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

Letty blinked at her. ‘What?’

‘Capitale,’ Victoire said. ‘The Latin capitale, derived from caput, becomes the Old French chatel, which in English becomes chattel. Livestock and property become wealth. They write that on the bars, daisy-chain it with the word cattle, and then they fix those bars to iron chains so that slaves can’t escape. You know how? It makes them docile. Like animals.’

‘But that’s . . .’ Letty was blinking very rapidly now, as if trying to force a mote of dust from her eye. ‘But, Victoire love, the slave trade was abolished in 1807.’^*

‘And you think they just stopped?’ Victoire made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. ‘You don’t think we sell bars to America? You think British manufacturers don’t still profit from shackles and irons? You don’t think there are people who still keep slaves in England who simply manage to hide it well?’

‘But Babel scholars wouldn’t—’

‘That’s exactly the kind of thing Babel scholars do,’ Victoire said viciously. ‘I should know. It’s the kind of thing our supervisor was working on. Every time I met with Leblanc he’d change the subject to his precious chattel bars. He said he thought I might have special insight. He even asked once if I would put them on. He said he wanted to make sure it worked on Negroes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Letty, I tried.’ Victoire’s voice broke. There was such pain in her eyes. And it made Robin deeply ashamed, for only now did he see the cruel pattern of their friendship. Robin had always had Ramy. But at the end of the day, when they parted ways, Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world.

And where were he and Ramy? Looking away, failing to notice, hoping secretly the girls would simply stop bickering and move on. Occasionally Ramy made jabs at Letty, but only for his own satisfaction. Never had either of them paused to consider how deeply alone Victoire had to have felt, all this time.

‘You didn’t care,’ Victoire continued. ‘Letty, you don’t even care that our landlady doesn’t let me use the indoor bathroom—’

‘What? That’s ridiculous, I would have noticed—’

‘No,’ said Victoire. ‘You didn’t. You never did, Letty, and that’s the point. And we’re asking you now to finally, please, hear what we’re trying to tell you. Please believe us.’

Letty, Robin thought, was close to a breaking point. She was running out of arguments. She had the look of a dog backed into a corner. But her eyes darted around, desperately seeking an escape. She would find any flimsy excuse, accept any convoluted alternative logic before she let go of her illusions.

He knew, because not so long ago, he’d done the same.

‘So there’s a war,’ she said after a pause. ‘You’re absolutely sure there’s going to be a war.’

Robin sighed. ‘Yes, Letty.’

‘And it’s absolutely Babel’s doing.’

‘You can read the letters yourself.’

‘And what’s – what’s the Hermes Society going to do about it?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘But they’re the only ones who can do something about it. We’ll bring them these documents, we’ll tell them all we know—’

‘But why?’ Letty persisted. ‘Why involve them? We should just do this ourselves. We should make pamphlets, we should go to Parliament – there are a thousand options we’ve got other than going through some . . . some secret ring of thieves. This degree of collusion, of corruption – if the public just knew, they wouldn’t possibly be for it, I’m certain. But operating underground, stealing from the university – that only hurts your cause, doesn’t it? Why can’t you simply go public?’

They were silent for a moment, all of them wondering who would tell Letty first.

Victoire shouldered the task. ‘I wonder,’ she said, very slowly, ‘if you’ve ever read any of the abolition literature published before Parliament finally outlawed slavery.’

Letty frowned. ‘I don’t see how . . .’

‘The Quakers presented the first antislavery petition to Parliament in 1783,’ said Victoire. ‘Equiano published his memoir in 1789. Add that to the countless slave stories the abolitionists were telling the British public – stories of the cruellest, most awful tortures you can inflict on a fellow human. Because the mere fact that Black people were denied their freedom was not enough. They needed to see how grotesque it was. And even then, it took them decades to finally outlaw the trade. And that’s slavery. Compared to that, a war in Canton over trade rights is going to look like nothing. It’s not romantic. There are no novelists penning sagas about the effects of opium addiction on Chinese families. If Parliament votes to force Canton’s ports open, it’s going to look like free trade working as it should. So don’t tell me that the British public, if they knew, would do anything at all.’

‘But this is war,’ said Letty. ‘Surely that’s different, surely that’ll provoke outrage—’