AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This Robin knew the answer to, only because he’d heard Professor Lovell and his friends complaining about it for years during those sitting room nights in Hampstead. ‘China.’
‘China. This country is gorging itself on imports from the Orient. They can’t get enough of China’s porcelain, lacquered cabinets, and silks. And tea. Heavens. Do you know how much tea gets exported from China to England every year? At least thirty million pounds’ worth. The British love tea so much that Parliament used to insist that the East India Company always keep a year’s worth of supply in stock in case of shortages. We spend millions and millions on tea from China every year, and we pay for it in silver.
‘But China has no reciprocal appetite for British goods. When the Qianlong Emperor received a display of British manufactured items from Lord Macartney, do you know what his response was? Strange and costly objects do not interest me. The Chinese don’t need anything we’re selling; they can produce everything they want on their own. So silver keeps flowing to China, and there’s nothing the British can do about it because they can’t alter supply and demand. One day it won’t matter how much translation talent we have, because the silver reserves will simply not exist to put it to use. The British Empire will crumble as a consequence of its own greed. Meanwhile, silver will accrue in new centres of power – places that have heretofore had their resources stolen and exploited. They’ll have the raw materials. All they’ll need then are silver-workers, and the talent will go where the work is; it always does. So it’s all as simple as running out the Empire. The cycles of history will do the rest, and you’ve only got to help us speed it along.’
‘But that’s...’ Robin trailed off, struggling to find the words to phrase his objection. ‘That’s so abstract, so simple, it can’t possibly – I mean, certainly you can’t predict history like this with such broad strokes—’
‘There’s quite a lot you can predict.’ Griffin shot Robin a sideways look. ‘But that’s the problem with a Babel education, isn’t it? They teach you languages and translation, but never history, never science, never international politics. They don’t tell you about the armies that back dialects.’
‘But what does it all look like?’ Robin persisted. ‘What you’re describing, I mean – how is this going to come about? A global war? A slow economic decline until the world looks entirely different?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Griffin. ‘No one knows precisely what the future looks like. Whether the levers of power move to China, or to the Americas, or whether Britain’s going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to its place – that’s impossible to foretell.’
‘Then how do you know that what you’re doing has any effect?’
‘I can’t predict how every encounter will shake out,’ Griffin clarified. ‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’
‘It’s such an uneven fight, though,’ Robin said helplessly. ‘You on one side, the whole of the Empire on the other.’
‘Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,’ said Griffin. ‘But it’s not. Take this current moment. We are just at the tail end of a great crisis in the Atlantic, after the monarchic empires have fallen one after the other. Britain and France lost in America, and then they went to war against each other to nobody’s benefit. Now we’re watching a new consolidation of power, that’s true – Britain got Bengal, it got Dutch Java and the Cape Colony – and if it gets what it wants in China, if it can reverse this trade imbalance, it’s going to be unstoppable.
‘But nothing’s written in stone – or even silver, as it were. So much rests on these contingencies, and it’s at these tipping points where we can push and pull. Where individual choices, where even the smallest of resistance armies make a difference. Take Barbados, for example. Take Jamaica. We sent bars there to the revolts—’
‘Those slave revolts were crushed,’ said Robin.
‘But slavery’s been abolished, hasn’t it?’ said Griffin. ‘At least in British territories. No – I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’
He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’
‘You really believe that,’ said Robin, amazed. Griffin’s faith astounded him. For Robin, such abstract reasoning was a reason to divest from the world, to retreat into the safety of dead languages and books. For Griffin, it was a rallying call.
‘I have to,’ said Griffin. ‘Otherwise, you’re right. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.’
After that conversation, Griffin seemed to have decided Robin wasn’t about to betray the Hermes Society, for Robin’s assignments vastly increased in number. Not all of his missions involved theft. More often Griffin made requests for materials – etymological handbooks, Grammatica pages, orthography charts – which were easily acquired, copied out, and returned without drawing attention. Still, he had to be clever with when and how he took the books out, as he’d attract suspicion if he kept sneaking away materials unrelated to his focus areas. One time Ilse, the upperclassman from Japan, demanded to know what he was doing with the Old German Grammatica, and he had to stammer out a story about pulling the title by accident in the course of trying to trace a Chinese word back to Hittite origins. No matter that he was at the entirely wrong section of the library. Ilse seemed ready to believe he was simply that dim.
By and large, Griffin’s requests were painless. It was all less romantic than Robin had imagined – and, perhaps, hoped for. There were no thrilling escapades or coded conversations spoken on bridges over running water. It was all so mundane. The great achievement of the Hermes Society, Robin learned, was how effectively it rendered itself invisible, how completely it concealed information even from its members. If one day Griffin disappeared, then Robin would be hard-pressed to prove to anyone the Hermes Society ever existed except as a figment of his imagination. He often felt that he wasn’t a part of a secret society at all, but rather of a large, boring bureaucracy that functioned with exquisite coordination.
Even the thefts became routine. Babel’s professors seemed wholly unaware that anything was being stolen at all. The Hermes Society took silver only in amounts small enough to mask with some accounting trickery, for the virtue of a humanities faculty, Griffin explained, was that everyone was hopeless with numbers.
‘Playfair would let entire crates of silver disappear if no one checked him,’ he told Robin. ‘Do you think he keeps tidy books? The man can barely add figures in two digits.’
Some days Griffin did not mention Hermes at all, but instead spent the hour it took to reach Port Meadow and back inquiring about Robin’s life at Oxford – his rowing exploits, his favourite bookshops, his thoughts on the food in hall and in the Buttery.
Robin answered cautiously. He kept waiting for the ball to drop, for Griffin to spin this conversation into an argument, for his own preference for plain scones to become the proof of his infatuation with the bourgeoisie. But Griffin only kept asking, and gradually it dawned on Robin that perhaps Griffin just missed being a student.
‘I do love the campus at Christmastime,’ said Griffin one night. ‘It’s the season when Oxford leans most into the magic of itself.’
The sun had set. The air had gone from pleasantly chilly to bone-cuttingly cold, but the city was bright with Christmas candles, and a light trickle of snow floated down around them. It was lovely. Robin slowed his pace, wanting to savour the scene, but Griffin, he noticed, was shivering madly.
‘Griffin, don’t...’ Robin hesitated; he didn’t know how to ask politely. ‘Is that the only coat you have?’
Griffin recoiled like a dog rising on its hackles. ‘Why?’
‘It’s just – I’ve got a stipend, if you wanted to buy something warmer—’
‘Don’t patronize me.’ Robin regretted instantly that he’d ever brought it up. Griffin was too proud. He could take no charity; he could not even take sympathy. ‘I don’t need your money.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Robin, wounded.
