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Chapter Sixteen
It appears quite certain that the Chinese, a money-making and money-loving people, are as much addicted to trade, and as anxious as any nation on earth to court a commercial intercourse with strangers.
JOHN CRAWFURD, ‘Chinese Empire and Trade’
Morning came. Robin rose, washed, and dressed for class. He met Ramy outside the house. Neither said a word; they walked in silence to the tower door, which, despite Robin’s sudden fear, opened to let them in. They were late; Professor Craft was already lecturing when they took their seats. Letty shot them an irritated glare. Victoire gave Robin a nod, her face inscrutable. Professor Craft continued as if she hadn’t seen them; this was how she always dealt with tardiness. They pulled out their pens and began taking down notes on Tacitus and his thorny ablative absolutes.
The room seemed at once both mundane and heartbreakingly beautiful: the morning light streaming through stained-glass windows, casting colourful patterns on the polished wooden desks; the clean scratch of chalk against the blackboard; and the sweet, woody smell of old books. A dream; this was an impossible dream, this fragile, lovely world in which, for the price of his convictions, he had been allowed to remain.
That afternoon they received notices in their pidges to prepare to depart for Canton by way of London by the eleventh of October – the day after next. They would spend three weeks in China – two in Canton, and one in Macau – and then stop in Mauritius for ten days on the way home.
Your destinations are temperate, but the sea voyage can be chilly, read the notice. Bring a thick coat.
‘Isn’t this a bit early?’ asked Letty. ‘I thought we weren’t going until after our exams.’
‘It explains here.’ Ramy tapped the bottom of the page. ‘Special circumstances in Canton – they’re short on Chinese translators and want Babblers to fill in the gap, so they’ve pushed our voyage up ahead.’
‘Well, that’s exciting!’ Letty beamed. ‘It’ll be our first chance to go out in the world and do something.’
Robin, Ramy, and Victoire exchanged glances with one another. They all shared the same suspicion – that this sudden departure was somehow linked to Friday night. But they couldn’t know what that meant for Ramy’s and Victoire’s presumed innocence, or what this voyage held in store for them all.
The final day before they left was torture. The only one among them who felt any excitement was Letty, who took it upon herself to march into their rooms that night and make sure their trunks were properly packed. ‘You don’t realize how cold it gets at sea in the mornings,’ she said, folding Ramy’s shirts into a neat pile on his bed. ‘You’ll need more than just a linen shirt, Ramy, you’ll want two layers at least.’
‘Please, Letitia.’ Ramy swatted her hand away before she could get at his socks. ‘We’ve all been at sea before.’
‘Well, I’ve travelled regularly,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘I ought to know. And we should keep a little bag of remedies – sleeping tinctures, ginger – I’m not sure there’s time to run to a shop, we might have to do so in London—’
‘It’s a long time on a little ship,’ snapped Ramy. ‘It’s not the Crusades.’
Letty turned stiffly to sort through Robin’s trunk. Victoire cast Robin and Ramy a helpless look. They couldn’t speak freely in Letty’s presence, so they could only sit simmering in anxiety. The same unanswered questions bedevilled them all. What was happening? Had they been forgiven, or was the axe still waiting to drop? Would they naively board the ship to Canton, only to be abandoned on the other side?
Most importantly – how was it possible they’d been recruited separately to the Hermes Society without knowledge of the others? Ramy and Victoire at least had some excuse – they were new to Hermes; they might have been too frightened by the society’s demands for silence to say anything to Robin yet. But Robin had known about Hermes for three years now, and he’d never spoken of it once, not even to Ramy. He’d done a marvellous job hiding his greatest secret from friends who, he’d proclaimed, owned his heart.
This, Robin suspected, had greatly rattled Ramy. After they’d walked the girls north to their lodgings that night, Robin tried to broach the subject, but Ramy shook his head. ‘Not now, Birdie.’
Robin’s heart ached. ‘But I only wanted to explain—’
‘Then I think we ought to wait for Victoire,’ Ramy said curtly. ‘Don’t you?’
They headed to London the next afternoon with Professor Lovell, who was to be their supervisor throughout the voyage. The trip was, thankfully, much shorter than the ten-hour stagecoach ride that had brought Robin to Oxford three years ago. The railway line between Oxford and Paddington Station had finally been completed over the previous summer, its opening commemorated with the installation of silver bars under the platform of the newly constructed Oxford Station,* and so the journey took them only an hour and a half, during which Robin managed not to meet Professor Lovell’s eyes once.
Their ship did not depart until tomorrow; they would lodge overnight at an inn on New Bond Street. Letty insisted they go out and explore London for a bit, so they ended up going to see the sitting room show of someone who called herself Princess Caraboo. Princess Caraboo was notorious among Babel students. Once a humble cobbler’s daughter, she had persuaded several people into believing she was exotic royalty from the island of Javasu. But it was now nearly a decade since Princess Caraboo had been unmasked as Mary Willcocks of North Devon, and her show – which consisted of a strange hopping dance, several very emphatic utterances in a made-up tongue, and prayers to a god she called Allah-Tallah (here Ramy wrinkled his nose), came off as more pathetic than funny. The display put a bad taste in their mouths; they left early and returned to the inn, tired and laconic.
The next morning, they boarded an East India Company clipper named the Merope heading straight for Canton. These ships were built for speed, for they had to ferry perishable goods back and forth as quickly as possible, and were thus fitted out with state-of-the-art silver bars to hasten their voyage. Robin vaguely remembered that his first journey from Canton to London, ten years ago, had taken close to four months. These clippers could make that journey a mere six weeks.
‘Excited?’ Letty asked him as the Merope made its way out from the Port of London over the Thames towards open water.
Robin wasn’t sure. He’d felt funny ever since they’d boarded, though he couldn’t quite give a name to his discomfort. It didn’t seem real that he was headed back. Ten years ago he’d been thrilled as he sailed towards London, head spinning with dreams of the world on the other side of the ocean. This time, he thought he knew what to expect. That scared him. He imagined his homecoming with a dreadful anticipation; the fear of not knowing one’s own mother in a crowd. Would he recognize what he saw? Would he remember it at all? At the same time, the prospect of seeing Canton again seemed so sudden and unbelievable; he found himself with the strange conviction that by the time they reached it, it would have disappeared clean off the globe.
Still more frightening was the possibility that once he arrived, he’d be made to stay; that Lovell had lied and this whole trip was contrived to get him out of England; that he would be exiled from Oxford, and all that he knew, forever.
Meanwhile, there were six weeks at sea to suffer through. These proved torturous from the start. Ramy and Victoire were like dead men walking, pale-faced and jumpy, flinching at the slightest noises, and unable to engage in the simplest small talk without assuming expressions of utter terror. Neither of them had been punished by the university. Neither of them had even been called in for questioning. But surely, Robin thought, Professor Lovell at least suspected their involvement. The guilt was written all over their faces. How much, then, did Babel know? How much did Hermes know? And what had happened to Griffin’s safe room?
Robin wanted nothing more than to discuss things with Ramy and Victoire, but they never had the opportunity. Letty was always there. Even at night, when they retreated into their separate cabins, there was no chance that Victoire could sneak away to join the boys without Letty growing suspicious. They had no choice but to pretend everything was normal, but they were dreadful at this. They were all clammy, fidgety, and irritable. None of them could drum up enthusiasm for what ought to have been the most exciting chapter of their careers. And they couldn’t make conversation about anything else; none of their old jokes or inconsequential debates came easily to mind, and whenever they did, they sounded heavy and forced. Letty – pushy, chatty, and oblivious – was grating on them all, and though they tried to conceal their irritation, for it wasn’t her fault, they couldn’t help snapping at her when she asked their thoughts on Cantonese cuisine for the dozenth time.
Finally she caught wind that something was going on. Three nights in, after Professor Lovell had departed the mess, she slammed down her fork at dinner and demanded, ‘What is wrong with everyone?’
Ramy gave her a wooden stare. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
