AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He knew very well what he was doing. He seemed to have done this before.
After twelve strikes, it all stopped. With just as much poise and precision, Professor Lovell returned the poker to the mantel, stepped back, and sat down at the table, regarding Robin silently as the boy climbed to his knees and wiped the blood, as best he could, from his face.
After a very long silence, he spoke. ‘When I brought you from Canton, I made clear my expectations.’
A sob had finally built up in Robin’s throat, a choking, delayed emotional reaction, but he swallowed it down. He was terrified of what Professor Lovell would do if he made a noise.
‘Get up,’ Professor Lovell said coldly. ‘Sit down.’
Automatically, Robin obeyed. One of his molars felt loose. He probed at it, wincing when a fresh, salty spurt of blood coated his tongue.
‘Look at me,’ Professor Lovell said.
Robin lifted his eyes.
‘Well, that’s one good thing about you,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.’
Robin’s nose prickled. Tears threatened to burst forth, and he strained to hold them back. He felt as if a spike were being driven through his temples. He was so overcome with pain then that he could not breathe, and still it seemed the most important thing was to display no hint of suffering at all. He had never felt so wretched in his life. He wanted to die.
‘I won’t tolerate laziness under this roof,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Translation is no easy occupation, Robin. It demands focus. Discipline. You are already at a disadvantage for your lack of an early education in Latin and Greek, and you’ve only six years to make up the difference before you begin at Oxford. You cannot sloth. You cannot waste time on daydreams.’
He sighed. ‘I hoped, based on Miss Slate’s reports, that you had grown to be a diligent and hardworking boy. I see now that I was wrong. Laziness and deceit are common traits among your kind. This is why China remains an indolent and backwards country while her neighbours hurtle towards progress. You are, by nature, foolish, weak-minded, and disinclined to hard work. You must resist these traits, Robin. You must learn to overcome the pollution of your blood. I’ve gambled greatly on your capacity to do so. Prove to me that it was worth it, or purchase your own passage back to Canton.’ He cocked his head. ‘Do you wish to return to Canton?’
Robin swallowed. ‘No.’
He meant it. Even after this, even after the miseries of his classes, he could not imagine an alternate future for himself. Canton meant poverty, insignificance, and ignorance. Canton meant the plague. Canton meant no more books. London meant all the material comforts he could ask for. London meant, someday, Oxford.
‘Then decide now, Robin. Dedicate yourself to excelling at your studies, make the sacrifices that entails, and promise me you will never embarrass me so much again. Or take the first packet home. You’ll be back on the streets with no family, no skills, and no money. You’ll never get the kinds of opportunities I’m offering you again. You’ll only ever dream of seeing London again, much less Oxford. You will never, ever touch a silver bar.’ Professor Lovell leaned back, regarding Robin through cold, scrutinizing eyes. ‘So. Choose.’
Robin whispered a response.
‘Louder. In English.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said hoarsely. ‘I want to stay.’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell stood up. ‘Mr Chester is waiting downstairs. Collect yourself and go to class.’
Somehow Robin made it through the entirety of that class, sniffling, too dazed to focus, a great bruise blooming on his face while his torso throbbed from a dozen invisible hurts. Mercifully, Mr Chester said nothing about the incident. Robin went through a list of conjugations and got all of them wrong. Mr Chester patiently corrected him in a pleasant if forcedly even tone. Robin’s tardiness had not shortened the class – they went far past suppertime, and those were the longest three hours of Robin’s life.
The next morning, Professor Lovell acted as if nothing had happened. When Robin came down for breakfast, the professor asked if he’d finished his translations. Robin said he had. Mrs Piper brought out eggs and ham for breakfast, and they ate in a somewhat frenzied silence. It hurt to chew, and at times to swallow – Robin’s face had swollen even more overnight – but Mrs Piper only suggested he cut his ham into smaller pieces when he coughed. They all finished their tea. Mrs Piper cleared the plates away, and Robin went to retrieve his Latin textbooks before Mr Felton arrived.
It never occurred to Robin to run, not then, and not once in the weeks that followed. Some other child might have been frightened, might have seized the first chance to escape into London’s streets. Some other child suited to better, kinder treatment might have realized that such nonchalance on the part of adults like Mrs Piper, Mr Felton, and Mr Chester to a badly bruised eleven-year-old was frightfully wrong. But Robin was so grateful for this return to equilibrium that he couldn’t find it in himself to even resent what had happened.
After all, it never happened again. Robin made sure it did not. He spent the next six years studying to the point of exhaustion. With the threat of expatriation looming constantly above him, he devoted his life to becoming the student Professor Lovell wanted to see.
Greek and Latin grew more entertaining after the first year, after he’d assembled enough building blocks of each language to piece together fragments of meaning for himself. From then on it felt less like groping in the dark whenever he encountered a new text and more like filling in the blanks. Figuring out the precise grammatical formulation of a phrase that had been frustrating him gave him the same sort of satisfaction he derived from reshelving a book where it belonged or finding a missing sock – all the pieces fitted together, and everything was whole and complete.
In Latin, he read through Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and Juvenal; in Greek, he tackled Xenophon, Homer, Lysias, and Plato. In time, he realized he was quite good at languages. His memory was strong, and he had a knack for tones and rhythm. He soon reached a level of fluency in both Greek and Latin that any Oxford undergraduate would have been jealous of. In time, Professor Lovell stopped commenting on his inherited inclination to sloth, and instead nodded in approval at every update on Robin’s rapid progress through the canon.
History, meanwhile, marched on around them. In 1830, King George IV had died and was succeeded by his younger brother, William IV, the eternal compromiser who pleased no one. In 1831, another cholera epidemic swept through London, leaving thirty thousand dead in its wake. The brunt of its impact fell on the poor and the destitute; those living in close, cramped quarters who could not escape each other’s tainted miasmas.* But the neighbourhood in Hampstead was untouched – to Professor Lovell and his friends in their remote walled estates, the epidemic was something to mention in passing, wince about in sympathy, and quickly forget.
In 1833, a momentous thing happened – slavery was abolished in England and its colonies, to be replaced by a six-year apprenticeship term as a transition to freedom. Among Professor Lovell’s interlocutors, this news was taken with the mild disappointment of a lost cricket match.
‘Well, that’s ruined the West Indies for us,’ Mr Hallows complained. ‘The abolitionists with their damned moralizing. I still believe this obsession with abolition is a product of the British needing to at least feel culturally superior now that they’ve lost America. And on what grounds? It isn’t as if those poor fellows aren’t equally enslaved back in Africa under those tyrants they call kings.’*
‘I wouldn’t give up on the West Indies just yet,’ Professor Lovell said. ‘They’re still allowing a legal kind of forced labour—’
‘But without ownership, it takes the teeth out of it all.’
