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Once admitted, she still suffered a thousand and one humiliations at Oxford. Professors talked down to her as if she were stupid. Clerks kept trying to glance through her shirt. She had an infuriatingly long walk to every class because the faculty forced women to live in a building nearly two miles north, where the landlady seemed to confuse her tenants with housemaids and yelled if they refused to do the sweeping. Scholars would reach past her at faculty parties to shake Robin’s or Ramy’s hand; if she spoke up, they pretended she did not exist. If Ramy corrected a professor, he was bold and brilliant; if Letty did the same she was aggravating. If she wanted to take a book out of the Bodleian, she needed Ramy or Robin present to give permission. If she wanted to get around in the dark, alone and unafraid, she had to dress and walk like a man.
None of this came as a surprise. She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb. It was infuriating. Her friends were always going on about the discrimination they faced as foreigners, but why didn’t anyone care that Oxford was equally cruel to women?
But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they be anything but unfailingly, desperately grateful?
But suddenly, after Canton, they were all speaking in a language that she couldn’t understand. Suddenly Letty was on the outside, and she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.
Their convictions baffled her – why, she wondered, would you dash yourself against a brick wall?
Still, she’d helped them, protected them, and kept their secrets. She loved them. She would have killed for them. And she tried not to believe the worst things about them, the things her upbringing would have had her think. They were not savages. They were not lesser, not soft-minded ingrates. They were only – sadly, dreadfully – misguided.
But oh, how she hated to see them making the same mistakes that Lincoln had.
Why could they not see how fortunate they were? To be allowed into these hallowed halls, to be lifted from their squalid upbringings into the dazzling heights of the Royal Institute of Translation! All of them had fought tooth and nail to win a seat in a classroom at Oxford. She was dazzled by her luck every day she sat in the Bodleian, thumbing through books that, without her Translator’s Privileges, she could not have requested from the stacks. Letty had defied fate to get here; they all had.
So why wasn’t that enough? They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well? Why bite the hand that fed you? Why throw it all away?
But there are larger things at stake, they told her (condescending, patronizing; as if she were an infant, as if she knew nothing at all). It’s a matter of global injustice, Letty. The plunder of the rest of the world.
She tried again to put aside her prejudices, to keep an open mind, to learn what it was that bothered them so. Time and time again she found her ethics questioned, and she reiterated her positions, as if proving she was not indeed a bad person. Of course she did not support this war. Of course she was against all kinds of prejudice and exploitation. Of course she sided with the abolitionists.
Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized.
But then they were talking about blackmail. About kidnapping, rioting, blowing up a shipyard. This was vindictive, violent, awful. And she couldn’t bear it – watching that horrible Griffin Lovell speak, that delighted glimmer in his eyes, and watching Ramy, her Ramy, nodding along. She could not believe it, what he’d become. What they’d all become.
Was it not awful enough that they’d covered up a murder? Did she have to be complicit in several more?
It was like waking up, like being doused with cold water. What was she doing here? What was she entertaining? This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion.
There was no future down this path. She saw this now. She’d been duped, strung along in this sickening charade, but this ended in only two ways: prison or the hangman. She was the only one there who wasn’t too mad to see it. And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.
