I should have paid more attention to what was missing in your letters, Esme. I should have visited. I would have, if not for Beth’s illness. When that passed, the headmistress advised against it. Too disruptive mid-term, she said. I took her word.
Harry wanted you home much sooner (truth be told, Harry never wanted you to leave). It was me, my dear Esme, who suggested his concerns were unfounded, that boarding school would take a while to get used to for a child accustomed to the local parish school and lunchtimes spent in the Scriptorium. I told him to give it another year, that things might change for the better.
After collecting you at Easter, Harry sent me the most direct letter of his life. You wouldn’t be going back, he said, whatever my opinion on the subject. You remember I travelled to Oxford the next day. When I saw you, I found no quarrel with his decision.
We barely spoke, you and I. I had hoped that time would restore you, but it seems you need more. You are in my heart, dear girl, even if I have been dislodged from yours. I hope it is not permanent.
I have enclosed a news clipping that I thought might be important to you. I do not want to presume but have found it difficult not to. Please forgive my blind eye.
Yours, with deepest love always,
Ditte
I folded the pages around the tiny news clipping and put them in my pocket. For the first time in a long time I would have something to put in the trunk when I visited Lizzie’s room.
‘What’ve you got there, Essy?’ said Lizzie, coming into her room and pulling her dirty pinny up over her head.
I looked at the tiny article clipped from the paper. It was just a single sentence, no more than a quotation. A teacher has been dismissed from Cauldshiels School for Young Ladies following the admission of a student to hospital.
‘Just words, Lizzie,’ I said.
‘There’s no “just words” for you, Essymay, ’specially if they end up in the trunk. What do they say?’
‘They say I wasn’t alone.’
During the day I helped Mrs Ballard in the kitchen, and I only ventured towards the Scriptorium in the late afternoon, when almost everyone had left. I’d hesitate in the doorway, like Lizzie used to do, and watch Hilda moving around the pigeon-holes. She filed slips and removed them; she wrote letters and corrected proofs. All the while, Dr Murray sat like a wise owl at his high desk. Sometimes he would invite me in and sometimes he wouldn’t.
‘It isn’t because he disapproves,’ whispered Mr Sweatman once. ‘It’s because he’s so single-minded. When he’s puzzling over an entry, his beard could be alight and he’d fail to notice.’
One afternoon I approached Da at the sorting table. ‘Could I be your assistant?’ I asked.
He put a line through something on the proof he was working on and wrote a note beside it. Then he looked up.
‘But you’re Mrs Ballard’s assistant.’
‘I don’t want to be a cook; I want to be an editor.’
The words were a surprise, to Da and to me.
‘Well, not an editor, but an assistant maybe, like Hilda …’
‘Mrs Ballard isn’t training you to be a cook, just how to cook. It will come in useful when you’re married,’ said Da.
‘But I’m not going to get married.’
‘Well, not right away.’
‘If I get married, I can’t be an assistant,’ I said.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because I’ll have to look after babies and cook all day.’
Da was silenced. He looked to Mr Sweatman for some support.
‘If you’re not going to get married, then why not aim to become an editor?’ Mr Sweatman asked.
‘I’m a girl,’ I said, annoyed at his teasing.
‘Should that matter?’
I blushed and didn’t answer. Mr Sweatman cocked his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Well?’
‘Quite right, Fred,’ said Da, then he looked at me to judge the seriousness of my statement. ‘An assistant is exactly what I need, Essy,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure Mr Sweatman could do with a hand every now and then.’
Mr Sweatman nodded his head in agreement.
They were true to their word, and I began to look forward to my afternoons in the Scriptorium. Usually I was asked to make polite replies to letters congratulating Dr Murray on the latest fascicle. When my back began to ache or my hand needed a rest, I would return books and manuscripts. There were shelves of old dictionaries and books in the Scriptorium, but the assistants needed to borrow all kinds of texts from scholars or from college libraries to investigate the origins of words. When the weather was fine, it hardly counted as a chore. Most of the good college libraries were near the centre of town. I would ride down Parks Road until I got to Broad Street, then I’d dismount and walk among the bustling crowds between Blackwell’s Bookshop and the Old Ashmolean. It was my favourite part of Oxford, where town and gown struck an unusual alliance. Both were superior, in their own minds, to the visitors trying to get a glimpse of the gardens in the grounds of Trinity College, or gain entry to the Sheldonian. Am I town or gown? I sometimes wondered. I didn’t fit snugly with either.
‘A nice morning for a bicycle ride,’ Dr Murray said one day. He was coming in through the gates of Sunnyside when I was going out. ‘Where do you take yourself?’
‘The colleges, sir. I return the books.’
‘The books?’
‘When the assistants have finished with them, I take them back to where they belong,’ I said.
‘Is that right?’ he said, then made a noise I couldn’t interpret. When he’d gone on
