben stepped out onto the main road and looked them over, counting them with one finger like they were ducklings. ‘You’re all here? Excellent. Come with me.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
This group is remarkable, although it has vanished in the invisible depths which are behind us.
VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables, trans. Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall
Their shock was fleeting. Anthony broke into a run, and they followed without question. But instead of doubling back on Magpie Lane all the way to Merton Street, from where they might escape out towards Christ Church meadow, he took them back onto Kybald towards the college.
‘What are you doing?’ Ramy panted. ‘That’s where everyone—’
‘Just hurry,’ Anthony hissed.
They obeyed. It was wonderful to have someone tell them what to do. Anthony led them through the doors behind the kitchen, past the Old Library, and straight into the hall. On the other side of the wall, the garden party was still going on in full force; they could hear string instruments and voices through the stone.
‘In here.’ Anthony waved them into the chapel.
They darted in and shut the heavy wooden doors behind them. Outside service hours, the chapel felt strange: unearthly, silent. The air inside was repressively still. Apart from their panting, the only movement was the dust motes floating in the prisms of light streaming through the windows.
Anthony stopped before the memorial frieze of Sir William Jones.
‘What are you—’ Letty began.
‘Hush.’ Anthony reached towards the epigram, which read, He formed a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan Laws. He touched a succession of letters in turn, which sank slightly back into the stone when pushed. G, O, R . . .
Ramy snickered. Anthony touched a final letter in the much longer Latin inscription above the frieze, a rambling celebration of William Jones’s life and accomplishments. B.
Gorasahib.*
There was a scraping noise, then a whoosh of cold air. The frieze popped several inches out from the wall. Anthony pushed his fingers into the crack at the bottom edge and slid the panel upwards to reveal a pitch-black hole in the wall. ‘Get in.’
One by one, they helped each other inside. The tunnel turned out to be much wider than it appeared from the outside. They only had to crawl on their hands and knees for several seconds before the shaft emptied into a larger corridor. Robin could just feel the damp earth skimming the top of his head when he stood, though Ramy exclaimed when his head bumped against the ceiling.
‘Hush,’ Anthony grunted again as he pulled the door down behind them. ‘The walls are thin.’
The frieze slid back into place with a thud. The light in the passage disappeared. They groped their way forward, cursing as they stumbled against each other.
‘Ah, sorry.’ Anthony struck a match, and a flame materialized in his palm. Now they could see that several yards in, the cramped shaft expanded outwards into something more like a hallway. ‘There we go. Keep going, there’s a long walk ahead.’
‘Where—’ Letty began, but Anthony shook his head, lifted a finger to his lips, and pointed to the walls.
The tunnel widened more and more as they walked. The branch leading to the Univ chapel was apparently a new addition, for the passage where they walked now seemed much larger and older. Dried mud gave way to brick walls, and at several junctures, Robin saw sconces affixed to the upper corners. The dark should have felt claustrophobic, but in fact it felt comforting. Swallowed in the belly of the earth, truly hidden from view for the first time since their return voyage, they all found that they could finally breathe.
After several minutes of silence, Ramy asked, ‘How long’s that been there?’
‘Only a few decades, actually,’ said Anthony. ‘The tunnels have been here forever – they aren’t a Hermes project, we only took advantage of them – but that entryway is new. Lady Jones had the frieze installed not too many years ago, but we got in fast before construction work was done. Don’t worry, no one else knows. Is everyone all right?’
‘We’re okay,’ said Robin. ‘But, Anthony, there’s something you have to—’
‘I imagine there’s quite a lot you need to tell me,’ said Anthony. ‘Why don’t we start with what you’ve done with Professor Lovell? Is he dead? The faculty seem to think so.’
‘Robin killed him,’ Ramy said cheerily.
Anthony turned to glance at Robin over his shoulder. ‘Oh, really?’
‘It was an accident,’ Robin insisted. ‘We were quarrelling, and he – I don’t know, I suddenly . . . I mean, I did use this match-pair, only I didn’t know I was doing it until it was over—’
‘What’s more important is the war on China,’ said Victoire. ‘We’ve been trying to find you, to tell you. They’re planning an invasion—’
‘We know,’ said Anthony.
‘You do?’ asked Robin.
‘Griffin’s been afraid of this for a while. We’ve kept an eye on Jardine and Matheson, been tracking developments in the Factories. Though it’s never got this bad before. Up until now it was all noise. But they’ll really go to war, you think?’
‘I’ve got papers—’ Robin reached for his breast pocket as if they were still stowed within his jacket, and then cursed. ‘Damn it, they’re all in my room—’
‘What do they say?’
‘They’re letters, correspondence between Lovell and Jardine and Matheson both – and Palmerston, and Gützlaff, the whole lot of them – oh, but I left them on Magpie Lane—’
‘What do they say?’
‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin, flustered. ‘They’re plans that have been months, years in the making—’
‘They’re evidence of direct collusion?’ Anthony pressed.
‘Yes, they indicate that the negotiations were never in good faith, that the last round was only a pretext—’
‘Good,’ said Anthony. ‘That’s very good. We can work with that. We’ll send someone over to retrieve them. You’re in Griffin’s old room, correct? Number seven?’
‘I – yes.’
‘Very good. I’ll have that sorted. In the meantime, I suggest you all calm down.’ He paused, turned around, and gave them a warm smile. After the week they’d just had, the sight of Anthony’s face in the soft candlelight made Robin want to cry with relief. ‘You’re in safe hands now. I agree it’s quite dire, but we can’t solve anything in this tunnel. You’ve done very well, and I imagine you’re quite scared, but you can relax now. The grown-ups are here.’
The underground passage turned out to be quite long. Robin lost track of how far they walked; it had to be nearly a mile. He wondered how vast the network was – now and then they passed a split in the tunnel or a door embedded in the wall, suggesting more hidden entrances across the university, but Anthony shepherded them along without comment. These were, Robin assumed, among Hermes’s many secrets.
At last, the passage narrowed again until there was only space to walk in single file. Anthony took the lead, holding the candle high above his head like a beacon. Letty followed just behind him.
‘Why you?’ she asked quietly. Robin couldn’t tell if she meant to be discreet, but the tunnel was so narrow, her voice carried to the back of the line.
‘Whatever do you mean?’ murmured Anthony.
‘You loved it at Babel,’ said Letty. ‘I remember, you gave us our orientation tour. You adored it there, and they adored you.’
‘That’s true,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel treated me better than anyone ever had.’
‘Then why—’
‘She thinks it’s about personal happiness,’ Ramy interjected. ‘But Letty, we’ve told you, it doesn’t matter how happy we were personally, it’s about the broader injustice—’
‘That’s not what I meant, Ramy, I only—’
‘Let me try to explain,’ Anthony said gently. ‘On the eve of abolition throughout the colonies, my master decided he wanted to pack up and return to America. I wouldn’t be free there, you see. He could keep me in his household and call me his. This man had labelled himself an abolitionist. He’d decried the general trade for years; he just seemed to think our relationship was special. But when the proposals he’d publicly supported became law, he decided he really couldn’t bear the sacrifice of losing me. So I went on the run and sought refuge at Oxford. The college took me in and hid me until I was legally declared a free man – not because they care much about abolition either, but because the professors at Babel knew my worth. And they knew if I were sent back to America, they would lose me to Harvard or Princeton.’
Robin couldn’t see Letty’s face in the darkness, but he could hear her breathing growing shallower. He wondered if she was about to cry again.
‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’
‘But you don’t really believe that about Babel,’ Letty whispered. ‘Do you? It’s just not the same – they weren’t enslaving you – I mean, Christ, you had a fellowship—’
‘Do you know what Equiano’s master told him when he was manumitted?’ Anthony asked mildly. ‘He told him that in a short time, he’d have slaves of his own.’
At last, the tunnel ended in a set of steps covered with a wooden board, sunlight streaming in through the slats. Anthony pressed his ears to the slats, waited a moment, then unlocked the board and pushed. ‘Come on up.’
They emerged in a sunny yard facing an old one-storey brick building half-hidden behind a mass of overgrown shrubbery. They couldn’t have strayed too far from the town centre – they were only two miles out at most – but Robin had never seen this building before. Its doors looked rusted shut, and its walls were nearly swallowed by ivy, as if someone had built this place and then abandoned it decades ago.
‘Welcome to the Old Library.’ Anthony helped them out of the tunnel. ‘Durham College built this place in the fourteenth century as an overflow room for old books, then forgot about it when they secured funding to build a new library closer to the centre of town.’
‘Just the Old Library?’ asked Victoire. ‘No other name?’
‘None that we use. A name would mark its importance, and we want it unnoticed and forgotten – something you skim over when you see it in the records, something easily confused for something else.’ Anthony spread his palm against the rusted door, murmured something under his breath, and then pushed. The door screeched open. ‘Come on in.’
Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From the outside, it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library. Wooden bookshelves radiated from the centre, and more lined walls which looked, magically and contradictorily, circular. All the shelves were meticulously labelled, and a long yellowed parchment listing the classification system hung from the opposite wall. Near the front was a shelf boasting new arrivals, on which Robin recognized a few of the titles he’d snuck out for Griffin over the past few years. They’d all had their Babel serial numbers scratched out.
‘We don’t like their categorization system,’ explained Anthony. ‘It only makes sense in Roman characters, but not every language is so easily Romanized, is it?’ He pointed to a mat near the door. ‘Wipe your shoes off, we don’t like tracking mud between the shelves. And there’s a stand over there for your coats.’
A rusted iron kettle hung inexplicably from the top rung of the coat stand. Robin reached towards it, curious, but Anthony said sharply, ‘Leave that alone.’
‘Sorry – what’s it for?’
‘Not tea, clearly.’ Anthony swung the kettle towards them to reveal the bottom, which displayed a familiar glint of silver. ‘It’s a security system. It whistles when someone we don’t know gets near the library.’
‘With what match-pair?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Anthony winked. ‘We do security like Babel does. Everyone devises their own traps, and we don’t tell the others how it’s done. The best thing we have set up is the glamour – it keeps sound from escaping the building, which means no passerby can eavesdrop on our conversations.’
‘But this place is massive,’ said Ramy. ‘I mean, you’re not invisible – how on earth do you stay hidden?’
‘Oldest trick in the world. We’re hidden in plain sight.’ Anthony led them further into the library. ‘When Durham went extinct in the mid-sixteenth century and Trinity took over its property, they overlooked the supplemental library in the deed transfer. The only things listed in that library on the catalogue were materials no one had used for decades, and which have more accessible duplicates in the Bodleian. So now we live on the edge of bureaucracy – everyone who walks past knows this is a storage library, but everyone assumes it belongs to some other, poorer college. These colleges are all too rich, you see. It makes them lose track of their holdings.’
‘Ah, you found the undergraduates!’
Figures emerged from within the shelves. Robin recognized them all – they were all former students or current graduate fellows he’d seen lurking around the tower. He supposed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were Vimal Srinivasan, Cathy O’Nell, and Ilse Dejima, who gave them a small wave as she approached.
