The Dictionary of Lost Words(85)
He removed the scrap of paper and held it up for us both to see. ‘Stopped me bleeding to death, this did.’
‘What on earth is it?’ asked Lizzie, peering at it.
‘The edge of a slip,’ Gareth said, smiling in my direction.
‘I really am grateful, you know,’ I said. ‘That man was terrifying. It was unfair of Tilda to mock you.’
‘She was just testing me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Making sure I was on the right side.’
I smiled. ‘And are you on the right side?’
He smiled back. ‘Yes, I am.’
He seemed more sure than I was, and part of me felt ashamed. ‘Sometimes I think there may be more than two sides,’ I said.
‘You’d do well not to take the side of the suffragettes,’ Lizzie said. ‘They’re slowing things down with all their mischief.’ She handed Gareth a glass of water.
‘Thank you, Miss Lester,’ he said.
‘You call me Lizzie. I don’t answer to anything else.’
We watched as he drank it down. When he finished, he took the glass to the sink and rinsed it. Lizzie looked at me in astonishment.
‘People have always taken different roads to get to the same place,’ Gareth said when he turned back to face us. ‘Women’s suffrage won’t be any different.’
When Gareth left, Lizzie sat me down and washed my face. She brushed out my hair and rolled it back into a bun.
‘Never met a man like him,’ she said. ‘Except maybe your da. He also rinses his cup.’
She had the same look on her face that Da did whenever Gareth visited the Scriptorium. I ignored her.
‘You never did say why you was there,’ she said.
I couldn’t tell her about Tilda. It was the one topic we avoided, and the events of the day wouldn’t help to elevate her in Lizzie’s eyes. ‘I was coming home from the Bodleian,’ I said.
‘Would have been quicker to come along Parks Road.’
‘There was so much anger, Lizzie.’
‘Well, I’m just glad you weren’t badly hurt, or arrested.’
‘What are they so scared of?’
Lizzie sighed. ‘All of them are scared of losing something; but for the likes of him that spat in your face, they don’t want their wives thinking they deserve more than they’ve got. Makes me glad to be in service when I think that men like that might be the alternative.’
The day was almost over when I returned to the Scriptorium. Tilda’s postcard was sitting on top. I read it again then wrote a new slip, in duplicate.
SISTERHOOD
‘I’m glad you have joined the sisterhood and will be adding your voice to the cry.’
Tilda Taylor, 1912
I searched the fascicles. Sisterhood was already published. The main sense referred, in one way or another, to the sisterhood experienced by nuns. Tilda’s quotation belonged with the second sense: Used loosely to denote a number of females having some common aim, characteristic or calling. Often in a bad sense.
I went to the pigeon-holes and found the original slips. Newspaper clippings made up most of the quotations. In a clipping about females who agitate on questions they know nothing about, a volunteer had underlined the shrieking sisterhood. The most recent slip, from an article written in 1909, described women of the suffragette type as a highly educated, screeching, childless, and husbandless sisterhood.
They were all insulting, and I was heartened to think that Dr Murray had rejected them. Even so, I rewrote the published definition on a new slip, leaving off in a bad sense, and pinned a copy of Tilda’s quotation in front of it. Then I put them in the pigeon-holes reserved for supplementary words.
When I turned away from the shelves, Da was watching me.
‘What do you think of newspapers as a source of meaning?’ he asked.
‘What else did you see?’
He smiled, but it seemed an effort. ‘I don’t mind what you add to the pigeon-holes, Essy. Even if your quotations don’t come from a text, they might encourage the search for something similar. The closest we can get to understanding new words is newspaper articles. James spends quite a bit of his time these days arguing for their validity.’
I thought about the clippings I’d just read. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘They often seem no better than opinion, and if you want opinion to define what something means then you should at least consider all sides. Not all sides have a newspaper to speak for them.’
‘It’s a good thing, then, that some of them have you.’
Da and I sat together in the sitting room, both of us trying to make conversation and failing; both of us trying not to let the other see our eagerness for the knock on the door. It was already six o’clock. Da was facing the window onto the street. Whenever his eyes registered someone passing, I held my breath for the sound of the gate then released it when the gate did not sing.
Da looked more animated than he had in a while. When I’d told him Gareth had offered to accompany me to Old Tom, Da had smiled as if relieved, but I couldn’t interpret it. Was he glad I had a chaperone for my meeting with Tilda, or was he glad I had a gentleman caller? He must have thought the latter would never happen. Whichever it was, it was the first time in weeks that the lines on his forehead had relaxed.