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

‘Oh, it’s a whole host of minor symptoms,’ Ramy lied smoothly. ‘He’s complained of a headache, some congestion, but it’s mostly nausea. He gets dizzy if he stands up for too long, so he’s spending most of his days in bed. Sleeping quite a lot. Could be seasickness, although he didn’t have any problems with it on the way over.’

‘Interesting.’ The cook rubbed his beard for a moment, then turned on his heel. ‘You wait right here.’

He strode out of the mess at a fast clip. They stared at the door, stricken. Had he grown suspicious? Was he alerting the captain? Was he checking on Professor Lovell’s cabin to confirm their story?

‘So,’ Ramy muttered, ‘do we run now, or . . . ?’

‘And go where?’ Victoire hissed. ‘We’re in the middle of an ocean!’

‘We could beat him to Lovell’s cabin, perhaps—’

‘But there’s nothing there, there’s nothing we can do—’

‘Shush.’ Letty nodded over her shoulder. The cook was already striding back into the mess, holding a small brown sachet in one hand.

‘Candied ginger.’ He offered it to Robin. ‘Good for upset stomachs. You scholars always forget to bring your own.’

‘Thank you.’ Heart hammering, Robin took the sachet. He tried his best to keep his voice level. ‘I’m sure he’ll be very grateful.’

Luckily, none of the rest of the crew ever questioned Professor Lovell’s whereabouts. The sailors were none too fascinated by the daily dealings of scholars they’d been paid a pittance to transport; they were more than happy to pretend they did not exist at all. Miss Smythe was a different story. She was, likely out of sheer boredom, desperately persistent in making herself useful. She asked incessantly about Professor Lovell’s fever, the sound of his cough, and colour and composition of his stool. ‘I’ve seen my share of tropical diseases,’ she said. ‘Whatever he’s got, I’ve surely seen it in among the locals. Just let me have a look at him, I’ll get him fixed right up.’

Somehow they convinced her that Professor Lovell was both highly contagious and painfully shy. (‘He won’t be alone with an unmarried woman,’ Letty vowed solemnly. ‘He’ll be furious if we let you in there.’) Still, Miss Smythe insisted that they join her in a daily prayer for his health, during which it took Robin all he had not to retch from guilt.

The days were terribly long. Time crawled when every second contained a horrible contingency, the question will we get away? Robin was constantly sick. His nausea was wholly different from the roiling unease of seasickness; it was a vicious mass of guilt gnawing at his stomach and clawing at his throat, a poisonous weight that made it hard to breathe. Trying to relax or to distract himself was no help; it was when he slipped up and lost his guard that the sickness redoubled. Then the buzzing in his ears grew louder and louder and black seeped into the edges of his vision, reducing the world to a blurry pinprick.

Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus. Sometimes the most he could do was to remember to breathe, hard and even. He had to scream a mantra in his mind – it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re all right, they don’t know, they think you’re just a student and they think he’s just sick – but even that mantra threatened to spin out of control; if he relaxed his focus for just one second, it morphed to the truth – you killed him, you blew a hole in his chest and his blood’s all over the books, all over your hands, slick, wet, warm—

He was scared of his subconscious; of letting it wander. He could dwell on nothing. Every thought that passed through his mind spiralled into a chaotic jumble of guilt and horror; always solidified into the same bleak refrain:

I have killed my father.

I have killed my father.

I have killed my father.

He tortured himself with imagining what might happen to them if they were caught. He projected the scenes so vividly they felt like memories – the short and damning trial, the disgusted looks from the jurors; the manacles around their wrists and, if not the gallows, then the long, crowded, miserable journey to a penal colony in Australia.