I looked at the engraving on the inside of the trunk, The Dictionary of Lost Words. I blushed.

“Stop that now,” she said, then nodded towards the word I was still holding in my hand. “How could Dr. Murray know that word was missing? Does he count them? There’d be so many.”

“He got a letter. From a man who expected to find it in the volume with all the A and B words, but didn’t.”

“People can’t expect every word to be in there,” Lizzie said.

“Oh, but they do. And sometimes Dr. Murray has to write to tell them why a word has not been included. There are all sorts of good reasons, Da tells me, but this time was different.” I was excited, recalling the drama of the morning. Against all common sense, I couldn’t help a feeling of accomplishment. I had been the cause of something that seemed to really matter.

I saw concern on Lizzie’s face.

“What is it, then?” she asked. “What is the word?”

“Bondmaid,” I said, deliberate and slow, feeling it in my throat and on my lips. “The word is bondmaid.”

Lizzie tried it: “Bondmaid. What does it mean?”

I looked at the scrap of paper. It was a top-slip, and I recognised Da’s hand. I could see where the pin once joined it to all the quotation slips, or maybe a proof. If I’d known it had come from Da, would I have kept it?

“Well, what does it mean?”

There were three definitions.

“A slave girl,” I said. “Or a bonded servant, or someone who is bound to serve till death.”

Lizzie thought on it for a while. “That’s what I am,” she said. “I reckon I’m bound to serve the Murrays till the day I die.”

“Oh, I don’t think it describes you, Lizzie.”

“Well enough,” she said. “Don’t look so stricken, Essymay. I’m glad I’m in the Dictionary; or would have been, if not for you.” She smiled. “I wonder what else is in there about me?”

I thought about the words in the trunk. Some I hadn’t heard or read until I saw them on a slip. Most were commonplace, but something about the slip or handwriting had endeared them to me. There were clumsy words with poorly transcribed quotations that would never end up in the Dictionary, and there were words that existed for one sentence and no other: fledglings, nonce words that never made it. I loved them all.

Bondmaid was no fledgling word, and its meaning disturbed me. Lizzie was right; it referred to her as it referred to a Roman slave girl.