Page 175 of Babel

Victoire gripped his wrist. ‘Oh, Robin.’

‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘A brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’

Victoire said nothing for a long time. She gazed out over the crumbling city, thinking. At last, she pulled a rumpled piece of paper from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. ‘You should have this.’

Robin unfolded it. It was the daguerreotype portrait of the four of them, folded and refolded so many times that thin white lines crisscrossed the image. But their faces were printed so clearly. Letty, glaring proudly, her face a bit strained after such a long time. Ramy’s hands affectionately on both her and Victoire’s shoulders. Victoire’s half-smile; chin tilted down, eyes raised and luminous. His own awkward shyness. Ramy’s grin.

He took a sharp breath. His chest tightened, as if his ribs were constricting, squeezing his heart like a vice. He hadn’t realized he could still hurt so much.

He wanted to rip it to shreds. But it was the only remaining likeness he had of Ramy.

‘I hadn’t realized you’d kept it.’

‘Letty kept it,’ said Victoire. ‘She kept it framed in our room. I took it out the night before the garden party. I don’t think she noticed.’

‘We look so young.’ He marvelled at their expressions. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since they’d posed for that daguerreotype. ‘We look like children.’

‘We were happy then.’ Victoire glanced down, fingers tracing their fading faces. ‘I thought about burning it, you know. I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see... to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I... I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything. She was so alone, you know. All she wanted was a group of friends, people who could understand what she’d been through. And she thought she’d finally found that in us.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘And I suppose, when it all fell apart – I suppose she felt just as betrayed as we did.’

Ibrahim, they noticed, spent a great deal of time writing in a leather-bound notebook.

‘It’s a chronicle,’ he told them when asked. ‘Of what happened inside the tower. Everything that was said. All the decisions that were made. Everything we stood for. Would you like to contribute?’

‘As a co-author?’ asked Robin.

‘As an interview subject. Tell me your thoughts. I’ll write them down.’

‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ Robin felt very tired, and for some reason the sight of those pages of scribbles filled him with dread.

‘I only want to be thorough,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I’ve got Professor Craft’s and the graduate fellows’ statements already. I just thought – well, if this all turns upside down...’

‘You think we’re going to lose,’ said Victoire.

‘I think no one knows how this is going to end,’ said Ibrahim. ‘But I know what they’ll say about us if it ends badly. When those students in Paris died at the barricades, everyone called them heroes. But if we die here, no one’s going to think we’re martyrs. And I just want to make sure some record of us exists, a record that doesn’t make us out to be the villains.’ Ibrahim glanced at Robin. ‘But you don’t like this project, do you?’

Had he been glaring? Robin hastily rearranged his face. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You look repelled.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I just...’ Robin didn’t know why he found it so hard to put the words together. ‘I suppose I just don’t like thinking of us as history when we haven’t even yet made a mark on the present.’

‘We’ve made our mark,’ said Ibrahim. ‘We’re already in the history books, for better or for worse. Here’s a chance to intervene against the archives, no?’

‘What sort of things are going in it?’ Victoire asked. ‘Broad strokes only? Or personal observations?’

‘Anything you like,’ said Ibrahim. ‘What you had for breakfast, if you want. How you while away the hours. But I’m most interested, of course, in how we all got here.’

‘I suppose you want to know about Hermes,’ said Robin.

‘I want to know everything you’d care to tell me.’

Robin felt a very heavy weight on his chest then. He wanted to start talking, to spill out everything he knew and have it preserved in ink, but the words died on his tongue. He didn’t know how to articulate that the problem was not the existence of the record itself, but the fact that it wasn’t enough, that it was such an insufficient intervention against the archives that it felt pointless.

There was so much to say. He didn’t know where to begin. He had never thought before about the lacuna of written history they existed in and the oppressive swath of denigrating narrative they fought against, and now that he did, it seemed insurmountable. The record was so blank. No chronicle of the Hermes Society existed at all except this one. Hermes had operated like the best of clandestine societies, erasing its own history even as it changed Britain’s. No one would celebrate their achievements. No one would even know what they were.

He thought of the Old Library, destroyed and dismantled, all those mountains of research locked away and hidden forever from view. He thought of that envelope, lost to ash; of the dozens of Hermes associates who’d never been contacted, who might never know what had happened. He thought of all those years Griffin spent abroad – fighting, struggling, railing against a system that was infinitely more powerful than he was. Robin would never know the full extent of what his brother had done, what he’d suffered. So much history, erased.

‘It just scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be all we ever were.’