Babel, page 47
‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.
‘It feels rather as if I’m dreaming.’ She blinked around the room, her gaze unfocused. ‘Everything’s upside down. Everything’s backwards.’
Fair enough, Robin thought. Letty was holding up rather well, all considered. He didn’t know how to politely phrase what he wanted to say next, so he asked obliquely, ‘What do you think?’
‘About what, Robin?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘The murder we’re covering up, the fall of the British Empire, or the fact that we’re fugitives now for the rest of our lives?’
‘All of it, I suppose.’
‘Justice is exhausting.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘That’s what I think.’
Cathy brought out a steaming pot of black tea, and they held their mugs forth in gratitude. Vimal stumbled yawning from the bathroom towards the kitchen. A few minutes later, the wonderful aroma of a fry-up seeped up through the Reading Room. ‘Masala eggs,’ he announced, heaping scrambled eggs in a tomatoey mess onto their plates. ‘There’s toast coming.’
‘Vimal,’ Cathy groaned. ‘I could marry you.’
They wolfed down their food in fast, mechanical silence. Minutes later the table was cleared, the dirty plates returned to the kitchenette. The front door screeched open. It was Ilse, back from the city centre with that morning’s newspapers.
‘Any word on the debates?’ Anthony asked.
‘They’re still at loggerheads,’ she said. ‘So we have some time yet. The Whigs are shaky on their numbers, and they won’t hold a vote until they’re confident. But we still want those pamphlets in London today or tomorrow. Get someone on the noon train, then get them printed on Fleet Street.’
‘Do we still know anyone in Fleet Street?’ Vimal asked.
‘Yes, Theresa’s still at the Standard. They go to print on Fridays. I can get in and use the machines, I’m sure, if you have something for me by tonight.’ She pulled a crumpled newspaper out of her messenger bag and slid it across the table. ‘Here’s the latest from London, by the way. Thought you’d like to see it.’
Robin craned his neck to read the upside-down text. OXFORD PROFESSOR MURDERED IN CANTON, it read. PERPETRATORS IN CONSPIRACY WITH CHINESE LOBBYISTS.
‘Well.’ He blinked. ‘I guess that’s got most of the details right.’
Ramy flipped the paper open. ‘Oh, look. It’s got drawings of our faces.’
‘That doesn’t look like you,’ said Victoire.
‘No, they haven’t quite captured my nose,’ Ramy agreed. ‘And they’ve made Robin’s eyes very small.’
‘Have they printed this in Oxford, too?’ Anthony asked Ilse.
‘Surprisingly, no. They’ve kept it all quiet.’
‘Interesting. Well, London’s still cancelled for you lot,’ said Anthony. They all began protesting at once, but he held up a hand. ‘Don’t be mad. It’s too dangerous, we’re not risking it. You’re hiding out in the Old Library until this is over. You can’t be recognized.’
‘Neither can you,’ Ramy retorted.
‘They think I’m dead. They think you’re a murderer. Those are very different things. No one’s printing my face in the papers.’
‘But I want to be out there,’ Ramy said, unhappy. ‘I want to do something, I want to help—’
‘You can help by not getting yourself thrown in gaol. This isn’t open war, as much as dear Griffin would like to pretend it is. These matters demand finesse.’ Anthony pointed to the blackboard. ‘Focus on the agenda. Let’s pick up where we left off. I think we tabled the issue of Lord Arsenault last night. Letty?’
Letty took a long draught of her tea, closed her eyes, then seemed to pull herself together. ‘Yes. I believe Lord Arsenault and my father are on rather good terms. I could write to him, try to set up a meeting—’
‘You don’t think your father’s going to be distracted by the news that you’re a murderer?’ asked Robin.
‘It doesn’t name Letty as a perpetrator.’ Victoire scanned the column. ‘It’s only the three of us. She’s not mentioned here at all.’
There was a brief, awkward silence.
‘No, that’s very good for us,’ Anthony said smoothly. ‘Gives us some freedom of movement. Now you start writing to your father, Letty, and the rest of you get to your assignments.’
One by one they filtered out of the Reading Room to carry out their designated tasks. Ilse set off to Babel to retrieve further news on developments in London. Cathy and Vimal went to the workshop to tinker with match-pairs using polemikós. Ramy and Victoire were put to work writing letters to prominent Radical leaders by impersonating white, middle-aged Radical supporters. Robin sat with Anthony in the Reading Room, pulling the most damning evidence of collusion from Professor Lovell’s letters as quotations for short, inflammatory pamphlets. Their hope was that such evidence might prove scandalous enough to get picked up by the London papers.
‘Be careful with your language,’ Anthony told him. ‘You’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anticolonialism and respecting national sovereignty. Use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency, and whatnot. Cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race.’
‘You want me to translate things for white people,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’
They worked in comfortable silence for about an hour, until Robin’s hand grew too sore to continue. He sat back, cradling a mug of tea in silence, until it seemed as if Anthony had reached the end of a paragraph. ‘Anthony, can I ask you something?’
Anthony put down his pen. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Do you honestly think this will work?’ Robin nodded to the stack of draft pamphlets. ‘Winning in the realm of public opinion, I mean.’
Anthony leaned back and flexed his fingers. ‘I see your brother’s got to you.’
‘Griffin spent last night teaching me how to use a gun,’ said Robin. ‘He thinks revolution’s impossible without violent insurrection. And he’s quite persuasive.’
Anthony thought for a while, nodding, tapping his pen against the inkwell. ‘Your brother likes to call me naive.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘I know, I know. I only mean to say that I’m not as soft as Griffin thinks. Let me remind you that I came to this country before they’d decided I could no longer be legally called a slave. I’ve lived most of my life in a country that is deeply confused on whether I fully count as human. Trust me, I am no jolly optimist on the ethical qualms of white Britain.’
‘But I suppose they did come around on abolition,’ said Robin. ‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing. The abolitionist movement you know is a load of pomp. Rhetoric only. Pitt first raised the motion because he saw the need to cut off the slave trade to France. And Parliament got on board with the abolitionists because they were so very afraid of Black insurrection in the West Indies.’
‘So you think it’s purely risk and economics.’
‘Well, not necessarily. You brother likes to argue that the Jamaican slave revolt, failed though it was, is what impelled the British to legislate abolition. He’s right, but only half right. See, the revolt won British sympathy because the leaders were part of the Baptist church, and when it failed, proslavery whites in Jamaica started destroying chapels and threatening missionaries. Those Baptists went back to England and drummed up support on the grounds of religion, not natural rights. My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’
‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘there’s Letty.’
‘Yes,’ said Anthony after a pause. ‘I suppose there’s Letty. But she’s a rare case, isn’t she?’
‘Then what’s our path forward?’ asked Robin. ‘Then what’s the point of any of this?’
‘The point is to build a coalition,’ said Anthony. ‘And it needs to include unlikely sympathizers. We can siphon as many resources from Babel as we want, but it still won’t be enough to budge such firmly entrenched levers of power as the likes of Jardine and Matheson. If we are to turn the tides of history, we need some of these men – the same men who find no issue in selling me and my kind at auction – to become our allies. We need to convince them that a global British expansion, founded on pyramids of silver, is not in their own best interest. Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’
‘You may as well convince them to walk the streets naked.’
‘Ha. No, the seeds for a coalition are there. The time’s ripe for a revolution in England, you know. The whole of Europe has been feverish for reform for decades; they caught it from the French. We must simply make this a war of class instead of race. And this is, indeed, an issue of class. It seems like a debate over opium and China, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones who stand to lose, are they? It’s all related. The silver industrial revolution is one of the greatest drivers of inequality, pollution, and unemployment in this country. The fate of a poor family in Canton is in fact intricately tied to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire. Neither benefits from the expansion of empire. Both only get poorer as the companies get richer. So if they could only form an alliance . . .’ Anthony wove his fingers together. ‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’
‘There’s a Chinese idiom that catches the gist,’ said Robin. ‘Tùsĭhúbēi.* The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’
‘Precisely,’ said Anthony. ‘Only we’ve got to convince them we’re not their prey. That there’s a hunter in the forest, and we’re all in danger.’
Robin glanced down at the pamphlets. They seemed so inadequate just then; just words, just ink scrawls on flimsy white paper. ‘And you truly think you can convince them so?’
‘We have to.’ Anthony flexed his fingers once more, then picked up his pen and resumed flipping through Professor Lovell’s letters. ‘I don’t see any other way out.’
Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access within an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.
At noon they regrouped in the Reading Room for lunch. Cathy and Vimal were quite excited with what they’d done with the polemikós match-pair, which, true to Griffin’s predictions, caused pamphlets to fly about and continue flapping around bystanders if thrown into the air. Vimal had supplemented this with the Latin origin of the word discuss: discutere could mean ‘to scatter’, or ‘to disperse’.
‘Suppose we apply both bars to a stack of printed pamphlets,’ he said. ‘They’d fly all over London, wind or no. How’s that for getting people’s attention?’
Gradually, the ideas that had seemed so ridiculous last night, those chaotic scribblings of sleep-deprived minds, coalesced into a rather impressive plan of action. Anthony summed up their numerous endeavours on the blackboard. Over the next few days, weeks if necessary, the Hermes Society would try to influence the debates in any way they could. Ilse’s connection on Fleet Street would soon publish a hit piece on how William Jardine, who’d stirred up all this mess in the first place, was whiling away his days at a spa town in Cheltenham. Vimal and Cathy, through several more respectable white intermediaries, would try to convince waffling Whigs that restoring good relations with China would at least keep open avenues trading legal goods, such as teas and rhubarbs. Then there were Griffin’s efforts in Glasgow, as well as the pamphlets about to fly all over London. Through blackmail, lobbying, and public pressure, Anthony concluded, they might make up enough votes to defeat the war motion.
‘This could work,’ Ilse said, blinking at the blackboard as if surprised.
‘It could work,’ Vimal agreed. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Are you sure we can’t come with you?’ Ramy asked.
Anthony gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. ‘You’ve done your part. You’ve been very brave, all of you. But it’s time to leave things to the professionals.’
‘You’ve barely got five years on us,’ said Robin. ‘How does that make you a professional?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anthony. ‘It just does.’
‘And we’re supposed to just wait without knowing anything?’ Letty asked. ‘We can’t even get the papers here.’
‘We’ll all be back after the vote,’ said Anthony. ‘And we’ll come back occasionally to check on you – every other day, if you’re that nervous.’
‘But what if something happens?’ Letty persisted. ‘What if you need our help? What if we need your help?’
The graduate fellows all exchanged glances with each other. It looked like they were having a silent conversation – a repeat, Robin guessed, of a conversation they’d had many times before, for it was clear what everyone’s position was. Anthony raised his eyebrows. Cathy and Vimal both nodded. Ilse, lips pursed, seemed reluctant, but at last she sighed and shrugged.
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
‘Griffin would say no,’ said Anthony.
‘Well,’ said Cathy, ‘Griffin’s not here.’
Anthony stood up, disappeared for a moment into the stacks, and returned bearing a sealed envelope. ‘This,’ he said, placing it down on the table, ‘contains the contact information for a dozen Hermes associates across the globe.’
Robin was astonished. ‘You’re sure you should be showing us that?’
‘No,’ said Anthony. ‘We really shouldn’t. I see Griffin’s paranoia has rubbed off on you, and that’s not a bad thing. But suppose you lot are the only ones left. There are no names or addresses here – only drop points and contact instructions. If you end up on your own, you’ll have at least some means to keep Hermes alive.’
‘You’re talking like you might not come back,’ said Victoire.
‘Well, there’s a non-zero chance we don’t, isn’t there?’
The library felt silent.
Suddenly Robin felt so young, so childish. It had seemed like such a fun game, plotting into the deep hours with the Hermes Society, playing around with his older brother’s gun. Their situation was so bizarre, and the conditions of victory so unimaginable, it had felt more like an exercise than real life. It sank in now that the forces they were playing with were actually quite terrifying, that the trading companies and political lobbies they were attempting to manipulate were not the laughable bogeymen they’d made them out to be but incredibly powerful organizations with deep, entrenched interests in the colonial trade, interests they would murder to protect.
‘But you’ll be all right,’ said Ramy. ‘Won’t you? Babel’s never caught you before—’
‘They’ve caught us many times,’ Anthony said gently. ‘Hence the paranoia.’
‘Hence the attrition,’ Vimal said as he slid a pistol into his belt. ‘We know the risks.’
‘But you’ll be safe here even if we’re compromised,’ Cathy reassured them. ‘We won’t give you up.’
Ilse nodded. ‘We’ll bite our tongues and suffocate first.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Letty stood up abruptly. She looked very pale; she touched her fingers to her mouth, as if she might vomit. ‘I just – I just need some air.’
‘Do you want some water?’ Victoire asked, concerned.
‘No, I’ll be fine.’ Letty bustled past their crowded chairs to the door. ‘I just need to breathe for a moment, if that’s all right.’
Anthony pointed. ‘The yard is that way.’
‘I think I’ll take a stroll round the front,’ said Letty. ‘The yard feels a bit . . . a bit penned in.’
‘Keep to the block, then,’ said Anthony. ‘Don’t be seen.’
‘Yes – yes, of course.’ Letty seemed quite distressed; her breath came in such quick, shallow bursts that Robin was worried she might faint. Ramy pushed his chair back to give her space to break free. Letty paused by the doorway and glanced over her shoulder – her eyes lingered on Robin, and she seemed on the verge of saying something – but then she pursed her lips and hurried out the door.
In the last minutes before the postgraduates left, Anthony went over housekeeping matters with Robin, Ramy, and Victoire. The kitchenette stocked enough provisions to last a week, and longer if they were happy with gruel and salt-cured fish. Fresh drinking water was trickier to acquire – the Old Library did receive its water supply from the city pumps, but they couldn’t run the taps too late at night or for too long at any time, since drainage elsewhere might draw attention. Otherwise, there were more than enough books in the library to keep them occupied, though they had strict orders not to mess with any ongoing projects in the workshop.
‘And try to stay inside as much as you can,’ Anthony said as he finished packing his bag. ‘You can take turns in the yard if you like, but keep your voices down – the glamour acts up every now and then. If you must get some fresh air, do it after sunset. If you get scared, there’s a rifle in that broom cupboard – I do hope you’ll never have to do it, but if you do, can any of you—’
