‘Yes?’ he said, in the tone he reserved for men with dirty fingernails. My fist closed tightly around my pencil.
‘I have Dr Murray’s proofs. Si to simple.’
‘I’ll take them,’ said Mr Dankworth, holding out his hand but not getting up.
‘And you are?’ the compositor asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The Controller would like to know who takes receipt of the proofs, if it isn’t Dr Murray himself.’
Mr Dankworth rose from the sorting table and approached the compositor. ‘You can tell the Controller that Mr Dankworth took receipt of the proofs.’ He took the pages before they were proffered.
In my place at the back of the room, I held my breath, irritation and embarrassment rising. I wanted to intervene, to welcome the compositor into the Scriptorium, but without his name I would look foolish.
‘I’ll be sure to do that, Mr Dankworth,’ the compositor said, looking Mr Dankworth square in the face. ‘My name is Gareth, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He held out his ink-stained hand, but Mr Dankworth just stared at it and rubbed his own hand up and down on the side of his trousers. Gareth lowered his arm and offered a slight nod instead. He glanced quickly to where I sat, then turned and left the Scriptorium.
I took a blank slip from my desk and wrote:
GARETH
Compositor.
I was standing just inside the door of the Scriptorium, reading an article in the Oxford Chronicle while Dr Murray finished off some correspondence he wanted me to take to Mr Bradley.
It was a small piece, buried in the middle pages.
Three suffragettes, arrested after a rooftop protest against Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, have been forcibly fed in Winson Green Gaol after several days on hunger strike. The women were gaoled for civil disobedience and criminal damage after throwing tiles at police from the roof of Bingley Hall in Birmingham, where Mr Asquith was holding a public budget meeting. Women were barred from attending.
My throat began to constrict. ‘How do you force-feed a grown woman?’ I said, to no one in particular. I skimmed the column of words, but there was no explanation of the procedure, and the women weren’t named. I thought of Tilda. Her last postcard had been from Birmingham, where, she’d written, women were willing to do more than just sign petitions.
‘Something for Mr Hart at the Press,’ said Dr Murray, startling me. ‘But visit the Old Ashmolean first; Mr Bradley is waiting on this.’ He handed me a letter with Bradley written on the envelope along with the first proofs for the letter T.
The Old Ashmolean was as grand as the Scriptorium was humble. It was stone instead of tin, and the entrance was flanked by the busts of men who had achieved something – I don’t know what. When I’d first seen them, I’d felt small and out of place, but after a while they’d encouraged a defiant ambition, and I’d imagined walking into that place and taking my seat at the Editor’s desk. But if women could be barred from a public budget meeting, I had no right to that ambition. I thought about Tilda, her hunger for the fight. And I thought about the women who had gone to gaol. Could I starve myself, I wondered? If I thought it would help me become an editor?
I climbed the stairs to large double doors that opened into the Dictionary Room. It was airy and light, with stone walls and a high ceiling held up by Grecian stone pillars. The Dictionary deserved this space, and when I first saw it I’d wondered why Mr Bradley and Mr Craigie had been given the honour of occupying it instead of Dr Murray. ‘He is a martyr to the Dictionary,’ Da said, when I asked. ‘The Scrippy suits him perfectly.’
I looked around the vast room, trying to work out which assistants were behind the mess of papers that covered every table. Eleanor Bradley looked above her parapet of books and waved.
She cleared some papers off a chair, and I sat down. ‘I have a letter for your father,’ I said.
‘Oh, good. He’s hoping for Dr Murray’s agreement on a question that he and Mr Craigie have been discussing.’
‘Discussing?’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, they are polite, but each is hoping for a nod in their direction from the chief.’ She looked at the envelope in my hand. ‘Pa will be glad to have it resolved one way or another.’
‘Is it about a particular word?’
‘A whole language.’ Eleanor leaned in, her wire-framed eyes huge with the gossip. She spoke quietly: ‘Mr Craigie is wanting to take another trip to Scandinavia. Apparently, he’s thrown his support behind a campaign to recognise Frisian.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘It’s Germanic.’
‘Of course,’ I said, remembering a one-way conversation I’d had with Mr Craigie at the picnic for O and P. The subject of the Icelandic language had animated him for over an hour.
‘Pa thinks it’s outside the scope of an editor of our English dictionary. He fears R will never be completed if Mr Craigie keeps pursuing other goals.’
‘If that’s his argument, I’m sure he’ll have Dr Murray’s support,’ I said.
I stood up to go, then hesitated. ‘Eleanor, have you read about the suffragettes in gaol in Birmingham? They’re being force-fed.’
She coloured and clenched her jaw. ‘I have,’ she said. ‘It’s shameful. Like the Dictionary, the vote seems inevitable. Why we have to suffer so much and for so long I cannot fathom.’
‘Do you think we will live to enjoy it?’ I asked.
She smiled. ‘On that question, I am more optimistic than Pa and Sir James. I am sure we will.’
I wasn’t so sure, but before I could say any more, Mr Bradley approached.
I peddled as fast as I could between the Old Ashmolean and Walton Street. It wasn’t so much the darkening sky that spurred me on as my fears for Tilda and women like her – and fears for all of
