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‘Is it going to be like this all year?’ Victoire asked in a small voice. ‘Out on the green, I mean.’
‘Not for long,’ Professor Lovell assured her. ‘No, they’ll have cleared off by this evening. Those men have no persistence. They’ll be gone by sunset once they get hungry, or once they wander off in search of a drink. And if they don’t, the wards and the police will move them on.’
But Professor Lovell was wrong. This wasn’t the work of an isolated handful of discontents, nor did they simply dissipate overnight. The police did clear the crowd away that morning, but they returned in smaller numbers; several times a week, a dozen or so men showed up to harass scholars on their way into the tower. One morning, the entire building had to be evacuated when a package making a ticking noise was delivered to Professor Playfair’s office. It turned out to be a clock connected to an explosive. Fortunately, rain had soaked through the package, eroding the fuse.
‘But what happens when it doesn’t rain?’ Ramy asked.
No one had a good answer to that.
Security at the tower doubled overnight. The post was now received and sorted by newly hired clerks at a processing centre halfway across Oxford. A rotating team of policemen guarded the tower entrance at all hours. Professor Playfair installed a new set of silver bars over the front door, though as usual he refused to reveal what match-pairs he’d inscribed them with, or what they would do when triggered.
These protests were not the symptoms of a minor disturbance. Something was happening throughout England, a set of changes the consequences of which they were only beginning to fathom. Oxford, which consistently ran about a century behind the rest of England’s major cities, could only pretend to be immune to change for so long. The vicissitudes of the world outside had now become impossible to ignore. This was about more than mill workers. Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade. The full impact of a so-called silver industrial revolution, a term coined by Peter Gaskell just six years before, was just beginning to be felt across the country. Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens. Rural agriculture was in decline; men, women, and children moved en masse to urban centres to work in factories, where they laboured unimaginably long hours and lost limbs and lives in frightful accidents. The New Poor Law of 1834, which had been designed to reduce the costs of poverty relief more than anything else, was fundamentally cruel and punitive in design; it withheld financial aid unless applicants moved into a workhouse, and those workhouses were designed to be so miserable no one would want to live in them. Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized. Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.
These currents were unsustainable. The gears of history were turning fast in England. The world was getting smaller, more mechanized, and more unequal, and it was as yet unclear where things would end up, or what that would mean for Babel, or for the Empire itself.
Robin and his cohort, though, did what scholars always did, which was to bend their heads over their books and focus solely on their research. The protestors eventually dispersed after troops sent in from London dragged the ringleaders off to Newgate. The scholars stopped holding their breath every time they ascended the steps to the tower. They learned to put up with the swarming police presence, along with the fact that now it took twice as long for new books and correspondence to arrive. They stopped reading the editorials in the Oxford Chronicle, which was a newly minted proreform, pro-Radical publication that seemed intent on destroying their reputation.
Still, they couldn’t quite ignore the headlines, hawked from every street corner on their way to the tower:
BABEL A THREAT TO THE NATIONAL ECONOMY?
FOREIGN BARS SEND DOZENS TO THE WORKHOUSE
SAY NO TO SILVER!
It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.
One stormy night, on his way to dinner at Professor Lovell’s home, Robin glimpsed a family sitting at the corner of Woodstock Road holding out tin mugs for alms. Beggars were a common sight in Oxford’s outskirts, but entire families were rare. The two small children gave him little waves as he approached, and the sight of their pale, rain-streaked faces made him feel guilty enough to stop and fish several pennies out of his pocket.
‘Thank you,’ murmured the father. ‘God bless you.’
The man’s beard had grown out, and his clothes had got a good deal tattier, but Robin still recognized him – he was, without question, one of the men who had screamed obscenities at him on his way into the tower several weeks ago. He met Robin’s eyes. It wasn’t clear if he recognized Robin as well; he opened his mouth to say something, but Robin quickened his pace, and whatever the man might have called after him was soon drowned out by the wind and the rain.
He didn’t mention the family to Mrs Piper or Professor Lovell. He didn’t want to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all. He’d seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his next meal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. For all his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he had not once gone to sleep hungry.
That night he ate his dinner, smiled at Mrs Piper’s compliments, and shared a bottle of wine with Professor Lovell. He walked a different route back to the college. The next month, he forgot to take the same detour on his way up, but it didn’t matter – by then, the little family was already gone.
Looming exams made a bad year awful. Babel scholars underwent two rounds of exams – one at the end of their third year, and another during their fourth. These were staggered throughout the calendar; the fourth years sat their exams in the middle of Hilary term, while the third years had until Trinity term. The effect was that starting after the winter holidays, the mood in the tower was utterly changed. The libraries and study rooms were packed during all hours by nervous fourth years who flinched whenever someone breathed and looked ready to murder whenever someone dared to so much as whisper.
Traditionally, Babel publicly announced the fourth years’ marks at the end of the examination period. At noon on Friday of that week, a bell rang three times throughout the tower. Everyone stood and hurried downstairs to the lobby, where that afternoon’s clients were being ushered out the door. Professor Playfair stood on a table at the centre of the room. He was dressed in an ornate gown with purple edges, holding aloft the kind of curling scroll that Robin had only ever seen in medieval illuminations. Once the tower had been cleared of everyone not affiliated with the faculty, he cleared his throat and intoned, ‘The following degree candidates have passed their qualifying exams with distinction. Matthew Houndslow—’
Someone in the back corner let out a loud shriek.
‘Adam Moorhead.’
A student near the front sat plumb down on the floor in the middle of the lobby, both hands clasped over his mouth.
‘This is inhumane,’ Ramy whispered.
‘Most cruel and unusual,’ Robin agreed. But he couldn’t take his eye off the proceedings. He wasn’t up for examination yet, but it was so much closer now, and his heart was pounding hard with vicarious terror. As horrific as this was, it was also still exciting, this public declaration of who had proven themselves brilliant and who hadn’t.
Only Matthew and Adam had won distinction. Professor Playfair announced a merit (James Fairfield) and a pass (Luke McCaffrey), then said in a very sombre voice, ‘The following candidate failed their qualifying exams, and will not be asked to return to the Royal Institute of Translation for a postgraduate fellowship, nor will they be awarded a degree. Philip Wright.’
Wright was the French and German specialist who had sat beside Robin at the faculty dinner during his first year. Over the years, he had grown thin and haggard-looking. He was one of the students who constantly lurked around at the library looking as if he hadn’t bathed or shaved in days, staring at the stack of papers before him with a mixture of panic and bewilderment.
‘You’ve been offered every lenience,’ Professor Playfair said. ‘You’ve been granted more accommodations than was good for you, I think. Now it’s time to acknowledge this is the end of your time here, Mr Wright.’
Wright made as if to approach Professor Playfair, but two graduate fellows seized him by the arms and pulled him back. He began to beg, babbling about how his exam response had been misinterpreted, how he could clarify everything if only he got another chance. Professor Playfair stood placidly with his hands held behind his back, pretending not to listen.
