The Dictionary of Lost Words(17)

I closed my eyes and lay as still as a plank. Time dragged, but I must have slept eventually, because I dreamed.

Da and I arrived at the Scriptorium, my stockings brimming over with blood. All the assistants and lexicographers I’d ever known were sitting around the sorting table. Even Mr Mitchell, his odd socks just visible under his chair. No one looked up. I turned to Da, but he had already moved away. When I looked back at the sorting table, he was in his usual place. His head was bowed to the words, like everyone else’s. When I tried to move towards him, I couldn’t. When I tried to leave, I couldn’t. When I shouted out, no one heard me.

‘Time to go home, Essymay; you’ve slept through the day.’ Lizzie stood at the end of the bed, my clothes hanging over her arm. ‘They’re toasty warm. They’ve been hanging in front of the range. Come, I’ll help you dress.’

Once again, she helped with the belt and the napkin. She pulled the shift over my head and replaced it with layers of warm clothing. Then she kneeled on the floor and put my feet in the stockings, slipped on my shoes and tied the laces.



Over the course of the next week I created more laundry than I had in the previous three months, and Da had to pay the occasional maid extra to get it all done. I’d been given leave from school, and each day I went to stay in Lizzie’s room. I wasn’t confined to bed, but I dared not stray too far from the kitchen. The Scriptorium was off limits. No one had said as much, but I feared my body would betray me again.

‘What is it for?’ I asked Lizzie on the fifth day. Mrs Ballard had put me in charge of stirring a brown sauce while she spoke with Mrs Murray about meals for the following week. Lizzie was sitting at the kitchen table, mending a pile of Murray clothes. The bleeding had almost stopped.

‘What is what for?’ she said.

‘The bleeding. Why does it happen?’

She looked at me, unsure. ‘It’s to do with babies,’ she said.

‘How?’

She shrugged her shoulders without looking up. ‘I don’t know exactly, Essymay. It just is.’

How could she not know? How could something so horrible happen to a person every month and that person not know why?

‘Does Mrs Ballard get the bleeding?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘When does it go away?’ I asked

‘When you’re too old to have babies.’

‘Did Mrs Ballard have any babies?’ I’d never heard her talk about children, but maybe they were all grown.

‘Mrs Ballard ain’t married, Essymay. There’s been no babies.’

‘Of course she’s married,’ I said.

Lizzie looked through the kitchen window to make sure Mrs Ballard wasn’t on her way back in, then she leaned closer to me. ‘She calls herself Mrs ’cos it’s more respectable. A lot of old spinsters do it, ’specially if they’s in a position to order others about.’

I was too confused to ask any more questions.



It had come earlier than he’d expected, Da said, looking apologetic. It was called catamenia, and the process of shedding it was menstruation. He reached for the sugar bowl and took great care to sprinkle a liberal amount on his porridge, even though it was already sweetened.

New words, but they made Da feel uncomfortable. For the first time in my life I felt unsure about my questions. We fell into a rare silence, with catamenia and menstruation hanging meaningless in the air.



I stayed away from the Scriptorium for two weeks. When I did return, I chose the quietest time. It was late afternoon, when Dr Murray was visiting Mr Hart at the Press and most of the assistants had gone home.

Only Da and Mr Sweatman sat at the long table. They were preparing entries for the letter F, which meant they had to check the work of all the other assistants to make sure they matched Dr Murray’s very particular style. Da and Mr Sweatman knew the Dictionary abbreviations better than anyone.

‘Come in, Esme,’ said Mr Sweatman as I peered around the Scriptorium door. ‘The big bad wolf has gone home.’

M words lived in pigeon-holes beyond the sight of the sorting table, and the words I wanted were crammed into a single pigeon-hole. They were already sorted under draft definitions. That is what Ditte spent so much of her time doing, and I wondered if I would recognise her hand on any of the top-slips.

There were so many words to describe the bleeding. Menstrue was the same as catamenia. It meant unclean blood. But what blood was clean? It always left a stain.

Four slips with various quotations were pinned to the word menstruate. The top-slip gave it two definitions: To discharge the catamenia and To pollute as with menstrual blood. Da had mentioned the first, but not the second.

Menstruosity was the condition of being menstruous. And menstruous had once meant horribly filthy or polluted.

Menstruous. Like monstrous. It came closest to explaining how I felt.

Lizzie had called it ‘The Curse’. She’d never heard of menstruation and laughed when I said it. ‘Probably a doctor’s word,’ she’d said. ‘They have their own language, and it hardly ever makes sense.’

I took the volume with all the C words from its shelf and searched for curse.

One’s evil fate.

It didn’t mention bleeding, but I understood. I let the pages fan past my thumb. There were thirteen hundred in just this one volume, about the same as in A and B, and I remembered Da saying there would never be an end to words beginning with C. I looked around the Scriptorium and tried to guess how many words were stored in the pigeon-holes and the books and in the heads of Dr Murray and his assistants. Not one of them could fully explain what had happened to me. Not one.