There was one letter for every week I had been away. I took them all from the box and removed the pages. There was nothing of me in any of them. How could Da have believed them? When I returned the envelopes to the box, they were empty of words—but never more meaningful.

I slept badly. Resentments and confusion about Ditte and Cauldshiels—and even Da—gathered strength in the dark. Eventually I gave up trying to silence them.

Da was snoring, a predictable rumble that had always comforted me when I woke in the night. It comforted me now; it meant he wouldn’t wake. I got out of bed and dressed, took a candle and matches from my bedside table and put them in my pocket. Then I slipped out of my room, down the stairs and into the night.

The sky was clear and the moon almost full. The black of night only played around the edges of things. When I arrived at Sunnyside, the Murray house stood dark and still, and I thought I could hear the collected breath of the family’s slumber.

I pushed on the gate. The house stretched towards the sky, as if suddenly alert, but no light flickered in the windows. I slipped through the gap and left the gate ajar then skirted the boundary, keeping to the deep dark under the trees, until I was looking at the Scriptorium.

In the moonlight it looked like any other shed, and I was annoyed I’d thought it was more. As I got closer, I could see its frailty; gutters laced with rust, paint peeling from the window frames—a wad of paper stopping the draught where the timber was rotted.

The door opened as it always did, and I stood on the threshold waiting for my eyes to adjust. Moonlight through dirty windows cast long shadows around the room. I could smell the words before I could see them, and memories tumbled over themselves; I used to think this place was the inside of a genie’s lamp.

I took Ditte’s letter from my pocket. It was still crumpled, so I found a space on the sorting table and smoothed it out as best I could. I lit the candle and felt the small thrill of defiance. Draughts competed to bat the flame this way and that, but none were strong enough to blow it out. I made a space on the sorting table and dripped some wax to hold the candle. I made sure it stuck fast.

The word I wanted was already published, but I knew where to find the slips. I ran my finger along a row of pigeon-holes until I came to “A to Ant.” My birthday words. If the Dictionary was a person, Da told me once, “A to Ant” would be its first tentative steps.

I pulled a small pile of slips from the pigeon-hole and unpinned them from their top-slip.

Abandon.