‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’
‘Because you’re fascinating.’
‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’
The ceiling was starting to crumble; first streams of pebbles, then whole chunks of marble, exposing planks, breaking beams. The shelves collapsed. Sunlight streaked the room where before there had been no windows. Robin looked up and saw Babel, falling in and upon him, and beyond that, the sky before dawn.
He shut his eyes.
But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace. As the windows smashed in, Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face.
She smiles. She says his name.
Epilogue
Victoire
Victoire Desgraves has always been good at surviving.
The key, she has learned, is refusing to look back. Even as she races north on horseback through the Cotswolds, head bent against the whipping branches, some part of her wants to be in the tower, with her friends, feeling the walls come down around them. If they must die, she wants them to be buried together.
But survival demands severing the cord. Survival demands she look only to the future. Who knows what will happen now? What happened in Oxford today is unthinkable, its ramifications unimaginable. There is no historical precedent for this. The juncture is shot. History, for once, is fluid.
But Victoire is familiar with the unthinkable. The liberation of her motherland was unthinkable even as it happened, for no one in France or England, not even the most radical proponents of universal freedom, believed that slaves – creatures they never thought fell under their categories of rational, rights-holding, enlightened men – would demand their own liberation. Two months after news broke of the August 1791 uprising, Jean Pierre Brissot, himself a founding member of the Amis des Noirs, announced to the French Assembly that this news must be false, for as anyone knew, slaves were simply incapable of such rapid, coordinated, defiant action. A year into the revolution, many still believed that soon the unrest would be quelled, that things would go back to normal, for normal meant white dominance over Blacks.
They were, of course, wrong.
But who, in living history, ever understands their part in the tapestry? For the better part of her life, Victoire was not even aware she hailed from the world’s first Black republic.
Here is all she knew, before Hermes:
She was born in Haiti, Ayiti, in 1820, the same year that King Henry Christophe, fearing a coup, took his own life. His wife and daughters fled to the home of an English benefactor in Suffolk. Victoire’s mother, a maid of the exiled queen, went with them. She referred to this always as their great flight and, once she set foot in Paris, refused ever to think again of Haiti as home.
Victoire’s understanding of Haitian history is of curses in the night; of a magnificent palace named Sans Souci, home to the first Black king in the New World; of men with guns; of vague political disagreements she does not understand that, somehow, uprooted her life and sent her across the Atlantic. As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe.
‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’
But her mother did not survive France. Victoire never learned how her mother, a free-born woman, was sent from Suffolk to work in the household of a retired Parisian academic, Professor Emile Desjardins. She does not know what promises her mother’s friends made her, whether or not money changed hands. She knows only that in Paris, at the Desjardins estate, they were not allowed to leave – for here, forms of slavery still existed, as they did all over the world; a twilight condition, the rules unwritten but implied. And when her mother fell ill, the Desjardinses did not send for a doctor. They merely closed the door to her sickroom and waited outside until a maid went in, felt for her breath and pulse, and announced she had expired.
Then they locked Victoire in a cupboard and did not let her out, for fear the illness would catch. But the contagion took the rest of the household regardless, and once again the doctors were powerless to do anything but watch it run its course.
Victoire survived. Professor Desjardins’s wife survived. His daughters survived. The professor himself died, and with him, Victoire’s only connection to the people who purported to love her mother, and had yet somehow sold her away.
The house fell into disrepair. Madame Desjardins, a tight-faced blonde woman, kept bad accounts and spent prodigiously. Money was tight. They fired the maid – why keep one, they argued, when they had Victoire? Overnight Victoire became responsible for dozens of tasks: keeping the fire, polishing the silver, dusting the rooms, serving the tea. But these were not tasks she’d been trained to fulfil. She’d been raised to read and compose and interpret, not manage a household, and for this they scolded and beat her.
She found no comfort from Madame Desjardins’s two little daughters, who took great delight in announcing to houseguests that Victoire was an orphan they’d rescued from Africa. ‘From Zanzibar,’ they would sing in unison. ‘Zaaanzibar!’
But it was not so bad.
It was not so bad, they told her, compared with her native Haiti, which was overrun with crime, which was being driven to poverty and anarchy by an incompetent and illegitimate regime. You are lucky, they said, to be here with us, where things are safe, and civilized.
This she believed. She had no way of knowing anything else.
She might have run away, but Professor and Madame Desjardins had kept her so sheltered, so isolated from the world outside that she had no idea she had the legal right to be free. Victoire had grown up in the great contradiction of France, whose citizens in 1789 had issued a declaration of the rights of man but had not abolished slavery, and had preserved the right to property including chattel.
Liberation was a string of coincidences, of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and luck. Victoire went through Professor Desjardins’s letters, looking for a deed, some proof that he did own her and her mother. She never found it. But she did learn about a place named the Royal Institute of Translation, a place he’d trained at in his youth, a place he’d written to about her, in fact. He’d told them about the brilliant little girl in his household, about her prodigious memory and talent for Greek and Latin. He’d intended to show her around Europe on tour. Perhaps they might be interested in an interview?
And so she created the conditions of her own freedom. When Professor Desjardins’s friends at Oxford finally wrote back, expressing that they would be very happy to have the talented Miss Desgraves at the Institute, and that they would pay the way, it felt like such an escape.
But the true liberation of Victoire Desgraves did not happen until she met Anthony Ribben. It was not until her induction to the Hermes Society that she learned to call herself Haitian at all. She learned to take pride in her Kreyòl, patchy, half-remembered, barely distinguishable from her French. (Madame Desjardins used to slap her whenever she spoke in Kreyòl. ‘Shut up,’ she would say, ‘I told you, you must speak French, the Frenchman’s French.’) She also learned that to much of the rest of the world, the Haitian Revolution was not a failed experiment but a beacon of hope.