‘No one’s home,’ I said.
‘They will be soon.’ He opened the door and I ducked as he stepped into the hall.
Da set me down, put his satchel on the sideboard and bent to pick the letters off the floor. I followed him down the hall and into the kitchen and sat at the table while he cooked our dinner. We had an occasional maid come three times a week to cook and clean and wash our clothes, but this wasn’t one of her days.
‘Will I go into service when I stop being a littlun?’
Da jiggled the pan to turn the sausages then looked across to where I sat at the kitchen table.
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Why not?’
He jiggled the sausages again. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
I waited. He took a deep breath and the thinking lines between his eyebrows got deeper. ‘Lizzie is fortunate to be in service, but for you it would be unfortunate.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’ He drained the peas and mashed the potatoes, and put them on our plates with the sausages. When he finally sat at the table, he said, ‘Service means different things to different people, Essy, depending on their position in society.’
‘Will all the different meanings be in the Dictionary?’
His thinking lines relaxed. ‘We’ll search the pigeon-holes tomorrow, shall we?’
‘Would Lily have been able to explain service?’ I asked.
‘Your mother would have had the words to explain the world to you, Essy,’ Da said. ‘But without her, we must rely on the Scrippy.’
The next morning, before we sorted the post, Da held me up and let me search the pigeon-holes containing S words.
‘Now, let’s see what we can find.’
Da pointed to a pigeon-hole that was almost too high, but not quite. I pulled out a bundle of slips. Service was written on a top-slip, and beneath that: Multiple senses. We sat at the sorting table, and Da let me loosen the string that bound the slips. They were separated into four smaller bundles of quotations, each with its own top-slip and a definition suggested by one of Dr Murray’s more trusted volunteers.
‘Edith sorted these,’ Da said, arranging the piles on the sorting table.
‘You mean Aunty Ditte?’
‘The very same.’
‘Is she a lexi—, lexiographa, like you?’
‘Lexicographer. No. But she is a very learned lady and we are lucky she has taken on the Dictionary as her hobby. There’s not a week goes by without a letter from Ditte to Dr Murray with a word, or copy for the next section.’
Not a week went by when we didn’t get our own letter from Ditte. When Da read them aloud, they were mostly about me.
‘Am I her hobby too?’
‘You are her goddaughter, which is much more important than a hobby.’
Although Ditte’s real name was Edith, when I was very small I struggled to say it. There were other ways to say her name, she’d said, and she let me choose my favourite. In Denmark she would be called Ditte. Ditte is sweeter, I sometimes thought, enjoying the rhyme. I never called her Edith again.
‘Now, let’s see how Ditte has defined service,’ Da said.
A lot of the definitions described Lizzie, but none of them explained why service might mean something different for her and for me. The last pile we looked at had no top-slip.
‘They’re duplicates,’ Da said. He helped me read them.
‘What will happen to them?’ I asked. But before Da could answer, the Scriptorium door opened and one of the assistants came in, knotting his tie as if he had only just put it on. When he was done it sat crooked, and he forgot to tuck it into his waistcoat.
Mr Mitchell looked over my shoulder at the piles of slips laid out on the sorting table. A wave of dark hair fell across his face. He smoothed it back but there wasn’t enough oil to hold it.
‘Service,’ he said.
‘Lizzie’s in service,’ I said.
‘So she is.’
‘But Da says it would be unfortunate for me to be in service.’
Mr Mitchell looked at Da, who shrugged and smiled.
‘When you grow up, Esme, I think you could do whatever you wanted to do,’ Mr Mitchell said.
‘I want to be a lexicographer.’
‘Well, this is a good start,’ he said, pointing to all the slips.
Mr Maling and Mr Balk came into the Scriptorium, discussing a word they had been arguing about the day before. Then Dr Murray came in, his black gown billowing. I looked from one man to another and wondered if I could tell how old they were from the length and colour of their beards. Da’s and Mr Mitchell’s were the shortest and darkest. Dr Murray’s was turning white and reached all the way to the top button of his waistcoat. Mr Maling’s and Mr Balk’s were somewhere in-between. Now they were all there, it was time for me to disappear. I crawled beneath the sorting table and watched for stray slips. I wanted more than anything for another word to find me. None did, but when Da told me to run along with Lizzie my pockets were not completely empty.
I showed Lizzie the slip. ‘Another secret,’ I said.
‘Should I be letting you bring secrets out of the Scrippy?’
‘Da said this one is a duplicate. There’s another one that says exactly the same thing.’
‘What does it say?’
‘That you should be in service and I should do needlepoint until a gentleman wants to marry me.’
‘Really? It says that?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, I could teach you needlepoint,’ Lizzie said.
I thought about it. ‘No thank you, Lizzie. Mr Mitchell said I could be a lexicographer.’
For the next few mornings, after helping Da with the post, I’d crawl to one end of the sorting table to wait for falling words. But when they fell, they were always quickly retrieved by an assistant. After a few days I forgot to keep an eye out for
