Now I looked into the trunk and saw Mabel’s words resting against Mr. Dankworth’s neat hand. She’d like that, I thought. He wouldn’t. I read random slips, his and hers. Not quite, he’d written on a top-slip I recognised as one of Mr. Sweatman’s—it seemed Dr. Murray’s were the only edits that escaped his fastidious attentions. Mr. Dankworth had drawn a line through the definition and rewritten it, no more accurately in my mind, though two words shorter. I’d rewritten Mr. Sweatman’s original and pocketed Mr. Dankworth’s correction. It was such a contrast to Mabel’s poorly spelled and childishly written slips. Their production had obviously been an effort for Mrs. Stiles, making the favour all the more generous.

I re-read the meaning I’d written for morbs. Not quite, I thought. Mabel wasn’t morbid and nor was I. Sad, yes, but not always. I took a pencil from my pocket and made the correction.

MORBS

A temporary sadness.

“I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ’ere gets the morbs…A woman’s lot, I reckon.”

Mabel O’Shaughnessy, 1908

I put the slip in the trunk and rested Taliesin on top.

The following Saturday, I joined Lizzie again for her trip to the Covered Market. As always, it was crowded, but we pushed through.

“Dead.” Mrs. Stiles called from her stall when she saw us coming. “Carted her off yesterday.”

Mrs. Stiles momentarily looked me in the eye, then bent to arrange a bucket of carnations. Lizzie and I turned to look for Mabel.

“She’d stopped coughing, you see. Blessed silence, I thought. But then it was a bit too quiet.” She paused in her arranging and took a deep breath that stretched the fabric across her bent back. She stood to face us. “Poor love. She’d been dead for hours.” Mrs. Stiles looked from me to Lizzie and back again, her hands smoothing down her apron again and again, her mouth tight around the slightest quiver. “I should have noticed sooner.”

The space that Mabel had occupied was already gone; the neighbouring stalls had expanded to fill it. I stood there for a minute or an hour, I don’t know which, and struggled to imagine how Mabel and her crate of whittled sticks had ever fit there. No one who passed seemed to notice her absence.

May 1909

When Mr. Dankworth moved to the sorting table, it felt as though a too-tight corset had finally been unhooked. It was Elsie who made it happen.

“You know, Esme,” she said one morning, when I tried to suggest a particular word might need a more skilled eye than mine, “everyone who contributes copy to the Dictionary will leave a trace of themselves, no matter how uniform Father, or Mr. Dankworth, would like it to be. Try to take Mr. Dankworth’s comments as suggestion, not dictum.”