“I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned—at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.” She paused, kneeled down beside me and stroked the embroidery on the edge of my skirt. It hid the repair she’d made when I tore it on brambles.

“Me needlework will always be here,” she said. “I see this and I feel…well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.”

“Permanent,” I said. “And the rest of the time?”

“I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”

August 1893

The Scriptorium always went quiet for a while over summer. “There’s more to life than words,” Da said once, when I asked where everyone went, but I didn’t think he meant it. We sometimes went to Scotland to visit my aunt, but we were always back at Sunnyside before all the other assistants. I loved waiting beneath the sorting table for each pair of shoes to return. When Dr. Murray came in, he would always ask Da if he’d forgotten to bring me home, and Da would always pretend he had. Then Dr. Murray would look beneath the sorting table and wink at me.

At the end of the summer of the year I turned eleven, Mr. Mitchell’s feet failed to appear, and Dr. Murray came into the Scriptorium saying very little. I waited to see a green-socked ankle crossed over a pale blue, but there was a gap where Mr. Mitchell usually sat. The other feet seemed limp, and even though Mr. Sweatman’s shoes tapped up and down, they were tuneless.

“When will Mr. Mitchell come back?” I asked Da. He took a long time to answer.

“He fell, Essy. While climbing a mountain. He won’t be back.”

I thought of his odd socks and the coloured pencils he’d given me. I’d used them until there was nothing left to hold, and that was years before. My world beneath the sorting table felt less comfortable.

When the year turned, the sorting table seemed to have shrunk. I crawled beneath it one afternoon and hit my head when I crawled out.

“Look at the state of your dress,” Lizzie said when she collected me for afternoon tea. It was patterned with smudges and dust. She beat off what she could. “It ain’t ladylike to crawl about the Scrippy, Essymay. I don’t know why your father lets you.”

“Because I’m not a lady,” I said.

“You ain’t a cat, either.”

When I returned to the Scriptorium, I navigated the perimeter. I trailed my funny fingers over shelves and books and collected little wads of dust. I wouldn’t mind being a cat, I thought.

Mr. Sweatman winked at me as I passed near him.

Mr. Maling said, “Kiel vi fartas, Esme?”