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By then it was half past eleven. At Oxford, all of them would be awake for hours yet, poring over their assignments or laughing in each other’s rooms. But they were all exhausted, and too scared to part ways to separate bedrooms, so they searched the house for all the blankets and pillows they could find and piled them in the sitting room.
They decided to sleep in shifts, with one person always awake to keep watch. None of them really believed that the police might come crashing through the doors – and never mind that there was little they could do about it if that did happen – but it felt good to be at least minimally prudent.
Robin volunteered to go first. At first none of them could keep still, all jittery from coffee and nerves, but soon fatigue got the better of them, and in minutes their murmured anxieties gave way to deep, even breathing. Letty and Victoire were slumped together on the couch, Victoire’s head on Letty’s arm. Ramy slept on the floor beside Robin, body curled around the couch like protective parenthesis. The sight of them all together made Robin’s chest ache.
He waited half an hour, watching their chests rise and fall, before he dared to stand up. He reasoned it was safe to leave his post. If anything happened, he’d hear it across the house – the rain had now eased to a light patter, and the house was otherwise deathly silent. Holding his breath, he tiptoed out of the sitting room and up the stairs to Professor Lovell’s office.
It was just as cramped and messy as he remembered. At Oxford, Professor Lovell kept his office in some semblance of order, but at home he let his things devolve to a state of managed chaos. Loose papers lay strewn across the floor; books were stacked in piles around the shelves, some lying open, some shut around pens crammed inside to mark the pages.
Robin picked his way across the room to Professor Lovell’s desk. He’d never stood behind it; he’d only ever sat across it, hands clasped nervously in his lap. The desk seemed unrecognizable from the other side. A framed painting was propped upright on the right corner – no, not a painting, a daguerreotype. Robin tried not to look closely, but he couldn’t help but glimpse the outline of a dark-haired woman and two children. He turned the frame down.
He flipped through the loose papers on the desk. They were nothing interesting – notes on Tang dynasty poems and oracle bone inscriptions, both research projects Robin had known Professor Lovell was pursuing at Oxford. He tried the drawer on the right. He expected it to be locked, but it slid open with no trouble. Stashed inside were sheafs and sheafs of letters. He pulled them out and held them up to the lamplight one by one, unsure what he was looking for, or even what he expected to see.
He only wanted a picture of the man. He only wanted to know who his father was.
Most of Professor Lovell’s correspondence was with Babel faculty and representatives of the various trading companies – a handful with the East India Company, more from representatives with Magniac & Co., but the lion’s share were from men at Jardine & Matheson. These were quite interesting. He read faster and faster as he made his way through the pile, skimming over opening niceties for critical phrases buried in the middle paragraphs—–
... Gützlaff’s blockade might work... would only take thirteen warships, though the question is the time and expense... Simple show of force... Lindsay wants to embarrass them with a diplomatic withdrawal, but surely this endangers the sole customs agents left behind... bring them to the edge and they will back down... can’t be hard to decimate a fleet run by sailors who don’t even know what steamers are...
Robin exhaled slowly and sat back in the chair.
Two things were clear. First, there was no ambiguity what these documents were. A letter from Reverend Gützlaff from four months ago contained a detailed sketch of Canton’s main docks. On the other side was a list of all the known ships in the Chinese navy. These were not hypotheticals of Britain’s China policy. These were war plans. These letters included thorough accounts of the Qing government’s coastal defences, reports detailing the number of junks defending the naval stations, the number and placement of forts on the surrounding islands, and even the precise number of troops stationed at each.
Second, Professor Lovell’s voice emerged as one of the most hawkish among his interlocutors. Initially, Robin had conceived a silly, baseless hope that perhaps this war was not Professor Lovell’s idea, and that perhaps he had been urging them to stop. But Professor Lovell was quite vocal, not only on the many benefits of such a war (including the vast linguistic resources that would then be at his disposal), but about the ease with which the ‘Chinese, languid and lazy, with an army without one iota of bravery or discipline, might be defeated’. His father had not simply been a scholar caught up in trade hostilities. He had helped design them. One unsent missive, written in Professor Lovell’s neat, tiny hand and addressed to Lord Palmerston, read:
The Chinese fleet consists of outdated junks whose cannons are too small to aim effectively. The Chinese have only one ship worthy of combat against our fleet, the merchantman the Cambridge, purchased from the Americans, but they have no sailors that can handle her. Our agents report she sits idle in the bay. We will make short work of her with the Nemesis.
Robin’s heart was beating very quickly. He felt seized by a sudden urge to discover all he could, to determine the full extent of this conspiracy. He read frantically through the stack; when the letters ran out, he pulled another pile of correspondence from the left drawer. It revealed much of the same. The desirability of war was never a question, only its timing, and the difficulty of persuading Parliament to act. But some of these letters dated as far back as 1837. How had Jardine, Matheson, and Lovell known negotiations in Canton would break out in hostilities more than two years ago?
But that was obvious. They’d known because this was their intent all along. They wanted hostilities because they wanted silver, and without some miraculous change in the Qing Emperor’s mind, the only way to get that was to turn their guns on China. They’d planned on war before they had even set sail. They’d never meant to negotiate with Commissioner Lin in good faith. Those talks were merely a pretext for hostilities. Those men had funded Professor Lovell’s trip to Canton as a final expedition before they introduced the bill to Parliament. These men were relying on Professor Lovell to help them win a short, brutal, efficient war.
What would happen when they learned Professor Lovell was never coming back?
‘What’s that?’
Robin glanced up. Ramy stood in the doorway, yawning.
‘You’ve got an hour left before your turn,’ Robin said.
‘Couldn’t sleep. And these shifts are nonsense anyway, no one’s coming for us tonight.’ Ramy joined Robin behind Professor Lovell’s desk. ‘Digging around, are we?’
‘Look.’ Robin tapped the letters. ‘Read these.’
Ramy picked up a letter from the top of the pile, skimmed it, and then sat down across from Robin to take a closer look at the rest. ‘Good heavens.’
‘They’re war plans,’ said Robin. ‘Everyone’s in on it, everyone we met in Canton – look, here are letters from Reverends Morrison and Gützlaff – they’ve been using their covers as missionaries to spy on the Qing military. Gützlaff’s even been bribing informants to tell him particulars of Chinese troop deployment, which influential Chinese traders are against the British, and even which pawnshops would be good places to raid.’
‘Gützlaff?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Really? I didn’t know that German had it in him.’
‘There are also pamphlets to whip up public support for the war – look, here Matheson calls the Chinese “a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy”. And here someone called Goddard writes that deploying warships would be a “tranquil and judicious visit”. Imagine. A tranquil and judicious visit. What a way to describe a violent invasion.’
‘Incredible.’ Ramy’s eyes roved up and down the documents as he flipped through with increasing speed. ‘Makes you wonder why they sent us in the first place.’
‘Because they still needed a pretext,’ said Robin. It was falling into place now. It was all so clear, so ridiculously simple that he wanted to kick himself for not seeing it earlier. ‘Because they still needed something to take to Parliament to prove the only way they were going to get what they wanted was by sheer force. They wanted Baylis to humiliate Lin, not compromise with him. They wanted to bait Lin into declaring hostilities first.’
Ramy snorted. ‘Only they didn’t count on Lin blowing up all that opium in the harbour.’
‘No,’ said Robin. ‘But I suppose they’re getting the just cause they wanted anyway.’
