The Dictionary of Lost Words(14)

There was no chest with games. There were no shelves with books. The little table beside her bed held a swatch of embroidery and the photograph of her mother in its simple wooden frame. I peered at it: a plain young woman in an ordinary hat and ordinary clothes, holding a simple bouquet of flowers. Lizzie looked just like her. Behind the frame was the hat pin I’d found in the trunk.

I kneeled down and peered under the bed. At one end were Lizzie’s winter boots; at the other, her chamber-pot and sewing box. My trunk lived right in the middle, its resting place marked by an absence of dust. There was nothing else. No pencils. Of course.

I looked at the trunk, still open on the floor, the latest word lying face-up on all the others. Then I looked at the hat pin on Lizzie’s bedside table and remembered how sharp it was.



The Dictionary of Lost Words. It took me all afternoon to scratch it inside the lid of the trunk. My hands ached from the effort. When it was done, Lizzie’s hat pin lay bent out of shape on the floor, the beads as bright as the day I’d found it.

Something filled me then, some strange and awful queasiness. I tried to straighten the pin, but it refused to be made perfect. The end had become so blunt I couldn’t imagine it piercing the felt of even the cheapest hat. I searched the room but found nothing that would fix it. I placed the pin on the floor beside Lizzie’s bedside table, hoping she’d think it had bent in the fall.



For the next few months, I mostly stayed away from the Scriptorium. Lizzie collected me from St Barnabas, fed me lunch, took me back. In the afternoons, I read my books and practised my writing. I alternated between the shade of the ash, the kitchen table and Lizzie’s room, depending on the weather. I pretended I was ill when they celebrated the publication of the second volume, the one containing all the words beginning with C, including count and counted.

On my twelfth birthday, Da picked me up from St Barnabas. When we came through the gates of Sunnyside, he kept hold of my hand and I walked with him towards the Scriptorium.

It was empty, except for Dr Murray. He looked up from his desk as we came in, then stepped down to greet me.

‘Happy birthday, young lady,’ he said. Then he peered at me over his spectacles, unsmiling. ‘Twelve, I believe.’

I nodded; he continued to peer.

My breath faltered. I was too big to hide beneath the sorting table, to escape from whatever he was thinking. So instead, I looked him in the eye.

‘Your father tells me you are a good student.’

I said nothing, and he turned and gestured towards the two Dictionary volumes behind his desk.

‘You must avail yourself of both volumes whenever you have the need. If you don’t, there is no reason for all our efforts,’ he said. ‘If you require knowledge of a word beyond C, then the fascicles are at your disposal as they are published. Beyond that —’ again he peered, ‘— you must ask your father to search the pigeon-holes. Do you have any questions?’

‘What is avail?’ I asked.

Dr Murray smiled and looked briefly at Da.

‘It is an A word, thankfully. Shall we look it up?’ He went to the shelf behind his desk and got down A and B.



When my twelfth birthday card from Ditte arrived, it contained a slip of paper. A word that Ditte said was superfluous to need.

‘What does superfluous mean?’ I asked Da as he put on his hat.

‘Unnecessary,’ he said. ‘Not wanted or needed.’

I looked at the slip. It was a B word: Brown. Bland and boring, I thought. Not lost or neglected or forgotten, just superfluous. Da must have told Ditte I’d taken a word. I put hers in my pocket.

I thought about it all day at school. I let my fingers play with the slip’s edges and imagined it a more interesting word. I considered throwing it away, but couldn’t. Superfluous, Ditte had said. Maybe I could add that to the list of rules Lizzie had insisted on.

When I arrived at Sunnyside in the afternoon, I went straight up to Lizzie’s room. She wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t mind me waiting. I pulled the trunk from under her bed and opened it.

She arrived just as I was getting the slip out of my pocket.

‘It’s from Ditte,’ I said quickly, to stop her frown from deepening. ‘She sent it for my birthday.’

Lizzie’s frown began to fall away, but then something caught her eye. Her face froze. I followed her gaze and saw the rough letters scratched inside the lid of the trunk. I remembered my anger, blind and selfish. When I turned back to Lizzie, a tear was sliding down her cheek.

It felt like a gas balloon was expanding in my chest, squashing all the bits I needed to breathe and speak. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought, but nothing came out. She went to her bedside table and picked up the pin.

‘Why?’ she asked.

Still, no words. Nothing that would make sense.

‘What does it even say?’ Her voice teetered between rage and disappointment. I hoped for rage. Harsh words against bad behaviour. A storm then calm.

‘The Dictionary of Lost Words,’ I mumbled, not raising my eyes from a knot in one of the floorboards.

‘The dictionary of stolen words, more like.’

My head snapped up. Lizzie was looking at the pin as if she might see something in it that she hadn’t seen before. Her lower lip quivered, like a child’s. When our eyes met, her face collapsed. It was the same look that Da had the day I was caught, as if she’d learned something new about me and didn’t like it. Not rage, then. Disappointment.