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By Root 671 0

that Bumpus longed to make love. Her journal crosses this out, but it’s plain that Bumpus continued to be charmed. Now, for Mrs Todd’s purpose, he suggested a colleague called Timothy Spaulding who practised law in Northampton and was a Justice of the Peace. Mr Spaulding was a polite gentleman whom Lavinia had not met but whose family was familiar. As a child she’d known his mother, who had lived in Amherst, and his father had been a friend of her father and brother.

Mabel arranged for Mr Spaulding to call on Lavinia on 7 February at 7 p.m., the usual time for social calls. No one who spied Mr Spaulding would suspect he’d come on business at such an hour.

‘I don’t think she’ll sign it,’ Mabel said to the lawyer as they walked over to the Homestead.

‘Oh yes she will.’

When Lavinia opened the door Mabel introduced him.

He spoke to her about the old days, drawing her out by listening to what she had to say. In subsequent and conflicting reports of what transpired during this scene, there is no disagreement over one fact: Mr Spaulding appeared keen to discuss the poetry of Emily Dickinson with her sister. For Lavinia this was the absorbing subject of discussion for twenty to thirty minutes, the normal length of a social call.

Then Mabel asked Lavinia, ‘Might I show Mr Spaulding your mother’s blue china?’

The three went into the dining room. It will be recalled that this was the sitting room in winter and the scene of Mabel’s embraces back in the eighties when Emily was alive. Here Lavinia keeps her writing materials. While the lawyer peers at dinner plates depicting the landing of Lafayette (in support of George Washington during the War of Independence), Mabel sets the deed on the table next to a pen and inkstand, and indicates where Lavinia is to sign.

Mr Spaulding, preoccupied in another part of the room, lifts his head to give Lavinia the routine caution. This is a deed to transfer a strip of land. It must be done of her free will. In Mabel’s statement later, ‘he said to her he should suppose she’d like to give Mrs Todd a little piece of land. He took it as an ordinary thing and didn’t make much of it. She answered as an ordinary lady would as if it was alright and said she’d be glad to sign it.’

It did not occur to Lavinia to see the document in advance. Accustomed to her father’s and brother’s legal expertise and handicapped by poor sight (she didn’t use spectacles), Lavinia was not in the habit of reading documents and she did not read this deed before she put her name to it in her sprawling hand - Mabel likened Lavinia’s hand to a demented spider who has fallen into an inkwell.

Mr Spaulding talked a bit more about Emily Dickinson, and then walked off with Mabel to The Dell. Their exit together in a mood of friendship emboldened Mabel to make her last move: she asked the lawyer to delay registration of the deed. By that time Mabel was at a distance from the scene, on her way to Japan.

One morning in May, in the post office, Lavinia’s loyal servant Maggie Maher heard talk of the deed. Hastening home, she broke it to Lavinia that talk in town gave out a Todd victory.

Lavinia was appalled. Instead of the ‘lovely’ little arrangement she’d been led to expect, and the congenial visit from Mr Spaulding in whose presence she had felt secure, the fierce terms of the deed were designed to wipe out any claim the Dickinson family might put forward to contravene Lavinia’s gesture. Here are the terms to which she’d put her signature:

Lavinia Dickinson of her free will gives Mabel Loomis Todd land, adjacent to land deeded to her by the Dickinsons on June 8th, 1886.

The land is handed over ‘in consideration of the sum of One dollar and other valuable considerations paid by Mabel Loomis Todd’. [What was ‘paid’ remains vague.]

Miss Dickinson grants the land to Mrs Todd and her heirs ‘to their own use and behoof forever’, and Miss Dickinson’s heirs [Ned and Mattie Dickinson] will defend Mrs Todd’s heirs forever against ‘the lawful claims and demands of all persons’.

Now it was public. Now Mr Hills would know the foolish