I paused, trying to remember the rest of the story. “And so, you told Da you will be my favourite aunt.”

“I did.”

“And that you will always take my side, even when I’m troublesome.”

“Did I say that?” I turned to look at her face. She smiled. “It’s exactly what Lily would have wanted me to say, and I meant every word.”

“The end,” I said.

April 1891

At breakfast one morning, Da said, “The C words would certainly cause consternation considering countless certifiable cases kept coming.” It took me less than a minute to work it out.

“Kept,” I said. “Kept starts with a K not a C.”

His mouth was still full of porridge; I was that quick.

“I thought throwing in certifiable might have tricked you,” he said.

“But that must start with a C; it’s from the word certain.”

“It certainly is. Now, tell me which quotation you like best.” Da pushed a page of dictionary proofs across the breakfast table.

It had been three years since the picnic to celebrate A and B, but they were still working on the proofs for C. The page had been typeset but some of the lines had been ruled out, and the margins were messy with Da’s corrections. Where he’d run out of room, he’d pinned a scrap of paper to the edge and written on that.

“I like the new one,” I said, pointing to the scrap of paper.

“What does it say?”

“To certefye this thinge, sende for the damoysell; and then shal ye know, by her owne mouthe.”

“Why do you like it?”

“It sounds funny, like the man who wrote it couldn’t spell and was making up some of the words.”

“It’s just old,” Da said, taking back the proof and reading what he’d written. “Words change over time, you see. The way they look, the way they sound; sometimes even their meaning changes. They have their own history.” Da ran his finger under the sentence. “If you took away some of the Es, this would almost look modern.”

“What’s a damoysell?”

“It’s a young woman.”

“Am I a damoysell?”

He looked at me, and the tiniest frown twitched his eyebrows.

“I’ll be ten next birthday,” I said, hopeful.

“Ten, you say? Well, that settles it. You will be a damoysell in no time.”

“And will the words keep changing?”

The spoon stopped midway to his mouth. “It’s possible, I suppose, that once the meaning is written down it will become fixed.”

“So you and Dr. Murray could make the words mean whatever you want them to mean, and we’ll all have to use them that way forever?”

“Of course not. Our job is to find consensus. We search through books to see how a word is used, then we come up with meanings that make sense of them all. It’s quite scientific, actually.”

“What does it mean?”