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Victoire blanched. Ramy sighed and rubbed at his temples. Robin reached to pour himself a glass of brandy.
The mood that night was decidedly glum. Other than the stack of letters Robin had found in Professor Lovell’s office, the day had yielded nothing. The Hermes Society had remained silent. Robin’s window was empty. Victoire and Ramy had been to each of Anthony’s old drop points – a loose brick behind the Christ Church cathedral, a hidden bench in the Botanic Garden, an overturned and rarely used punt on the bank of the Cherwell – but none showed signs of recent visitation. They’d even walked back and forth in front of the Twisted Root for the better part of an hour, hoping Griffin might spot them lurking, but succeeded only in drawing looks from the patrons.
At least nothing disastrous had happened – no breakdowns, no ominous encounters with the Oxford police. Letty had begun hyperventilating again in the Buttery during lunch, or so Robin heard, but Victoire had slapped her on the back and pretended she’d merely choked on a grape. (Letty, Robin thought unkindly, was not helping the general feminist case that women were not nervous, pea-brained hysterics.)
They were safe, perhaps, for now. Yet they could not help feeling like sitting ducks. The clock was running out on them; too many people were growing suspicious, and their luck would not hold forever. But where else could they go? If they ran, then the Hermes Society had no way of finding them. They were trapped by obligation.
‘Oh, hell,’ said Ramy. He was going through the stacks of correspondence he’d retrieved from their pidges, sorting out the meaningless pamphlets from everything important. ‘I forgot.’
‘What?’ asked Letty.
‘The faculty party.’ Ramy waved a thick cream-coloured invitation card at them. ‘The damn faculty party, it’s this Friday.’
‘Well of course we’re not going,’ said Robin.
‘We can’t not go,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s the faculty party.’
Every year just before the start of Hilary, the Royal Institute of Translation put on a garden party in the University College grounds for faculty, students, and graduate fellows. They’d been to three by now. They were long, unremarkable events; like at all Oxford functions, the food was barely passable and the speeches were long. What Robin couldn’t understand was why Ramy was making such a big deal of it.
‘So what?’ asked Victoire.
‘So everyone goes,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s mandatory. They all know we’re back by now – we ran into Professor Craft outside the Rad Cam this morning, and plenty of people saw Letty in the Buttery. We have to keep up appearances.’
Robin could not imagine anything more horrifying than eating hors d’oeuvres in the company of Babel faculty.
‘Are you mad?’ Victoire demanded. ‘Those things are endless; we’ll never make it through.’
‘It’s only a party,’ said Ramy.
‘Three courses? Wine? Speeches? Letty’s barely keeping it together as it is, and you want to plant her by Craft and Playfair and expect her to talk about what a lovely time she had in Canton for over three hours?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ Letty said weakly, convincing no one.
‘They’ll start asking questions if we’re not there—’
‘And they won’t ask questions when Letty vomits all over the centrepiece?’
‘She can pretend she has food poisoning,’ said Ramy. ‘We can pretend she’s been sick since this morning, which explains why she’s all pale and clammy, and why she had a fit in the Buttery. But can you really argue that’s more suspicious than all four of us failing to show up at all?’
Robin glanced to Victoire, hoping she had a counter-argument. But she was looking to him, expecting the same.
‘The party buys time,’ Ramy said firmly. ‘If we can just manage not to seem like total lunatics, we buy ourselves a day. Or two. That’s it. More time. That’s the only factor that matters.’
Friday turned out to be an unseasonably hot day. It began with a typical January morning chill, but by midafternoon the sun had burned through the cloud cover and was shining in full force. They’d all overestimated the cold when they got dressed, but once in the courtyard they could not easily remove their wool undershirts, which meant they had no choice but to sweat.
That year’s garden party was the most extravagant Babel had ever put on. The faculty was swimming in coin after a visit by the Russian Archduke Alexander to the university the previous May; the archduke, who had been so impressed by the wit and skill of his spontaneous interpreters at the reception, had made Babel a gift of one thousand pounds for discretionary funding. The professors had put that to lavish, if ill-considered, use. A string quartet played lustily in the middle of the quadrangle, though everyone veered away from them because the noise made conversation impossible. Half a dozen peacocks, reportedly imported from London Zoo, wandered around the green, harassing anyone dressed in bright colours. Three long, tented tables of food and drink occupied the centre of the green. The offerings included finger sandwiches, small pies, a grotesque variety of chocolates, and seven different flavours of ice cream.
Babel scholars milled around holding rapidly warming glasses of wine, making tepid and petty conversation. Like all faculties at Oxford, the Translation Institute was rife with internal rivalries and jealousies over funding and appointments, a problem exacerbated by the fact that each regional specialist thought their language was more rich, more poetic, more literary, and more fertile for silver-working than others. Babel’s departmental prejudices were just as arbitrary as they were confusing. The Romanticists enjoyed most of the literary prestige,* though Arabic and Chinese were highly prized mostly by virtue of how foreign and different they were, while languages closer to home like Gaelic and Welsh had almost no respect at all. This made small talk very dangerous; it was very easy to give offence if one displayed either too much or too little enthusiasm about one’s research. Walking around in the midst of it all was Reverend Doctor Frederick Charles Plumptre, Master of the College, and it was understood at some point that each of them would have to shake his hand, pretend that they believed he remembered them when it was obvious he hadn’t a clue what their names were, and suffer a painfully banal conversation about where they were from and what they studied before he let them go.
All this for three unbearable hours, for no one could leave before the banquet was over. The seating charts were made; their absences would be noticed. They had to stay until the sun had set, until all the toasts had been given, and until all the scholars present had had enough of pretending to enjoy socializing for a lifetime.
This is a disaster, Robin thought, glancing around. They would have been better off not showing up. None of them had their wits about them. He watched a graduate fellow ask Victoire a question three times before she finally registered his presence. Letty was standing in the corner, gulping down glass after glass of cold water as sweat dripped down her forehead. Ramy was faring the best, holding court with a gaggle of first years regaling him with questions about his voyage, but as Robin walked past him, he heard Ramy burst out in such an abrupt, hysterical peal of laughter that he nearly flinched back with fright.
Robin felt dizzy as he looked out over the crowded lawn. This was madness, he thought, sheer madness that he should be standing here among the faculty, holding a wineglass, concealing the truth that he’d killed one of their number. He wandered towards the buffet tables and filled a small plate with hors d’oeuvres, just to have something to do, but the thought of putting any of the rapidly spoiling tarts in his mouth was nauseating.
‘Feeling all right?’
He jumped and turned. It was Professors De Vreese and Playfair. They stood on either side of him like prison guards. Robin blinked rapidly, trying to arrange his features into something like a neutral smile. ‘Professors. Sirs.’
