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.