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

‘I read some.’ The boy sat gingerly, taking care not to tread on the volumes – Richard Hakluyt’s travel notes, he noticed – amassed by his feet. ‘We didn’t have many books. I ended up re-reading what we had.’

For someone who had never left Canton in his life, the boy’s English was remarkably good. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. This was thanks to an Englishwoman – one Miss Elizabeth Slate, whom the boy had called Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there – his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a foreigner – but someone must have been paying her wages because she had never left, not even when the plague hit. Her Cantonese was passably good, decent enough for her to make her way around town without trouble, but with the boy, she spoke exclusively in English. Her sole duty seemed to be taking care of him, and it was through conversation with her, and later with British sailors at the docks, that the boy had become fluent.

He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside London – a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about. Regardless, he and Miss Betty used to sit together under candlelight, laboriously tracing their fingers over each word as they sounded them out loud. When he grew older, he spent entire afternoons poring over the worn pages on his own. But a dozen books were hardly enough to last six months; he always read each one so many times over he’d nearly memorized them by the time the next shipment came.

He realized now, without quite grasping the larger picture, that those parcels must have come from the professor.

‘I do quite enjoy it,’ he supplied feebly. Then, thinking he ought to say a bit more, ‘And no – English was not a problem.’

‘Very good.’ Professor Lovell picked a volume off the shelf behind him and slid it across the table. ‘I suppose you haven’t seen this one before?’

The boy glanced at the title. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘That’s fine.’ The professor opened the book to a page in the middle and pointed. ‘Read out loud for me. Start here.’

The boy swallowed, coughed to clear his throat, and began to read. The book was intimidatingly thick, the font very small, and the prose proved considerably more difficult than the breezy adventure novels he’d read with Miss Betty. His tongue tripped over words he didn’t know, words he could only guess at and sound out.

‘The par . . . particular ad-advantage which each col-o-colonizing country derives from the col . . . colonies which par . . . particularly belong to it, are of two different kinds; first, those common advantages which every empire de . . . rives?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Derives . . . from the provinces subject to its dom . . . dom . . .’^*

‘That’s enough.’

He had no idea what he’d just read. ‘Sir, what does—’

‘No, that’s all right,’ said the professor. ‘I hardly expect you to understand international economics. You did very well.’ He set the book aside, reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a silver bar. ‘Remember this?’

The boy stared, wide-eyed, too apprehensive even to touch it.

He’d seen bars like that before. They were rare in Canton, but everyone knew about them. Yínfúlù, silver talismans. He’d seen them embedded in the prows of ships, carved into the sides of palanquins, and installed over the doors of warehouses in the foreign quarter. He’d never figured out precisely what they were, and no one in his household could explain. His grandmother called them rich men’s magic spells, metal amulets carrying blessings from the gods. His mother thought they contained trapped demons who could be summoned to accomplish their masters’ orders. Even Miss Betty, who made loud her disdain for indigenous Chinese superstition and constantly criticized his mother’s heeding of hungry ghosts, found them unnerving. ‘They’re witchcraft,’ she’d said when he asked. ‘They’re devil’s work is what they are.’

So the boy didn’t know what to make of this yínfúlù, except that it was a bar just like this one that had several days ago saved his life.

‘Go on.’ Professor Lovell held it out towards him. ‘Have a look. It won’t bite.’

The boy hesitated, then received it in both hands. The bar was very smooth and cold to the touch, but otherwise it seemed quite ordinary. If there was a demon trapped inside, it hid itself well.

‘Can you read what it says?’

The boy looked closer and noticed there was indeed writing, tiny words engraved neatly on either side of the bar: English letters on one side, Chinese characters on the other. ‘Yes.’

‘Say them out loud. Chinese first, then English. Speak very clearly.’