VOLUME 1. A AND B

OXFORD:

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1888

Forty years earlier. Esme would have been six years old.

Meg picked up the slip for beat and read the quotation.

“Beat until the sugar is well combined and the mixture pales.”

She turned the pages of the Dictionary until she found the word. Beat had fifty-nine different senses across ten columns. Violence characterised so many of them. She ran her finger down the columns until she came to a definition that suited the slip. Four quotations, about beating eggs. The quotation on her slip wasn’t there.

Meg placed A and B on the floor beside the trunk. She opened the shoebox and riffled through it.

LIE-CHILD

“To keep a lie-child condemns her and it. I’ll fetch a wet-nurse.”

Mrs. Mead, midwife, 1907

Esme’s handwriting was already familiar. Meg retrieved Volume VI of the Dictionary and found the corresponding page. Lie-child was missing completely, but Meg understood what it meant. She returned to Volume I and turned to bastard.

Begotten and born out of wedlock.

Illegitimate, unrecognised, unauthorised.

Not genuine; counterfeit, spurious; debased, adulterated, corrupt.

Meg slammed the volume shut. She rose from the floor, but her legs were shaking. She felt fragile, suddenly unfamiliar to herself. She collapsed into the armchair and began to sob. Bastard had two columns, yet what it meant for her had not been captured by a single quotation.

Meg missed her mum, missed all her words and gestures, which she knew would have made sense of the mess that covered the floor of the sitting room. She buried her face in the fabric of the chair and smelled her mum’s hair, the familiar scent of Pears’ soap, which she’d always used to wash it. And which Meg still used. Deeper sobs. Was that what it meant to be a daughter? To have hair that smelled of your mother’s? To use the same soap? Or was it a shared passion, a shared frustration? Meg had never wanted to kneel in the dirt and plant bulbs like her mum; she longed to be considered—not with kindness, but with curiosity, with regard for her thoughts, with respect for her words.

Was that what the mess on the floor was? Evidence of a curious mind? Fragments of frustration? An effort to understand and explain? Were Meg’s longings akin to Esme’s, and was that what it meant to be a daughter?

By the time her dad knocked at the door, Meg had stopped sobbing. Something was trying to emerge from her grief—to complicate it or simplify it, she did not know.

“Meg, love?” His manner was as gentle as it had been the night before, and he came into the room like a bird-watcher afraid of startling a wren.

Meg said nothing; her mind tripped repeatedly over something uncomfortable.

“Would you like some breakfast?” he asked.

“I’d like some paper, Dad. If you don’t mind.”

“Writing paper?”