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It was, by every measure, a very bad year.
Something had poisoned Oxford, had sucked out everything about the university that gave Robin joy. The nights felt colder, the rains heavier. The tower no longer felt like a paradise but a prison. Coursework was torture. He and his friends took no pleasure in their studies; they felt neither the thrilling discovery of their first year nor the satisfaction of actually working with silver that might one day come with their fourth.
The older cohorts assured them that this always happened, that the third-year slump was normal and inevitable. But that year seemed a markedly bad year in several other respects. For one, the number of assaults on the tower rose alarmingly. Before, Babel could expect two to three attempted break-ins per year, all of which were the subject of great spectacle as the students crowded around the doors to see what cruel effect Playfair’s wards had wrought that time. But by February of that year, the attempted thefts started happening nearly every week, and the students began to grow sick of the sight of policemen dragging maimed perpetrators down the cobblestones.
They weren’t only targeted by thieves. The base of the tower was constantly being defiled, usually with urine, broken bottles, and spilt booze. Twice they discovered graffiti painted overnight in large, crooked scarlet letters. TONGUES OF SATAN read the one on the back wall; DEVIL’S SILVER read the one beneath the first-floor window.
Another morning, Robin and his cohort arrived to find dozens of townsmen assembled on the green, shouting viciously at the scholars going in and out of the front door. They approached cautiously. The crowd was a bit frightening, but not so dense that they couldn’t weave their way through. Perhaps it said something that they were willing to risk a mob rather than miss class, but it really looked like they might get by without harassment until a large man stepped in front of Victoire and began snarling something in a rough and incomprehensible northern accent.
‘I don’t know you,’ Victoire gasped. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’
‘Christ!’ Ramy lurched forward like he’d been shot. Victoire yelped. Robin’s heart stopped. But it was only an egg, he saw; it was aimed at Victoire, and Ramy had lurched because he’d stepped forward to protect her. Victoire flinched back, arms shielding her face; Ramy put an arm around her shoulder and ushered her up the front steps.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Letty screamed.
The man who’d thrown the egg shouted something unintelligible in return. Hastily Robin clenched Letty’s hand and dragged her through the door behind Ramy and Victoire.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Victoire was trembling so hard she could barely speak. ‘Fine, I’m fine – oh, Ramy, let me, I’ve got a handkerchief...’
‘Don’t worry.’ Ramy shrugged off his jacket. ‘It’s a lost cause, I’ll buy a new one.’
Inside the lobby, students and clients alike were clustered at the wall, watching the crowd through the windows. Robin’s first instinct was to wonder if this was the work of Hermes. But it couldn’t be – Griffin’s thefts were so meticulously planned; they belied a far more sophisticated apparatus than this furious mob.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Robin asked Cathy O’Nell.
‘They’re mill workers, I think,’ said Cathy. ‘I heard Babel’s just signed a contract with mill owners north of here and that’s put all these people out of work.’
‘All these people?’ Ramy asked. ‘With just some silver bars?’
‘Oh, they’ve laid off several hundred workers,’ said Vimal, who’d overheard. ‘Supposedly it’s a brilliant match-pair, something Professor Playfair came up with, and it’s netted us enough to fund renovations for the entire east wing of the lobby. Which doesn’t surprise me, if it can do the work of all those men combined.’
‘But it’s quite sad, isn’t it?’ mused Cathy. ‘I wonder what they’ll do now.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Robin.
Cathy gestured to the window. ‘Well, how are they going to provide for their families?’
It shamed Robin that he hadn’t even considered this.
Upstairs in their Etymology class, Professor Lovell expressed a decidedly more cruel opinion. ‘Don’t worry about them. Just the usual riffraff. Drunkards, malcontents from up north, lowlifes with no better way to express their opinions than shouting about them on the street. I’d prefer they wrote a letter, of course, but I doubt half of them can read.’
‘Is it true they’re out of work?’ asked Victoire.
‘Well, of course. The sort of labour they do is redundant now. It should have been made redundant long ago; there’s simply no reason that weaving, spinning, carding, or roving hasn’t all been mechanized already. This is simply human progress.’
‘They seem rather cross about it,’ Ramy observed.
‘Oh, they’re furious for sure,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You can imagine why. What has silver-working done for this country over the past decade? Increased agricultural and industrial productivity to an unimaginable extent. It’s made factories so efficient they can run with a quarter of their workers. Take the textile industry – Kay’s flying shuttle, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s loom were all made possible with silver-working. Silver-working has catapulted Britain ahead of every other nation, and put thousands of labourers out of work in the process. So instead of using their wits to learn a skill that might actually be useful, they’ve decided to whine about it on our front steps. Those protests outside aren’t anything new, you know. There’s a sickness in this country.’ Professor Lovell spoke now with a sudden, nasty vehemence. ‘It started with the Luddites – some idiot workers in Nottingham who thought they’d rather smash machinery than adapt to progress – and it’s spread across England since. There are people all over the country who’d rather see us dead. It’s not just Babel that gets attacked like this; no, we don’t even see the worst of it, since our security’s better than most. Up north, those men are pulling off arson, they’re stoning building owners, they’re throwing acid on factory managers. They can’t seem to stop smashing looms in Lancashire. No, this isn’t the first time our faculty have received death threats, it’s only the first time they’ve dared to come as far south as Oxford.’
‘Do you get death threats?’ Letty asked, alarmed.
‘Of course. I get more and more every year.’
‘But doesn’t it bother you?’
Professor Lovell scoffed. ‘Never. I look at those men, and I think of the vast differences between us. I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They are where they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward with the future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’
