The Dictionary of Lost Words(20)

I stood on the threshold and looked in. The sorting table was a mess of books and slips and proofs. I could see Da’s jacket on the back of his chair and Dr Murray’s mortar board on the shelf behind his high desk. The pigeon-holes seemed full, but I knew that room could always be found for new quotations. The Scriptorium was as it had always been, but my stomach wouldn’t settle. I felt changed. I didn’t go in.

When I turned to leave, I noticed the pile of unopened letters just inside the door. Ditte’s handwriting. A larger envelope, the kind she used for Dictionary correspondence. I grabbed it without any thought, and left.

In the kitchen, apples were stewing on the range, but Mrs Ballard was nowhere to be seen. I held Ditte’s envelope above the steam from the apples until the seal gave. Then I took the stairs to Lizzie’s room, two at a time.

There were four pages of proofs for the words hurlyburly to hurry-scurry. Ditte had pinned additional quotations to the edges of each page. The red-haired hurlyburlying Scotch professor was attached to the first, and I wondered if Dr Murray would allow it. I began to read the edits she’d made on the proof, trying to understand how they might improve the entry. Then tears were running down my face. I’d wanted to see Ditte so much, needed to see her, to talk to her. She’d said she would visit at Easter to take me out for my fifteenth birthday. She never came. It was Ditte who’d convinced Da to send me to Cauldshiels. Ditte who’d made me want to go.

I dashed the tears away.

Lizzie came into the room, startling me. She looked at Ditte’s pages, splayed on the floor.

‘Esme, what are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Oh, Essymay, I may not be able to read but I know fair well where those papers belong, and it’s not in this room,’ she said.

When I made no reply, she sat on the floor opposite me. She was heavier than she used to be and didn’t look comfortable.

‘These are different to your usual words,’ she said, picking up a page.

‘They’re proofs,’ I said. ‘This is what the words will look like when they’re in the Dictionary.’

‘You’ve been in there then, the Scrippy?’

I shrugged and started gathering up Ditte’s pages. ‘I couldn’t. I just looked in.’

‘You can’t take words from the Scrippy anymore, Essymay. You know that.’

I settled my gaze on Ditte’s familiar handwriting on the slip pinned to the last page of proofs. ‘I don’t want to go back to school, Lizzie.’

‘You’re lucky you have the chance to go to school,’ she said.

‘If you had been to school, you’d know how cruel it can be.’

‘I guess it’s bound to feel that way to a child who’s had as much freedom as you, Essymay,’ Lizzie soothed. ‘But there’s no one that can teach you here, and you’re too bright to stop your learning. It will only be for a little while, and after that you can choose to do whatever you please. You could be a teacher, or write about history like your Miss Thompson, or work on the Dictionary like Hilda Murray. Did you know she’s started working in the Scrippy?’

I didn’t. Since going to Cauldshiels I felt further away from the things I once dreamed of. When Lizzie tried to catch my eye, I looked away. She retrieved her sewing box from beneath the bed then walked to the door.

‘You should eat your lunch,’ she said. ‘And you should return those papers to the Scrippy.’ She closed the door softly behind her.

I unpinned Ditte’s note from the proof. It was an additional meaning for the word hurry: this definition was more akin to harassment than haste, and it only had a single quotation to support it. I said it out loud and liked it. I leaned under the bed and was relieved to feel the leather handle and the weight of the trunk as I pulled it towards me. Lizzie must have kept the trunk secret the whole time I’d been away. I wondered what might have happened to her if anyone had found it here.

The thought made me pause, made me think about pinning hurry back in its place. But taking it felt like a reckoning. I opened the trunk and breathed in the words. I put hurry on top, then closed the lid.

In that moment, my anger towards Ditte faded, just a little, and an idea occurred to me. I would write to her.

I returned the proofs to their envelope and resealed it. As I left Sunnyside to walk home, I dropped Ditte’s envelope in the letterbox on the gate.



August 28th, 1897

My dear Esme,

As always it was a joy to come across your familiar hand as I was sifting through yesterday’s post. There were one or two letters from the Scriptorium besides yours: one from Dr Murray and another from Mr Sweatman. The letter ‘I’ is causing a bit of bother – all those prefixes, where should they stop?! I was grateful to put off the work to read about your summer back in Oxford.

But you told me almost nothing, other than that the weather was stifling. Six months in Scotland and it seems you’ve acclimatised to the chilly damp and boundless space. I wonder if you miss the ‘sweep of hills towards troubled sky and the unfathomable depths of the loch’?

Do you remember writing this after your first few weeks at Cauldshiels? I read it and was reminded of your father’s love of that place. The rugged solitude restored him, he said. I can’t say I shared his view. Hills and lochs are not in my blood as they are in yours.