Already the day was warm, and the air around my desk was still and stifling. Ditte’s letter sat separate from the other piles; one page and a single slip. She asked after my health and how I was getting on at the Scriptorium. She’d had good reports from more than one source, she wrote, and I blushed with pride.

The slip was for a common word. I didn’t want to be moved by it, but I was. When I searched the pigeon-holes I found no equivalent quotation. It belonged with a large bundle that had already been sorted and sub-edited into twenty variant senses. Instead of putting it in its place, I took it back to my desk.

I traced the writing as I might have done with Da before I learned to read. Ditte had fashioned the slip from heavy parchment and embellished the edges with scrolls. I brought it up to my face and breathed in the familiar scent of lavender. Did she spray the slip, I wondered, or hold it close before putting it in the envelope?

Silence was all I’d had to punish her with, and then I hadn’t been able to find the right words to breach it. How I missed her.

I took a blank slip from my desk and copied onto it every word from Ditte’s.

LOVE

“Love doth move the mynde to merci.”

The Babees’ Book, 1557

I returned to the pigeon-holes and pinned the copy to the most relevant top-slip. Ditte’s original slip went into the pocket of my skirt. The first in a long time—it was a relief.

I lost an hour to thoughts of Ditte, to the words I might use to end my silence. When I finally did return to the post, I pulled another slip from its envelope. This one was unadorned, though not uninteresting. There were some words I’d never heard uttered and could hardly imagine using, yet they made their way into the Dictionary because someone great had written them down. Relics, I used to think, when I came across them.

Misbode was one of them. The quotation was from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.

“Who hath yow misboden, or offended?” it said.

It was at least five hundred years old. I checked the slip was complete, then searched for the relevant pigeon-hole. There was a small pile, no top-slip. I added Chaucer’s quotation. It wouldn’t be long before M words needed to be defined. K was almost completed. I returned to my desk, then took up the next envelope to relieve it of its contents. When all the letters were checked and sorted, I made my way around the desks, delivering them to the men in exchange for errands. When I approached Dr. Murray’s desk, he handed me a pile of letters that had arrived during the previous week.

“Minor enquiries,” he said. “You know more than enough to respond.”