Letty took a long draught of her tea, closed her eyes, then seemed to pull herself together. ‘Yes. I believe Lord Arsenault and my father are on rather good terms. I could write to him, try to set up a meeting—’
‘You don’t think your father’s going to be distracted by the news that you’re a murderer?’ asked Robin.
‘It doesn’t name Letty as a perpetrator.’ Victoire scanned the column. ‘It’s only the three of us. She’s not mentioned here at all.’
There was a brief, awkward silence.
‘No, that’s very good for us,’ Anthony said smoothly. ‘Gives us some freedom of movement. Now you start writing to your father, Letty, and the rest of you get to your assignments.’
One by one they filtered out of the Reading Room to carry out their designated tasks. Ilse set off to Babel to retrieve further news on developments in London. Cathy and Vimal went to the workshop to tinker with match-pairs using polemikós. Ramy and Victoire were put to work writing letters to prominent Radical leaders by impersonating white, middle-aged Radical supporters. Robin sat with Anthony in the Reading Room, pulling the most damning evidence of collusion from Professor Lovell’s letters as quotations for short, inflammatory pamphlets. Their hope was that such evidence might prove scandalous enough to get picked up by the London papers.
‘Be careful with your language,’ Anthony told him. ‘You’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anticolonialism and respecting national sovereignty. Use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency, and whatnot. Cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race.’
‘You want me to translate things for white people,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’
They worked in comfortable silence for about an hour, until Robin’s hand grew too sore to continue. He sat back, cradling a mug of tea in silence, until it seemed as if Anthony had reached the end of a paragraph. ‘Anthony, can I ask you something?’
Anthony put down his pen. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Do you honestly think this will work?’ Robin nodded to the stack of draft pamphlets. ‘Winning in the realm of public opinion, I mean.’
Anthony leaned back and flexed his fingers. ‘I see your brother’s got to you.’
‘Griffin spent last night teaching me how to use a gun,’ said Robin. ‘He thinks revolution’s impossible without violent insurrection. And he’s quite persuasive.’
Anthony thought for a while, nodding, tapping his pen against the inkwell. ‘Your brother likes to call me naive.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘I know, I know. I only mean to say that I’m not as soft as Griffin thinks. Let me remind you that I came to this country before they’d decided I could no longer be legally called a slave. I’ve lived most of my life in a country that is deeply confused on whether I fully count as human. Trust me, I am no jolly optimist on the ethical qualms of white Britain.’
‘But I suppose they did come around on abolition,’ said Robin. ‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing. The abolitionist movement you know is a load of pomp. Rhetoric only. Pitt first raised the motion because he saw the need to cut off the slave trade to France. And Parliament got on board with the abolitionists because they were so very afraid of Black insurrection in the West Indies.’
‘So you think it’s purely risk and economics.’
‘Well, not necessarily. You brother likes to argue that the Jamaican slave revolt, failed though it was, is what impelled the British to legislate abolition. He’s right, but only half right. See, the revolt won British sympathy because the leaders were part of the Baptist church, and when it failed, proslavery whites in Jamaica started destroying chapels and threatening missionaries. Those Baptists went back to England and drummed up support on the grounds of religion, not natural rights. My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’
‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘there’s Letty.’
‘Yes,’ said Anthony after a pause. ‘I suppose there’s Letty. But she’s a rare case, isn’t she?’
‘Then what’s our path forward?’ asked Robin. ‘Then what’s the point of any of this?’
‘The point is to build a coalition,’ said Anthony. ‘And it needs to include unlikely sympathizers. We can siphon as many resources from Babel as we want, but it still won’t be enough to budge such firmly entrenched levers of power as the likes of Jardine and Matheson. If we are to turn the tides of history, we need some of these men – the same men who find no issue in selling me and my kind at auction – to become our allies. We need to convince them that a global British expansion, founded on pyramids of silver, is not in their own best interest. Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’
‘You may as well convince them to walk the streets naked.’
‘Ha. No, the seeds for a coalition are there. The time’s ripe for a revolution in England, you know. The whole of Europe has been feverish for reform for decades; they caught it from the French. We must simply make this a war of class instead of race. And this is, indeed, an issue of class. It seems like a debate over opium and China, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones who stand to lose, are they? It’s all related. The silver industrial revolution is one of the greatest drivers of inequality, pollution, and unemployment in this country. The fate of a poor family in Canton is in fact intricately tied to the fate of an out-of-work weaver from Yorkshire. Neither benefits from the expansion of empire. Both only get poorer as the companies get richer. So if they could only form an alliance . . .’ Anthony wove his fingers together. ‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’
‘There’s a Chinese idiom that catches the gist,’ said Robin. ‘Tùsĭhúbēi.* The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’
‘Precisely,’ said Anthony. ‘Only we’ve got to convince them we’re not their prey. That there’s a hunter in the forest, and we’re all in danger.’
Robin glanced down at the pamphlets. They seemed so inadequate just then; just words, just ink scrawls on flimsy white paper. ‘And you truly think you can convince them so?’
‘We have to.’ Anthony flexed his fingers once more, then picked up his pen and resumed flipping through Professor Lovell’s letters. ‘I don’t see any other way out.’
Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access within an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.