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

‘It’s not obvious, so don’t tell me,’ Robin hissed. The siren’s wailing was endless; soon the police would be at the green. ‘Say nothing. I know nothing, and when they question me, that’s what I’ll say. Just hurry and go, please, I’ll think of something.’

‘You’re sure—’ Victoire began.

‘Go,’ Robin insisted.

Ramy opened his mouth, closed it, then bent down to scoop up the stolen materials. Victoire followed suit. They left just two bars behind – clever, Robin thought, for that was some evidence that Robin had been working alone, that he had no accomplices who’d disappeared with all the contraband. Then they dashed down the steps, across the green and into the alley.

‘Who’s there?’ someone shouted. Robin saw lamps bobbing at the other end of the quadrangle. He twisted his head and squinted towards Broad Street, trying and failing to glimpse any trace of his friends. They’d got away, it had worked, the police were coming only for the tower. Only for him.

He took a shaky breath, then turned to face the light.

Angry shouts, bright lamps in his face, firm hands on his arms. Robin hardly processed what happened over the next several minutes; he was aware only of his vague, incoherent rambles, a cacophony of policemen yelling different orders and questions in his ear. He tried piecing together an excuse, some story about seeing thieves caught in the webbing, and how they’d snagged him when he went to stop them, but that was incoherent upon utterance, and the police only laughed. Eventually they prised him free of the web and led him back into the tower to a small, windowless room in the lobby, empty save for a single chair. The door had a small grate at eye level covered by a sliding flap; it resembled a jail cell more than a reading room. He wondered if he was not the first Hermes operative to be detained here. He wondered if the faint brown splotch in the corner might be dried blood.

‘You’ll stay here,’ said the constable in charge as he cuffed Robin’s hands behind his back. ‘Till the professor arrives.’

They locked the door and left. They had not said which professor, or when they would return. Not knowing was torture. Robin sat and waited, knees jangling, arms shuddering miserably from waves and waves of nauseating adrenaline.

He was finished. There was, surely, no coming back from this. It was so difficult to be expelled from Babel, which invested so much in its hard-sought talent that previous Babel undergraduates had been pardoned for almost every kind of offence save for murder.^* But surely thievery and treason were grounds for expulsion. And then what? A cell in the city gaol? In Newgate? Would they hang him? Or would he simply be put on a ship and sent back to where he had come from, where he had no friends, no family, and no prospects?

An image rose in his mind, one he had locked away for nearly a decade now – a hot, airless room, the smell of sick, his mother lying stiff beside him, her drawn cheeks turning blue before his eyes. The last ten years – Hampstead, Oxford, Babel – had all been a miraculous enchantment, but he had broken the rules – had broken the spell – and soon the glamour would fall away and he would be back among the poor, the sick, the dying, the dead.

The door creaked open.

‘Robin.’

It was Professor Lovell. Robin searched his eyes for a shred of something – kindness, disappointment, or anger – anything that might prophesy what he should expect. But his father’s expression, as ever before, was only a blank, inscrutable mask. ‘Good morning.’

‘Have a seat.’ The first thing Professor Lovell had done was unlock Robin’s cuffs. Then he’d led him up the stairs to his office on the seventh floor, where now they sat facing each other as casually as if convening for a weekly tutorial.

‘You’re very lucky the police contacted me first. Imagine if they’d found Jerome instead. You’d be missing your legs right now.’ Professor Lovell leaned forward, hands clasped over his desk. ‘How long have you been pilfering resources for the Hermes Society?’

Robin blanched. He had not expected Professor Lovell to be so direct. This question was very dangerous. Professor Lovell evidently knew about Hermes. But how much did he know? How much could Robin lie about? Perhaps he was bluffing, and perhaps Robin could fumble his way out of this if he minced his words in just the right way.

‘Tell the truth,’ Professor Lovell said in a hard, flat voice. ‘That’s the only thing that will save you now.’

‘Three months,’ Robin breathed. Three months felt less damning than three years, but long enough to sound plausible. ‘Only – only since the summer.’

‘I see.’ There was no ire in Professor Lovell’s voice. The calm made him terrifyingly unreadable. Robin would have preferred that he screamed.

‘Sir, I—’

‘Quiet,’ Professor Lovell said.