by Pip Williams
I’d never seen her desk up close. It was covered in papers and books and narrow boxes filled with hundreds of slips.
‘Behold, go,’ she said with a grand gesture of her hand.
I felt an urge to touch them, followed by a rush of shame.
When I left, I walked the bicycle across the busy quad of the Press and under the archway out into Walton Street. Eleanor’s slips were the first I’d been close to since returning to the Scriptorium. Had there been a discussion about it? Had Dr Murray agreed to my return as long as I was kept away from the words?
‘Maybe I could help sort slips,’ I said to Da as we walked home that night. He said nothing, but his hand found the coins in his pocket and I heard them jangle against each other as he moved them between his fingers.
We walked in silence for several minutes, every question in my head finding an uncomfortable answer. Halfway down St Margaret’s Road, he said, ‘I’ll ask James when he returns from London.’
‘You never used to ask Dr Murray,’ I said.
I heard the coins shift in his pocket. He looked at the pavement and said nothing.
A few days later, when Dr Murray asked me to visit Mr Hart, it was to deliver the slips for grade and graded. He held the bundles towards me. There were several tied with string, and each slip and top-slip was numbered in case the order was disturbed. I grasped them in my funny fingers, but Dr Murray did not let go. He looked over his spectacles.
‘Until they are set in type, Esme, these are the only copies,’ he said. ‘Every one of them is precious.’ He let go and turned back to his desk before I could fashion a reply.
I opened my satchel and took care to place the bundles snugly into the bottom. Precious, every one, and yet there were so many ways they could be lost. I remembered the piles of words on the compositor’s bench and imagined a breeze or a clumsy visitor; slips falling to the floor, one riding a wave of air and landing where no one but a child would discover it.
I’d been forbidden to touch them, and now I was given the role of protector. I wanted to tell someone. If anyone had been in the garden just then, I would have found a way to show them the slips, to say that Dr Murray had entrusted them to me. I collected the bicycle from behind the Scriptorium and rode through the gates of Sunnyside and along the Banbury Road. As I turned into St Margaret’s Road, tears began to course down my cheeks. They were warm and welcome.
The building on Walton Street greeted me differently, its wide entrance no longer an intimidation but instead a welcoming gesture – I was on important Dictionary business.
When I was in the building, I took one bundle of slips from my satchel and released the bow that held them. Each sense of the word grade was defined on a top-slip and followed by the quotations that illustrated it. I scanned the various meanings and found one wanting. I thought to tell Da, or perhaps Dr Murray, and my arrogance made me laugh. Then someone bumped me, or I bumped them, and my funny fingers lost their hold. Slips fell to the ground like litter. When I looked to see where they had landed all I saw were hurrying feet. I felt the blood rush from my face.
‘No harm done,’ a man said, bending to pick up what had fallen. ‘They’re numbered for a reason.’
He handed me the slips. My hand shook as I reached for them.
‘Goodness, are you alright?’ He took my elbow. ‘You need to sit down before you faint.’ He opened the nearest door and sat me on a chair just inside it. ‘I hope the noise doesn’t bother you, miss. Take a minute and I’ll be right back with a glass of water.’
It was the printing room, and it was, indeed, noisy. But there were rhythms on top of rhythms, and trying to separate them settled my panic. I checked the slips: one, two, three … I counted to thirty. None were missing. I secured their string and put them back in the satchel. When the man returned, I had my face in my hands, all the emotion of the past hour risen to the surface and hard to contain.
‘Here, have this,’ he said, crouching and offering the glass of water.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what came over me.’
He gave me his hand and helped me up from the chair. His gaze lingered on my funny fingers, and I withdrew them.
‘Do you work in here?’ I asked, looking beyond him into the printing room.
‘Only if a machine needs some tinkering,’ he said. ‘Mostly I set the type. I’m a compositor.’
‘You make the words real,’ I said, finally looking at him. His eyes were almost violet. It was the young compositor who’d been standing with Mr Hart and Mr Bradley on my first visit.
He tilted his head, and I thought he might not understand what I meant. But then he smiled. ‘I prefer to say that I give them substance – a real word is one that is said out loud and means something to someone. Not all of them will find their way to a page. There are words I’ve heard all my life that I’ve never set in type.’
What words? I wanted to ask. What do they mean? Who says them? But my tongue had become tied.
‘I should go,’ I finally managed. ‘I have to deliver these slips to Mr Hart.’
‘Well, it was nice to bump into you, Esme,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is Esme, isn’t it? We were never actually introduced.’
I remembered his eyes but not his name. I stood stupid and mute.
‘Gareth,’ he said, holding out his hand, again. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’
I hesitated, then returned my hand to his. He had long tapered fingers and a strangely bulbous thumb. My gaze lingered.
‘Pleased to meet you too,’ I said.
He opened the door and saw me into the hallway.
‘You know the way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right then. Go carefully.’
I turned and headed to the Controller’s office. It was a relief to hand over the bundles of slips.
A new century started, and although there was a feeling that anything might happen, I never thought I’d see Dr Murray come to the kitchen door. When Mrs Ballard saw him striding across the lawn, she brushed down her apron and fixed the hair that had come loose from her cap. She unlatched the top door, and Dr Murray leaned in, his long beard wafting on the warm breath coming from the hearth.
‘And where is Lizzie?’ he asked, glancing at where I stood by the bench, stirring the batter of a cake.
‘I sent her to fetch a few things, Dr Murray, sir,’ said Mrs Ballard. ‘She’ll be back in no time, and then Esme will help her with hanging laundry in the drying cupboard. She’s a great help to us, is Esme.’
‘Well, that may be so, but I’d like Esme to come with me to the Scriptorium.’
Instinctively, I checked my pockets. Mrs Ballard looked at me. I shook my head as if to say, I’ve done nothing, I promise.
‘Off you go now, Esme. Follow Dr Murray to the Scrippy.’ I took off my apron and walked, as if through treacle, to the kitchen door.
When I came into the Scriptorium, Da was there, smiling. He had many kinds of smiles, but his ‘caged smile’ was my favourite. It struggled to be released from behind pursed lips and twitching eyebrows. My fingers unfurled from the fists they’d been making.
Da took my hand, and the three of us walked to the back of the Scriptorium.
‘This, Essy, is for you,’ Da said, freeing his smile.
Behind a shelf of old dictionaries was a wooden desk. It was the kind I’d sat at in a cold room at Cauldshiels. My fingers twitched remembering the pain of the lid being brought down. A whispered taunt that my fingers were already good for nothing echoed in my head. I began to shake, but Da’s hand on my shoulder brought me back to the Scriptorium. When Dr Murray lifted the lid, it revealed new pencils and blank slips, and two books that I immediately recognised.
‘They belong to Elsie,’ I heard myself say to Dr Murray, wanting to clarify that I hadn’t taken them.
‘Elsie has read them, Esme. She’d like you to have them. Consider them a late Christmas gift – or, better still, a gift for the new century.’
Then I noticed that the underside of the lid had been pasted with an offcut of wallpaper – a pale green with tiny yellow roses. It was the same paper that covered the walls of the sitting room in the Murray house. The desk was different to those at Cauldshiels in other ways too: it was bigger, with polished wood and hinges that caught the light, and the seat was separate.
Dr Murray closed the lid and stood a little awkwardly. ‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘This is where you’ll sit, and your father will employ you to do whatever is useful.’
With that, he gave Da a curt nod and returned to his own desk.
I threw my arms around Da and realised, for the first time, that I had to bend for my cheek to rest against his.
The next morning, I dressed more carefully than usual. I noticed the creases in the skirt that I’d left on the floor and so chose a clean one from the wardrobe. I spent half an hour trying to tame my hair into a tight braid, as Lizzie had once done, but ended with a messy bun, as usual. I spat on my shoes and gave them a rub with the corner of my bedspread. Then I went into Da’s room to look in Lily’s mirror.
‘You can have that in your room, if you like,’ said Da, startling me. ‘Your mother wasn’t a vain woman, but she loved that mirror.’
I blushed, shy of my own reflection and conscious of being examined, and compared. Lily had been tall and slender, like me, and I had her clear skin and brown eyes. But instead of her flaxen tresses, Da’s flame-red curls crowned my head. I saw him in the glass and wondered what he saw.
‘She would be proud,’ he said.
At Sunnyside, Da checked the morning post, and instead of joining Lizzie and Mrs Ballard in the kitchen I walked with him to the Scriptorium. He turned on the new electric lights and tended the coals until they glowed. The temperature barely shifted, but there was an illusion of warmth. I stood by the sorting table, nervous and awaiting instruction.
Da passed me the bundle of letters. ‘This will be your job from now on, Essy,’ he said. ‘Collect and sort the letters as you’ve seen me do it. You’re lucky Dr Murray no longer makes appeals for words; we used to get sack-loads. But you still need to open everything to check for slips.’ He opened one of the envelopes. ‘This is a letter, so it gets pinned to the envelope and left for whomever it is intended – you know where everyone sits?’
I nodded. Of course I knew.
I took the letters to the back of the Scriptorium. My desk sat in the alcove made by two shelves of old dictionaries and the only visible section of wall. I imagined it as a large pigeon-hole, built especially for my dimensions. From it, I could see the assistants at the sorting table and Dr Murray at his high desk. To see me, they would have to turn and crane their necks.
It was a relief to realise I could still observe without being observed, but my presence was not accidental. I had a desk, and the assistants would not be instructed to ignore me. I would serve the words as they served the words. And Dr Murray said he would pay me £1. 5s. per month. It was barely a quarter of what Da earned, and it was even less than Lizzie’s wage, but it would be enough to buy flowers every week and have curtains made for the sitting room. And I wouldn’t have to ask Da for money when I wanted a new dress.
I looked forward to the daily ritual of sorting the post, and the predictable responses of the assistants when I delivered it. They each had a manner and script that defined them, just as their shoes and socks had once defined them.
Mr Maling was the first on my rounds. ‘Dankon,’ he would say, with a little bow of his upper body. Mr Balk rarely looked up and always called me Miss Murray. Hilda had left the year before to take up a lectureship at Royal Holloway College, in Surrey, and Elsie had taken her place beside their father’s desk. Mr Balk seemed unable to tell us all apart, despite my height and hair. Da simply said thank you, looking up or not, depending on the complexity of his work.
Only with Mr Sweatman would I linger. He would put down his pencil and twist in his chair. ‘What intelligence do you have from Mrs B’s kitchen, Esme?’ he always asked.
‘She has promised a sponge for afternoon tea,’ I might say.
‘Excellent. You may proceed.’
Most of the letters were for Dr Murray.
‘The post, Dr Murray.’
‘Is it worth reading?’ he would say, looking at me over his spectacles.
‘I couldn’t say.’
Then he would take the letters and reorder them according to the agreeability of the senders. Certain gentlemen from the Philological Society would be shifted back, but letters from the Press Delegates always ended up on the bottom.
My post round over, I would return to my desk to attend to any small task I might have been given, but the bulk of my day was spent sorting through piles of slips for particular words beginning with M and putting them in order, from oldest quotation to most recent.
The days when the post brought slips were my favourite. I would examine each in the hope of being the one to share a new word with Da or Dr Murray. Every word, no matter where in the alphabet it fell, would have to be checked against the words that had already been collected. The quotation might show a slightly different meaning, or it could pre-date the quotations already collected. When there were slips in the post, I could spend hours among the pigeon-holes and barely notice the time turning.
I worked hard, and another year passed. Each day followed the same pattern, though the words coloured them differently. There was the post, the slips, replies to letters. In the afternoon I still delivered books and checked quotations at the Bodleian. I was never restless or bored. Not even the passing of Queen Victoria could depress me; I wore black, like everybody else, but I was the happiest I’d been since my days beneath the sorting table.
When winter passed into spring, Mr Bradley moved from the Press into his new Dictionary Room at the Old Ashmolean, and the third editor, Mr Craigie, joined him with two assistants. Dr Murray did not approve of the new editor and responded by pushing his own team to produce words more quickly. It was as if he wanted to prove the new editor unnecessary, although we all knew the Dictionary was already a decade overdue.
By the summer of 1901, Mr Balk had finally started calling me Miss Nicoll.
‘It will be hot in the Scrippy today,’ said Lizzie, when I popped my head into the kitchen to say good morning.
‘Will you make up some lemonade for us?’ I asked.
‘I’ve already been to the market.’ She tilted her head towards a bowl of bright-yellow lemons.
I blew her a kiss and walked to the Scriptorium, sifting through the post as I went.
I’d developed a habit of guessing what was in the envelopes before opening them. As I made my way across the garden, I shuffled through the pile for a cursory assessment. A small number were addressed To the Editor, some so flimsy they were sure to contain nothing other than a slip. For me, I thought. There were several letters to Dr James Murray – most from the general public (their handwriting and return addresses unfamiliar), a few from gentlemen of the Philological Society, and one in the familiar envelope of the Press Delegates. This last was likely to be a caution about funds; if it suggested Dr Murray trim the contents of the Dictionary to speed progress, we would all suffer his bad mood. I placed it at the bottom of the pile so he could start his day with the compliments of strangers.
There were one or two letters for each of the assistants, and then, at the bottom of the bundle, there was a letter addressed to me.
Miss Esme Nicoll, Junior Assistant
Sunnyside, Scriptorium
Banbury Road
Oxford
It was the first letter I’d ever received at the Scriptorium, and the first time I’d been acknowledged as an assistant. My whole body tingled with the thrill, but the sensation dulled when I recognised the handwriting as Ditte’s. It had been three years, but I still couldn’t think of her without thinking of Cauldshiels, and I didn’t want to think of that place.
Already the day was warm, and the air around my de
sk was still and stifling. Ditte’s letter sat separate from the other piles; one page and a single slip. She asked after my health and how I was getting on at the Scriptorium. She’d had good reports from more than one source, she wrote, and I blushed with pride.
The slip was for a common word. I didn’t want to be moved by it, but I was. When I searched the pigeon-holes I found no equivalent quotation. It belonged with a large bundle that had already been sorted and sub-edited into twenty variant senses. Instead of putting it in its place, I took it back to my desk.
I traced the writing as I might have done with Da before I learned to read. Ditte had fashioned the slip from heavy parchment and embellished the edges with scrolls. I brought it up to my face and breathed in the familiar scent of lavender. Did she spray the slip, I wondered, or hold it close before putting it in the envelope?
Silence was all I’d had to punish her with, and then I hadn’t been able to find the right words to breach it. How I missed her.
I took a blank slip from my desk and copied onto it every word from Ditte’s.
LOVE
‘Love doth move the mynde to merci.’
The Babees’ Book, 1557
I returned to the pigeon-holes and pinned the copy to the most relevant top-slip. Ditte’s original slip went into the pocket of my skirt. The first in a long time – it was a relief.
I lost an hour to thoughts of Ditte, to the words I might use to end my silence. When I finally did return to the post, I pulled another slip from its envelope. This one was unadorned, though not uninteresting. There were some words I’d never heard uttered and could hardly imagine using, yet they made their way into the Dictionary because someone great had written them down. Relics, I used to think, when I came across them.
Misbode was one of them. The quotation was from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.
‘Who hath yow misboden, or offended?’ it said.
It was at least five hundred years old. I checked the slip was complete, then searched for the relevant pigeon-hole. There was a small pile, no top-slip. I added Chaucer’s quotation. It wouldn’t be long before M words needed to be defined. K was almost completed. I returned to my desk, then took up the next envelope to relieve it of its contents. When all the letters were checked and sorted, I made my way around the desks, delivering them to the men in exchange for errands. When I approached Dr Murray’s desk, he handed me a pile of letters that had arrived during the previous week.
