‘We look so young.’ He marvelled at their expressions. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since they’d posed for that daguerreotype. ‘We look like children.’
‘We were happy then.’ Victoire glanced down, fingers tracing their fading faces. ‘I thought about burning it, you know. I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see . . . to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I . . . I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything. She was so alone, you know. All she wanted was a group of friends, people who could understand what she’d been through. And she thought she’d finally found that in us.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘And I suppose, when it all fell apart – I suppose she felt just as betrayed as we did.’
Ibrahim, they noticed, spent a great deal of time writing in a leather-bound notebook.
‘It’s a chronicle,’ he told them when asked. ‘Of what happened inside the tower. Everything that was said. All the decisions that were made. Everything we stood for. Would you like to contribute?’
‘As a co-author?’ asked Robin.
‘As an interview subject. Tell me your thoughts. I’ll write them down.’
‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ Robin felt very tired, and for some reason the sight of those pages of scribbles filled him with dread.
‘I only want to be thorough,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I’ve got Professor Craft’s and the graduate fellows’ statements already. I just thought – well, if this all turns upside down . . .’
‘You think we’re going to lose,’ said Victoire.
‘I think no one knows how this is going to end,’ said Ibrahim. ‘But I know what they’ll say about us if it ends badly. When those students in Paris died at the barricades, everyone called them heroes. But if we die here, no one’s going to think we’re martyrs. And I just want to make sure some record of us exists, a record that doesn’t make us out to be the villains.’ Ibrahim glanced at Robin. ‘But you don’t like this project, do you?’
Had he been glaring? Robin hastily rearranged his face. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You look repelled.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I just . . .’ Robin didn’t know why he found it so hard to put the words together. ‘I suppose I just don’t like thinking of us as history when we haven’t even yet made a mark on the present.’
‘We’ve made our mark,’ said Ibrahim. ‘We’re already in the history books, for better or for worse. Here’s a chance to intervene against the archives, no?’
‘What sort of things are going in it?’ Victoire asked. ‘Broad strokes only? Or personal observations?’
‘Anything you like,’ said Ibrahim. ‘What you had for breakfast, if you want. How you while away the hours. But I’m most interested, of course, in how we all got here.’
‘I suppose you want to know about Hermes,’ said Robin.
‘I want to know everything you’d care to tell me.’
Robin felt a very heavy weight on his chest then. He wanted to start talking, to spill out everything he knew and have it preserved in ink, but the words died on his tongue. He didn’t know how to articulate that the problem was not the existence of the record itself, but the fact that it wasn’t enough, that it was such an insufficient intervention against the archives that it felt pointless.
There was so much to say. He didn’t know where to begin. He had never thought before about the lacuna of written history they existed in and the oppressive swath of denigrating narrative they fought against, and now that he did, it seemed insurmountable. The record was so blank. No chronicle of the Hermes Society existed at all except this one. Hermes had operated like the best of clandestine societies, erasing its own history even as it changed Britain’s. No one would celebrate their achievements. No one would even know what they were.
He thought of the Old Library, destroyed and dismantled, all those mountains of research locked away and hidden forever from view. He thought of that envelope, lost to ash; of the dozens of Hermes associates who’d never been contacted, who might never know what had happened. He thought of all those years Griffin spent abroad – fighting, struggling, railing against a system that was infinitely more powerful than he was. Robin would never know the full extent of what his brother had done, what he’d suffered. So much history, erased.
‘It just scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be all we ever were.’
Ibrahim nodded to his notebook. ‘Worth getting some of it down, then.’
‘It’s a good idea.’ Victoire took a seat. ‘I’ll play. Ask me anything. Let’s see if we can change some future historian’s mind.’
‘Perhaps we’ll be remembered like the Oxford Martyrs,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Perhaps we’ll get a monument.’
‘The Oxford Martyrs were tried for heresy and burned at the stake,’ said Robin.
‘Ah,’ said Ibrahim, eyes twinkling. ‘But Oxford’s an Anglican university now, isn’t it?’
Robin wondered in the days that followed if what they’d felt that night was a shared sense of mortality, akin to how soldiers felt sitting in trenches at war. For it was war, what was breaking out on those streets. Westminster Bridge had not fallen, not yet, but the accidents continued and the shortages grew worse. London’s patience was strained. The public demanded retribution, demanded action, in some form or another. And since Parliament would not vote no on the China invasion, they simply increased their pressure on the Army.
It appeared the guardsmen had orders to leave the tower itself alone, but were permitted to aim at individual scholars when they got the chance. Robin stopped venturing outside when a rendezvous with Abel Goodfellow was interrupted by a spate of rifle fire. Once, a window shattered next to Victoire’s head when she was searching the stacks for a book. They all dropped to the floor and crawled on hands and knees to the basement, where they were protected by walls on all sides. Later they found a bullet lodged in the shelf just behind where she’d been standing.
‘How is this possible?’ demanded Professor Craft. ‘Nothing penetrates these windows. Nothing gets through these walls.’
Curious, Robin examined the bullet: thick, warped, and unnaturally cold to the touch. He held it up to the light and saw a thin band of silver lining the base of the casing. ‘I suppose Professor Playfair thought of something.’
That raised the stakes. Babel was not impenetrable. This was not a strike any longer, but a siege. If the soldiers broke through the barricades, if soldiers wielding Professor Playfair’s inventions reached the front door, their strike was effectively over. Professor Craft and Professor Chakravarti had replaced Professor Playfair’s wards on their first night in the tower, but even they admitted they were not as good at this as Professor Playfair had been; they were not sure how well their own defences would hold up.
‘Let’s stay away from windows from now on,’ Victoire suggested.
For now the barricades held, though outside, the skirmishing had turned vicious. Initially Abel Goodfellow’s strikers had fought a purely defensive war from behind the barricades. They reinforced their structures, they ran supply lines, but they did not provoke the guardsmen. Now the streets had turned bloody. Soldiers fired regularly now on the barricaders, and the barricaders struck back in turn. They made incendiary devices with cloth, oil, and bottles and hurled them at the Army camps. They climbed the rooftops of the Radcliffe Library and the Bodleian, from which they threw paving stones and poured boiling water onto the troops below.
It shouldn’t have been so evenly matched, civilians against guardsmen. In theory, they shouldn’t have lasted a week. But many of Abel’s men were veterans, men discharged from an army falling into disrepair after the defeat of Napoleon. They knew where to find firearms. They knew what to do with them.