The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth had a theory – either nobody on the Swansby staff knew the twins’ individual Christian names or they did not care. During his five years at Swansby House, he had not once been introduced to either of the twins separately and he had not been confident enough to enquire. In his head he called them the Condiments whenever he had cause to speak to them, one being pepper-headed, the other salt.

There was a vile limerick about them scratched into the tiles in the bathrooms in the Scrivenery, the rhyme scheme of which used the word Ossianic with particular inventiveness.

Bielefeld and Appleton swivelled in their seats at the voice of the Cottingham, craning their necks. Half an inch closer and this action would have had Appleton’s eye out, Winceworth thought. He daydreamed a little. He imagined the eye plucked out and flicked directly into post boy Edmund’s wicker basket as he snaked between their desks.

‘Does she even speak English?’ Bielefeld pressed, and the Cottingham twin with the white hair came over to their desks, shrugging.

‘Who can say?’

‘Who can get a word in edgeways with Frasham?’ Appleton supplied, and all but Winceworth laughed a light, frank and tender laugh.

‘Hah hah hah,’ said Winceworth, very slowly and deliberately half a second after their titters had finished. Another Anglo-Saxon cloud scurried between their desks and Bielefeld pretended to be busy with some small chits on his freasquiscent desk. He put them in a pile, disordered them, then put them in a line again, miming an approximation of work.

‘I heard that she is related to the Tsar somehow,’ the Miss Cottingham continued.

Winceworth turned in his seat as Bielefeld and Appleton both said, ‘No!’ and ‘No?’

‘Not a daughter or a niece or anything,’ said the Condiment. ‘But perched somewhere in that family tree.’

‘You are pulling my leg,’ Appleton said.

‘If the tree’s big enough, I’m probably related to the Tsar too,’ scoffed Bielefeld.

‘And the Préfet of Timbuctoo,’ agreed Miss Cottingham, and they all laughed again.

‘But, you know, I really wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Bielefeld. ‘Frasham seems to move in all types of circles. A tsarina in our midst, imagine.’

‘I think Frasham mentioned she was from Irkutsk?’ the gossiping Appleton went on.

‘Yes, I’ve just been updating our entry for Irkutsk,’ Bielefeld said. ‘I thought it might come in handy if I was permitted to talk with her.’ Winceworth waited for the inevitable one-upmanship of trivia that Swansby researchers could never bear to not perform. ‘Did you know its coat of arms shows a beaver-like animal holding a sable-fox skin? Due to a mistranslation of the word babr, which in the local dialect meant a Siberian tiger! Babr became bobr, meaning beaver. Quite extraordinary.’

Stifling a yawn, Winceworth thought about his morning and tigerish imaginary Mr Grumps while Bielefeld and Appleton twirled back to their desks with eyebrows raised in appreciative silence. Winceworth picked up the topmost envelope in front of him and shook its letter free. He scanned the page. Its lettering was in a looping, brown ink with lots of underlining.

… enclosed, as directed, evidence of a number of words beginning with the letter S … One particularly arresting example from a recipe given to me by the Very Reverend … Although quite why the sultanas would be complemented by two-day-old rind in such a way remains entirely …

‘You know Frasham’s father was friends with Coleridge?’ came a hiss from the other Miss Cottingham behind them. Winceworth, Bielefeld and Appleton whirled in their seats once more, orbiting with the intractable tug of gossip.

‘You are pulling my other leg,’ said Appleton.

‘Well, there’s a thing!’

Looking Appleton directly in the face, Winceworth said, ‘You look just like a cafetière; I’ve often thought so.’ Again this went completely unnoticed.

‘Or was it Wordsworth?’ said Pepper-Cottingham. ‘One of the two. No, I’m sure it was Coleridge.’

‘I’ve just been writing up one of his – where is it—?’ Bielefeld flapped his papers along his desk, scrabbling and adding a frantic new pace of rustle to the Scrivenery’s hall. ‘Yes! Here! One of Coleridge’s first coinages—’ Bielefeld held up one of his blue index cards, face flushed with triumph. ‘Soul-mate, noun!’ His cry caused a flush of Shhh!s to ripple across the room. Correspondingly, the group’s voices sank. ‘“You must have a Soul-mate as well as a House-or a Yoke-mate,”’ he quoted. ‘You see: there! First used in Coleridge’s letters.’ Bielefeld had the smile of a Master of the Hunt, Winceworth observed.