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‘Ha,’ said Ramy. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’
‘It simply seems to me that all this aggression is quite pre-emptive,’ Letty insisted. ‘I mean, you haven’t even tried making your case to the public. Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?’
‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’
‘But public opinion on China is malleable,’ Anthony intervened. ‘Most Londoners oppose the opium trade to begin with, and there’s quite a lot of sympathetic coverage for Commissioner Lin in the newspapers. You can get pretty far with moralists and religious conservatives in this country. The question there is how to get them sufficiently bothered about it to exert pressure on Parliament. Unpopular wars have been fought over less.’
‘In terms of sparking public outcry, we’ve had one idea,’ said Griffin. ‘The match-pair polemic and the Greek root polemikós, which of course, means—’
‘War,’ said Ramy.
‘Correct.’
‘So you’ve got a war of ideas.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What does the match-pair do?’
‘That’s a work in progress; we’re still fiddling around with it. If we can just connect that semantic warp with the right medium, we might get somewhere. But the point is, we can’t achieve anything until more people understand where we’re coming from. Most of the British don’t understand there’s a fight to be had at all. For them, this war is something imaginary – something that could only benefit them, something they don’t have to look at or worry over. They don’t know the cruelty involved, or the continued violence it will enable. They don’t know what opium does to people.’
‘You won’t get anywhere with that argument,’ said Robin.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they don’t care,’ said Robin. ‘It’s a war happening in a foreign land that they can’t even imagine. It’s too distant for them to care.’
‘What makes you so sure of that?’ asked Cathy.
‘Because I didn’t,’ said Robin. ‘I didn’t, even though I’d been told time and time again how awful things were. It took witnessing it happening, in person, for me to realize all the abstractions were real. And even then, I tried my very hardest to look away. It’s hard to accept what you don’t want to see.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Well then,’ Anthony said, with forced cheer, ‘we’ll have to get creative with our persuasions, won’t we?’
So that was the goal of the night: to shift the engines of history onto a different track. Things were not as helpless as they seemed. The Hermes Society had several plans already in motion, most including various forms of bribery and blackmail, and one including the destruction of a shipyard in Glasgow.
‘The vote for war hinges on Parliament’s belief that it’ll be easily won,’ Griffin explained. ‘And technically, yes, our ships could blow Canton’s navy out of the water. But they run on silver to work. A few months ago, Thomas Peacock—’
‘Oh,’ Ramy made a face. ‘Him.’*
‘Indeed. He’s a rabid enthusiast of steam technology, and he put in an order for six iron steamboats at the shipbuilders Laird’s. William Laird and Son, that is – they’re based in Glasgow. These ships are more frightening than anything the waters of Asia have ever seen. They’ve got Congreve rockets, and their shallow draught and steam power make them more mobile than anything in the Chinese fleet. If Parliament votes yes, at least one of them is heading straight to Canton.’
‘So I assume you’re going to Glasgow,’ said Robin.
‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ said Griffin. ‘It’ll take ten hours by train. But I expect Parliament will hear within the day once I’m there.’
He did not elaborate on precisely what he would do in Glasgow, though Robin did not doubt his brother was capable of demolishing an entire shipyard.
‘Well, that sounds much more effective,’ Ramy said happily. ‘Why aren’t we putting all of our efforts into sabotage?’
‘Because we’re scholars, not soldiers,’ said Anthony. ‘The shipyard’s one thing, but we’re not going to take on the entire British Navy. We’ve got to leverage influence where we can. Leave the violent theatrics to Griffin—’
Griffin bristled. ‘They aren’t mere theatrics—’
‘The violent high jinks,’ Anthony amended, though Griffin bristled at that too. ‘And let’s focus on how to sway the vote in London.’
So they went back to the blackboard. A war for the fate of the world could not be won overnight – this they all knew in theory – but they could not bring themselves to stop and go to sleep. Every passing hour brought new ideas and tactics, though as the hours dragged far past midnight, their thoughts began to lose some coherence. Suppose they ensnared Lord Palmerston in a prostitution scandal by sending in Letty and Cathy to seduce him in disguise. Suppose they convinced the British public that the country China did not actually exist and was in fact an elaborate hoax by Marco Polo. At some point, they dissolved into helpless laughter as Griffin described in intricate detail a plot to kidnap Queen Victoria in the gardens of Buckingham Palace under the guise of an underground Chinese crime ring and hold her hostage in Trafalgar Square.
Theirs was a harrowing and impossible mission, yes, but Robin also found a certain exhilarating pleasure in this work. This creative problem-solving, this breaking up of a momentous mission into a dozen small tasks which, combined with enormous luck and possibly divine intervention, might carry them to victory – it all reminded him of how it felt to be in the library working on a thorny translation at four in the morning, laughing hysterically because they were so unbelievably tired but somehow thrumming with energy because it was such a thrill when a solution inevitably coalesced from their mess of scrawled notes and wild brainstorming.
Defying empire, it turned out, was fun.
