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

Morning came. Robin rose, washed, and dressed for class. He met Ramy outside the house. Neither said a word; they walked in silence to the tower door, which, despite Robin’s sudden fear, opened to let them in. They were late; Professor Craft was already lecturing when they took their seats. Letty shot them an irritated glare. Victoire gave Robin a nod, her face inscrutable. Professor Craft continued as if she hadn’t seen them; this was how she always dealt with tardiness. They pulled out their pens and began taking down notes on Tacitus and his thorny ablative absolutes.

The room seemed at once both mundane and heartbreakingly beautiful: the morning light streaming through stained-glass windows, casting colourful patterns on the polished wooden desks; the clean scratch of chalk against the blackboard; and the sweet, woody smell of old books. A dream; this was an impossible dream, this fragile, lovely world in which, for the price of his convictions, he had been allowed to remain.

That afternoon they received notices in their pidges to prepare to depart for Canton by way of London by the eleventh of October – the day after next. They would spend three weeks in China – two in Canton, and one in Macau – and then stop in Mauritius for ten days on the way home.

Your destinations are temperate, but the sea voyage can be chilly, read the notice. Bring a thick coat.

‘Isn’t this a bit early?’ asked Letty. ‘I thought we weren’t going until after our exams.’

‘It explains here.’ Ramy tapped the bottom of the page. ‘Special circumstances in Canton – they’re short on Chinese translators and want Babblers to fill in the gap, so they’ve pushed our voyage up ahead.’

‘Well, that’s exciting!’ Letty beamed. ‘It’ll be our first chance to go out in the world and do something.’

Robin, Ramy, and Victoire exchanged glances with one another. They all shared the same suspicion – that this sudden departure was somehow linked to Friday night. But they couldn’t know what that meant for Ramy’s and Victoire’s presumed innocence, or what this voyage held in store for them all.

The final day before they left was torture. The only one among them who felt any excitement was Letty, who took it upon herself to march into their rooms that night and make sure their trunks were properly packed. ‘You don’t realize how cold it gets at sea in the mornings,’ she said, folding Ramy’s shirts into a neat pile on his bed. ‘You’ll need more than just a linen shirt, Ramy, you’ll want two layers at least.’

‘Please, Letitia.’ Ramy swatted her hand away before she could get at his socks. ‘We’ve all been at sea before.’

‘Well, I’ve travelled regularly,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘I ought to know. And we should keep a little bag of remedies – sleeping tinctures, ginger – I’m not sure there’s time to run to a shop, we might have to do so in London—’

‘It’s a long time on a little ship,’ snapped Ramy. ‘It’s not the Crusades.’

Letty turned stiffly to sort through Robin’s trunk. Victoire cast Robin and Ramy a helpless look. They couldn’t speak freely in Letty’s presence, so they could only sit simmering in anxiety. The same unanswered questions bedevilled them all. What was happening? Had they been forgiven, or was the axe still waiting to drop? Would they naively board the ship to Canton, only to be abandoned on the other side?

Most importantly – how was it possible they’d been recruited separately to the Hermes Society without knowledge of the others? Ramy and Victoire at least had some excuse – they were new to Hermes; they might have been too frightened by the society’s demands for silence to say anything to Robin yet. But Robin had known about Hermes for three years now, and he’d never spoken of it once, not even to Ramy. He’d done a marvellous job hiding his greatest secret from friends who, he’d proclaimed, owned his heart.

This, Robin suspected, had greatly rattled Ramy. After they’d walked the girls north to their lodgings that night, Robin tried to broach the subject, but Ramy shook his head. ‘Not now, Birdie.’

Robin’s heart ached. ‘But I only wanted to explain—’

‘Then I think we ought to wait for Victoire,’ Ramy said curtly. ‘Don’t you?’

They headed to London the next afternoon with Professor Lovell, who was to be their supervisor throughout the voyage. The trip was, thankfully, much shorter than the ten-hour stagecoach ride that had brought Robin to Oxford three years ago. The railway line between Oxford and Paddington Station had finally been completed over the previous summer, its opening commemorated with the installation of silver bars under the platform of the newly constructed Oxford Station,^* and so the journey took them only an hour and a half, during which Robin managed not to meet Professor Lovell’s eyes once.