Before I sign off, Beth wants me to tell you that ‘A Dragoon’s Wife’ has just been reprinted. It seems the fight for suffrage is not incompatible with the romance of being swept off one’s feet. We are a complicated species.
Yours,
Ditte
Megan. Meg. MeggyMay.
She had a name and She was thriving. That was all I needed to know. All I could hold without bursting.
Two more birthdays passed. Megan turned three, then four. An account of Her became part of Ditte’s annual gift, as Lily’s story had once been. She would send a book, a letter, Her first steps, Her first words. The book was always put aside, and Ditte’s news soon forgotten. I struggled to recall the motion of my days.
Time marked the Scriptorium in subtle ways from one year to the next. Books piled higher and pigeon-holes were built for more slips, the shelving creating a nook for an old chair that Rosfrith brought over from the house. It became a favourite retreat for Mr Maling when he had need to study a foreign text. The beards around the sorting table were greyer, and Dr Murray’s grew ever longer.
It was never a noisy place, but the Scriptorium had an ensemble of sounds that combined to create a comforting hum. I was used to the shuffling of papers, the scraping of pens and the sounds of frustration that identified each person like a fingerprint. If a word was troubling him, Dr Murray would grunt and get down from his chair to take a lungful of air from the doorway. Mr Dankworth would make a metronome of his pencil, a slow tap marking the rhythm of his thought. Da would cease to make any sound at all. He would remove his glasses and rub the bridge of his nose. Then he’d rest his chin on his hand and raise his eyes to the ceiling, just as he would if our dinner conversation had stumped him.
Elsie and Rosfrith had their own accompanying sounds, and I loved to hear the hems of their skirts sweep the floor, catching slips that had been carelessly dropped (such windfall, I sometimes thought, and I would watch to see where they ended up so I could collect them if no one else did). The Murray girls – I still thought of them this way, though we had all passed thirty – would also disturb the air with lavender and rose. I would breathe it in as a tonic against the sometimes careless hygiene of the men.
Once in a while, the Scriptorium would be stilled and silent and all mine. It was usually just before the publication of a fascicle: the editors and their senior assistants would meet at the Old Ashmolean to settle last-minute arguments, and Elsie and Rosfrith would take the opportunity to be somewhere else.
Normally, with the Scriptorium to myself, I would wend my way among the tables and shelves, looking for small slips of treasure. But on this particular day, I was in a hurry. I’d spent my morning tea-break in Lizzie’s room, sorting through more slips from the trunk, and now I had a small bundle of women’s words I wanted to catalogue.
I lifted the lid of my desk and took out the shoebox I was using as a pigeon-hole for my words. It was half-full of small bundles of slips, each representing a word, with meanings and quotations from various women pinned together. I spread the new slips across my desk. Some belonged with words I’d already defined; others were new and needed a top-slip. This was what I enjoyed most: considering all the variants of a word and deciding which would be the headword, then fashioning a definition to suit it. I was never alone in this process; without fail, I would be guided by the voice of the woman who used it. When it was Mabel, I would linger a little longer, making sure I got the meaning just right, and imagining her gummy grin when I did.
Lizzie’s pincushion lived in my desk now, and I took a pin to secure quotations for git. Tilda was the first to give me a quotation, but Mabel liked to use it whenever she spoke about a man she did not like. Even Lizzie used it from time to time. So it was an insult, but not vulgar; and Mabel had never used it to refer to Mrs Stiles, so it could only refer to men. I stuck the pin through one corner of the slips and began composing a top-slip in my head.
‘What’s this?’
The pin pricked my thumb and made me gasp. I looked up. Mr Dankworth was beside me, peering at the mess of slips spread across my desk. They were exposed and vulnerable. Clearly not the words I was supposed to be working on.
‘Nothing of any consequence,’ I said, trying to bundle the slips back into a pile and smiling up at him, conscious of how stupid I must look: a grown woman squashed behind a school desk.
He leaned over a little to get a closer look at the words. I tried to push back my chair, but found that I couldn’t. For the moment, I remained stuck while he continued his inspection.
‘If it’s of no consequence, why are you doing it?’ he asked, reaching over me so that I had to bend to avoid him. He picked up the pile of slips.
A sudden memory asserted itself, one I’d thought buried under time and kindness. I was smaller, the
