Babel, page 51
But it was Letty who had the talent for languages, who absorbed Greek and Latin as easily as she did English. She learned from reading on her own, and from sitting with her ear pressed to the door during Lincoln’s tutoring sessions. Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. She approached language with a determined, mathematical rigour, and she broke down the thorniest of Latin constructions through sheer force of will. It was Letty who drilled her brother late at night when he couldn’t remember his vocabulary lists, who finished his translations and corrected his compositions when he got bored and went off to ride or hunt or whatever it was boys did outdoors.
If their roles had been switched, she would have been hailed as a genius. She would have been the next Sir William Jones.
But this was not in her stars. She tried to be happy for Lincoln, to project her hopes and dreams onto her brother like so many women of that era did. If Lincoln became an Oxford don, then perhaps she might become his secretary. But his mind was simply a brick wall. He hated his lessons; he despised his tutors. He thought his readings boring. All he ever wanted was to be outdoors; he could not sit still in front of a book for more than a minute before he began to fidget. And she simply couldn’t understand him, why someone with such opportunities would reject the chance to use them.
‘If I were at Oxford I would read until my eyes bled,’ she told him.
‘If you were at Oxford,’ said Lincoln, ‘the world would know to tremble.’
She loved her brother, she did. But she could not stand his ingratitude, the way he scorned all the gifts he’d been given by the world. And it felt like justice, almost, when it turned out that Oxford suited Lincoln very badly. His tutors at Balliol wrote to Admiral Price with complaints of drinking, gambling, staying out past curfew. Lincoln wrote home asking for money. His letters to Letty were brief, tantalizing, offering glimpses of a world he clearly did not appreciate – classes a snooze, don’t bother to go – not during rowing season, anyhow, you should come up and see us at Bumps next spring. In the beginning, Admiral Price wrote this off as natural, as growing pains. Young men, living away from home for the first time, always took some time to adjust – and why shouldn’t they sow their wild oats? Lincoln would pick up his books, in time.
But things only got worse. Lincoln’s marks never improved. The letters from his tutors were less patient now, more threatening. When Lincoln came home for holidays during his third year, something had changed. A rot had set in, Letty saw. Something permanent, dark. Her brother’s face was puffy, his speech slow, biting, and bitter. He said scarcely a word to either of them all vacation. Afternoons he spent alone in his room, working steadily through a bottle of scotch. Evenings he either went out and didn’t come back until the early hours, or he quarrelled with his father, and though the two of them locked the door to the study, their angry voices pierced every room in the house. You’re a disgrace, said Admiral Price. I hate it there, said Lincoln. I’m not happy. And it’s your dream, not mine.
At last Letty decided to confront him. When Lincoln left the study that night, she was in the hallway, waiting.
‘What are you looking at?’ he leered. ‘Here to gloat?’
‘You’re breaking his heart,’ she said.
‘You don’t care about his heart. You’re jealous.’
‘Of course I’m jealous. You have everything. Everything, Lincoln. And I don’t understand what’s impelled you to squander it. If your friends are a drag, cut them off. If the courses are difficult, I’ll help you – I’ll come with you, I’ll look over every paper you write—’
But he was swaying, eyes unfocused, barely listening to her. ‘Go and bring me a brandy.’
‘Lincoln, what is wrong with you?’
‘Oh, don’t you judge me.’ His lip curled. ‘Righteous Letty, brilliant Letty, should have been at Oxford except for the gap between her legs—’
‘You disgust me.’
Lincoln only laughed and turned away.
‘Don’t come home,’ she shouted after him. ‘You’re better off gone. You’re better off dead.’
The next morning a constable knocked at their door and asked if this was the residence of Admiral Price, and if he would come with them, please, to identify a body. The driver never saw him, they said. Didn’t even know he was under the cart until this morning, when the horses had a fright. It was dark, it was raining, and Lincoln had been drunk, traipsing across the road – the admiral could sue, as was his right, but they doubted the court would be on his side. It was an accident.
After this, Letty would always fear and marvel at the power of a single word. She did not need silver bars to prove how saying something could make it true.
While her father prepared for the funeral, Letty wrote to Lincoln’s tutors. She included some compositions of her own.
Once admitted, she still suffered a thousand and one humiliations at Oxford. Professors talked down to her as if she were stupid. Clerks kept trying to glance through her shirt. She had an infuriatingly long walk to every class because the faculty forced women to live in a building nearly two miles north, where the landlady seemed to confuse her tenants with housemaids and yelled if they refused to do the sweeping. Scholars would reach past her at faculty parties to shake Robin’s or Ramy’s hand; if she spoke up, they pretended she did not exist. If Ramy corrected a professor, he was bold and brilliant; if Letty did the same she was aggravating. If she wanted to take a book out of the Bodleian, she needed Ramy or Robin present to give permission. If she wanted to get around in the dark, alone and unafraid, she had to dress and walk like a man.
None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb. It was infuriating. Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women?
But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they be anything but unfailingly, desperately grateful?
But suddenly, after Canton, they were all speaking in a language that she couldn’t understand. Suddenly Letty was on the outside, and she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.
Their convictions baffled her – why, she wondered, would you dash yourself against a brick wall?
Still, she’d helped them, protected them, and kept their secrets. She loved them. She would have killed for them. And she tried not to believe the worst things about them, the things her upbringing would have had her think. They were not savages. They were not lesser, not soft-minded ingrates. They were only – sadly, dreadfully – misguided.
But oh, how she hated to see them making the same mistakes that Lincoln had.
Why could they not see how fortunate they were? To be allowed into these hallowed halls, to be lifted from their squalid upbringings into the dazzling heights of the Royal Institute of Translation! All of them had fought tooth and nail to win a seat in a classroom at Oxford. She was dazzled by her luck every day she sat in the Bodleian, thumbing through books that, without her Translator’s Privileges, she could not have requested from the stacks. Letty had defied fate to get here; they all had.
So why wasn’t that enough? They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well? Why bite the hand that fed you? Why throw it all away?
But there are larger things at stake, they told her (condescending, patronizing; as if she were an infant, as if she knew nothing at all). It’s a matter of global injustice, Letty. The plunder of the rest of the world.
She tried again to put aside her prejudices, to keep an open mind, to learn what it was that bothered them so. Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person. Of course she did not support this war. Of course she was against all kinds of prejudice and exploitation. Of course she sided with the abolitionists.
Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized.
But then they were talking about blackmail. About kidnapping, rioting, blowing up a shipyard. This was vindictive, violent, awful. And she couldn’t bear it – watching that horrible Griffin Lovell speak, that delighted glimmer in his eyes, and watching Ramy, her Ramy, nodding along. She could not believe it, what he’d become. What they’d all become.
Was it not awful enough that they’d covered up a murder? Did she have to be complicit in several more?
It was like waking up, like being doused with cold water. What was she doing here? What was she entertaining? This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion.
There was no future down this path. She saw this now. She’d been duped, strung along in this sickening charade, but this ended in only two ways: prison or the hangman. She was the only one there who wasn’t too mad to see it. And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox
A hidden door by the Vaults & Garden supply cellar revealed a cramped dirt tunnel, just large enough for them to wriggle through on their hands and knees. It felt endless. They inched forth, groping blindly. Robin wished for a light, but they had no candle, no kindling or flint; they could only trust in Anthony’s word and crawl, their shallow breaths echoing around them. At last, the ceiling of the tunnel sloped upwards, and a rush of cool air bathed their clammy skin. They pawed the earthen wall until they found a door, and then a handle; this they pushed open to find a small, low-ceilinged room, illuminated by moonlight seeping through a tiny grate above.
They stepped inside and blinked around.
Someone had been here recently. A loaf of bread sat on the desk, still so fresh that it was soft to the touch, and a half-melted candle beside it. Victoire rooted in the drawers until she found a box of matches, and then held the lit candle up to the room. ‘So this is where Griffin hid.’
The safe room felt uncannily familiar to Robin, though it took him a moment to realize why. The room’s layout – the desk beneath the grated window, the cot tucked neatly in the corner, the double bookshelves on the opposite wall – was a precise match of the dormitories on Magpie Lane. Here below Oxford, Griffin – consciously or not – had tried to re-create his college days.
‘Do you think we’re safe here for the night?’ Robin asked. ‘I mean – do you think—’
‘It doesn’t look disturbed.’ Victoire sat down gingerly on the edge of the cot. ‘I think if they knew, they would have torn this place apart.’
‘I think you’re right.’ He sat down beside her. Only now did he feel the exhaustion, seeping up his legs and into his chest. All the adrenaline of their escape had ebbed, now that they were safe, hidden in the belly of the earth. He wanted to keel over and never wake up.
Victoire leaned over to the side of the cot, where a barrel of what looked like fresh water stood. She poured some over a bunched-up shirt, then handed it to Robin. ‘Wipe.’
‘What?’
‘There’s blood,’ she said softly. ‘There’s blood all over you.’
He glanced up and looked at her, properly, for the first time since their escape. ‘There’s blood all over you.’
They sat side by side and cleaned themselves in silence. They were covered in an astonishing amount of grime; they went through one shirt each, and then another. Somehow, Griffin’s blood had got not only on Robin’s hands and arms but also across his cheeks, behind his ears, and up in the hollows where his neck met his ears, caked under layers of dust and dirt.
They took turns wiping at each other’s faces. The simple, tactile act felt good; it gave them something to focus on, distracted from all the words that hung heavy and unsaid. It felt good not trying to give them voice. They could not articulate them anyhow; they were not discrete thoughts but black, suffocating clouds. They were both thinking of Ramy and Griffin and Anthony and everyone else who’d been abruptly, brutally torn from this world. But they could not touch that abyss of grief. It was too early yet to give it a name, to shape and tame it with words, and any attempt would crush them. They could only wipe the blood from their skin and try to keep breathing.
At last, they dropped the dirty rags on the floor and leaned back against the wall, against each other. The damp air was cold, and there was no fireplace. They sat close, pulling the flimsy blanket tight around their shoulders. It was a long while before either of them spoke.
‘What do you suppose we do now?’ asked Victoire.
Such a heavy question, uttered in such a small voice. What could they do now? They had spoken of making Babel burn, but how in God’s name was that in their power? The Old Library was destroyed. Their friends were dead. Everyone bolder and better than them was dead. But the two of them were still here, and it was their duty to ensure their friends had not died in vain.
‘Griffin said you would know what to do,’ said Robin. ‘What did he mean?’
‘Only that we’d find allies,’ Victoire whispered. ‘That we had more friends than we knew, if we could just get to the safe room.’
‘We’re here.’ Robin gestured pointlessly about. ‘It’s empty.’
Victoire stood. ‘Oh, don’t be like that.’
They began searching the room for clues. Victoire took the cabinet, Robin the desk. Inside the desk drawers were stacks upon stacks of Griffin’s notes and letters. These he held up to the flickering candle, squinting. It made Robin’s chest ache to read Griffin’s handwriting in English – a cramped, spidered style that looked so similar to Robin’s own, and to their father’s. These letters, all these narrow, bold, and crowded lines, spoke of a frenetic but meticulous writer, were a glimpse into a version of Griffin that Robin had never known.
And Griffin’s network had been so much vaster than he’d suspected. He saw correspondence addressed to recipients in Boston, in New York, in Cairo, in Singapore. But the names were always coded, always obvious literary references like ‘Mr Pickwick’ and ‘King Ahab’ or names so generically English like ‘Mr Brown’ and ‘Mr Pink’ that they could not possibly be real.
‘Hm.’ Victoire held a small square of paper up to her eyes, frowning.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a letter. Addressed to you.’
‘Can I see?’
She hesitated a moment before handing it over. The envelope was thin and sealed. There on the back was his name, Robin Swift, dashed out in Griffin’s forceful scrawl. But when had he found the time to write this? It couldn’t have been after Anthony brought them to Hermes; Griffin hadn’t known where they were back then. It could only have been written after Robin had cut ties with Hermes, after Robin had declared he wanted nothing to do with him.
‘Are you going to read it?’ Victoire asked.
‘I – I don’t think I can.’ He passed it back to her. He felt terrified of the contents; it made his breath quicken to even hold it in his hand. He could not face his brother’s judgment. Not now. ‘Will you keep it for me?’
‘What if it’s something that can help?’
‘I don’t think it is,’ said Robin. ‘I think . . . it has to be something else. Please, Victoire – you can read it later, if you want, but I can’t look at it right now.’
She hesitated, then folded it into her inner pocket. ‘Of course.’
They resumed rooting through Griffin’s belongings. Apart from letters, Griffin had kept an impressive array of weapons – knives, garrotes, a number of silver bars, and at least three pistols. Robin refused to touch them; Victoire surveyed the collection, fingers skimming the barrels, before selecting one and tucking it into her belt.
‘Do you know how to use that?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Anthony taught me.’
‘Wondrous girl, you. Full of surprises.’
She snorted. ‘Oh, you just weren’t paying attention.’
But there was no list of contacts, no clues to other safe houses or possible allies. Griffin had shrouded everything in code, had created a network so invisible that, upon his death, it could never be reconstructed.
‘What’s that?’ Victoire pointed.
Up on top of the bookshelf, pushed so far back it was nearly hidden, was a lamp.
Robin reached for it, hoping wildly – yes, there it was, the familiar glint of silver embedded in the bottom. The beacon, Anthony had yelled. He thought of the burn on Griffin’s hand, of how Griffin had known, even miles away, that something awful had happened.
He turned it over, squinting. 燎. Liáo.
Griffin had made this. Liáo, in Mandarin, could mean ‘to burn’ or ‘to illuminate’. It could also refer to a signal lamp. There was a second, smaller silver bar inscribed above the first. Bēacen, it read. It looked like Latin, but Robin, raking his memory, couldn’t come up with its precise meaning or origin. Germanic, perhaps?*
Still, he could guess vaguely at the function of the lamp. This was how Hermes communicated. They sent signals through fire.
