The Dictionary of Lost Words, стр. 19

Sunnyside looked smaller than it had two seasons earlier. The trees were in full leaf, and the sky was a patch of blue between the house and the hedges. I could hear the clatter of carts and the clop of horses drawing trams along the Banbury Road.

I stood under the ash for a long time. I’d been home for weeks, but only now did I understand what I’d been missing. Oxford wrapped around me like a blanket, and I began to breathe easily for the first time in months.

From the minute I’d arrived home from Cauldshiels, I’d wanted more than anything to be inside the Scriptorium. But every time I stepped towards it, I’d felt a wave in my stomach. I didn’t belong there. I was a nuisance. That was why I’d been sent so far away, whatever Ditte tried to say about adventure and opportunity. So I pretended to Da that I had outgrown the Scriptorium. In truth I could barely resist it.

Now, a week before I was to return to Cauldshiels, the Scriptorium stood empty. Mr Crane was long gone – dismissed, too many errors. Da could barely hold my gaze when he told me. Da and Dr Murray were at the Press with Mr Hart, and the other assistants were spending their lunch hour by the river. I wondered if the Scriptorium might be locked. It never had been, but things could change. Everything was locked at Cauldshiels. To stop us getting in. To stop us getting out. I took one step and then another. When I tried the door, it opened with a familiar creaking of hinges.

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 hurly-burly 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