The Dictionary of Lost Words : A Novel (2020)

by Williams, Pip

  Something filled me then, some strange and awful queasiness. I tried to straighten the pin, but it refused to be made perfect. The end had become so blunt I couldn’t imagine it piercing the felt of even the cheapest hat. I searched the room but found nothing that would fix it. I placed the pin on the floor beside Lizzie’s bedside table, hoping she’d think it had bent in the fall.

  For the next few months, I mostly stayed away from the Scriptorium. Lizzie collected me from St Barnabas, fed me lunch, took me back. In the afternoons, I read my books and practised my writing. I alternated between the shade of the ash, the kitchen table and Lizzie’s room, depending on the weather. I pretended I was ill when they celebrated the publication of the second volume, the one containing all the words beginning with C, including count and counted.

  On my twelfth birthday, Da picked me up from St Barnabas. When we came through the gates of Sunnyside, he kept hold of my hand and I walked with him towards the Scriptorium.

  It was empty, except for Dr Murray. He looked up from his desk as we came in, then stepped down to greet me.

  ‘Happy birthday, young lady,’ he said. Then he peered at me over his spectacles, unsmiling. ‘Twelve, I believe.’

  I nodded; he continued to peer.

  My breath faltered. I was too big to hide beneath the sorting table, to escape from whatever he was thinking. So instead, I looked him in the eye.

  ‘Your father tells me you are a good student.’

  I said nothing, and he turned and gestured towards the two Dictionary volumes behind his desk.

  ‘You must avail yourself of both volumes whenever you have the need. If you don’t, there is no reason for all our efforts,’ he said. ‘If you require knowledge of a word beyond C, then the fascicles are at your disposal as they are published. Beyond that —’ again he peered, ‘— you must ask your father to search the pigeon-holes. Do you have any questions?’

  ‘What is avail?’ I asked.

  Dr Murray smiled and looked briefly at Da.

  ‘It is an A word, thankfully. Shall we look it up?’ He went to the shelf behind his desk and got down A and B.

  When my twelfth birthday card from Ditte arrived, it contained a slip of paper. A word that Ditte said was superfluous to need.

  ‘What does superfluous mean?’ I asked Da as he put on his hat.

  ‘Unnecessary,’ he said. ‘Not wanted or needed.’

  I looked at the slip. It was a B word: Brown. Bland and boring, I thought. Not lost or neglected or forgotten, just superfluous. Da must have told Ditte I’d taken a word. I put hers in my pocket.

  I thought about it all day at school. I let my fingers play with the slip’s edges and imagined it a more interesting word. I considered throwing it away, but couldn’t. Superfluous, Ditte had said. Maybe I could add that to the list of rules Lizzie had insisted on.

  When I arrived at Sunnyside in the afternoon, I went straight up to Lizzie’s room. She wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t mind me waiting. I pulled the trunk from under her bed and opened it.

  She arrived just as I was getting the slip out of my pocket.

  ‘It’s from Ditte,’ I said quickly, to stop her frown from deepening. ‘She sent it for my birthday.’

  Lizzie’s frown began to fall away, but then something caught her eye. Her face froze. I followed her gaze and saw the rough letters scratched inside the lid of the trunk. I remembered my anger, blind and selfish. When I turned back to Lizzie, a tear was sliding down her cheek.

  It felt like a gas balloon was expanding in my chest, squashing all the bits I needed to breathe and speak. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought, but nothing came out. She went to her bedside table and picked up the pin.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Still, no words. Nothing that would make sense.

  ‘What does it even say?’ Her voice teetered between rage and disappointment. I hoped for rage. Harsh words against bad behaviour. A storm then calm.

  ‘The Dictionary of Lost Words,’ I mumbled, not raising my eyes from a knot in one of the floorboards.

  ‘The dictionary of stolen words, more like.’

  My head snapped up. Lizzie was looking at the pin as if she might see something in it that she hadn’t seen before. Her lower lip quivered, like a child’s. When our eyes met, her face collapsed. It was the same look that Da had the day I was caught, as if she’d learned something new about me and didn’t like it. Not rage, then. Disappointment.

  ‘They’s just words, Esme.’ Lizzie held out her hand to pull me up off the floor. She made me sit on the bed beside her. I sat rigid.

  ‘All I had of me mother was that photograph,’ she said. ‘She’s not smiling, and I reckoned that life always weighed heavy on her, even before all us children came along. But then you found the pin.’ She twirled it and the beads became a blur of colour. ‘I don’t know much about her for sure, but it helps me to imagine her happy, knowing something beautiful came to her.’

  I thought of the photographs of Lily all around my house, the clothes that still hung in Da’s wardrobe, the blue envelopes. I thought of the story Ditte told me every birthday. My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.

  The trunk was still open, and I looked at the words carved into it. Then I looked at the pin, so fine against Lizzie’s rough hand, despite its bandy leg. We both needed proof of who we were.

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ I said, and I reached out, thinking I could straighten it by sheer force of will. Lizzie let me take it and watched as I tried.

  ‘Good enough,’ she said, when I finally gave up. ‘And the sharpening stone might work on the point.’

  The balloon in my chest burst, and a flood of emotion escaped. Tears and sniffling and a fractured apology: ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I know you are, me little cabbage.’ Lizzie held me until the blubbering stopped, stroked my hair and rocked me, as she had when I was small, though I had almost outgrown her. When it was over, she returned the pin to its place in front of the picture of her mother. I kneeled on the hard floor to close the trunk. My fingers brushed the lettering, rough and untidy. But permanent. The Dictionary of Lost Words.

  Mr Crane was leaving early. When he saw me sitting under the ash, he gave neither a word nor a smile. I watched him stride towards his bicycle, shove his satchel around to his back and swing one leg over the saddle. He didn’t notice when a bundle of slips fell to the ground behind him. I didn’t call out.

  There were ten slips pinned together. I put them between the pages of the book I’d been reading and returned to the ash.

  Distrustful was written on the top-slip in Mr Crane’s untidy hand. He had defined it as Full of or marked by distrust in oneself or others; wanting in confidence, diffident; doubtful, suspicious, incredulous. I didn’t know what incredulous meant and shuffled through the slips for a sense of it. My discomfort grew with each quotation. Distrustfull miscreants fight till the last gaspe, wrote Shakespeare.

  But I had rescued them, from the evening wind and morning dew. I had rescued them from Mr Crane’s negligence. It was he who could not be trusted.

  I separated one of the slips from the others. A quotation but no author, no book title or date. It would be discarded. I folded it and put it in my shoe.

  The rest of the slips went back inside my book, and when the bells of Oxford rang out five o’clock I went to join Da in the Scriptorium.

  He was alone at the sorting table, a proof in front of him, slips and books spread all around. He was bent to the page, oblivious to my presence.

  I fingered the pages of the book in my pocket and removed the Distrustful slips. When I reached the sorting table, I added them to the disorder of Mr Crane’s workspace.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Mr Crane stood in the doorway of the Scriptorium, his features hard to make out against the afternoon light, but his slightly s
tooped frame and thin voice unmistakable.

  Da looked up, startled, then saw the slips under my hand.

  Mr Crane strode over and reached out as if to slap my hand away, but seemed to flinch at its deformity. ‘This really won’t do,’ he said, turning to Da.

  ‘I found them,’ I said to Mr Crane, but he wouldn’t look at me. ‘I found them near the fence where you lean your bicycle. They fell out of your satchel.’ I looked to Da. ‘I was putting them back.’

  ‘With all due respect, Harry, she shouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘I was putting them back,’ I said, but it was as if I couldn’t be heard or seen; neither of them responded. Neither of them looked at me.

  Da took a deep breath and released it with a barely noticeable shake of his head.

  ‘Leave this to me,’ he said to Mr Crane.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Crane, then he took up the pile of slips that had fallen from his satchel.

  When he had gone, Da removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Da?’

  He returned his glasses to their usual place and looked at me. Then he pushed his chair back from the sorting table and patted his knee for me to sit.

  ‘You’re almost too big,’ he said, trying to smile.

  ‘He did drop them; I saw him.’

  ‘I believe you, Essy.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say anything?’

  He sighed. ‘It’s too complicated to explain.’

  ‘Is there a word for it?’ I asked.

  ‘A word?’

  ‘For why you didn’t say anything. I could look it up.’

  He smiled then. ‘Diplomacy springs to mind. Compromise, mollify.’

  ‘I like mollify.’

  Together we searched the pigeon-holes.

  MOLLIFY

  ‘To mollify, by these indulgences, the rage of his most furious persecutors.’

  David Hume, The History of Great Britain, 1754

  I thought on it. ‘You were trying to make him less angry,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I thought I’d wet the bed, but when I pulled back the covers, my nightdress and sheets were stained red. I screamed. My hands were sticky with blood. The ache I’d been feeling in my back and belly was suddenly terrifying.

  Da burst into my room and looked around in a panic, then he came to my bedside, worry all over his face. When he saw my bloodied nightdress, he was relieved. Then he was awkward.

  The mattress gave in to the weight of him as he sat on the edge. He pulled the covers back over me and stroked my cheek. I knew, then, what it was, and was suddenly conscious of myself. I pulled the covers higher and avoided looking at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  We sat there for an uncomfortable minute, and I knew how much he wished Lily was there.

  ‘Has Lizzie …’ Da began.

  I nodded.

  ‘Have you got what you need?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Can I …?’

  I shook my head.

  Da kissed my cheek and stood. ‘French toast this morning,’ he said, closing the door as if I were an invalid, or a sleeping baby. But I was fourteen.

  I waited to hear his footsteps on the stairs before letting go of the covers and sitting on the edge of the bed. I felt more blood leak from me. In the drawer of my bedside table was a monthlies box that Lizzie had made up especially, with belts and padded napkins she’d sewn from rags. I bunched up the length of my nightdress and held it between my legs.

  Da was making a racket in the kitchen, letting me know the coast was clear. With the box under my arm, I crossed the landing to the bathroom and held tighter to the wad of fabric that stopped me from dripping.

  No school, Da said. I would spend the day with Lizzie. My eyes welled with the relief of it.

  We left the house and began the familiar walk to Sunnyside. As if nothing was different, Da told me a word he was working on and asked me to guess what it meant. I barely knew how to think, and for once I didn’t care. The streets stretched long, and everyone we passed looked at me as if they knew. I walked as though nothing I wore was a good fit.

  There was a dampness between my thighs, then the trace of a single drop, like a tear running across a cheek. By the time we were on the Banbury Road, blood was running down the inside of my leg. I felt it seeping into my stockings. I stopped walking, squeezed my legs together, held my hand to the place that was bleeding.

  I whimpered. ‘Da?’

  He was a few steps ahead. He turned and looked at me, looked down along the length of my body and then around, as if there might be someone better equipped to help. He took my hand, and we walked as fast as we could to Sunnyside.

  ‘Oh, pet,’ Mrs Ballard said as she ushered me into the kitchen. She nodded at Da, discharging him of any further responsibility. He kissed my forehead, then strode across the garden to the Scriptorium. When Lizzie walked in, she gave me a pitying look then went straight to the range to heat water.

  Upstairs, Lizzie removed my clothing and sponged me down. The basin of warm water swirled pink with my humiliation. She showed me again how to fit the belt around my waist and the rags inside it.

  ‘You didn’t make it thick enough, or tight enough.’ She put me in one of her night shifts and made me get into bed.

  ‘Must it hurt so much?’ I asked.

  ‘I guess it must,’ Lizzie said. ‘Though I don’t know why.’

  I groaned and Lizzie looked at me with an expression of kindly impatience. ‘It should hurt less over time. The first is often the worst.’

  ‘Should?’

  ‘Some ain’t so lucky, but there’re teas to make it better,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask Mrs Ballard if she has yarrow.’

  ‘How long will it last?’ I asked.

  Lizzie was adding my clothes to the basin now. I imagined they’d all stain red and that would be my uniform from now on.

  ‘A week – maybe less, maybe more,’ she said.

  ‘A week? Must I stay in bed for a week?’

  ‘No, no. Just a day. It’s heaviest on the first day, which might be why it hurts so much. After that, it slows down and eventually stops, but you’ll need the rags for about a week.’

  Lizzie had told me I would bleed every month, and now she was telling me I would bleed for a week every month and have to stay in bed for a day every month.

  ‘I’ve never known you to stay in bed, Lizzie,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘I really would have to be dying to spend a day in bed.’

  ‘But how do you stop it running down your legs?’

  ‘There are ways, Essymay. But it ain’t right to talk of them to a girl.’

  ‘But I want to know,’ I said.

  She looked at me, her hands in the tub of water; it didn’t disgust her to have my blood on her skin.

  ‘If you was in service you might need to know, but you ain’t. You’re a little lady, and no one will mind you spending a day in bed every month.’ With that, she picked up the basin and went down the stairs.

  I closed my eyes and lay as still as a plank. Time dragged, but I must have slept eventually, because I dreamed.

  Da and I arrived at the Scriptorium, my stockings brimming over with blood. All the assistants and lexicographers I’d ever known were sitting around the sorting table. Even Mr Mitchell, his odd socks just visible under his chair. No one looked up. I turned to Da, but he had already moved away. When I looked back at the sorting table, he was in his usual place. His head was bowed to the words, like everyone else’s. When I tried to move towards him, I couldn’t. When I tried to leave, I couldn’t. When I shouted out, no one heard me.

  ‘Time to go home, Essymay; you’ve slept through the day.’ Lizzie stood at the end of the bed, my clothes hanging over her arm. ‘They’re toasty warm. They’ve been hanging in front of the range. Come, I’ll help you dress.’

  Once again, she helped with the belt
and the napkin. She pulled the shift over my head and replaced it with layers of warm clothing. Then she kneeled on the floor and put my feet in the stockings, slipped on my shoes and tied the laces.

  Over the course of the next week I created more laundry than I had in the previous three months, and Da had to pay the occasional maid extra to get it all done. I’d been given leave from school, and each day I went to stay in Lizzie’s room. I wasn’t confined to bed, but I dared not stray too far from the kitchen. The Scriptorium was off limits. No one had said as much, but I feared my body would betray me again.

  ‘What is it for?’ I asked Lizzie on the fifth day. Mrs Ballard had put me in charge of stirring a brown sauce while she spoke with Mrs Murray about meals for the following week. Lizzie was sitting at the kitchen table, mending a pile of Murray clothes. The bleeding had almost stopped.

  ‘What is what for?’ she said.

  ‘The bleeding. Why does it happen?’

  She looked at me, unsure. ‘It’s to do with babies,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  She shrugged her shoulders without looking up. ‘I don’t know exactly, Essymay. It just is.’

  How could she not know? How could something so horrible happen to a person every month and that person not know why?

  ‘Does Mrs Ballard get the bleeding?’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘When does it go away?’ I asked

  ‘When you’re too old to have babies.’

  ‘Did Mrs Ballard have any babies?’ I’d never heard her talk about children, but maybe they were all grown.

  ‘Mrs Ballard ain’t married, Essymay. There’s been no babies.’

  ‘Of course she’s married,’ I said.

  Lizzie looked through the kitchen window to make sure Mrs Ballard wasn’t on her way back in, then she leaned closer to me. ‘She calls herself Mrs ’cos it’s more respectable. A lot of old spinsters do it, ’specially if they’s in a position to order others about.’

  I was too confused to ask any more questions.