Page 151 of Babel

Book V

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Interlude

Letty

Letitia Price was not a wicked person.

Harsh, perhaps. Cold, blunt, severe: all the words one might use to describe a girl who demanded from the world the same things a man would. But only because severity was the only way to make people take her seriously, because it was better to be feared and disliked than to be considered a sweet, pretty, stupid pet; and because academia respected steel, could tolerate cruelty, but could never accept weakness.

Letty had fought and clawed for everything she had. Oh, one wouldn’t know it from looking at her, this fair English rose, this admiral’s daughter raised on a Brighton estate with half a dozen servants at hand and two hundred pounds per annum to whoever married her. Letitia Price has everything, said the ugly jealous girls at London balls. But Letty was born second after a boy, Lincoln, the apple of her father’s eye. Meanwhile her father, the admiral, could barely stand to look at her, for when he did all he saw was a shadow of the frail and late Mrs Amelia Price, killed by childbirth in a room humid with blood that smelled like the ocean.

‘I certainly don’t blame you,’ he told her, late one night, after too much wine. ‘But you’ll understand, Letitia, if I’d rather you made yourself scarce in my presence.’

Lincoln was meant for Oxford, Letty for an early marriage. Lincoln received the rotation of tutors, all recent Oxford graduates who hadn’t landed a parish elsewhere; the fancy pens, creamy stationery, and thick, glossy books on birthdays and Christmases. As for Letty – well, her father’s opinion on women’s literacy was that they needed only to be able to sign the marriage certificate.

But it was Letty who had the talent for languages, who absorbed Greek and Latin as easily as she did English. She learned from reading on her own, and from sitting with her ear pressed to the door during Lincoln’s tutoring sessions. Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges. She approached language with a determined, mathematical rigour, and she broke down the thorniest of Latin constructions through sheer force of will. It was Letty who drilled her brother late at night when he couldn’t remember his vocabulary lists, who finished his translations and corrected his compositions when he got bored and went off to ride or hunt or whatever it was boys did outdoors.

If their roles had been switched, she would have been hailed as a genius. She would have been the next Sir William Jones.

But this was not in her stars. She tried to be happy for Lincoln, to project her hopes and dreams onto her brother like so many women of that era did. If Lincoln became an Oxford don, then perhaps she might become his secretary. But his mind was simply a brick wall. He hated his lessons; he despised his tutors. He thought his readings boring. All he ever wanted was to be outdoors; he could not sit still in front of a book for more than a minute before he began to fidget. And she simply couldn’t understand him, why someone with such opportunities would reject the chance to use them.

‘If I were at Oxford I would read until my eyes bled,’ she told him.

‘If you were at Oxford,’ said Lincoln, ‘the world would know to tremble.’

She loved her brother, she did. But she could not stand his ingratitude, the way he scorned all the gifts he’d been given by the world. And it felt like justice, almost, when it turned out that Oxford suited Lincoln very badly. His tutors at Balliol wrote to Admiral Price with complaints of drinking, gambling, staying out past curfew. Lincoln wrote home asking for money. His letters to Letty were brief, tantalizing, offering glimpses of a world he clearly did not appreciate – classes a snooze, don’t bother to go – not during rowing season, anyhow, you should come up and see us at Bumps next spring. In the beginning, Admiral Price wrote this off as natural, as growing pains. Young men, living away from home for the first time, always took some time to adjust – and why shouldn’t they sow their wild oats? Lincoln would pick up his books, in time.

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.