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

Still, she’d helped them, protected them, and kept their secrets. She loved them. She would have killed for them. And she tried not to believe the worst things about them, the things her upbringing would have had her think. They were not savages. They were not lesser, not soft-minded ingrates. They were only – sadly, dreadfully – misguided.

But oh, how she hated to see them making the same mistakes that Lincoln had.

Why could they not see how fortunate they were? To be allowed into these hallowed halls, to be lifted from their squalid upbringings into the dazzling heights of the Royal Institute of Translation! All of them had fought tooth and nail to win a seat in a classroom at Oxford. She was dazzled by her luck every day she sat in the Bodleian, thumbing through books that, without her Translator’s Privileges, she could not have requested from the stacks. Letty had defied fate to get here; they all had.

So why wasn’t that enough? They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well? Why bite the hand that fed you? Why throw it all away?

But there are larger things at stake, they told her (condescending, patronizing; as if she were an infant, as if she knew nothing at all). It’s a matter of global injustice, Letty. The plunder of the rest of the world.

She tried again to put aside her prejudices, to keep an open mind, to learn what it was that bothered them so. Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person. Of course she did not support this war. Of course she was against all kinds of prejudice and exploitation. Of course she sided with the abolitionists.

Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized.

But then they were talking about blackmail. About kidnapping, rioting, blowing up a shipyard. This was vindictive, violent, awful. And she couldn’t bear it – watching that horrible Griffin Lovell speak, that delighted glimmer in his eyes, and watching Ramy, her Ramy, nodding along. She could not believe it, what he’d become. What they’d all become.

Was it not awful enough that they’d covered up a murder? Did she have to be complicit in several more?

It was like waking up, like being doused with cold water. What was she doing here? What was she entertaining? This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion.

There was no future down this path. She saw this now. She’d been duped, strung along in this sickening charade, but this ended in only two ways: prison or the hangman. She was the only one there who wasn’t too mad to see it. And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.

FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

A hidden door by the Vaults & Garden supply cellar revealed a cramped dirt tunnel, just large enough for them to wriggle through on their hands and knees. It felt endless. They inched forth, groping blindly. Robin wished for a light, but they had no candle, no kindling or flint; they could only trust in Anthony’s word and crawl, their shallow breaths echoing around them. At last, the ceiling of the tunnel sloped upwards, and a rush of cool air bathed their clammy skin. They pawed the earthen wall until they found a door, and then a handle; this they pushed open to find a small, low-ceilinged room, illuminated by moonlight seeping through a tiny grate above.

They stepped inside and blinked around.

Someone had been here recently. A loaf of bread sat on the desk, still so fresh that it was soft to the touch, and a half-melted candle beside it. Victoire rooted in the drawers until she found a box of matches, and then held the lit candle up to the room. ‘So this is where Griffin hid.’

The safe room felt uncannily familiar to Robin, though it took him a moment to realize why. The room’s layout – the desk beneath the grated window, the cot tucked neatly in the corner, the double bookshelves on the opposite wall – was a precise match of the dormitories on Magpie Lane. Here below Oxford, Griffin – consciously or not – had tried to re-create his college days.

‘Do you think we’re safe here for the night?’ Robin asked. ‘I mean – do you think—’

‘It doesn’t look disturbed.’ Victoire sat down gingerly on the edge of the cot. ‘I think if they knew, they would have torn this place apart.’