Letty stared at him for a long time. She did not move, save for the rapid rise and fall of her chest. When she spoke, her voice was high and cold.
‘I didn’t,’ she said; and Robin could tell from the way she narrowed her eyes and drawled her words, punctuating them just so, like daggers, what was going to come next. His own words, thrown back in his face. ‘I didn’t think at all. I panicked. And then I killed him.’
‘Murder’s not that simple,’ he said.
‘It turns out it is, Birdie.’ She cast him a scornful look. ‘Isn’t that how we got here?’
‘We loved you,’ Victoire whispered. ‘Letty, we would have died for you.’
Letty did not answer. She turned on her heel, threw the door open, and fled into the night.
The door slammed shut, and then there was silence. They weren’t ready to take the news upstairs. They didn’t know what they could say.
‘You think she means it?’ Robin asked finally.
‘She absolutely does,’ said Victoire. ‘Letty doesn’t flinch.’
‘Then do we let her win?’
‘How,’ Victoire asked slowly, ‘do you think we make her lose?’
An awful weight hung between them. Robin knew his answer, only not how to utter it. Victoire knew everything in his heart except this. It was the one thing he’d concealed from her – in part because he did not want to make her share this burden, and in part because he was afraid of how she might respond.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Robin.’
‘We destroy the tower,’ he said. ‘And we destroy ourselves.’
She didn’t flinch; she only seemed to deflate, as if she’d been waiting for confirmation. He hadn’t pretended as well as he’d thought; she’d expected this from him. ‘You can’t.’
‘There’s a way.’ Robin misinterpreted her words on purpose, hoping, rather, that her objection was one of logistics. ‘You know there is. They showed us at the very beginning.’
Victoire went very still then. Robin knew what she was imagining. The shrill, vibrating bar in Professor Playfair’s hands, screaming as if in pain, shattering into a thousand sharp, glinting pieces. Multiply that over and over. Instead of a bar, imagine a tower. Imagine a country.
‘It’s a chain reaction,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll finish the job on its own. Remember? Playfair showed us how it’s done. If it so much as touches another bar, the effect transmits across the metal. It doesn’t stop, it just keeps going, until it renders all the silver unusable.’
How much silver lined the walls of Babel? When this was over, all those bars would be worthless. Then the cooperation of the translators wouldn’t matter. Their facilities would be gone. Their library, gone. The Grammaticas, gone. Their resonance rods, their silver, useless, gone.
‘How long have you been planning this?’ Victoire demanded.
‘Since the beginning,’ he said.
‘I hate you.’
‘It’s the only way we have left to win.’
‘It’s your suicide plan,’ she said angrily. ‘And don’t tell me that it’s anything but. You want this; you’ve always wanted this.’
But that was just it, Robin thought. How did he explain the weight crushing his chest, the constant inability to breathe? ‘I think – ever since Ramy and Griffin – no, ever since Canton, I . . .’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve felt I didn’t have the right.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘It’s true. They were better men, and they died—’
‘Robin, that’s not how it works—’
‘And what did I do? I lived a life I shouldn’t have, I had what millions of people didn’t – all that suffering, Victoire, and the whole time I was drinking champagne—’
‘Don’t you dare.’ She raised a hand as if to slap him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re just some fragile academic who can’t handle the weight of the world now that you’ve seen it – that’s absolute tripe, Robin. You’re not some foppish dandy who faints at the first mention of suffering. You know what those men are? They’re cowards, romantics, idiots who never did a thing to change the world they found so upsetting, hiding away because they felt so guilty—’
‘Guilty,’ he repeated. ‘Guilty, that’s exactly what I am. Ramy told me once that I didn’t care about doing the right thing, that I just wanted to take the easy way out.’
‘He was right,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s the coward’s way, you know it—’
‘No, listen.’ He gripped her hands. They were trembling. She tried to pull away, but he squeezed her fingers between his. He needed her with him. Needed to make her understand, before she hated him forever for abandoning her to the dark. ‘He’s right. You’re right. I know it, I’m trying to say it – he was right. I’m so sorry. But I don’t know how to go on.’
‘Day by day, Birdie.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘You go on, day by day. Just as we’ve been doing. It’s not hard.’
‘No, it’s – Victoire, I can’t.’ He didn’t want to cry; if he started crying, then all his words would disappear and he would never manage to say what he needed to. He ploughed through before his tears could catch up. ‘I want to believe in the future we’re fighting for, but it’s not there, it’s just not there, and I can’t take things day by day when I’m too horrified by the thought of tomorrow. I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I wanted a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility. But this – this is my way out.’
She shook her head. She was weeping freely now; both of them were. ‘Don’t say this to me.’
‘Someone’s got to speak the words. Someone has to stay.’
‘Then aren’t you going to ask me to stay with you?’
‘Oh, Victoire.’
What else was there to say? He could not ask this of her, and she knew he would never dare. Yet the question hung between them, unanswered.
Victoire’s gaze was fixed steadily on the window, at the black lawn outside, at the torchlit barricades. She cried, steadily and silently; the tears kept streaming down her cheeks and she kept wiping them away, pointlessly. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. This was the first time, since all this had started, that he couldn’t read her heart.
At last she took a deep breath and lifted her head. Without turning around, she asked, ‘Did you ever read that poem the abolitionists love? That one by Bicknell and Day. It’s called The Dying Negro.’
Robin had read it, in fact, in an abolitionist pamphlet he’d picked up in London. He’d found it striking; he still remembered it in detail. It described the story of an African man who, facing the prospects of capture and return to slavery, killed himself instead.[115] Robin had found it romantic and moving at the time, but now, seeing Victoire’s expression, he realized it was anything but.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘It was – tragic.’
‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko.[116] I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.’
She fell against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, rocking back and forth.
‘I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?’
115
‘Arm’d with thy sad last gift – the pow’r to die! / Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy.’ (Thomas Day and John Bicknell, 1775)
116
In (the white Englishwoman) Aphra Behn’s 1688 romantic novel