‘I guess I like to keep me hands busy,’ Lizzie said. For a moment I forgot what I’d asked. ‘And it proves I exist,’ she added.
‘But that’s silly. Of course you exist.’
She stopped making the bed and looked at me with such seriousness I put down Ditte’s letter.
‘I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned – at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.’ She paused, kneeled down beside me and stroked the embroidery on the edge of my skirt. It hid the repair she’d made when I tore it on brambles.
‘Me needlework will always be here,’ she said. ‘I see this and I feel … well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.’
‘Permanent,’ I said. ‘And the rest of the time?’
‘I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.’
The Scriptorium always went quiet for a while over summer. ‘There’s more to life than words,’ Da said once, when I asked where everyone went, but I didn’t think he meant it. We sometimes went to Scotland to visit my aunt, but we were always back at Sunnyside before all the other assistants. I loved waiting beneath the sorting table for each pair of shoes to return. When Dr Murray came in, he would always ask Da if he’d forgotten to bring me home, and Da would always pretend he had. Then Dr Murray would look beneath the sorting table and wink at me.
At the end of the summer of the year I turned eleven, Mr Mitchell’s feet failed to appear, and Dr Murray came into the Scriptorium saying very little. I waited to see a green-socked ankle crossed over a pale blue, but there was a gap where Mr Mitchell usually sat. The other feet seemed limp, and even though Mr Sweatman’s shoes tapped up and down, they were tuneless.
‘When will Mr Mitchell come back?’ I asked Da. He took a long time to answer.
‘He fell, Essy. While climbing a mountain. He won’t be back.’
I thought of his odd socks and the coloured pencils he’d given me. I’d used them until there was nothing left to hold, and that was years before. My world beneath the sorting table felt less comfortable.
When the year turned, the sorting table seemed to have shrunk. I crawled beneath it one afternoon and hit my head when I crawled out.
‘Look at the state of your dress,’ Lizzie said when she collected me for afternoon tea. It was patterned with smudges and dust. She beat off what she could, ‘It ain’t ladylike to crawl about the Scrippy, Essymay. I don’t know why your father lets you.’
‘Because I’m not a lady,’ I said.
‘You ain’t a cat, either.’
When I returned to the Scriptorium, I navigated the perimeter. I trailed my funny fingers over shelves and books and collected little wads of dust. I wouldn’t mind being a cat, I thought.
Mr Sweatman winked at me as I passed near him.
Mr Maling said, ‘Kiel vi fartas, Esme?’
I said, ‘I’m well, thank you, Mr Maling.’
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘And in Esperanto you would say?’
I had to think. ‘Mi fartas bone, dankon.’
He smiled and nodded. ‘Bona.’
Mr Crane took a deep breath to let everyone know I was a disturbance.
I considered slinking beneath the sorting table, but didn’t. It was a grown-up decision, and I felt a sulk take hold as if someone other than me had made it. Instead, I found a space between two shelves and shuffled awkwardly into place, disturbing cobwebs and dust and two lost slips.
They’d been hidden beneath the shelf on my right. I picked up one and then the other. C words, only recently lost. I tucked them away then looked over to the sorting table. Mr Crane sat closest, and there was another word by his chair. I wondered if he even cared.
‘She’s light-fingered,’ I heard Mr Crane say to Dr Murray. Dr Murray turned my way, and a chill spread through me. I thought I might turn to stone. He returned to his high desk and picked up a proof. Then he walked over to Da.
Dr Murray tried to make it look as though they were talking about the words, but neither looked at the proof. When Dr Murray had moved away, Da looked along the length of the sorting table to the gap between the shelves. He caught my eye and signalled towards the Scriptorium door.
When we were standing under the ash, Da held out his hand. I just looked at it. He said my name louder than he’d ever said it before. Then he made me turn out my pockets.
The word was flimsy and uninteresting, but I liked the quotation. When I put it in his hand, Da looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was. As if he didn’t know what he should do with it. I saw his lips move around the word and the sentence that contained it.
COUNT
‘I count you for a fool.’ – Tennyson, 1859
For a very long time he said nothing. We stood there in the cold as if we were playing a game of statues and neither of us wanted to be the first to move. Then he put the slip in his trouser pocket and steered me towards the kitchen.
‘Lizzie, would it be alright if Esme spent the rest of the afternoon in your room?’ Da asked, closing the door behind him to keep in the heat of the range.
Lizzie put down the potato she was peeling and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘ ’Course, Mr Nicoll. Esme is always welcome.’
‘She’s
