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

‘But that’s just it,’ Robin insisted. ‘If I turn myself in, that takes the heat off the two of you. It disentangles this opium war from the murder, don’t you see? It frees you up—’

‘Stop it,’ said Victoire. ‘We won’t let you.’

‘Course we won’t,’ said Ramy. ‘Besides, that’s selfish – you don’t get to take the easy way out.’

‘How is that the easy—’

‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’

‘I do not—’

‘That’s why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.’

Robin thought this was supremely unfair. ‘I was only trying to save you that night.’

‘You were trying to let yourself off the hook,’ Ramy said, not unkindly. ‘But all sacrifice does is make you feel better. It doesn’t help the rest of us, so it’s an ultimately meaningless gesture. Now, if you’re finished with grand attempts at martyrdom, I think we should discuss . . .’

He trailed off. Victoire and Ramy followed his gaze to the door, where Letty stood, hands clutched against her chest. None of them knew how long she’d been there. Her face had gone very pale, save for two blotches of colour high on her cheeks.

‘Oh,’ said Ramy. ‘We thought you were asleep.’

Letty’s throat pulsed. She looked about to burst into sobs. ‘What,’ she asked in a tremulous whisper, ‘is the Hermes Society?’

‘But I don’t understand.’

Letty had been repeating this for the last ten minutes at regular intervals. It didn’t matter how they explained it – the necessity of the Hermes Society, and the myriad reasons why such an organization had to exist in the shadows – she kept shaking her head, her eyes blank and uncomprehending. She didn’t seem outraged or upset so much as truly baffled, as if they were trying to convince her that the sky was green. ‘I don’t understand. Weren’t you happy at Babel?’

‘Happy?’ Ramy repeated. ‘I suppose no one’s ever asked you if your skin’s been washed with walnut juice.’

‘Oh, Ramy, do they really?’ Her eyes widened. ‘But I never heard – but your skin is lovely—’

‘Or said you weren’t allowed in a shop, for reasons unclear,’ Ramy continued. ‘Or cut a wide circle around you on the pavement as if you had fleas.’

‘But that’s just Oxfordians being stupid and provincial,’ said Letty, ‘it doesn’t mean—’

‘I know you don’t see it,’ said Ramy. ‘And I don’t expect you to, that’s not your lot in life. But it’s not really about whether we were happy at Babel. It’s about what our conscience demands.’

‘But Babel gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’

‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

‘But the scholarships – I mean, without those scholarships all of you would have been – I don’t understand—’

‘You’ve made that abundantly clear,’ Ramy snapped. ‘You’re a proper little princess, aren’t you? Big estate in Brighton, summers in Toulouse, porcelain china on your shelves and Assam in your teacups? How could you understand? Your people reap the fruits of the Empire. Ours don’t. So shut up, Letty, and just listen to what we’re trying to tell you. It’s not right what they’re doing to our countries.’ His voice grew louder, harder. ‘And it’s not right that I’m trained to use my languages for their benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good.’

Letty took this better than Robin thought she would. She sat in silence for a moment, blinking, her eyes huge. Then her brows furrowed, and she asked, ‘But . . . but if inequality is the issue, then couldn’t you have gone through the university? There are all sorts of aid programmes, missionary groups. There’s philanthropy, you know, why couldn’t we just go to the colonial governments and—’

‘That’s a bit difficult when the whole point of the institution is preserving the Empire,’ said Victoire. ‘Babel doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit itself.’

‘But that’s not true,’ said Letty. ‘They contribute to charity all the time, I know, Professor Leblanc was leading research into London’s waterworks so that the tenement housing wouldn’t be so diseased, and there are humanitarian societies all over the globe—’^*

‘Did you know that Babel sells bars to slave traders?’ Victoire interrupted.