The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams

Suffragette wasn’t.

Emmeline Pankhurst

“Problem is, Esme, you’re scared of the wrong thing. Without the vote nothing we say matters, and that should terrify you.”

“I know my own mind, Lizzie.” “That may be, but you’ve never been any good at knowing what’s good for you.”

Women don’t have to live lives determined by others. They have choices, and I choose not to live the rest of my days doing as I’m told and worrying about what people will think. That’s no life at all.”

“Choice would be a fine thing, but from where I stand things look much the same as they always have. If you’ve got choices, Esme, choose well.”

“Fear ’ates the ordinary,” she said. “When yer feared, you need to think ordinary thoughts, do ordinary things. You ’ear me? The fear’ll back off, for a time at least.”

gaol,

“I don’t love him, though. And I don’t want to be married.”

“What do you want?” “I want things to stay as they are. I want to keep sorting words and understanding what they mean. I want to get better at it and be given more responsibility, and I want to keep earning my own money. I feel as though I’ve only begun to understand who I am. Being a wife or a mother just doesn’t fit.”

Your path, whatever you want it to be, need not be diverted.

“In time you will get used to us, Mr. Shaw-Smith,” said Beth, and I wondered if she was referring to us three, or to the whole of womankind.

Oxford and the Scriptorium had always been enough. Our visits to family in Scotland had always seemed a little too long, and the one time I’d been away on my own had made me wary of ever leaving again.

“Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think?”

“They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your

lip. It can be quite cathartic in the r...

“To keep a lie-child condemns her and it. I’ll fetch a wet-nurse.” The midwife.

There was no end to the words. No end to what they meant, or the ways they had been used. Some words’ histories stretched

so far back that our modern understanding of them was nothing more than an echo of the original, a distortion.

everything that comes

after that first utterance is a corruption.

Lie-child.

I felt I was seeing Lizzie as she might have been.

The thought shocked me. I’d never once seen Lizzie with a friend.

Lizzie had never let me turn back. “It’s the kind of pain that achieves something,” she said.

“What does it achieve?” I moaned. “Time will tell,” she said,

“I’m a bondmaid to the Dictionary,” I heard Lizzie say to Mrs. Lloyd one afternoon as I pulled on my boots.

can’t think of anything more boring,” said Mrs. Lloyd. “Do you remember having to write the same word over and over till all the letters slanted the same way? Numbers

made more sense to me. Their meaning never changes.”

“Bostin,”

“Bostin,”

lovely.”

“Lizzie Lester, my bostin mairt.”

mairt?

“Friend,”

“A chip doesn’t stop it from holding tea,” Mrs. Lloyd had said.

All that matters is who you are in your heart. I’ve never loved him as much as I should, but here I do.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I reckon it’s the first time he’s...

“Do you think he’ll forgive me, Lizzie?” It was barely

more than a thought, but I knew I’d spoken the words.

I realised it was not God’s forgiveness I cared about; it was hers.

Lizzie was different, or perhaps it was just that now I saw her differently, as a woman who existed beyond my need for her.

“It’s not about forgiveness, Essymay. We can’t always make the choices we’d like,

but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for. Take care not to dwell.”

“What exactly is a good family, Da?”

“Love, Essy. A good family is one where there is love.”

have made mistakes, Da, and I have made choices. One of those choices was not to seek a marriage.”

“But, Essy, life is hard for women who aren’t married.”

codswallop?”