Babel

by R.F. Kuang

He told Robin they would reside in his estate in Hampstead when they reached England. He did not say whether he had family at that estate. He confirmed that he had paid Miss Betty all those years, but did not explain why. He intimated that he’d known Robin’s mother, which was how he’d known Robin’s address, but he did not elaborate on the nature of their relationship or how they’d met. The only time he acknowledged their prior acquaintance was when he asked Robin how his family came to live in that riverside shack. ‘They were a well-off merchant family when I knew them,’ he said. ‘Had an estate in Peking before they moved south. What was it, gambling? I suppose it was the brother, wasn’t it?’ Months ago Robin would have spat at anyone for speaking so cruelly about his family. But here, alone in the middle of the ocean with no relatives and nothing to his name, he could not summon the ire. He had no fire left in him. He was only scared, and so very tired. In any case, all this accorded with what Robin had been told of his family’s previous wealth, which had been squandered completely in the years after his birth. His mother had complained about it bitterly and often. Robin was fuzzy on the details, but the story involved what so many tales of decline in Qing dynasty China did: an aging patriarch, a profligate son, malicious and manipulative friends, and a helpless daughter whom, for some mysterious reason, no one would marry. Once, he’d been told, he’d slept in a lacquered ...