Every day, the Scriptorium cast off a little more of itself. In the last week of September, the final boxes were filled with the paraphernalia that each assistant needed to do their job. The mood was sombre, and on their last day the assistants left without ceremony; there was very little of the Scriptorium to farewell.

I wasn’t ready to leave. I volunteered to stay back and box up all the slips for storage or rehousing at the Old Ashmolean. Besides me, Mr. Sweatman was the last to finish packing. He closed up his box and left it on the sorting table to be picked up by the Press boy. Then he came to say goodbye.

“Are you thinking of staying?” he said, looking at my desk and its contents, exactly where they had always been.

“Maybe,” I said. “You were such a rowdy bunch; I’ll get more work done now you’re gone.”

He sighed, all the chaff gone out of him. I stood up and embraced him.

Alone, I finally dared to look around. The sorting table stood solid and familiar; the pigeon-holes were still full of slips, but the shelves were empty and the desks were clean. The shuffling of papers and scratching of pens had ceased. The Scriptorium had lost almost all its flesh, and the bones resembled nothing more than a shed.

I spent the next few weeks shifting back and forth between the Scriptorium and the Radcliffe Infirmary.

I touched Bertie’s hand. “Mano,” I said. Then I pointed to mine. “Mano.”

“You’ll not want to do this alone, Essymay,” said Lizzie. She must have seen me arrive and was coming across the garden towards the Scriptorium.

“You have enough to do,” I said.

“Mrs. Murray managed to get an extra girl in for a few weeks. My mornings are yours.”

I kissed Lizzie on the cheek, then I opened the Scriptorium door.

Empty shoeboxes covered the sorting table.

“Akvo,” I said, and Bertie took the cup of water. He had long fingers, and the callouses of soldiering had almost disappeared. Beneath them the skin was soft. Not a labourer, I thought. Perhaps a clerk.

It felt like the work of the bereaved. The slips were familiar but half forgotten. I kept stopping to remember.

I lifted my meal from Bertie’s tray. “Vespermanĝo,” I said. I drank my tea. “Teon.”

I stacked the slips in small bundles beside the shoeboxes. If they were loose, Lizzie tied them with string and placed one bundle beside another until the shoebox was full. Then I wrote the contents on the front, adding Store or Old Ash. It seemed extraordinary to me that the slips were such a good fit, as if Dr. Murray had designed the shoeboxes too.

“Why does he always get his vespermanĝo first?” Angus asked.

“He doesn’t make a fuss, like some,” I said.