“There are no plates, Mrs. Owen. It is too much of an expense to produce plates for small print runs, let alone single copies.”

Until this moment I had felt a kind of strength, a clarity of purpose that I knew would hold me up. I reached for the other chair and barely got to it in time.

“If the compositor expects changes—edits, corrections—he’ll keep the formes that hold the type. The type is loose, you see. Easy to adjust.”

“Gareth wouldn’t have expected corrections,” I said.

“He was my best…is my best compositor. It is a rule that we keep the formes for a period.”

The idea animated us both. We rose together and walked in silence to the composing room. It was half-empty, but Gareth’s old bench was occupied by an apprentice. Mr. Hart opened one of the wide drawers that held formes still in use. He opened another, then another. I stopped shadowing him and began to imagine our empty house.

“Here they are.”

Mr. Hart crouched down to the lowest drawer and I crouched with him. Together our fingers traced the type. I closed my eyes and felt the difference under the tips of my funny fingers.

Words, for me, were always tangible, but never like this. This was how Gareth knew them, and I suddenly wanted to learn how to read them blind.

“Perhaps he anticipated additional copies,” the old Controller said.

Perhaps he did.

I was the first to return to the Scriptorium a few days after the funeral. Dr. Murray’s mortarboard was just where I’d left it after taking his photograph less than two weeks earlier. Dust had settled on it again. I couldn’t bring myself to brush it off. The photograph, Rosfrith told me after the funeral, would be in the September issue of the Periodical. Even in her grief, she thought to apologise for my exclusion.

But that wasn’t the worst news she had to give. “We will be moving,” she said, her eyes filling with tears again. “In September. To the Old Ashmolean. All of us. Everything.”

I was stunned. I stood there as if I hadn’t understood a word she’d said. September was only a month away. “What will happen to the Scriptorium?” I finally asked.

She shrugged sadly. “It will become a garden shed.”

As I walked towards my desk, trailing my fingers along the shelves of slips, I remembered Da reading me the story of Ala-ed-Din. The Scriptorium had been my cave then. But unlike Ala-ed-Din, I’d had no desire to be released. I belonged to the Scriptorium; I was its willing prisoner. My only wish had been to serve the Dictionary, and that had come true. But my service was contained within these walls. I was bonded to this place as surely as Lizzie was bonded to the kitchen and her room at the top of the stairs.