PART 3 | 1902–1907

May 1902

Two years after I received my first pay packet, Dr. Murray asked me to show Rosfrith the process of sorting slips and checking senses and anything else that would help her settle in as the newest assistant. After half an hour, it was clear there was no need for my instruction. Like all her siblings, Rosfrith had been sorting slips since she was a child. She may not have hidden beneath the sorting table, but she knew her way around the Scriptorium.

“I am superfluous to need,” I said, and Rosfrith grinned. She was so like Elsie, though a little slimmer, a little taller, a little fairer. She had the same fine-featured face, the same downward slant to her eyes. They would have made her look sad if she didn’t smile so much. I left her at the desk she would share with her sister, just to the left of Dr. Murray’s, and returned to my own. Slips for words beginning with L sat in neat piles along the edge. When I sat down, I wondered what it would feel like to divide the task of sorting them with someone who looked a little like me.

Normally, I would take my time over the words I sorted. If the word was familiar, I would check my understanding of it against the example provided by the volunteer. If it was unfamiliar, I would commit its meaning to memory. These new words became the focus of my walk home with Da. If he did not know the word then I would explain it to him, and we would shuttle it back and forth in ever more elaborate sentences.

But listless started me yawning. It had thirteen slips of unvaried meaning, and it was easy to let my mind wander beyond the confines of the Scriptorium. I thought of what Ditte had said about the need for words to have a textual history. Well, listless certainly had that. The earliest quotation was from a book written in 1440, so its inclusion was assured, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as Lizzie’s word, knackered. Lizzie had never once said she felt listless, but she was knackered all the time.

I pinned all the listless slips together, from oldest quotation to most recent. One was only partially completed: listless was in the top-left corner, and there was a quotation, but it had no date, book title or author. It would have been discarded, but my heart still raced as I put it in my pocket.

Mrs. Ballard was already sitting at the table when I came into the kitchen, and Lizzie was making ham sandwiches for their lunch. There were three teacups already out.

“What does knackered mean, Lizzie?”

Mrs. Ballard scoffed. “You could ask anyone in service that question, Esme. We’d all have an answer.”

Lizzie poured the tea and sat down. “It means you’re tired.”

“Why don’t you just say tired, then?”