How could they tell her she was being delusional? That it was insane to imagine that the British legal system was truly neutral, that they would receive a fair trial, that people who looked like Robin, Ramy, and Victoire might kill a white Oxford professor, throw his body overboard, lie about it for weeks, and then walk away unscathed? That the fact that she clearly believed all this was only evidence of the starkly different worlds they lived in?
But since they couldn’t tell her the truth, Letty was undeterred. ‘I’ve got a new idea,’ she announced after they shot down her self-defence proposal. ‘So, as you all probably know, my father’s quite an important man—’
‘No,’ said Ramy.
‘Just let me finish. My father was rather influential in his time—’
‘Your father’s a retired admiral, put out to pasture—’
‘But he still knows people,’ Letty insisted. ‘He could call in some favours—’
‘What kind of favours?’ demanded Ramy. ‘“Hello, Judge Blathers, here’s the thing – my daughter and her dirty foreign friends have had their professor killed – a man crucial to the Empire, both financially and diplomatically – so when they’re up for trial I’ll need you to just go ahead and proclaim them innocent—”’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Letty snapped. ‘What I’m saying is, if we tell him what happened and explain it’s an accident—’
‘An accident?’ Ramy repeated. ‘Have you covered up accidents before? Do they just look the other way when rich white girls kill people? Is that how it works, Letty? Besides, aren’t you on the outs with the admiral?’
Letty’s nostrils flared. ‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘We know,’ Robin said quickly, desperate to diffuse the tension. ‘And I’m grateful, truly. But Ramy’s right. I think it’s best that we keep all this quiet.’
Letty, glaring stiffly at the wall, said nothing.
Somehow they made it back to England. Two months passed and one morning they woke up to London on the horizon, shrouded in its familiar gloomy greys.
Feigning Professor Lovell’s illness throughout the journey had turned out to be simpler than even Victoire had expected; it was apparently very easy to convince an entire ship that an Oxford professor had a remarkably weak constitution. Jemima Smythe, for all her efforts, had finally grown tired of her clammed-up company, and made no efforts to draw out their parting. The sailors said hardly as much as a word of farewell when they disembarked. No one paid much attention to four travel-worn students making their way through the Legal Quays, not when there were goods to unload and pay to collect.
‘We sent the professor on ahead to see a physician,’ Letty told the captain when they passed him on the docks. ‘He said – ah, to say thank you for a smooth trip.’
The captain looked slightly puzzled by these words, but shrugged and waved them off.
‘A smooth trip?’ Ramy muttered. ‘A smooth trip?’
‘I couldn’t think of anything else to say!’
‘Be quiet and walk,’ Victoire hissed.
Robin was sure that everything they did screamed Murderers! as they lugged their trunks down the planks. Any moment now, he thought dizzily; one more step, and there it would be – a suspicious look, a flurry of footsteps, a call of ‘Hey there! You, stop!’ Surely they would not let them escape the Hellas so easily.
On shore, just twelve feet away, was England, was asylum, was freedom. Once they reached that shore, once they disappeared into the crowd, they would be free. But that was impossible, surely – the links connecting them to that bloody room could not be so easily severed. Could they?
The boardwalk gave way to solid land. Robin glimpsed over his shoulder. No one had followed them. No one was even looking their way.
They boarded an omnibus to north London, from which they hailed a cab to Hampstead. They’d agreed without much debate that they would first spend the night at Professor Lovell’s Hampstead residence upon arrival – they had got in too late to catch any trains to Oxford, and Robin knew both that Mrs Piper would still be in Jericho and that the spare key to the estate was hidden under the Ming flowerpot in the garden. The next morning they would board a train to Paddington and return to school as planned.
During the voyage it had crossed all their minds that there remained one obvious option – running, dropping everything and fleeing the continent; climbing onto a packet bound for America or Australia, or returning to the countries from which they’d been plucked.
‘We could escape to the New World,’ Ramy proposed. ‘Go to Canada.’
‘You don’t even speak French,’ Letty said.
‘It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?’
‘We’d have to find work,’ Victoire pointed out. ‘We won’t have our stipends anymore; how would we live?’
This was a good point, and one they’d somehow overlooked. Years of receiving a reliable stipend had made them forget that they only ever had enough to live on for several months; outside Oxford, in a place where their lodgings and meals were no longer provided, they would have nothing.
‘Well, how do other people find employment?’ Ramy had asked. ‘I suppose you just go up to a shop and answer an advertisement?’
‘You have to have been an apprentice,’ Letty had said. ‘There’s a training period, I think, though that costs money—’
‘Then how does one find a tradesman to take them on?’
‘I don’t know,’ Letty had said, frustrated. ‘How would I know? I’ve no idea.’
No, there was never any real possibility they would leave the university. Despite everything, despite the very real risk that if they went back to Oxford then they’d be arrested, investigated, and thrown in prison or hanged, they couldn’t conceive of a life not tied to the university. For they had nothing else. They had no skills; they had not the strength nor the temperament for manual labour, and they did not have the connections to find employment. Most importantly, they didn’t know how to live. None of them had the faintest idea how much it would cost to rent rooms, acquire a week’s worth of groceries, or set oneself up in a town that was not the university. Until now, all of that had been taken care of for them. In Hampstead, there had been Mrs Piper, and at Oxford, there were the scouts and bedmakers. Robin, indeed, would have been hard-pressed to explain how exactly one did the laundry.
When it came down to it, they simply could not think of themselves as anything else but students, couldn’t imagine a world where they did not belong to Babel. Babel was all they knew. Babel was home. And though he knew it was stupid, Robin suspected he wasn’t the only one who believed deep down that, despite everything, there was a world where once this trouble ended, once all necessary arrangements had been made and things were swept under the rug, he might still return to his room on Magpie Lane, might wake up to gentle birdsong and warm sunlight streaming through the narrow window, and once again spend his days poring over nothing but dead languages.