I closed my eyes and lay as still as a plank. Time dragged, but I must have slept eventually, because I dreamed.

Da and I arrived at the Scriptorium, my stockings brimming over with blood. All the assistants and lexicographers I’d ever known were sitting around the sorting table. Even Mr. Mitchell, his odd socks just visible under his chair. No one looked up. I turned to Da, but he had already moved away. When I looked back at the sorting table, he was in his usual place. His head was bowed to the words, like everyone else’s. When I tried to move towards him, I couldn’t. When I tried to leave, I couldn’t. When I shouted out, no one heard me.

“Time to go home, Essymay; you’ve slept through the day.” Lizzie stood at the end of the bed, my clothes hanging over her arm. “They’re toasty warm. They’ve been hanging in front of the range. Come, I’ll help you dress.”

Once again, she helped with the belt and the napkin. She pulled the shift over my head and replaced it with layers of warm clothing. Then she kneeled on the floor and put my feet in the stockings, slipped on my shoes and tied the laces.

Over the course of the next week I created more laundry than I had in the previous three months, and Da had to pay the occasional maid extra to get it all done. I’d been given leave from school, and each day I went to stay in Lizzie’s room. I wasn’t confined to bed, but I dared not stray too far from the kitchen. The Scriptorium was off limits. No one had said as much, but I feared my body would betray me again.

“What is it for?” I asked Lizzie on the fifth day. Mrs. Ballard had put me in charge of stirring a brown sauce while she spoke with Mrs. Murray about meals for the following week. Lizzie was sitting at the kitchen table, mending a pile of Murray clothes. The bleeding had almost stopped.

“What is what for?” she said.

“The bleeding. Why does it happen?”

She looked at me, unsure. “It’s to do with babies,” she said.

“How?”

She shrugged her shoulders without looking up. “I don’t know exactly, Essymay. It just is.”

How could she not know? How could something so horrible happen to a person every month and that person not know why?

“Does Mrs. Ballard get the bleeding?”

“Not anymore.”

“When does it go away?” I asked.

“When you’re too old to have babies.”

“Did Mrs. Ballard have any babies?” I’d never heard her talk about children, but maybe they were all grown.

“Mrs. Ballard ain’t married, Essymay. There’s been no babies.”

“Of course she’s married,” I said.