The right and obvious thing to do was to raise the alarm.
But somehow, helping seemed the only option. He didn’t question this logic, he simply acted. It felt like falling into a dream, like stepping into a play where he already knew his lines, though everything else was a mystery. This was an illusion with its own internal logic, and for some reason he couldn’t quite name, he didn’t want to break it.
At last all the silver bars had been shoved down shirt fronts and into pockets. Robin gave the ones he’d picked up to his doppelgänger. Their fingers touched, and Robin felt a chill.
‘Let’s go,’ said the blond man.
But none of them moved. They all looked at Robin, visibly uncertain what to do with him.
‘What if he—’ began the woman.
‘He won’t,’ Robin’s doppelgänger said firmly. ‘Will you?’
‘Of course not,’ Robin whispered.
The blond man looked unconvinced. ‘Would be easier to just—’
‘No. Not this time.’ Robin’s doppelgänger looked Robin up and down for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘You’re a translator, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Robin breathed. ‘Yes, I’ve only just got here.’
‘The Twisted Root,’ said his doppelgänger. ‘Find me there.’
The woman and the blond man exchanged a glance. The woman opened her mouth as if to object, paused, and then closed it.
‘Fine,’ said the blond man. ‘Now let’s go.’
‘Wait,’ Robin said desperately. ‘Who are – when should—’
But the thieves had broken into a run.
They were startlingly fast. Just seconds later, the street was empty. They’d left no trace they’d ever been there – they’d picked up every last bar, had even run away with the broken ruins of the trunk. They could have been ghosts. Robin could have imagined this entire encounter, and the world would have looked no different at all.
Ramy was still awake when Robin returned. He opened his door at the first knock.
‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the notebook.
‘Of course.’
They stood looking at each other in silence.
There was no question about what had happened. They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.
And they never would say it out loud. It hurt too much to consider the truth. It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.
‘Well,’ Robin said lamely, ‘good night.’
Ramy nodded and, without speaking, closed his door.
Chapter Four
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Sleep felt impossible. Robin kept seeing the face of his doppelgänger floating in the dark. Had he, fatigued and rattled, imagined the whole thing? But the streetlamps had shone so brightly, and his twin’s features – his fear, his panic – were so sharply etched into his memory. He knew it was not a projection. It had not quite felt like looking into a mirror, where all his features were reflected backwards, a false representation of what the world saw, but a gut recognition of sameness. Whatever was in that man’s face was in his as well.
Was that why he had helped him? Some instinctive sympathy?
He was only beginning to fathom the weight of his actions. He’d stolen from the university. Was it a test? Stranger rituals were practised at Oxford. Had he passed or failed? Or would constables come banging on his door the next morning and ask him to leave?
But I can’t be sent down, he thought. I’ve only just got here. Suddenly the delights of Oxford – the warmth of his bed, the smell of new books and new clothes – made him squirm in discomfort, for now all he could think about was how soon he might lose it all. He tossed and turned in sweaty sheets, conjuring up more and more detailed visions of how the morning might go – how the constables would pull him from his bed, how they’d shackle his wrists and drag him to the gaol, how Professor Lovell would sternly ask Robin never to contact him or Mrs Piper again.
At last he fell asleep from exhaustion. He woke to a persistent tapping at his door.
‘What are you doing?’ Ramy demanded. ‘You haven’t even washed?’
Robin blinked at him. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s Monday morning, you dolt.’ Ramy was already dressed in his black gown, cap in hand. ‘We’re due at the tower in twenty minutes.’
They made it in time, but barely; they were half running down the greens of the quadrangle to the Institute, gowns flapping in the wind, when the bells rang for nine.
Two slim youths awaited them on the green – the other half of their cohort, Robin assumed. One was white; the other was Black.
‘Hello,’ said the white one as they approached. ‘You’re late.’
Robin gaped at her, trying to catch his breath. ‘You’re a girl.’
This was a shock. Robin and Ramy had both grown up in sterile, isolated environments, kept far away from girls their own age. The feminine was an idea that existed in theory, the stuff of novels or a rare phenomenon to be glimpsed from across the street. The best description Robin knew of women came from a treatise he’d once flipped through by a Mrs Sarah Ellis,[20] which labelled girls ‘gentle, inoffensive, delicate, and passively amiable’. As far as Robin was concerned, girls were mysterious subjects imbued not with a rich inner life but with qualities that made them otherworldly, inscrutable, and possibly not human at all.
‘Sorry – I mean, hello,’ he managed. ‘I didn’t mean to – anyhow.’
Ramy was less subtle. ‘Why are you girls?’
The white girl gave him a look of such withering scorn that Robin wilted on Ramy’s behalf.
‘Well,’ she drawled, ‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’
‘The university has asked us to dress like this so as to not upset or distract the young gentlemen,’ the Black girl explained. Her English carried a faint accent, which Robin thought resembled French, though he wasn’t sure. She shook her left leg at him, displaying trousers so crisp and stiff they looked like they’d been purchased yesterday. ‘Not every faculty is as liberal as the Translation Institute, you see.’
‘Is it uncomfortable?’ Robin asked, trying valiantly to prove his own lack of prejudice. ‘Wearing trousers, I mean?’
‘It’s not, in fact, since we have two legs and not fish tails.’ She extended her hand to him. ‘Victoire Desgraves.’
He shook it. ‘Robin Swift.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Swift? But surely—’
‘Letitia Price,’ the white girl interjected. ‘Letty, if you like. And you?’
‘Ramiz.’ Ramy halfway extended his hand, as if unsure whether he wanted to touch the girls or not. Letty decided for him and shook it; Ramy winced in discomfort. ‘Ramiz Mirza. Ramy to friends.’
‘Hello, Ramiz.’ Letty glanced around. ‘So we’re the whole cohort, then.’
20
Sarah Stickney Ellis, a well-known author, published several books (including