After all, it never happened again. Robin made sure it did not. He spent the next six years studying to the point of exhaustion. With the threat of expatriation looming constantly above him, he devoted his life to becoming the student Professor Lovell wanted to see.
Greek and Latin grew more entertaining after the first year, after he’d assembled enough building blocks of each language to piece together fragments of meaning for himself. From then on it felt less like groping in the dark whenever he encountered a new text and more like filling in the blanks. Figuring out the precise grammatical formulation of a phrase that had been frustrating him gave him the same sort of satisfaction he derived from reshelving a book where it belonged or finding a missing sock – all the pieces fitted together, and everything was whole and complete.
In Latin, he read through Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and Juvenal; in Greek, he tackled Xenophon, Homer, Lysias, and Plato. In time, he realized he was quite good at languages. His memory was strong, and he had a knack for tones and rhythm. He soon reached a level of fluency in both Greek and Latin that any Oxford undergraduate would have been jealous of. In time, Professor Lovell stopped commenting on his inherited inclination to sloth, and instead nodded in approval at every update on Robin’s rapid progress through the canon.
History, meanwhile, marched on around them. In 1830, King George IV had died and was succeeded by his younger brother, William IV, the eternal compromiser who pleased no one. In 1831, another cholera epidemic swept through London, leaving thirty thousand dead in its wake. The brunt of its impact fell on the poor and the destitute; those living in close, cramped quarters who could not escape each other’s tainted miasmas.[12] But the neighbourhood in Hampstead was untouched – to Professor Lovell and his friends in their remote walled estates, the epidemic was something to mention in passing, wince about in sympathy, and quickly forget.
In 1833, a momentous thing happened – slavery was abolished in England and its colonies, to be replaced by a six-year apprenticeship term as a transition to freedom. Among Professor Lovell’s interlocutors, this news was taken with the mild disappointment of a lost cricket match.
‘Well, that’s ruined the West Indies for us,’ Mr Hallows complained. ‘The abolitionists with their damned moralizing. I still believe this obsession with abolition is a product of the British needing to at least feel culturally superior now that they’ve lost America. And on what grounds? It isn’t as if those poor fellows aren’t equally enslaved back in Africa under those tyrants they call kings.’[13]
‘I wouldn’t give up on the West Indies just yet,’ Professor Lovell said. ‘They’re still allowing a legal kind of forced labour—’
‘But without ownership, it takes the teeth out of it all.’
‘Perhaps that’s for the best, though – freedmen do work better than slaves after all, and slavery is in fact more expensive than a free labour market—’
‘You’ve been reading too much of Smith. Hobart and MacQueen had the right idea – just smuggle in a ship full of Chinamen,[14] that’ll do the trick. They’re so very industrious and orderly, Richard should know—’
‘No, Richard thinks they’re lazy, don’t you, Richard?’
‘Now, what I wish,’ interrupted Mr Ratcliffe, ‘is that all these women would stop taking part in those anti-slavery debates. They see too much of themselves in their situation; it puts ideas in their head.’
‘What,’ asked Professor Lovell, ‘is Mrs Ratcliffe unsatisfied with her domestic situation?’
‘She’d like to think that it’s a hop and a skip from abolition to women’s suffrage.’ Mr Ratcliffe let out a nasty laugh. ‘That would be the day.’
And with that, the conversation turned to the absurdity of women’s rights.
Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were pieces to be moved and manipulated at will.
But if the world was an abstract object for them, it was even more abstract to him, for he had no stake in any of these matters. Robin processed that era through the myopic world of Lovell Manor. Reforms, colonial uprisings, slave revolts, women’s suffrage, and the latest Parliamentary debates all meant nothing to him. All that mattered were the dead languages before him, and the fact that one day, a day that drew ever closer as the years trickled by, he would matriculate at the university he knew only from the painting on the wall – the city of knowledge, the city of dreaming spires.
It all ended without circumstance, without celebration. One day Mr Chester told Robin as he packed up his books that he’d enjoyed their lessons, and that he wished him well at university. This was how Robin discovered he was to be sent up to Oxford the next week.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Professor Lovell when asked. ‘Did I forget to tell you? I’ve written to the college. They’ll be expecting you.’
Supposedly there was an application process, some exchange of letters of introduction and guarantees of funding that secured his position. Robin was involved with none of this. Professor Lovell simply informed him he was due to move into his new lodgings on 29th September, so he’d best have his bags packed by the evening of the 28th. ‘You’ll arrive a few days before the start of term. We’ll ride up together.’
The night before they left, Mrs Piper baked Robin a plate of small, hard, round biscuits so rich and crumbly they seemed to melt away in his mouth.
‘It’s shortbread,’ she explained. ‘Now, they’re very rich, so don’t eat them all at once. I don’t make them much, as Richard thinks sugar ruins a boy, but you’ve deserved it.’
‘Shortbread,’ Robin repeated. ‘Because they don’t last long?’
They had been playing this game since the night of the bannock debate.
‘No, dear.’ She laughed. ‘Because of the crumble. Fat “shortens” the pastry. That’s what short means, you know – it’s how we get the word shortening.’
He swallowed the sweet, fatty lump and chased it down with a gulp of milk. ‘I’ll miss your etymology lessons, Mrs Piper.’
To his surprise, her eyes turned red at the corners. Her voice grew thick. ‘Write home whenever you need a sack of victuals,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much of what goes on inside those colleges, but I know their food is something awful.’
Chapter Three
But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.
The next morning Robin and Professor Lovell took a cab to a station in central London, where they transferred to a stagecoach bound all the way for Oxford. As they waited to board, Robin entertained himself by trying to guess at the etymology of stagecoach. Coach was obvious, but why stage? Was it because the flat, wide carriage looked something like a stage? Because entire troupes of actors might have travelled thus, or performed atop one? But that was a stretch. A carriage looked like a lot of things, but he couldn’t imagine how a stage – a raised public platform – was the obvious association. Why not a basketcoach? An omnicoach?
12
As the weekly papers recorded the climbing death counts, Robin asked Mrs Piper why the doctors could not simply go around healing the sick with silver, as Professor Lovell had done to him. ‘Silver is expensive,’ responded Mrs Piper, and that was the last they ever spoke of it.
13
Here Mr Hallows forgets that chattel slavery, wherein slaves were treated as property and not persons, is a wholly European invention.
14
Indeed, in the wake of Haiti’s liberation, the British began toying with the idea of importing labourers of other races, such as the Chinese (‘a sober, patient, industrious people’), as a possible alternative to African slave labour. The