“They will be soon.” He opened the door and I ducked as he stepped into the hall.

Da set me down, put his satchel on the sideboard and bent to pick the letters off the floor. I followed him down the hall and into the kitchen and sat at the table while he cooked our dinner. We had an occasional maid come three times a week to cook and clean and wash our clothes, but this wasn’t one of her days.

“Will I go into service when I stop being a littlun?”

Da jiggled the pan to turn the sausages then looked across to where I sat at the kitchen table.

“No, you won’t.”

“Why not?”

He jiggled the sausages again. “It’s hard to explain.”

I waited. He took a deep breath and the thinking lines between his eyebrows got deeper. “Lizzie is fortunate to be in service, but for you it would be unfortunate.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.” He drained the peas and mashed the potatoes, and put them on our plates with the sausages. When he finally sat at the table, he said, “Service means different things to different people, Essy, depending on their position in society.”

“Will all the different meanings be in the Dictionary?”

His thinking lines relaxed. “We’ll search the pigeon-holes tomorrow, shall we?”

“Would Lily have been able to explain service?” I asked.

“Your mother would have had the words to explain the world to you, Essy,” Da said. “But without her, we must rely on the Scrippy.”

The next morning, before we sorted the post, Da held me up and let me search the pigeon-holes containing S words.

“Now, let’s see what we can find.”

Da pointed to a pigeon-hole that was almost too high, but not quite. I pulled out a bundle of slips. Service was written on a top-slip, and beneath that: Multiple senses. We sat at the sorting table, and Da let me loosen the string that bound the slips. They were separated into four smaller bundles of quotations, each with its own top-slip and a definition suggested by one of Dr. Murray’s more trusted volunteers.

“Edith sorted these,” Da said, arranging the piles on the sorting table.

“You mean Aunty Ditte?”

“The very same.”

“Is she a lexi—, lexiographa, like you?”

“Lexicographer. No. But she is a very learned lady and we are lucky she has taken on the Dictionary as her hobby. There’s not a week goes by without a letter from Ditte to Dr. Murray with a word, or copy for the next section.”

Not a week went by when we didn’t get our own letter from Ditte. When Da read them aloud, they were mostly about me.

“Am I her hobby too?”

“You are her goddaughter, which is much more important than a hobby.”