Page 130 of Babel

‘You do?’ asked Robin.

‘Griffin’s been afraid of this for a while. We’ve kept an eye on Jardine and Matheson, been tracking developments in the Factories. Though it’s never got this bad before. Up until now it was all noise. But they’ll really go to war, you think?’

‘I’ve got papers—’ Robin reached for his breast pocket as if they were still stowed within his jacket, and then cursed. ‘Damn it, they’re all in my room—’

‘What do they say?’

‘They’re letters, correspondence between Lovell and Jardine and Matheson both – and Palmerston, and Gützlaff, the whole lot of them – oh, but I left them on Magpie Lane—’

‘What do they say?’

‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin, flustered. ‘They’re plans that have been months, years in the making—’

‘They’re evidence of direct collusion?’ Anthony pressed.

‘Yes, they indicate that the negotiations were never in good faith, that the last round was only a pretext—’

‘Good,’ said Anthony. ‘That’s very good. We can work with that. We’ll send someone over to retrieve them. You’re in Griffin’s old room, correct? Number seven?’

‘I – yes.’

‘Very good. I’ll have that sorted. In the meantime, I suggest you all calm down.’ He paused, turned around, and gave them a warm smile. After the week they’d just had, the sight of Anthony’s face in the soft candlelight made Robin want to cry with relief. ‘You’re in safe hands now. I agree it’s quite dire, but we can’t solve anything in this tunnel. You’ve done very well, and I imagine you’re quite scared, but you can relax now. The grown-ups are here.’

The underground passage turned out to be quite long. Robin lost track of how far they walked; it had to be nearly a mile. He wondered how vast the network was – now and then they passed a split in the tunnel or a door embedded in the wall, suggesting more hidden entrances across the university, but Anthony shepherded them along without comment. These were, Robin assumed, among Hermes’s many secrets.

At last, the passage narrowed again until there was only space to walk in single file. Anthony took the lead, holding the candle high above his head like a beacon. Letty followed just behind him.

‘Why you?’ she asked quietly. Robin couldn’t tell if she meant to be discreet, but the tunnel was so narrow, her voice carried to the back of the line.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ murmured Anthony.

‘You loved it at Babel,’ said Letty. ‘I remember, you gave us our orientation tour. You adored it there, and they adored you.’

‘That’s true,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel treated me better than anyone ever had.’

‘Then why—’

‘She thinks it’s about personal happiness,’ Ramy interjected. ‘But Letty, we’ve told you, it doesn’t matter how happy we were personally, it’s about the broader injustice—’

‘That’s not what I meant, Ramy, I only—’

‘Let me try to explain,’ Anthony said gently. ‘On the eve of abolition throughout the colonies, my master decided he wanted to pack up and return to America. I wouldn’t be free there, you see. He could keep me in his household and call me his. This man had labelled himself an abolitionist. He’d decried the general trade for years; he just seemed to think our relationship was special. But when the proposals he’d publicly supported became law, he decided he really couldn’t bear the sacrifice of losing me. So I went on the run and sought refuge at Oxford. The college took me in and hid me until I was legally declared a free man – not because they care much about abolition either, but because the professors at Babel knew my worth. And they knew if I were sent back to America, they would lose me to Harvard or Princeton.’

Robin couldn’t see Letty’s face in the darkness, but he could hear her breathing growing shallower. He wondered if she was about to cry again.

‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’

‘But you don’t really believe that about Babel,’ Letty whispered. ‘Do you? It’s just not the same – they weren’t enslaving you – I mean, Christ, you had a fellowship—’

‘Do you know what Equiano’s master told him when he was manumitted?’ Anthony asked mildly. ‘He told him that in a short time, he’d have slaves of his own.’

At last, the tunnel ended in a set of steps covered with a wooden board, sunlight streaming in through the slats. Anthony pressed his ears to the slats, waited a moment, then unlocked the board and pushed. ‘Come on up.’

They emerged in a sunny yard facing an old one-storey brick building half-hidden behind a mass of overgrown shrubbery. They couldn’t have strayed too far from the town centre – they were only two miles out at most – but Robin had never seen this building before. Its doors looked rusted shut, and its walls were nearly swallowed by ivy, as if someone had built this place and then abandoned it decades ago.

‘Welcome to the Old Library.’ Anthony helped them out of the tunnel. ‘Durham College built this place in the fourteenth century as an overflow room for old books, then forgot about it when they secured funding to build a new library closer to the centre of town.’

‘Just the Old Library?’ asked Victoire. ‘No other name?’