Professor Lovell seemed to prefer that Robin keep out of sight when company came. He never explicitly forbade Robin’s presence, but he would make a note to say that Mr Woodbridge and Mr Ratcliffe were visiting at eight, which Robin interpreted to mean that he ought to make himself scarce.
Robin had no issue with this arrangement. Admittedly, he found their conversations fascinating – they spoke often of far-flung things like expeditions to the West Indies, negotiations over cotton prints in India, and violent unrest throughout the Near East. But as a group, they were frightening; a procession of solemn, erudite men, all dressed in black like a murder of crows, each more intimidating than the last.
The only time he barged in on one of these gatherings was by accident. He’d been out in the garden, taking his daily physician-recommended turn, when he overheard the professor and his guests loudly discussing Canton.
‘Napier’s an idiot,’ Professor Lovell was saying. ‘He’s playing his hand too early – there’s no subtlety. Parliament’s not ready, and he’s irritating the compradors besides.’
‘You think the Tories will want to move in at any point?’ asked a man with a very deep voice.
‘Perhaps. But they’ll have to get a better stronghold in Canton if they’re going to bring ships in.’
At this point Robin could not help but venture into the sitting room. ‘What about Canton?’
The gentlemen all turned to regard him at once. There were four of them, all very tall, and all either spectacled or monocled.
‘What about Canton?’ Robin asked again, suddenly nervous.
‘Shush,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, your shoes are filthy, you’re tracking mud everywhere. Take them off and go and have a bath.’
Robin persisted. ‘Is King George going to declare war on Canton?’
‘He can’t declare war on Canton, Robin. No one declares war on cities.’
‘Then is King George going to invade China?’ he persisted.
For some reason this made the gentlemen laugh.
‘Would that we could,’ said the man with the deep voice. ‘It’d make this whole enterprise a lot easier, wouldn’t it?’
A man with a great grey beard peered down at Robin. ‘And where would your loyalties lie? Here, or back home?’
‘My goodness.’ The fourth man, whose pale blue eyes Robin found unnerving, bent down to inspect him, as if through a massive, invisible magnifying glass. ‘Is this the new one? He’s even more of your spitting image than the last—’
Professor Lovell’s voice cut through the room like glass. ‘Hayward.’
‘Really, it’s uncanny, I mean, look at his eyes. Not the colour, but the shape—’
‘Hayward.’
Robin glanced back and forth between them, baffled.
‘That’s quite enough,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, go.’
Robin muttered an apology and hurried up the stairs, muddy boots forgotten. Over his shoulder, he heard fragments of Professor Lovell’s response: ‘He doesn’t know, I don’t like giving him ideas . . . No, Hayward, I won’t—’ But by the time he reached the safety of the landing, where he could lean over the banister and listen in without being caught, they had already changed the topic to Afghanistan.
That night, Robin stood before his mirror, staring intently at his face for so long that eventually it began to seem alien.
His aunts liked to say he had the kind of face that could blend in anywhere – his hair and eyes, both a softer shade of brown than the indigo-black that coloured the rest of his family, could have plausibly marked him as either the son of a Portuguese sailor or the heir to the Qing Emperor. But Robin had always attributed this to some accidental arrangement of nature that ascribed him features that could have belonged anywhere on the spectrum of either race, white or yellow.
He had never wondered whether he might not be full-blooded Chinese.
But what was the alternative? That his father was white? That his father was—
Look at his eyes.
That was incontrovertible proof, wasn’t it?
Then why would his father not claim Robin as his own? Why was he only a ward, and not a son?
But even then, Robin was not too young to understand there were some truths that could not be uttered, that life as normal was only possible if they were never acknowledged. He had a roof over his head, three guaranteed meals a day, and access to more books than he could read in a lifetime. He did not, he knew, have the right to demand anything more.
He made a decision then. He would never question Professor Lovell, never probe at the empty space where the truth belonged. As long as Professor Lovell did not accept him as a son, Robin would not attempt to claim him as a father. A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.
He dried himself, dressed, and sat down at his desk to finish his translation exercise for the evening. He and Mr Felton had moved on to Tacitus’s Agricola now.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.[6]
When Michaelmas term began in early October, Professor Lovell departed for Oxford, where he would stay for the next eight weeks. He would do this for each of Oxford’s three academic terms, returning only during the breaks. Robin relished these periods; even though his classes did not pause, it felt possible to breathe and relax then without risk of disappointing his guardian at every turn.
It also meant that, without Professor Lovell breathing over his shoulder, he had the freedom to explore the city.
Professor Lovell gave him no allowance, but Mrs Piper occasionally let him have some small change for fares, which he saved up until he could get to Covent Garden by carriage. When he learned from a paperboy about the horse-drawn omnibus service, he rode it almost every weekend, crisscrossing the heart of London from Paddington Green to the Bank. His first few trips alone terrified him; several times he grew convinced he would never find his way back to Hampstead again and would be doomed to live out his life as a waif on the streets. But he persisted. He refused to be cowed by London’s complexity, for wasn’t Canton, too, a labyrinth? He determined to make the place home by walking every inch of it. Bit by bit London grew to feel less overwhelming, less like a belching, contorted pit of monsters that might swallow him up at any corner and more like a navigable maze whose tricks and turns he could anticipate.
He read the city. London in the 1830s was exploding with print. Newspapers, magazines, journals, quarterlies, weeklies, monthlies, and books of every genre were flying off the shelves, tossed on doorsteps, and hawked from the corners of nearly every street. He pored over newsstand copies of The Times, the Standard, and the Morning Post; he read, though did not fully comprehend, articles in academic journals like Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review; he read penny satirical papers like Figaro in London, melodramatic pseudo-news like colourful crime reports and a series on the dying confessions of condemned prisoners. For cheaper stuff, he entertained himself with the Bawbee Bagpipe. He stumbled on a series called The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white. He discovered Fleet Street, the heart of London publishing, where newspapers came off the printing presses still hot. He went back there time and time again, bringing home stacks of yesterday’s papers for free from piles that were dumped on the corner.
6
‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’