Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

They could have spent hours alone reading the ledger, which was full of endlessly interesting and astonishingly brilliant innovations. Many, Robin discovered, had been devised by Professor Lovell. One particularly ingenious pair was the translation from the Chinese character gǔ (古) meaning ‘old or aged’, and the English ‘old’. The Chinese gǔ carried a connotation of durability and strength; indeed, the same character 古 was present in the character gù (固), which meant ‘hard, strong, or solid’. Linking the concepts of durability and antiquity helped prevent machinery from decaying over time; in fact, the longer it was in use, the more reliable it became.

‘Who’s Eveline Brooke?’ Ramy asked, flipping through the most recent entries near the back.

‘Eveline Brooke?’ Robin repeated. ‘Why does that sound familiar?’

‘Whoever she is, she’s a genius.’ Ramy pointed at a page. ‘Look, she’s got over twelve match-pairs in 1833 alone. Most of the graduate fellows haven’t got more than five.’

‘Hold on,’ said Letty. ‘Do you mean Evie?’

Ramy frowned. ‘Evie?’

‘The desk,’ Letty said. ‘Remember? That time Playfair snapped at me for sitting in the wrong chair? He said it was Evie’s chair.’

‘Suppose she’s very particular,’ Victoire said. ‘And she doesn’t like when people mess with her things.’

‘But no one’s moved any of her things since that morning,’ said Letty. ‘I’ve noticed. It’s been months. And those books and pens are right where she left them. So either she’s particular about her things to a frightening degree, or she hasn’t been back at that desk at all.’

As they flipped through the ledger, another theory became more evident. Evie had been wildly prolific between the years 1833 and 1834, but by 1835, her research had dropped completely off the record. Not a single innovation in the past five years. They’d never met an Evie Brooke at any of the departmental parties or dinners; she’d given no lectures, no seminars. Whoever Eveline Brooke was, as brilliant as she’d been, she was clearly no longer at Babel.

‘Hold on,’ said Victoire. ‘Suppose she graduated in 1833. That would have put her in the same class as Sterling Jones. And Anthony.’

And Griffin, Robin realized, though he did not say this out loud.

‘Perhaps she was also lost at sea,’ said Letty.

‘A cursed class, then, that,’ observed Ramy.

The room suddenly felt very cold.

‘Suppose we get back to revising,’ Victoire suggested. No one disagreed.

In the late hours of the night, when they’d been staring at their books for so long that they could no longer think straight, they made a game of conceiving implausible match-pairs that might help them pass.

Robin won one night with jīxīn. ‘In Canton, mothers would send their sons off to the imperial exams with a breakfast of chicken hearts,’ he explained. ‘Because chicken hearts – jīxīn – sounds similar to jìxing, which means memory.’^*

‘What would that do?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Scatter bloody chicken bits all over your paper?’

‘Or make your heart the size of a chicken’s,’ said Victoire. ‘Imagine, one moment you’ve got a normal-size heart and the next it’s smaller than a thimble, and it can’t pump all the blood you need to survive, so you collapse—’

‘Christ, Victoire,’ said Robin. ‘That’s morbid.’

‘No, this is easy,’ said Letty. ‘It’s a metaphor of sacrifice – the key is the trade. The chicken’s blood – the chicken’s heart – is what supports your memory. So you’ve only got to slaughter a chicken to the gods and you’ll pass.’

They stared at each other. It was very late, and none of them had got enough sleep. They were all presently suffering the peculiar madness of the very scared and very determined, the madness that made academia feel as dangerous as the battlefield.

If Letty had suggested they plunder a henhouse right then, none of them would have hesitated to follow.

The fated week came. They were as prepared as they could be. They’d been promised a fair exam as long as they did their work, and they had done their work. They were frightened, of course, but warily confident. These exams, after all, were precisely what they had been trained to do for the last two and a half years; no more and no less.

Professor Chakravarti’s paper was easiest of all. Robin had to translate, unseen, a five-hundred-character-long passage in Classical Chinese that Professor Chakravarti had composed. It was a charming parable about a virtuous man who loses one goat in a mulberry field but finds another. Robin realized after the exam that he’d mistranslated yànshǐ, which meant ‘romantic history’, as the tamer ‘colourful history’,^* which missed the tone of the passage somewhat, but hoped the ambiguities between ‘sexual’ and ‘colourful’ in English would be enough to fudge things over.