When Gareth left, Lizzie sat me down and washed my face. She brushed out my hair and rolled it back into a bun.

“Never met a man like him,” she said. “Except maybe your da. He also rinses his cup.”

She had the same look on her face that Da did whenever Gareth visited the Scriptorium. I ignored her.

“You never did say why you was there,” she said.

I couldn’t tell her about Tilda. It was the one topic we avoided, and the events of the day wouldn’t help to elevate her in Lizzie’s eyes. “I was coming home from the Bodleian,” I said.

“Would have been quicker to come along Parks Road.”

“There was so much anger, Lizzie.”

“Well, I’m just glad you weren’t badly hurt, or arrested.”

“What are they so scared of?”

Lizzie sighed. “All of them are scared of losing something; but for the likes of him that spat in your face, they don’t want their wives thinking they deserve more than they’ve got. Makes me glad to be in service when I think that men like that might be the alternative.”

The day was almost over when I returned to the Scriptorium. Tilda’s postcard was sitting on top. I read it again then wrote a new slip, in duplicate.

SISTERHOOD

“I’m glad you have joined the sisterhood and will be adding your voice to the cry.”

Tilda Taylor, 1912

I searched the fascicles. Sisterhood was already published. The main sense referred, in one way or another, to the sisterhood experienced by nuns. Tilda’s quotation belonged with the second sense: Used loosely to denote a number of females having some common aim, characteristic or calling. Often in a bad sense.

I went to the pigeon-holes and found the original slips. Newspaper clippings made up most of the quotations. In a clipping about females who agitate on questions they know nothing about, a volunteer had underlined the shrieking sisterhood. The most recent slip, from an article written in 1909, described women of the suffragette type as a highly educated, screeching, childless, and husbandless sisterhood.

They were all insulting, and I was heartened to think that Dr. Murray had rejected them. Even so, I rewrote the published definition on a new slip, leaving off in a bad sense, and pinned a copy of Tilda’s quotation in front of it. Then I put them in the pigeon-holes reserved for supplementary words.

When I turned away from the shelves, Da was watching me.

“What do you think of newspapers as a source of meaning?” he asked.

“What else did you see?”