He took them, blind to the smudges of ink on my fingers. I quickly put my hand in my pocket. Gareth was not so distracted, and from the corner of my eye I saw him check the type he had been setting. He found nothing missing, and his gaze swept over the tray. I clutched at the type, felt their sharp edges and held them so tight they hurt.
‘Excellent,’ said Mr Hart as he looked over the pages. ‘We inch forward.’ Then he turned to Gareth. ‘We will review these tomorrow. Come and see me at nine.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Gareth.
Mr Hart headed towards his office, still looking through the proofs.
‘I must be off,’ I said, walking away from Gareth without looking at him.
‘I hope you visit again,’ I heard him say.
When I walked my bicycle out of the Press, the sky was darker. Before I reached the Banbury Road, it had split apart. By the time I arrived at the Scriptorium, I was dripping wet and shivering.
‘Stop!’ Mr Dankworth shouted when I opened the Scriptorium door.
I stopped, and only then realised what a sight I must be. Everyone was looking in my direction.
Rosfrith stood up from where she was sitting at her father’s desk. ‘Mr Dankworth, are you proposing that Esme stand out in the rain all afternoon?’
‘She’ll drip all over our papers,’ he said more quietly, then he bent to his work as if uninterested in what happened next. I stayed where I was. My teeth began to chatter.
‘Father should never have sent you out. Anyone could see it was going to rain.’ Rosfrith took an umbrella out of the stand and then took my arm. ‘Come with me; he and your father are due back soon, and they’ll both be upset if they see you in this state.’
Rosfrith held the umbrella over us both as we crossed the garden to the front of the house. I was rarely invited into the main part of the Murray home, and could count on one hand the number of times I’d walked through the front door. In that moment, I imagined I was feeling a little of what Lizzie must have felt every day of her life.
‘Wait here,’ Rosfrith said when the front door was closed behind us. She went towards the kitchen, and I could hear her calling to Lizzie. A minute later, Lizzie was in front of me, patting me down with a towel warm from the linen press.
‘Why didn’t you just wait it out at the Press?’ Lizzie asked as she kneeled to undo my shoes and remove my soaked stockings.
‘Thank you, Lizzie, I’ll take it from here.’ Rosfrith took the towel and led me up the stairs to her bedroom.
I was older than Rosfrith by almost two years, and yet I’d always felt younger. As she searched through her wardrobe for clothes that might fit me, I saw in her the self-assured practicality of her mother. Mrs Murray was as entitled to a damehood as Dr Murray was to a knighthood, Da had said. ‘Without her, the Dictionary would have faltered long ago.’
How reassuring it must be to know how you should act: like having a definition of yourself written clearly in black type.
‘You’re taller, and thinner, but I think these will fit.’ Rosfrith laid a skirt, blouse, cardigan and undergarments on her bed, then left me to change.
Before I stepped out of my own skirt, I searched the pockets. In one, there was a handkerchief, a pencil and a wad of damp blank slips. I went to throw the wad in the wastepaper basket and couldn’t help but look at the papers on Rosfrith’s desk. Everything was neatly arranged. There was a photograph of her father after receiving his knighthood, and one of the whole family in the garden of Sunnyside. There were proofs and letters at various stages of completion. I recognised the recipient of the letter she’d been working on most recently. It was the governor of Winson Green Gaol. Dear Sir, it said. I wish to object. That was as far as she had gone. Beside it was a copy of the Times of London.
From my other pocket, I pulled out the type I’d stolen from Gareth, and the slip with his name on it. It was almost translucent from the rain, but his name was still visible.
After I’d changed into Rosfrith’s clothes, I wrapped the type in my damp handkerchief and put it in one of the skirt pockets. I picked up the slip with Gareth’s name on it. He knew I’d taken the type. I’d be too ashamed to visit him again. I dropped the slip in the wastepaper basket.
Then I turned again to Rosfrith’s desk. The Times of London gave the women in Winson Green more column space. Tilda wasn’t one of them; not this time, I thought. Charlotte Marsh was the daughter of artist Arthur Hardwick Marsh. Laura Ainsworth’s father was a respected school inspector. Mary Leigh was the wife of a builder. This was how the women were defined.
Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realised that the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words – maiden, wife, mother – told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. What was the male equivalent of Mrs, of whore, of common scold? I looked out the window towards the Scriptorium, the place where the definitions of all these words were being bedded down. Which words would define me? Which would be used to judge or contain? I was no maiden, yet I was no man’s wife. And I had no desire to be.
As I read how the ‘treatment’ was administered, I felt the ghost of a gag reflex and the pain of a tube scraping membrane from cheek to throat
