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‘Those were the terms between you and me,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This makes you an Englishman.’
Robin scanned the looping script – guardian, orphan, minor, custody. ‘You’re claiming me as a son?’
‘I’m claiming you as a ward. That’s different.’
Why?, he almost asked. Something important hinged on that question, though he was still too young to know what precisely it was. A moment stretched between them, pregnant with possibility. The solicitor scratched his nose. Professor Lovell cleared his throat. But the moment passed without comment. Professor Lovell was not forthcoming, and Robin already knew better than to press. He signed.
The sun had long set by the time they returned to Hampstead. Robin asked if he might head up to bed, but Professor Lovell urged him to the dining room.
‘You can’t disappoint Mrs Piper; she’s been in the kitchen all afternoon. At least push your food around on your plate for a bit.’
Mrs Piper and her kitchen had enjoyed a glorious reunion. The dining room table, which seemed ridiculously large for just the two of them, was piled with pitchers of milk, white rolls of bread, roast carrots and potatoes, gravy, something still simmering in a silver-gilded tureen, and what looked like an entire glazed chicken. Robin hadn’t eaten since that morning; he should have been famished, but he was so exhausted that the sight of all that food made his stomach twist.
Instead, he turned his eyes to a painting that hung behind the table. It was impossible to ignore; it dominated the entire room. It depicted a beautiful city at dusk, but it was not London, he didn’t think. It seemed more dignified. More ancient.
‘Ah. Now that,’ Professor Lovell followed his gaze, ‘is Oxford.’
Oxford. He’d heard that word before, but he wasn’t sure where. He tried to parse the name, the way he did with all unfamiliar English words. ‘A... a cow-trading centre? Is it a market?’
‘A university,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘A place where all the great minds of the nation can congregate in research, study, and instruction. It’s a wonderful place, Robin.’
He pointed to a grand domed building in the middle of the painting. ‘This is the Radcliffe Library. And this,’ he gestured to a tower beside it, the tallest building in the landscape, ‘is the Royal Institute of Translation. This is where I teach, and where I spend the majority of the year when I’m not in London.’
‘It’s lovely,’ said Robin.
‘Oh, yes.’ Professor Lovell spoke with uncharacteristic warmth. ‘It’s the loveliest place on earth.’
He spread his hands through the air, as if envisioning Oxford before him. ‘Imagine a town of scholars, all researching the most marvellous, fascinating things. Science. Mathematics. Languages. Literature. Imagine building after building filled with more books than you’ve seen in your entire life. Imagine quiet, solitude, and a serene place to think.’ He sighed. ‘London is a blathering mess. It’s impossible to get anything done here; the city’s too loud, and it demands too much of you. You can escape out to places like Hampstead, but the screaming core draws you back in whether you like it or not. But Oxford gives you all the tools you need for your work – food, clothes, books, tea – and then it leaves you alone. It is the centre of all knowledge and innovation in the civilized world. And, should you progress sufficiently well in your studies here, you might one day be lucky enough to call it home.’
The only appropriate response here seemed to be an awed silence. Professor Lovell gazed wistfully at the painting. Robin tried to match his enthusiasm, but could not help glancing sideways at the professor. The softness in his eyes, the longing, startled him. In the little time he’d known him, Robin had never seen Professor Lovell express such fondness for anything.
Robin’s lessons began the next day.
As soon as breakfast concluded, Professor Lovell instructed Robin to wash and return to the drawing room in ten minutes. There waited a portly, smiling gentleman named Mr Felton – a first class at Oxford, an Oriel man, mind you – and yes, he’d make sure Robin was up to Oxford’s Latinate speed. The boy was starting a bit late compared to his peers, but if he studied hard, that could be easily remedied.
Thus began a morning of memorizing basic vocabulary – agricola, terra, aqua – which was daunting, but then seemed easy compared to the head-spinning explanations of declensions and conjugations which followed. Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar – he knew what worked in English because it sounded right – and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself. Noun, verb, subject, predicate, copula; then the nominative, genitive, accusative cases... He absorbed a bewildering amount of material over the next three hours, and had forgotten half of it by the time the lesson ended, but he came away with a deep appreciation of language and all the words for what you could do with it.
‘That’s all right, lad.’ Mr Felton, thankfully, was a patient fellow, and seemed sympathetic to the mental brutalization he’d subjected Robin to. ‘You’ll have much more fun after we’ve finished laying the groundwork. Just wait until we get to Cicero.’ He peered down at Robin’s notes. ‘But you’ve got to be more careful with your spelling.’
Robin couldn’t see where he’d gone wrong. ‘How do you mean?’
‘You’ve forgotten nearly all the macron marks.’
‘Oh.’ Robin suppressed a noise of impatience; he was very hungry, and just wanted to be done so he could go to lunch. ‘Those.’
Mr Felton rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and malum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’
Mr Felton departed at lunchtime, after assigning a list of nearly a hundred vocabulary words to memorize before the following morning. Robin ate alone in the drawing room, mechanically shoving ham and potatoes into his mouth as he blinked uncomprehendingly at his grammar.
‘More potatoes, dear?’ Mrs Piper asked.
‘No, thank you.’ The heavy food, combined with the tiny font of his readings, was making him sleepy. His head throbbed; what he really would have liked then was a long nap.
But there was no reprieve. At two on the dot, a thin, grey-whiskered gentleman who introduced himself as Mr Chester arrived at the house, and for the next three hours, they commenced Robin’s education in Ancient Greek.
Greek was an exercise in making the familiar strange. Its alphabet mapped onto the Roman alphabet, but only partly so, and often letters did not sound how they looked – a rho (P) was not a P, and an eta (H) was not an H. Like Latin, it made use of conjugations and declensions, but there were a good deal more moods, tenses, and voices to keep track of. Its inventory of sounds seemed further from English than Latin’s did, and Robin kept struggling not to make Greek tones sound like Chinese tones. Mr Chester was harsher than Mr Felton, and became snippy and irritable when Robin kept flubbing his verb endings. By the end of the afternoon, Robin felt so lost that it was all he could do to simply repeat the sounds Mr Chester spat at him.
Mr Chester left at five, after also assigning a mountain of readings that hurt Robin to look at. He carried the texts to his room, then stumbled, head spinning, to the dining room for supper.
