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

But things only got worse. Lincoln’s marks never improved. The letters from his tutors were less patient now, more threatening. When Lincoln came home for holidays during his third year, something had changed. A rot had set in, Letty saw. Something permanent, dark. Her brother’s face was puffy, his speech slow, biting, and bitter. He said scarcely a word to either of them all vacation. Afternoons he spent alone in his room, working steadily through a bottle of scotch. Evenings he either went out and didn’t come back until the early hours, or he quarrelled with his father, and though the two of them locked the door to the study, their angry voices pierced every room in the house. You’re a disgrace, said Admiral Price. I hate it there, said Lincoln. I’m not happy. And it’s your dream, not mine.

At last Letty decided to confront him. When Lincoln left the study that night, she was in the hallway, waiting.

‘What are you looking at?’ he leered. ‘Here to gloat?’

‘You’re breaking his heart,’ she said.

‘You don’t care about his heart. You’re jealous.’

‘Of course I’m jealous. You have everything. Everything, Lincoln. And I don’t understand what’s impelled you to squander it. If your friends are a drag, cut them off. If the courses are difficult, I’ll help you – I’ll come with you, I’ll look over every paper you write—’

But he was swaying, eyes unfocused, barely listening to her. ‘Go and bring me a brandy.’

‘Lincoln, what is wrong with you?’

‘Oh, don’t you judge me.’ His lip curled. ‘Righteous Letty, brilliant Letty, should have been at Oxford except for the gap between her legs—’

‘You disgust me.’

Lincoln only laughed and turned away.

‘Don’t come home,’ she shouted after him. ‘You’re better off gone. You’re better off dead.’

The next morning a constable knocked at their door and asked if this was the residence of Admiral Price, and if he would come with them, please, to identify a body. The driver never saw him, they said. Didn’t even know he was under the cart until this morning, when the horses had a fright. It was dark, it was raining, and Lincoln had been drunk, traipsing across the road – the admiral could sue, as was his right, but they doubted the court would be on his side. It was an accident.

After this, Letty would always fear and marvel at the power of a single word. She did not need silver bars to prove how saying something could make it true.

While her father prepared for the funeral, Letty wrote to Lincoln’s tutors. She included some compositions of her own.

Once admitted, she still suffered a thousand and one humiliations at Oxford. Professors talked down to her as if she were stupid. Clerks kept trying to glance through her shirt. She had an infuriatingly long walk to every class because the faculty forced women to live in a building nearly two miles north, where the landlady seemed to confuse her tenants with housemaids and yelled if they refused to do the sweeping. Scholars would reach past her at faculty parties to shake Robin’s or Ramy’s hand; if she spoke up, they pretended she did not exist. If Ramy corrected a professor, he was bold and brilliant; if Letty did the same she was aggravating. If she wanted to take a book out of the Bodleian, she needed Ramy or Robin present to give permission. If she wanted to get around in the dark, alone and unafraid, she had to dress and walk like a man.

None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb. It was infuriating. Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women?

But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they be anything but unfailingly, desperately grateful?

But suddenly, after Canton, they were all speaking in a language that she couldn’t understand. Suddenly Letty was on the outside, and she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.

Their convictions baffled her – why, she wondered, would you dash yourself against a brick wall?