Page 88 of Babel

He was finished. There was, surely, no coming back from this. It was so difficult to be expelled from Babel, which invested so much in its hard-sought talent that previous Babel undergraduates had been pardoned for almost every kind of offence save for murder.* But surely thievery and treason were grounds for expulsion. And then what? A cell in the city gaol? In Newgate? Would they hang him? Or would he simply be put on a ship and sent back to where he had come from, where he had no friends, no family, and no prospects?

An image rose in his mind, one he had locked away for nearly a decade now – a hot, airless room, the smell of sick, his mother lying stiff beside him, her drawn cheeks turning blue before his eyes. The last ten years – Hampstead, Oxford, Babel – had all been a miraculous enchantment, but he had broken the rules – had broken the spell – and soon the glamour would fall away and he would be back among the poor, the sick, the dying, the dead.

The door creaked open.

‘Robin.’

It was Professor Lovell. Robin searched his eyes for a shred of something – kindness, disappointment, or anger – anything that might prophesy what he should expect. But his father’s expression, as ever before, was only a blank, inscrutable mask. ‘Good morning.’

‘Have a seat.’ The first thing Professor Lovell had done was unlock Robin’s cuffs. Then he’d led him up the stairs to his office on the seventh floor, where now they sat facing each other as casually as if convening for a weekly tutorial.

‘You’re very lucky the police contacted me first. Imagine if they’d found Jerome instead. You’d be missing your legs right now.’ Professor Lovell leaned forward, hands clasped over his desk. ‘How long have you been pilfering resources for the Hermes Society?’

Robin blanched. He had not expected Professor Lovell to be so direct. This question was very dangerous. Professor Lovell evidently knew about Hermes. But how much did he know? How much could Robin lie about? Perhaps he was bluffing, and perhaps Robin could fumble his way out of this if he minced his words in just the right way.

‘Tell the truth,’ Professor Lovell said in a hard, flat voice. ‘That’s the only thing that will save you now.’

‘Three months,’ Robin breathed. Three months felt less damning than three years, but long enough to sound plausible. ‘Only – only since the summer.’

‘I see.’ There was no ire in Professor Lovell’s voice. The calm made him terrifyingly unreadable. Robin would have preferred that he screamed.

‘Sir, I—’

‘Quiet,’ Professor Lovell said.

Robin clamped his mouth shut. It didn’t matter. He didn’t know what he would have said. There was no explaining himself out of this mess, no possible exoneration. He could only face up to the stark evidence of his betrayal and await the consequences. But if he could keep Ramy and Victoire’s names out of this, if he could convince Professor Lovell that he’d acted alone, that would be enough.

‘To think,’ Professor Lovell said after a long while, ‘that you would have turned out so abominably ungrateful.’

He leaned back, shook his head. ‘I have done more for you than you could ever imagine. You were a dock boy in Canton. Your mother was an outcast. Even if your father had been Chinese,’ Professor Lovell’s throat pulsed then, and this was as much of an admission as he would ever make, Robin knew, ‘your station would have been the same. You would have scraped along for pennies your entire life. You never would have seen the shores of England. You never would have read Horace, Homer, or Thucydides – you never would have opened a book, for that matter. You would have lived and died in squalor and ignorance, never imagining the world of opportunities that I have afforded you. I lifted you from destitution. I gifted you the world.’

‘Sir, I didn’t—’

‘How dare you? How dare you spit in the face of all you were given?’

‘Sir—’

‘Do you know how privileged you’ve been by this university?’ Professor Lovell’s voice remained unchanged in volume, but each syllable grew longer, first drawled and then spat out as if he were biting the words off at the ends. ‘Do you know how much most households pay to send their sons to Oxford? You enjoy rooms and lodging at no cost. You’re blessed with a monthly allowance. You have access to the largest stores of knowledge in the world. Did you think your situation was common?’

A hundred arguments swam through Robin’s head – that he had not requested these privileges of Oxford, had not chosen to be spirited out of Canton at all, that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to. That he had not wished for this fate until it was thrust upon him, decided for him. That he didn’t know what life he would have chosen – this one, or a life in which he’d grown up in Canton, among people who looked and spoke like him.

But what did it matter? Professor Lovell would hardly sympathize. All that mattered was that Robin was guilty.

‘Was it fun for you?’ Professor Lovell’s lip curled. ‘Did you get a thrill out of it? Oh, you must have. I imagine you considered yourself the hero of one of your little stories – a regular Dick Turpin, didn’t you? You always did love your penny dreadfuls. A weary student by day, and a dashing thief by night? Was it romantic, Robin Swift?’

‘No.’ Robin squared his shoulders and tried, at least, not to sound so pathetically scared. If he was going to be punished, he might as well own his principles. ‘No, I was doing the right thing.’

‘Oh? And what is the right thing?’

‘I know you don’t care. But I did it, and I’m not sorry, and you can do whatever you like—’

‘No, Robin. Tell me what you were fighting for.’ Professor Lovell leaned back, steepled his fingers together, and nodded. As if this were an examination. As if he were really listening. ‘Go, on, convince me. Try to recruit me. Do your very best.’

‘The way Babel hoards materials isn’t just,’ said Robin.

‘Oh! It’s not just!’

‘It’s not right,’ Robin continued angrily. ‘It’s selfish. All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.’