“He won’t. But I’ll explain it.”

“But you got to use familiar words to explain it.”

“Not necessarily.”

Angus laughed. “You got your work cut out, missus.”

“Well, if you keep eavesdropping, you at least will leave here with a larger vocabulary.”

“Reckon I know all the words I need,” he said.

Bertie ate his meal like any other man, and for its duration I could imagine him burping at the end and saying, “Excuse me, missus,” like so many of them did. But when he’d had enough, he resumed his forward gaze and was as silent as ever.

“Finita,” I said.

Bertie’s eyes registered nothing.

“What does that mean?” asked Angus.

“It means finished.”

“What language is it?”

“Esperanto.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s made up, in a way,” I said. “It’s meant to be easy enough for anyone to learn—it was created to foster peace between nations.”

“And how’s that going, missus?”

I smiled wearily as my gaze settled on the end of Angus’s bed: no feet beneath the sheet.

“Still,” he went on, “if it helps old Bertie here, it might not have been a waste of time making it up.” He nodded towards Bertie’s tray. “Can I have the leftovers if he’s finished?”

I picked up the plate of food and took it over to Angus.

“How do you say thanks in Esperanto?” he asked.

I had a list of words in my pocket, but this one I knew by heart: “Dankon.”

“Well, dankon, Mrs. Owen.”

“Ne dankinde, Angus.”

Mrs. Murray knocked, then opened the door to the Scriptorium. We all looked up from our desks.

“It begins,” she announced, and with a cheerless expression she ushered in a boy wearing the familiar apron of the Press. He pushed in a trolley stacked with flattened cardboard boxes.

“The Press has offered to help with the move and will be sending a boy each afternoon with a trolley. They will take whatever boxes you have packed to the Old Ashmolean.” She looked as though she was about to say more, but no words came. We watched her look around the room, taking in the shelves of pigeon-holes, the books, the stacks of paper. It should have been a private moment. Her eyes settled at last on Dr. Murray’s desk, on the mortarboard resting on the shelf beside Q to Sh. She turned and left.

Rosfrith and Elsie got up to follow their mother. “You can leave the boxes on the floor,” Rosfrith said as she passed the trolley boy. “I’m sure we’ll be able to figure out how to assemble them.”

Work could not stop, but assembling boxes became our morning-tea activity. At lunchtime, we’d pack them with old dictionaries and all the books and journals we could do without. A boy would turn up each afternoon at three o’clock to take them away.