The Dictionary of Lost Words(12)

You must tell Esme to stay well-hidden when she’s in the Scrippy or she will be Dr Murray’s next recruit. I daresay she’s bright enough, and I wonder if she would, in fact, be willing.

Yours,

Edith

I put both boxes back in the wardrobe then I tip-toed across the landing. The letter was still in my hand.

The next day, Lizzie watched as I opened the trunk. I pulled Ditte’s letter from my pocket and placed it on top of the slips that covered the bottom.

‘You’re collecting a lot of secrets,’ she said, her hand finding the cross beneath her clothes.

‘It’s about me,’ I said.

‘Discarded or neglected?’ She’d insisted on rules.

I thought about it. ‘Forgotten,’ I said.

I returned to the wardrobe again and again to read Ditte’s letters – there was always something about me; some answer to a query of Da’s. It was as if I were a word and the letters were slips that helped define me. If I read them all, I thought, maybe I would make more sense.

But I could never bring myself to read the letters in the polished box. I liked to look at them, to run my hand across their spines and feel them flutter past. They were together in that box, my mother and my father, and when sleep was about to catch me, I sometimes imagined I could hear their muffled voices. One night I sneaked into Da’s room and crawled like a hunting cat into the wardrobe. I wanted to catch them unawares. But when I lifted the lid of their polished box, they went quiet. A terrible loneliness shadowed me back to bed and kept me from sleeping.

The next morning, I was too tired for school. Da took me to Sunnyside, and I spent the morning beneath the sorting table with blank slips and coloured pencils. I wrote my name in different colours on ten different slips.

When I opened the polished box later that night, I nestled each slip between a white envelope and a blue. We were together now, all three of us. I wouldn’t miss a thing.



The trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed began to feel the weight of all the letters and words.

‘No shells or stones. Nothing pretty,’ Lizzie said when I opened it one afternoon. ‘Why do you collect all this paper, Essymay?’

‘It’s not the paper I’m collecting, Lizzie; it’s the words.’

‘But what’s so important about these words?’ she asked.

I didn’t know, exactly. It was more feeling than thought. Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why. Ditte’s letters were the same, like parts of a jigsaw that might one day fit together to explain something Da didn’t know how to say – something Lily might have.

I didn’t know how to say any of this, so I asked, ‘Why do you do needlepoint, Lizzie?’

She was quiet for a very long time. She folded her washing and changed the sheets on her bed.

I stopped waiting for an answer and went back to reading a letter from Ditte to Da. Have you considered what to do when Esme outgrows St Barnabas? she asked. I thought about my head popping through the chimney of the schoolroom and my arms extending out the windows on both sides.

‘I guess I like to keep me hands busy,’ Lizzie said. For a moment I forgot what I’d asked. ‘And it proves I exist,’ she added.

‘But that’s silly. Of course you exist.’

She stopped making the bed and looked at me with such seriousness I put down Ditte’s letter.

‘I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned – at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.’ She paused, kneeled down beside me and stroked the embroidery on the edge of my skirt. It hid the repair she’d made when I tore it on brambles.

‘Me needlework will always be here,’ she said. ‘I see this and I feel … well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.’

‘Permanent,’ I said. ‘And the rest of the time?’

‘I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.’





The Scriptorium always went quiet for a while over summer. ‘There’s more to life than words,’ Da said once, when I asked where everyone went, but I didn’t think he meant it. We sometimes went to Scotland to visit my aunt, but we were always back at Sunnyside before all the other assistants. I loved waiting beneath the sorting table for each pair of shoes to return. When Dr Murray came in, he would always ask Da if he’d forgotten to bring me home, and Da would always pretend he had. Then Dr Murray would look beneath the sorting table and wink at me.

At the end of the summer of the year I turned eleven, Mr Mitchell’s feet failed to appear, and Dr Murray came into the Scriptorium saying very little. I waited to see a green-socked ankle crossed over a pale blue, but there was a gap where Mr Mitchell usually sat. The other feet seemed limp, and even though Mr Sweatman’s shoes tapped up and down, they were tuneless.

‘When will Mr Mitchell come back?’ I asked Da. He took a long time to answer.

‘He fell, Essy. While climbing a mountain. He won’t be back.’

I thought of his odd socks and the coloured pencils he’d given me. I’d used them until there was nothing left to hold, and that was years before. My world beneath the sorting table felt less comfortable.