The underground passage turned out to be quite long. Robin lost track of how far they walked; it had to be nearly a mile. He wondered how vast the network was – now and then they passed a split in the tunnel or a door embedded in the wall, suggesting more hidden entrances across the university, but Anthony shepherded them along without comment. These were, Robin assumed, among Hermes’s many secrets.
At last, the passage narrowed again until there was only space to walk in single file. Anthony took the lead, holding the candle high above his head like a beacon. Letty followed just behind him.
‘Why you?’ she asked quietly. Robin couldn’t tell if she meant to be discreet, but the tunnel was so narrow, her voice carried to the back of the line.
‘Whatever do you mean?’ murmured Anthony.
‘You loved it at Babel,’ said Letty. ‘I remember, you gave us our orientation tour. You adored it there, and they adored you.’
‘That’s true,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel treated me better than anyone ever had.’
‘Then why—’
‘She thinks it’s about personal happiness,’ Ramy interjected. ‘But Letty, we’ve told you, it doesn’t matter how happy we were personally, it’s about the broader injustice—’
‘That’s not what I meant, Ramy, I only—’
‘Let me try to explain,’ Anthony said gently. ‘On the eve of abolition throughout the colonies, my master decided he wanted to pack up and return to America. I wouldn’t be free there, you see. He could keep me in his household and call me his. This man had labelled himself an abolitionist. He’d decried the general trade for years; he just seemed to think our relationship was special. But when the proposals he’d publicly supported became law, he decided he really couldn’t bear the sacrifice of losing me. So I went on the run and sought refuge at Oxford. The college took me in and hid me until I was legally declared a free man – not because they care much about abolition either, but because the professors at Babel knew my worth. And they knew if I were sent back to America, they would lose me to Harvard or Princeton.’
Robin couldn’t see Letty’s face in the darkness, but he could hear her breathing growing shallower. He wondered if she was about to cry again.
‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’
‘But you don’t really believe that about Babel,’ Letty whispered. ‘Do you? It’s just not the same – they weren’t enslaving you – I mean, Christ, you had a fellowship—’
‘Do you know what Equiano’s master told him when he was manumitted?’ Anthony asked mildly. ‘He told him that in a short time, he’d have slaves of his own.’
At last, the tunnel ended in a set of steps covered with a wooden board, sunlight streaming in through the slats. Anthony pressed his ears to the slats, waited a moment, then unlocked the board and pushed. ‘Come on up.’
They emerged in a sunny yard facing an old one-storey brick building half-hidden behind a mass of overgrown shrubbery. They couldn’t have strayed too far from the town centre – they were only two miles out at most – but Robin had never seen this building before. Its doors looked rusted shut, and its walls were nearly swallowed by ivy, as if someone had built this place and then abandoned it decades ago.
‘Welcome to the Old Library.’ Anthony helped them out of the tunnel. ‘Durham College built this place in the fourteenth century as an overflow room for old books, then forgot about it when they secured funding to build a new library closer to the centre of town.’
‘Just the Old Library?’ asked Victoire. ‘No other name?’
‘None that we use. A name would mark its importance, and we want it unnoticed and forgotten – something you skim over when you see it in the records, something easily confused for something else.’ Anthony spread his palm against the rusted door, murmured something under his breath, and then pushed. The door screeched open. ‘Come on in.’
Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From the outside, it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library. Wooden bookshelves radiated from the centre, and more lined walls which looked, magically and contradictorily, circular. All the shelves were meticulously labelled, and a long yellowed parchment listing the classification system hung from the opposite wall. Near the front was a shelf boasting new arrivals, on which Robin recognized a few of the titles he’d snuck out for Griffin over the past few years. They’d all had their Babel serial numbers scratched out.
‘We don’t like their categorization system,’ explained Anthony. ‘It only makes sense in Roman characters, but not every language is so easily Romanized, is it?’ He pointed to a mat near the door. ‘Wipe your shoes off, we don’t like tracking mud between the shelves. And there’s a stand over there for your coats.’
A rusted iron kettle hung inexplicably from the top rung of the coat stand. Robin reached towards it, curious, but Anthony said sharply, ‘Leave that alone.’
‘Sorry – what’s it for?’
‘Not tea, clearly.’ Anthony swung the kettle towards them to reveal the bottom, which displayed a familiar glint of silver. ‘It’s a security system. It whistles when someone we don’t know gets near the library.’
‘With what match-pair?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Anthony winked. ‘We do security like Babel does. Everyone devises their own traps, and we don’t tell the others how it’s done. The best thing we have set up is the glamour – it keeps sound from escaping the building, which means no passerby can eavesdrop on our conversations.’
‘But this place is massive,’ said Ramy. ‘I mean, you’re not invisible – how on earth do you stay hidden?’
‘Oldest trick in the world. We’re hidden in plain sight.’ Anthony led them further into the library. ‘When Durham went extinct in the mid-sixteenth century and Trinity took over its property, they overlooked the supplemental library in the deed transfer. The only things listed in that library on the catalogue were materials no one had used for decades, and which have more accessible duplicates in the Bodleian. So now we live on the edge of bureaucracy – everyone who walks past knows this is a storage library, but everyone assumes it belongs to some other, poorer college. These colleges are all too rich, you see. It makes them lose track of their holdings.’
‘Ah, you found the undergraduates!’
Figures emerged from within the shelves. Robin recognized them all – they were all former students or current graduate fellows he’d seen lurking around the tower. He supposed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were Vimal Srinivasan, Cathy O’Nell, and Ilse Dejima, who gave them a small wave as she approached.
‘Heard you’d had a bad week.’ She was much friendlier now than she’d ever been at the tower. ‘Welcome to Chez Hermes. You’re just in time for dinner.’
‘I didn’t realize there were so many of you,’ said Ramy. ‘Who else here has faked their death?’
Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m the only ghost in residence at Oxford. We have a few others overseas – Vaibhav and Frédérique, you might have heard of them – they faked drowning on a clipper back from Bombay and they’ve been operating from India since. Lisette simply announced she was leaving for home to get married, and all the Babel faculty were too disappointed in her to follow up on her story. Obviously, Vimal, Cathy, and Ilse are still at Babel. Easier for them to siphon out resources.’