There was one letter for every week I had been away. I took them all from the box and removed the pages. There was nothing of me in any of them. How could Da have believed them? When I returned the envelopes to the box, they were empty of words – but never more meaningful.
I slept badly. Resentments and confusion about Ditte and Cauldshiels – and even Da – gathered strength in the dark. Eventually I gave up trying to silence them.
Da was snoring, a predictable rumble that had always comforted me when I woke in the night. It comforted me now; it meant he wouldn’t wake. I got out of bed and dressed, took a candle and matches from my bedside table and put them in my pocket. Then I slipped out of my room, down the stairs and into the night.
The sky was clear and the moon almost full. The black of night only played around the edges of things. When I arrived at Sunnyside, the Murray house stood dark and still, and I thought I could hear the collected breath of the family’s slumber.
I pushed on the gate. The house stretched towards the sky, as if suddenly alert, but no light flickered in the windows. I slipped through the gap and left the gate ajar then skirted the boundary, keeping to the deep dark under the trees, until I was looking at the Scriptorium.
In the moonlight it looked like any other shed, and I was annoyed I’d thought it was more. As I got closer, I could see its frailty; gutters laced with rust, paint peeling from the window frames – a wad of paper stopping the draft where the timber was rotted.
The door opened as it always did, and I stood on the threshold waiting for my eyes to adjust. Moonlight through dirty windows cast long shadows around the room. I could smell the words before I could see them, and memories tumbled over themselves; I used to think this place was the inside of a genie’s lamp.
I took Ditte’s letter from my pocket. It was still crumpled, so I found a space on the sorting table and smoothed it out as best I could. I lit the candle and felt the small thrill of defiance. Draughts competed to bat the flame this way and that, but none were strong enough to blow it out. I made a space on the sorting table and dripped some wax to hold the candle. I made sure it stuck fast.
The word I wanted was already published, but I knew where to find the slips. I ran my finger along a row of pigeon-holes until I came to ‘A to Ant’. My birthday words. If the Dictionary was a person, Da told me once, ‘A to Ant’ would be its first tentative steps.
I pulled a small pile of slips from the pigeon-hole and unpinned them from their top-slip.
Abandon.
The earliest example was more than six hundred years old, and the words that made it were malformed and difficult. As I read through the slips the quotations got easier, and when I was almost at the bottom of the pile I found one I liked. The quotation was not much older than me, and it was written by a Miss Braddon.
I found myself abandoned and alone in the world.
I pinned the slip to Ditte’s letter, then read it again. Alone in the world.
Alone had a pigeon-hole all to itself, with bundles of slips piled one on top of the other. I took out the topmost and untied its string. The slips had been separated into various senses, each with a top-slip showing the definition. I knew that if I got A and B off the shelf, I would find the definitions on the top-slips transcribed into columns, their quotations below.
It was Da who had written the definition I settled on. I read his tight script: Quite by oneself, unaccompanied, solitary.
I wondered briefly if he had spoken to Lily about all the ways to be alone. Lily would never have sent me to school.
I unpinned the top-slip from its quotation slips – its job was done, after all – and put the quotations back into their pigeon-hole. Then I returned to the sorting table and pinned Da’s definition to Ditte’s letter.
Then a sound. A long note in the quiet. It was the gate: its unoiled hinge.
I looked around the Scriptorium for somewhere I might hide. I felt the galloping beat of panic. I couldn’t have the words taken from me. They explained me. I reached under my skirt and shoved the letter with its attached slips into the waistband of my drawers. Then I took up the candle from the table.
The door opened and moonlight flooded in.
‘Esme?’
It was Da. Relief and anger rose.
‘Esme, put the candle down.’
It tilted. Wax dripped onto proofs spread across the sorting table, sealing them together. I saw what he saw. Imagined what he imagined. Wondered if I could actually do it.
‘I would never —’
‘Give me the candle, Esme.’
‘But you don’t understand, I was just …’
He blew out the candle and collapsed into a chair. I watched the wisp of smoke wobble upward.
I turned out my pockets and there was nothing, not a single word. I thought he might ask to check my socks, my sleeves, and I looked at him as if I had nothing to hide. He just sighed and turned to leave the Scriptorium. I followed. When he whispered to close the door quietly, I did as I was told.
Morning was only beginning to colour the garden. The house was still dark, except for a single wavering light in the topmost window above the kitchen. If Lizzie looked out, she would see me. I could almost feel the weight of the trunk as I dragged it from under her bed.
But Lizzie and the trunk were as far away as Scotland. Not seeing them before I left would be my punishment.
