A telegram, a slender leather-bound volume with Women’s Words and Their Meanings embossed on the cover, letters, and loose bits and pieces—a few suffrage pamphlets, theatre programmes and newspaper clippings. There were three sketches of a woman, naked. She was looking out a window in the first, the swell of her belly just visible. In the third her hands and gaze embraced the baby that must have been stirring.

But mostly there were small bits of paper, no bigger than postcards. Some were pinned together, others loose. There was a shoebox full of them, sorted into alphabetical order with small cards between each letter, like a library catalogue drawer. Each slip of paper had a word written at the top, and a sentence below. Sometimes there was the name of a book, but most just had a woman’s name, sometimes a man’s.

Morning light streamed through the bay window, warming Meg’s cheek. She woke with a start. Her back ached from the hours she had slept on the chaise longue. Another scorcher, she thought, the trunk and its contents submerged like a dream. But Women’s Words was open on her lap, and her skin felt tight where tears had dried. Under the glare of the Adelaide sun, Esme’s words, in all their forms, lay scattered across the floor, exposed and real.

Meg began to sort them. She gathered Ditte’s letters and placed them in one pile, Tilda’s postcards in another. Suffrage pamphlets and news clippings had a pile of their own. There was a programme for Much Ado About Nothing and a handful of ticket stubs that she put with other bits and pieces to form a pile of miscellany.

The slips in the shoebox were almost all written in a single hand. When she checked, they each had an entry in Women’s Words. She left them as they were and turned to the rest. There were so many, a hundred or more, each unique in script and content. There were ordinary words and words she’d never heard of. Some of the quotations were so old she could make no sense of them at all. But she read each one.